206 CHAPTER IV. " THE EVER-FAITHFUL ISLAND OF CUBA."

THE Maine disaster alone would not have produced the war. It led to the outbreak of hostilities because it came at the end of a long period of extreme tension between Spain and America. It was the final shock whichbrought the strain up tobreakingpoint. To understand the situation we must take a rapid glance at what had been occurring in Cuba.

The island is the largest of the West Indies, and with the Isle of Pines and Puerto Rico it formed the last vestige of the great western empire that Spain ruled a hundred years ago.

When Columbus first saw the shores of Cuba, in 1492, he wrote ofit as " the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld." The great tropical islandis rich inmineral and vegetableproducts; it has beenasource of great wealth to Spain in the past,and with abetter colonialsystemwould have been even more productive. The surface of Cuba is about half again as great as that of Ireland,but much of it is made up of mountain and morass, covered with a dense growth of jungle-like forest. The elongated shape of the islandgivesit a shore-line out of all proportion to its surface. There are nearly2,000 miles of coast, with severalexcellentharbours,and many creeks and almost land-locked stretches of sheltered water behind the outlying fringes of rocks and lesser islands. No wonder that in olden days the Cuban shores were so often the haunt of the pirate and the buccaneer.

Roughly speaking, there are about a million and a half of inhabitants,of whoma quarter of a millionare inor close aroundHavana,the island capital. More than half a million are negroes, for the island was long a headquarters of the slavetrade;its tobaccoandsugarwereproducedby black labour,andslavery after a previouspartial abolitionwas finally declaredillegal only in 1886. Of the remaining million inhabitants less than a half are ofpure white descent. The mixed race of mulattoes and Creoles is the most numerous, varying in every shade of black, brown, and "yellow." Even some of the old so-called Spanish-Cuban families, which date back to the early settlements of the sixteenth century, are by this time far more Creole than Spanish. Spaniards fresh from the Peninsula were always a large element in the white population, but many of them were soldiers or officials who had come to make money during their term of office, and hoped to get back to Europe as soon as possible. Then there was a non-Spanish white element, Americans, who had invested in tobacco plantations, or had come to work the iron mines, and English, French, and German traders. Chinese coolies, introduced in the last thirty years, number, according to some authorities, about 40,000, according to others doublethe number. Of the aboriginal Indian or Carib inhabitants there is hardly a trace. Cuba was the scene of the first wildhunt for goldby the old"Conquistadores," the adventurers from Spain who came to make their fortunes sword in hand. It is the only Spanish land in the New World in which the Indians were thus exterminated. This part of Cuba's story is a dark chapter in the history of Spanish conquest.

Cuba is, therefore, a land of the coloured race, with a people very largely of African blood, a slave-state till recent years, with a white population of which the adventurer and the slave-holder were the chief factors. This must be always kept in mind, for it is the key to much of its history. When Mexico, the Californias,Peru, and Chili raised the standard of revolt, Cuba remained the stronghold ofSpainin the westernseas. Hence the name by whichit was long spoken of in proclamations and state papers dating from Madrid or Havana:La siemprcfielIsla de Cuba, "The ever-faithful islandof Cuba." The words read strangely in the light of the numerous insurrections of the last half-century. This period of intermittent and mostly abortive rebellions began with the attempt of Narciso Lopez in 1850. Then came the conspiracies 0' Ramon Pinto,Estrampes, and Santa Rosa, and at last in 1868 there was a seriously organised outbreak, supported by filibustering expeditions from the United States, Central America, and San Domingo. Itlasted till 1878, and is known in Cuba as the " Ten Years' War." Its beginning in 1868 was the echo across the Atlantic of the revolution in Spain which so swiftly overthrew the throne of Isabella II. hs