The official figures for 1851 show total imports amounting to $34,000,000, and exports to $33,000,000, but the accuracy of the figures is open to question.  The more important fact is that of a very large gain in population and in production.  The coffee industry, that assumed important proportions during a part of the first half of the century, gradually declined for the reason that sugar became a much more profitable crop.  Now, Cuba imports most of its coffee from Porto Rico.  Because of its convenience as a contraband article, there are no reliable figures of the tobacco output.  Prior to 1817, the commodity was, for much of the time, a crown monopoly and, for the remainder of the time, a monopoly concession to private companies.  In that year, cultivation and trade became free, subject to a tax on each planter of one-twentieth of his production.

As we shall see, in another chapter, Cuba at last wearied of Spanish exactions and revolted as did the United States, weary of British rule and British exactions and restrictions, more than a hundred years earlier.

III

THE COUNTRY

Description of the physical features of a country seldom makes highly entertaining reading, but it seems a necessary part of a book of this kind.  Some readers may find interest if not entertainment in such a review.  The total area of the island, including a thousand or more adjacent islands, islets, and keys, is given as 44,164 square miles, a little less than the area of Pennsylvania and a little more than that of Ohio or Tennessee.  Illustration of its shape by some familiar object is difficult, although various comparisons have been attempted.  Some old Spanish geographers gave the island the name of La Lengua de Pajaro, “the bird’s tongue.”  Mr. M.M.  Ballou likened it to “the blade of a Turkish scimitar slightly curved back, or approaching the form of a long, narrow, crescent.”  Mr. Robert T. Hill holds that it “resembles a great hammer-headed shark, the head of which forms the straight, south coast of the east end of the island, from which the sinuous body extends westward.  This analogy is made still more striking by two long, finlike strings of keys, or islets, which extend backward along the opposite coasts, parallel to the main body of the island.”  But all such comparisons call for a lively imagination.  It might be likened to the curving handles of a plow attached to a share, or to any one of a dozen things that it does not at all clearly resemble.  Regarding the Oriente coast, from Cape Cruz to Cape Maisi, as a base, from that springs a long and comparatively slender arm that runs northwesterly for five hundred miles to the vicinity of Havana.  There, the arm, somewhat narrowed, turns downward in a generally southwestern direction for about two hundred miles.  The total length of the island, from Cape Maisi on the east to Cape San Antonio on the west, is about seven hundred