balconies on both sides hanging over the streets, and full of young men smoking cigarettes; men parading up and down the hall and quizzing the women, who were all seated—­two rows of them, hundreds all together—­seriously contemplating the male procession:  enameled, powdered, attired in the wealth of the Indies, saying nothing, doing nothing, not smiling, not blinking, just sitting there, an awful array of hideousness.  After the band struck up and the dancing began, I remained long enough to lose in the music the horrible impression of, the opening scene, and then hurried home.  At the opera and the Carnival it is not so positively unendurable, but a handsome face, or a pretty face, or even an intelligent, expressive face, I have not yet seen in a woman in Havana; and at this season of the year, if ever, Havana is Cuba.  I don’t condemn them—­I merely give my luck.

The town is of course full of Spanish military and their accessories, civil functionaries who are all Spanish, money-makers, adventurers, shoddy.  The Spanish army is at “the front,” posted across or partly across the island on a sort of strong picket-line, fortified by block-houses, whence watch is kept on the movements of the insurgents, who seem to come and go as they please in the Spanish front, and cross the lines with impunity.  The Spanish hold the whole seaboard, all important towns and villages, hold the insurgents practically in check, so far as the fertile region of the island is concerned, and from year to year keep military matters just about in statu quo.  The insurgents dwell in the wildest portion of the island, often in almost impenetrable woods, living the life of savages, and depending on the bounty of Nature for their daily bread.

So the war lingers.  It is not what we would call a war:  it is a condition of armed hostility.  It is conducted almost wholly at the expense of Spain in men, wholly at the expense of Cuba in money.  The Cuban volunteers are a home-guard, but the purse of the Cubans is open.  Spain is not loath to dip into it, and taxation for carrying on the government and the war has become very onerous—­dreadfully so, in fact, though I believe that the Cubans do not realize it so fully as strangers do.  The government is impoverished; the war makes no progress; what becomes of the enormous revenue derived from the taxes?  A rich planter said to me dryly, “They are ignorant men:  they make mistakes in applying it.”  Hard things are openly said of all Spanish officials; and all officials, from the captain-general to the harbor pilot, are Spanish.  Startling things are heard here every day in political and military discussions.  The people think in classes:  there is the Spanish view, the Creole view, the foreign view—­none very dispassionate, and none very accurate.  There is no accepted basis of fact for anything:  nobody believes anybody else, and truth here lies in a very deep well.  But one thing else is clear.  Cuba,