CARDENAS — North Coast of Cuba.
January 16th, 1897.
[DEAR MOTHER:]
It is very funny not knowing what sort of a place you are
to sleep in next and taking things out of a grab bag, as it
were — In Europe you can always guess what the well known
towns will give you for you have a guide book, but here it is
all luck. Matanzas was a pretty city but the people were
awful, the hotel was Spanish and the proprietor insolent,
though I was spending more of Willie Hearst's money than all
of the officers spend in a week, the Consul could not talk
English or Spanish, he said he hadn't come there "to go to
school to no Spaniard" and he gloried in the fact he had been
there three years without knowing a word of the language. His
vice-Consul was worse and everything went wrong generally.
Every one I met was an Alarmist and that is polite for liar.
They asked Remington if he was the man who manufactured the
rifles and gave us the Iowa Democrat to
read. To night I reached here after a six hours ride through
blazing fields of sugar cane and stopped on my way to the
hotel to ask the Consul when the next boat went to Saqua la
Grande — I had no letter of introduction to him as I had to
the Matanzas consul, but as soon as he saw my card he got out
of his chair and shook hands again and was as hearty and well
bred and delightful as Charley himself and unlike Chas he did
not ask me 14 francs for looking on him. He is out now
chasing around to get me a train for to-morrow. But I won't
go to-morrow. My hotel looks on the plaza and the proprietor
and the whole suite of attendants are my slaves. It is just
as different as can be. My interpreter does it, he calls
himself
my valet, although I point out to him that two
shirts and twelve collars do not constitute a wardrobe even
with a rubber coat thrown in. But he likes to play at my
being a distinguished stranger and I can't say I object. Only
when you remember the way I was invited to see Cuba and
expected to see it, and now the way I am seeing it from car
windows with
a valet. What would the new school of yellow
kid journalists say if they knew that. For the first time on
this trip I have wished you were both with me, that was to
night. I never see anything really beautiful but that it
instantly makes me feel selfish and wish you could see it too.
It has happened again and again and to night I wish you could
be here with me on this balcony. The town runs down a slope
to the bay and in the middle of it is the Plaza with me on the
balcony which lets out of my sleeping room — "the room" so the
proprietor tells me, "reserved only for the Capitain General."
It is just like the description in that remarkable novel of
mine where Clay and Alice sit on
the balcony of the restaurant. I have the moonlight and the
Cathedral with the open doors and the bronze statue in the
middle and the royal palms moving in the breeze straight from
the sea and the people walking around the plaza below. If it
was in any way as beautiful as this Clay and Alice would have
ended the novel that night.
I got a grand lot of letters to-day which Otto, my
interpreter brought back from Havana after having conducted
Remington there in safety. I must say you are writing very
cheerfully now, but I don't wonder you worried at first but
now that I am a commercial traveller with an order from Weyler
which does everything when I find it necessary, you really
must not worry any more but just let me continue on my
uneventful journey and then come home. I shall have been gone
so long and my friends, judging from Russell and Dana and
Irene's letters, will be so glad to see me, that they will
have forgotten I went out to do other things than coast around
in trains. As a matter of fact this is a terribly big problem
and most difficult to get the truth of, I find myself growing
to be the opposite of the alarmist, whatever that is, although
you would think the picturesque and dramatic and exciting
thing would be the one I would rather believe because I want
to believe it, but I find that that is not so, I see a great
deal on both sides and I do not believe half I am told. As we
used to say at college, "it is against history," and it is
against history for men to act as I am told they are acting
here — They show me the pueblo huddled together around the
fortified towns, living in palm huts but I know that they have
always lived in palm huts, the yellow kid reporters don't know
that or consider it, but send off
word that the condition of the people is terrible, that they
have only leaves to cover them, and it sounds very badly.
That is an instance of what I mean. In a big way there is no
doubt that the process going on here is one of extermination
and ruin. Two years ago the amount of sugar shipped from the
port of Matanzas to the U. S. was valued at 11 millions a
year. This last year just over shows that sugar to the amount
of $800,000 was sent out. In '94, 154 vessels touched at
Matanzas on their way to America. In '95 there were 80 and in
'96 there are 16. I always imagined that houses were
destroyed during a war because they got in the way of cannon
balls or they were burned because they might offer shelter to
the enemy, but here they are destroyed, with the purpose of
making the war horrible and hurrying up the end. The
insurgents began first by destroying the sugar mills, some of
which were worth millions of dollars in machinery, and now the
Spaniards are burning the homes of the people and herding them
in around the towns to starve out the insurgents and to leave
them without shelter or places to go for food or to hide the
wounded. So all day long where ever you look you see great
heavy columns of smoke rising into this beautiful sky above
the magnificent palms the most noble of all palms, almost of
all trees — It is the most beautiful country I have ever
visited. I had no recollection of how beautiful it was or
else I had not the knowledge of other places with which to
compare it. Nothing out of the imagination can approach it in
its great waterfalls and mossy rocks and grand plains and
forests of white pillars with plumes waving above them. Only
man is vile here and it is cruel to see the walls of the
houses with blind eyes, with roofs gone
and gardens burned, every church but one that I have seen was
a fortress with hammocks swung from the altars and rude
barricades thrown up around the doorways — If this is war I am
of the opinion that it is a senseless wicked institution made
for soldiers, lovers and correspondents for different reasons,
and for no one else in the world and it is too expensive for
the others to keep it going to entertain these few gentlemen —
I have seen very little of it yet and I probably won't see
much more, but I have seen all I want. Remington had his mind
satisfied even sooner — but then he is an alarmist and
exaggerates things — The men who wear the red badge of
courage, I don't feel sorry for, they have their reward in
their bloody bandages and the little cross on their tunic but
those you meet coming back sick and dying with fever are the
ones that make fighting contemptible — poor little farmers,
poor little children with no interest in Cuba or Spain's right
to hold it, who have been sent out to die like ants before
they have learned to hold a mauser, and who are going back
again with the beards that have grown in the field hospitals
on their cheeks and their eyes hollow, and too weak to move or
speak. Six of them died while I was in Jaroco, a town as big
as Marion and that had been the average for two months, think
of that, six people dying in Marion every day through July and
August — I didn't stay in that town any longer than the train
did — Well I have been writing editorials here instead of
cheering you up but I guess I'm about right and when I see a
little more I'll tell it over again to
The Journal — It
is
not as exciting reading as deeds of daring by our special
correspondent and I haven't changed my name or shaved my
eyebrows or done anything the other
men have done but I believe I am getting near the truth. They
have shut off provisions going or coming from the towns, they
have huddled hundreds of people who do not know what a bath
means around these towns, and this is going to happen — As
soon as the rains begin the yellow fever and smallpox will set
in and all vessels leaving Cuban ports will be quarantined and
the island will be one great plague spot. The insurgents who
are in the open fields will live and the soldiers will die for
their officers know nothing of sanitation or care nothing.
The little Consul has just been here to see me and we have had
a long talk and I got back at him. He told me he had seen the
Franco-German war as a correspondent of
The Tribune and I
asked him if he had ever met another correspondent of
The
Tribune at that time a German student named Hans who cabled
the story of the battle of Gravellote and who Archibald Forbes
says was the first correspondent to use the cable. The Consul
who looks like William D. Howells wriggled around in his chair
and said "I guess you mean me but I was not a German student,
I was born and raised in Philadelphia and Forbes got my name
wrong, it is Hance." So then I got up and shook hands with
him in my turn and told him I had always wanted to meet that
correspondent and did not expect to do so in Cardenas, on the
coast of Cuba.
Thank you all for your letters. I am glad you liked the
Jameson book. I thought you knew I was a F. R. G. S. It was
George Curzon proposed me and as he is a gold medallist of the
Society it was easy getting in. Lots of love.
DICK.
Richard returned to New York from Cuba in February, 1897,
but the following month started for Florence to pay me a
long-promised visit. On his way he stopped for a few days in
London and Paris.
