Part 47

There are six provinces--Pinar del Rio, Havana, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Camaguey or Puerto Principe, and Oriente. Each has a provincial governor and assembly chosen directly by the people, generally charged with independent control of matters affecting the province; but the president may interfere against an abuse of power by either the governor or the assembly. Municipalities are administered by mayors (alcaldes) and assemblies elected by the people, and control strictly municipal affairs. The "termino municipal" is the chief political and administrative civil division. It is an urban district together with contiguous rural territory. Its divisions are "barrios." The president may interfere if necessary in the municipality as in the province; and so may the governor of the province. But all interference is subject to review of claims by the courts. Both provinces and municipalities are forbidden by the constitution to contract debts without a coincident provision of permanent revenue for their settlement.

The franchise is granted to every male Cuban twenty-one years of age, not mentally incapacitated, nor previously a convict of crime, nor serving in the army or navy of the state. Foreigners may become citizens in five years by naturalization. Church and state are completely separated, toleration being guaranteed for the profession and practice of all religious beliefs, and the government may not subsidize any religion.

Education.

Primary education is declared by the constitution to be free and compulsory; and its expenses are paid by the central government so far as it may be beyond the power of the province or municipality to bear them. Secondary and advanced education is controlled by the state. In the last days of Spanish rule (1894), there were 904 public and 704 private schools, and not more than 60,000 pupils enrolled; in 1000 there were 3550 public schools with an enrolment of 172,273 and an average attendance of 123,362. In the four school years from 1903-1904 to 1906-1907 the figures of enrolment and average attendance were: 201,824 and 110,531; 194,657 and 105,706; 186,571 and 98,329; and 189,289 and 93,865. In 1906-1907 the percentage (31.6) of attendants to children of school age was twice as large as in 1898-1899. Private schools, some of very high grade, draw many pupils. Almost all schools are primary. The university of Havana (founded 1728) was given greatly improved facilities, especially of material equipment, by the American military government, and seems to have begun an ambitious progress. In 1907 the number of students was 554. Below the university there are six provincial institutes, one in each province, in each of which there is a preparatory department, a department of secondary education, and (this due to peculiar local conditions) a school of surveying; and in that of Havana commercial departments in addition. In Havana, also, there is a school of painting and sculpture, a school of arts and trades, and a national library, all of which are supported or subventioned by the national government, as are also a public library in Matanzas, and the Agricultural Experiment Station at Santiago de las Vegas. In connexion with the university is a botanical garden; with the national sanitary service, a biological laboratory, and special services for small-pox, glanders and yellow fever. Independent of the government are various schools and learned societies in Havana (q.v.). A school was established by the government in Key West, Florida (U.S.A.), in 1905, for the benefit of the Cuban colony there. Finally, the government sustains about two score of penal establishments, reform schools, hospitals, dispensaries and asylums, which are scattered all over the island,--every town of any considerable size having one or more of these charities.

Former government.

Under the colonial rule of Spain the head of government was a supreme civil-military officer, the governor and captain-general. His control of the entire administrative life of the island was practically absolute. Originally residents at Santiago de Cuba, the captains-general resided after 1589 at Havana. Because of the isolation of the eastern part of the island, the dangers from pirates, and the important considerations which had caused Santiago de Cuba (q.v.) to be the first capital of the island, Cuba was divided in 1607 into two departments, and a governor, subordinate in military matters to the captain-general at Havana, was appointed to rule the territory east of Puerto Principe. In 1801, when the audiencia--of which the captain-general was _ex officio_ president--began its functions at that point, the governor of Santiago became subordinated in political matters as much as in military. Two chief courts of justice (audiencias) sat at Havana (after 1832) and Puerto Principe (1800-1853); appeals could go to Spain; below the audiencias were "alcaldes mayores" or district judges and ordinary "alcaldes" or local judges. The audiencias also held important political powers under the Laws of the Indies. The captaincy-general of Cuba was not originally, however, by any means so broad in powers as the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru; and by the creation in 1765 of the office of intendant--the delegate of the national treasury--his faculties were very greatly curtailed. The great powers of the intendant were, however, merged in those of the governor-general in 1853; and the captain-general having been given by royal order in 1825 (several times later explicitly confirmed, and not revoked until 1870) the absolute powers (to be assumed at his initiative and discretion) of the governor of a besieged city, and by a royal order of 1834 the power to banish at will persons supposed to be inimical to the public peace; and being by virtue of his office the president and dominator of all the important administrative boards of the government, held the government of the island, and in any emergency the liberty and property of its inhabitants, in his hand. The royal orders following 1825 developed a system of extraordinary and extreme repression. In 1878, as the result of the Ten Years' War, various administrative reforms, of a decentralizing tendency, were introduced. The six provinces were created, and had governors and assemblies ("diputaciones"); and a municipal law was provided that in many ways was a sound basis for local government. But centralization remained very great. In the municipality the alcalde (mayor) was appointed by the governor-general, and the ayuntamiento (council) was controlled by the veto of the provincial governor and by the assembly of the province. The deputation was subject in turn to the same veto of the provincial governor, and he controlled by the governor-general. There was besides a provincial commission of five lawyers named by the governor-general from the members of the deputation, who settled election questions, and questions of eligibility in this body, gave advice as to laws, acted for the deputation when it was not sitting, and in general facilitated centralized control of the administrative system. The character of this body was altered in 1890, and in 1898, in which latter year its functions were reduced to the essentially judicial. Despite superficial decentralization after 1878 any real growth of local self-government was rendered impossible. Moreover, no great reforms were made in the abuses naturally incident to the old personal system. Exile and imprisonment at the will of the government and without trial were common. Personal liberty, liberty of conscience, speech, assembly, petition, association, press, liberty of movement and security of home, were without real guarantee even within the extremely small limits in which they nominally existed. Under the constitution of the Republic the sphere of individual liberty is large and constitutionally protected against the government.

_Finance._--There has been a great change in the budget of Cuba since the advent of the Republic. In 1891-1896 the average annual income was $20,738,930, the annual average expenditure $25,967,139. More than half of the revenue was derived from customs duties (two-thirds of the total being collected at Havana). Of the expenditure more than ten million dollars annually went for the public debt, 5.5 to 6 millions for the army and navy, as much more for civil administration (including more than two millions for purely Peninsular services with which the colony was burdened); and on an average probably one million more went for sinecures. Every Cuban paid about twice as heavy taxes as a Spaniard of the Peninsula. Very little was spent on sanitation, roads, other public works and education. The revenue receipts under the Republic have increased especially over those of the old regime in the item of customs duties; and the expenditure is very differently distributed. Lotteries which were an important source of revenue under Spain were abolished under the Republic. The debt resting on the colony in 1895 (a large part of it as a result of the war of 1868-1878, the entire cost of which was laid upon the island, but a part as the result of Spain's war adventures in Mexico and San Domingo, home loans, &c.) was officially stated at $168,500,000. The attainment of independence freed the island from this debt, and from enormous contemplated additions to cover the expense incurred by Spain during the last insurrection. The debt of the Republic in April 1908 was $48,146,585, including twenty-seven millions which were assumed in 1902 for the payment of the army of independence, four for agriculture, and four for the payment of revolutionary debts, and $2,196,585, representing obligations assumed by the revolution's representative in the United States during the War of Independence. United States and British investments, always important in the agriculture and manufactures of the island, greatly increased following 1898, and by 1908 those of each nation were supposed to exceed considerably $100,000,000.

_Archaeology._--Archaeological study in Cuba has been limited, and has not produced results of great importance. Almost nothing is actually known of prehistoric Cuba; and a few skulls and implements are the only basis existing for conjecture. Very little also is known as to the natives who inhabited the island at the time of the discovery. They were a tall race of copper hue; fairly intelligent, mild in temperament, who lived in poor huts and practised a limited and primitive agriculture. How numerous they were when the Spaniards first came among them cannot be said; undoubtedly tradition has greatly exaggerated their number. They are supposed to have been practically extinct by 1550. Even in the 19th century reports were spread of communities in which Indian blood was supposedly still plainly dominant; but the conclusion of the competent scientists who have investigated such rumours has been that at least absolutely nothing of the language and traditions of the aborigines has survived.

_History._--Cuba was discovered by Columbus in the course of his first voyage, on the 27th of October 1492. He died believing Cuba was part of a continent. In 1508 Sebastian de Ocampo circumnavigated it. In 1511 Diego Velazquez began the conquest of the island. Baracoa (the landing point), Bayamo, Santiago de Cuba, Puerto Principe, Sancti Spiritus, Trinidad and the original Havana were all founded by 1515. Velazquez's reputation and legends of wealth drew many immigrants to the island. From Cuba went the expeditions that discovered Yucatan (1517), and explored the shores of Mexico, Hernando Cortes's expedition for the invasion of Mexico, and de Soto's for the exploration of Florida. The last two had a pernicious effect on Cuba, draining it of horses, money and of men. At least as early as 1523 the African slave trade was begun. In 1544 the Indians, so far as they had not succumbed to the labour of the mines and fields to which they were put by the Spaniards, were proclaimed emancipated. The administration in the 16th century was loose and violent. The local authorities were divided among themselves by bitter feuds--the ecclesiastical against the civil, the _ayuntamiento_ against the governors, the administrative officers among themselves; brigandage, mutinies and intestinal struggles disturbed the peace. As a result of the transfer of Jamaica to England, the population of Cuba was greatly augmented by Jamaican immigrants to about 30,000 in the middle of the 17th century.

The activity of English and French pirates began in the 16th century, and reached its climax in the middle of the 17th century. So early also began dissatisfaction with the economic regulations of the colonial system, even grave resistance to their enforcement; and illicit trade with privateers and foreign colonies had begun long before, and in the 17th and 18th centuries was the basis of the island's wealth. In 1762 Havana was captured after a long resistance by a British force under Admiral Sir George Pocock and the earl of Albemarle, with heavy loss to the besiegers. It was returned to Spain the next year in exchange for the Floridas. From this date begins the modern history of the island. The British opened the port to commerce and the slave trade and revealed its possibilities. The government of Spain, beginning in 1764, made notable breaches in the old monopolistic system of colonial trade throughout America; and Cuba received special privileges, also, that were a basis for real prosperity. Spain paid increasing attention to the island, and in harmony with the policy of the Laws of the Indies many decrees intended to stimulate agriculture and commerce were issued by the crown, first in the form of monopolies, then with increased freedom and with bounties. Various colonial products and the slave trade were favoured in this way. After the cession of the Spanish portion of San Domingo to France hundreds of Spanish families emigrated to Cuba, and many thousand more immigrants, mainly French, followed them from the entire island during the revolution of the blacks. Most of them settled in Oriente province, where their names and blood are still apparent, and with their cafetales and sugar plantations converted that region from neglect and poverty to high prosperity.

Under a succession of liberal governors (especially Luis de las Casas, 1790-1796, and the marques de Someruelos, 1799-1813), at the end of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th, when the wars in Europe cut off Spain almost entirely from the colony, Cuba was practically independent. Trade was comparatively free, and worked a revolution in culture and material conditions. General Las Casas, in particular, left behind him in Cuba an undying memory of good efforts. Free commerce with foreigners--a fact after 1809--was definitely legalized in 1818 (confirmed in 1824). The state tobacco monopoly was abolished in 1817. The reported populations by the (untrustworthy) censuses of 1774, 1792 and 1817 were 161,670, 273,301 and 553,033. Something of political freedom was enjoyed during the two terms of Spanish constitutional government under the constitution of 1812. The sharp division between creoles and peninsulars (i.e. between those born in Cuba and those born in Spain), the question of annexation to the United States or possibly to some other power, the plotting for independence, all go back to the early years of the century.

Partly because of political and social divisions thus revealed, conspiracies being rife in the decade 1820-1830, and partly as preparation for the defence against Mexico and Colombia, who throughout these same years were threatening the island with invasion, the captains-general, in 1825, received the powers above referred to; which became, as time passed, monstrously in disaccord with the general tendencies of colonial government and with increasing liberties in Spain, but continued to be the spiritual basis of Spanish rule in the island. Among the governors of the 19th century Miguel Tacon, governor in 1834-1839, a forceful and high-handed soldier, deserves mention, especially in the annals of Havana; he ruled as a tyrant, made many reforms as regarded law and order, and left Havana, in particular, full of municipal improvements. The good he did was limited to the spheres of public works and police; in other respects his rule was a pernicious influence for Cuba. Politically his rule was marked by the proclamation at Santiago in 1836, without his consent, of the Spanish constitution of 1834; he repressed the movement, and in 1837 the deputies of Cuba to the Cortes of Spain (to which they were admitted in the two earlier constitutional periods) were excluded from that body, and it was declared in the national constitution that Cuba (and Porto Rico) should be governed by "special laws." The inapplicability of many laws passed for the Peninsula--all of which under a constitutional system would apply to Cuba as to any other province, unless that system be modified--was indeed notorious; and Cuban opinion had repeatedly, through official bodies, protested against laws thus imposed that worked injustice, and had pleaded for special consideration of colonial conditions. The promise of "special laws" based upon such consideration was therefore not, in itself, unjust, nor unwelcome. But as the colony had no voice in the Cortes, while the "special laws" were never passed (Cuba expected special fundamental laws, reforming her government, and the government regarded the old Laws of the Indies as satisfying the obligation of the constitution) the arbitrary rule of the captains-general remained quite supreme, under the will of the crown, and colonial discontent became stronger and stronger. The rule of Leopoldo O'Donnell was marked in 1844 by a cruel and bloody persecution of negroes for a supposed plot of servile war; O'Donnell's actions being partly due to the inquietude that had prevailed for some years over the supposed machinations of English abolitionists and even of English official residents in the island, and also over the mutual jealousies and supposed annexation ambitions of Great Britain and the United States.

A Cuban international question had arisen before 1820. Spain, the United States, England, France, Colombia and Mexico were all involved in it, the first four continually. In the eighteen-fifties a strong pro-slavery interest in the United States advocated the acquisition of the island. One feature of this was the "Ostend Manifesto" (see Buchanan, James), in which the ministers of the United States at London, Paris and Madrid declared that if Spain refused a money offer for the colony the United States should seize it. Their government gave this document publicity. The Cuban policy of Presidents Pierce and Buchanan (during 1853-1861) was vainly directed to acquiring the island. From 1849 to 1851 there were three abortive filibustering expeditions from the United States, two being under a Spanish general, Narciso Lopez (1798-1851). The domestic problem, the problem of discontent in the island, had become acute by 1850, and from this time on to 1868 the years were full of conflict between liberal and reactionary sentiment in the colony, centreing about the asserted connivance of the captains-general in the illegal slave trade (declared illegal after 1820 by the treaties of 1817 and 1835 between Great Britain and Spain), the notorious immorality and prodigal wastefulness of the government, and the selfish exploitation of the colony by Spaniards and the Spanish government. From early in the 19th century there had always been separatists, reformists and repressionists in the island, but they were individuals rather than groups. The last were peninsulars, the others mainly creoles, and among the wealthy classes of the latter the separatists gradually gained increasing support.

An ineffective and extremely corrupt administration, a grave economic condition, new and heavy taxes, military repression, recurring heavy deficits in the budget, adding to a debt (about $150,000,000 in 1868) already very large and burdensome, and the complete fiasco of the _junta_ of inquiry of Cuban and Porto Rican representatives which met in Madrid in 1866-1867--all were important influences favouring the outbreak of the Ten Years' War. Among those who waged the war were men who fought to compel reforms, others who fought for annexation to the United States, others who fought for independence. The reformists demanded, besides the correction of the above evils, action against slavery, assimilation of rights between peninsulars and creoles and the practical recognition of equality, e.g. in the matter of office-holding, a grievance centuries old in Cuba as in other Spanish colonies, and guarantees of personal liberties. The separatists, headed by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes (1819-1874), a wealthy planter who proclaimed the revolution at Yara on the 10th of October, demanded the same reforms, including gradual emancipation of the slaves with indemnity to owners, and the grant of free and universal suffrage. War was confined throughout the ten years almost wholly to the E. provinces. The policy of successive captains-general was alternately uncompromisingly repressive and conciliatory. The Spanish volunteers committed horrible excesses in Havana and other places; the rebels also burned and killed indiscriminatingly, and the war became increasingly cruel and sanguinary. Intervention by the United States seemed probable, but did not come, and after alternations in the fortunes of war, Martinez Campos in January 1878 secured the acceptance by the rebels of the convention (pacto) of Zanjon, which promised amnesty for the war, liberty to slaves in the rebel ranks, the abolition of slavery, reforms in government, and colonial autonomy. A small rising after peace (the "Little War" of 1879-1880) was easily repressed. Gradual abolition of slavery was declared by a law of the 13th of February 1880; definitive abolition in 1886; and in 1893 the equal civil status of blacks and whites in all respects was proclaimed by General Calleja. There is no more evidence to warrant the wholly erroneous statement sometimes made that emancipation was an economic set-back to Cuba than could be gathered to support a similar statement regarding the United States. Coolie importation from China had been stopped in 1871.

As for autonomy and political reforms it has already been remarked that the change from the old regime was only superficial. The Spanish constitution of 1876 was proclaimed in Cuba in 1881. In 1878-1895 political parties had a complex development. The Liberal party was of growing radicalism, the Union Constitutional party of growing conservatism; and after 1893 a Reformist party was launched that drew the compromisers and the waverers. The demands of the Liberals were as in 1868; those for personal and property rights were much more definitely stated, and among explicit reforms demanded were the separation of civil and military power, general recognition of administrative responsibility under a colonial autonomous constitutional regime; also among economic matters, customs reforms and reciprocity with the United States were demanded. As for the representation accorded Cuba in the Spanish Cortes, as a rule about a quarter of her deputies were Cuban-born, and the choice of only a few autonomists was allowed by those who controlled the elections. Reciprocity with the United States was in force from 1891 to 1894 and was extremely beneficial to Cuba. Its cessation greatly increased disaffection.