Cuba in War Time | Page 8

home, not a shelter tent,
and they were placed well apart from one another, with the free air of
the plain or mountain blowing about them, with room for the sun to
beat down and drink up the impurities, and with patches of green things
growing in rows over the few acres. I have seen them like that all over
Cuba, and I am sure that no disease could have sprung from houses
built so admirably to admit the sun and the air.
I have also seen them, I might add in parenthesis, rising in sluggish
columns of black smoke against the sky, hundreds of them, while those
who had lived in them for years stood huddled together at a distance,

watching the flames run over the dry rafters of their homes, roaring and
crackling with delight, like something human or inhuman, and marring
the beautiful sunlit landscape with great blotches of red flames.
The huts in which these people live at present lean one against the other,
and there are no broad roads nor green tobacco patches to separate one
from another. There are, on the contrary, only narrow paths, two feet
wide, where dogs and cattle and human beings tramp over daily
growing heaps of refuse and garbage and filth, and where malaria rises
at night in a white winding sheet of poisonous mist.
The condition of these people differs in degree; some are living the life
of gypsies, others are as destitute as so many shipwrecked emigrants,
and still others find it difficult to hold up their heads and breathe.
[Illustration: A Spanish Guerrilla]
In Jaruco, in the Havana province, a town of only two thousand
inhabitants, the deaths from small-pox averaged seven a day for the
month of December, and while Frederic Remington and I were there,
six victims of small-pox were carried past us up the hill to the burying
ground in the space of twelve hours. There were Spanish soldiers as
well as pacificos among these, for the Spanish officers either know or
care nothing about the health of their men.
There is no attempt made to police these military camps, and in Jaruco
the filth covered the streets and the plaza ankle-deep, and even filled
the corners of the church which had been turned into a fort, and had
hammocks swung from the altars. The huts of the pacíficos, with from
four to six people in each, were jammed together in rows a quarter of a
mile long, within ten feet of the cavalry barracks, where sixty men and
horses had lived for a month. Next to the stables were the barracks. No
one was vaccinated, no one was clean, and all of them were living on
half rations.
Jaruco was a little worse than the other towns, but I found that the
condition of the people is about the same everywhere. Around every
town and even around the forts outside of the towns, you will see from

one hundred to five hundred of these palm huts, with the people
crouched about them, covered with rags, starving, with no chance to
obtain work.
In the city of Matanzas the huts have been built upon a hill, and so far
neither small-pox nor yellow fever has made headway there; but there
is nothing for these people to eat, either, and while I was there three
babies died from plain, old-fashioned starvation and no other cause.
The government's report for the year just ended gives the number of
deaths in three hospitals of Matanzas as three hundred and eighty for
the year, which is an average of a little over one death a day. As a
matter of fact, in the military hospital alone the soldiers during several
months of last year died at the rate of sixteen a day. It seems hard that
Spain should hold Cuba at such a sacrifice of her own people.
In Cardenas, one of the principal seaport towns of the island, I found
the pacíficos lodged in huts at the back of the town and also in
abandoned warehouses along the water front. The condition of these
latter was so pitiable that it is difficult to describe it correctly and hope
to be believed.
The warehouses are built on wooden posts about fifty feet from the
water's edge. They were originally nearly as large in extent as Madison
Square Garden, but the half of the roof of one has fallen in, carrying the
flooring with it, and the adobe walls and one side of the sloping roof
and the high wooden piles on which half of the floor once rested are all
that remain.
Some time ago an unusually high tide swept in under one of these
warehouses and left a pool of water a hundred yards long and as many