It is not possible in so brief a survey of Cuba’s resources and industries to include all its present activities, to say nothing of its future possibilities.  At the present time, the island is practically an extensive but only partly cultivated farm, producing mainly sugar and tobacco, with fruits and vegetables as a side line.  The metal deposits supplement this, with promise of becoming increasingly valuable.  The forest resources, commercially, are not great, although there are, and will continue to be, sales of mahogany and other fine hardwoods.  Local manufacturing is on a comparatively limited scale.  All cities and many towns have their artisans, the bakers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and others.  Cigar making is, of course, classed as a manufacturing enterprise, and so, for census purposes, is the conversion of the juice of the sugar-cane into sugar.  A number of cities have breweries, ice factories, match factories, soap works, and other establishments large or small.  All these, however, are incidental to the great industries of the soil, and the greater part of Cuba’s requirements in the line of mill and factory products is imported.  While little is done in the shipment of cattle or beef, Cuba is a natural cattle country.  Water and nutritious grasses are abundant, and there are vast areas, now idle, that might well be utilized for stock-raising.  There are, of course, just as there are elsewhere, various difficulties to be met, but they are met and overcome.  There are insects and diseases, but these are controlled by properly applied scientific methods.  There is open feeding throughout the entire year, so there is no need of barns or hay.  The local cattle industry makes possible the shipment of some $2,500,000 worth of hides and skins annually.  Other lines of industry worthy of mention, but not possible of detailed description here, include sponges, tortoise shell, honey, wax, molasses, and henequen or sisal.  All these represent their individual thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their employment of scores or hundreds of wage-earners.  Those who start for Cuba with a notion that the Cubans are an idle and lazy people, will do well to revise that notion.  There is not the hustle that may be seen further north, but the results of Cuban activity, measured in dollars or in tons, fairly dispute the notion of any national indolence.  When two and a half million people produce what is produced in Cuba, somebody has to work.

XIV

POLITICS, GOVERNMENT, AND COMMERCE

The British colonists in America were in large measure self-governing.  This is notably true in their local affairs.  The Spanish colonists were governed almost absolutely by the mother-country.  A United States official publication reports that “all government control centred in the Council of the Indies and the King, and local self government, which was developed at an early stage in the English colonies,