Cuba in War Time | Page 9

wide, around the wooden posts, and it has remained there undisturbed.
This pool is now covered a half-inch thick with green slime, colored
blue and yellow, and with a damp fungus spread over the wooden posts
and up the sides of the walls.
Over this sewage are now living three hundred women and children and
a few men. The floor beneath them has rotted away, and the planks

have broken and fallen into the pool, leaving big gaps, through which
rise day and night deadly stenches and poisonous exhalations from the
pool below.
The people above it are not ignorant of their situation. They know that
they are living over a death-trap, but there is no other place for them.
Bands of guerrillas and flying columns have driven them in like sheep
to this city, and, with no money and no chance to obtain work, they
have taken shelter in the only place that is left open to them.
With planks and blankets and bits of old sheet iron they have, for the
sake of decency, put up barriers across these abandoned warehouses,
and there they are now sitting on the floor or stretched on heaps of rags,
gaunt and hollow-eyed. Outside, in the angles of the fallen walls, and
among the refuse of the warehouses, they have built fireplaces, and,
with the few pots and kettles they use in common, they cook what food
the children can find or beg.
One gentleman of Cardenas told me that a hundred of these people
called at his house every day for a bit of food.
Old negroes and little white children, some of them as beautiful, in
spite of their rags, as any children I ever saw, act as providers for this
hapless colony. They beg the food and gather the sticks and do the
cooking. Inside the old women and young mothers sit on the rotten
planks listless and silent, staring ahead of them at nothing.
I saw the survivors of the Johnstown flood when the horror of that
disaster was still plainly written in their eyes, but destitute as they were
of home and food and clothing, they were in better plight than those
fever-stricken, starving pacíficos, who have sinned in no way, who
have given no aid to the rebels, and whose only crime is that they lived
in the country instead of in the town. They are now to suffer because
General Weyler, finding that he cannot hold the country as he can the
towns, lays it waste and treats those who lived there with less
consideration than the Sultan of Morocco shows to the murderers in his
jail at Tangier. Had these people been guilty of the most unnatural
crimes, their punishment could not have been more severe nor their end

more certain.
[Illustration: Murdering the Cuban Wounded]
I found the hospital for this colony behind three blankets which had
been hung across a corner of the warehouse. A young woman and a
man were lying side by side, the girl on a cot and the man on the floor.
The others sat within a few feet of them on the other side of the
blankets, apparently lost to all sense of their danger, and too dejected
and hopeless to even raise their eyes when I gave them money.
A fat little doctor was caring for the sick woman, and he pointed
through the cracks in the floor at the green slime below us, and held his
fingers to his nose and shrugged his shoulders. I asked him what ailed
his patients, and he said it was yellow fever, and pointed again at the
slime, which moved and bubbled in the hot sun.
He showed me babies with the skin drawn so tightly over their little
bodies that the bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a
glove. They were covered with sores, and they protested as loudly as
they could against the treatment which the world was giving them,
clinching their fists and sobbing with pain when the sore places came in
contact with their mothers' arms. A planter who had at one time
employed a large number of these people, and who was moving about
among them, said that five hundred had died in Cardenas since the
order to leave the fields had been issued. Another gentleman told me
that in the huts at the back of the town there had been twenty-five cases
of small-pox in one week, of which seventeen had resulted in death.
I do not know that the United States will interfere in the affairs of Cuba,
but whatever may happen later, this is what is likely to happen now,
and it should have some weight in helping to decide the question with
those whose proper business it is to