Ever since Spain lost her colonies on the American continent the Cubans have striven to gain their independence.  The Ten Years War cost the mother country 300,000,000 pesetas and 100,000 men, most of them victims of yellow fever.  When slavery was abolished in 1880 fresh disturbances ensued.  The majority of slave holders, who received no compensation, joined the party of independence.

Spain, adhering to her old policy of distrust, retained a large army in Cuba and a navy round about her shores, the expenses of which caused the budget to amount to $46,594,000 at a time when two-thirds of the island was nothing but a mass of ruins, and when Cuba was beginning to feel the effects of the competition with other sugar-producing countries.

While the European manufacturers received important bounties those of Cuba had to pay export duties on their sugar, and the importation of all agricultural and industrial implements was subjected to a tariff almost prohibitive.

Two laws were enacted in 1882 to regulate commerce between Cuba and Spain.  By the provisions of these laws the import duties on all Spanish products were to be gradually diminished until their importation in Cuba became entirely free, while the Cubans had to pay on their imports to Spain duties which practically closed the Spanish market to all their products.

Spanish goods, as a rule, are much inferior to those of English, French or American manufacture, but the Cuban consumer was forced to buy Spanish goods or pay an exorbitant price for those which he would have preferred to buy at a fair price.  An instance will suffice to illustrate this:  When the present war began in 1895 the duty on a hundred kilogrammes of woolen cashmere was fifteen dollars and forty-seven cents if Spanish, three hundred dollars if foreign.  These differential duties opened a reign of prosperity for industry in Spain, where foreign goods were imported or smuggled, to be later sent to Cuba as Spanish.

The injustice of these commercial laws was so evident and so detrimental to the interests of Cuba that in 1894 the Planters’ Association, the president of which, the Count de Diana, was a Spaniard, referred to them as “destructive of our public wealth, a source of inextinguishable discontent and the germ of serious dissensions.”

The insular budgets could never be covered, and the result was that the public debt was kept on the increase.  The expenditures were classed as follows:  For army and navy, 36.59 per cent of the budget’s total; for the debt, 40.89; for justice and government, 19.77, and for public works, 2.75.  No public work of any kind was begun in the seventeen years which intervened between the two wars.

The Cuban Treasury, between 1823 and 1864, sent to Spain $82,165,436 in gold.  This money entered the Spanish Treasury as “Colonial surplus,” but as a Spanish writer (Zaragoza) says in his book, “Las Insurrecciones de Cuba,” it was absurd to speak of a surplus when not even the opening of a bad road was undertaken.