Politically, the condition of the Cubans after the restoration of peace in 1878, was as bad as it had been before.  Laws existed which might lead unobserving persons to believe that the Cubans enjoyed every liberty, but as a matter of fact the Cubans were kept under the most unbearable vassalage.  The Spaniards in Cuba before this war numbered only 9.30 per cent of the island’s population, but, availing themselves of a law which gave to them a majority in the electoral census, they were to return twenty-four of the thirty deputies which the island then sent to the Spanish Cortes.

So restrictive was the electoral law that only 53,000 men were qualified to vote in the entire island, although its population was 1,762,000.  In the municipal district of Guines, with a population of 12,500 Cubans and 500 Spaniards, the electoral census included 400 Spaniards and thirty-two Cubans.  This is one among many similar instances.  The Board of Aldermen in Havana, the capital city of the island, has for years been made up entirely of Spaniards, and the same may be said of Cienfuegos and other important cities.

Despite all constitutional provisions the governor-general of the island had the power to deport from the island, without a trial, any person whose presence there he considered dangerous to the security of the State.  The island was at peace when Cepeda, Lopez de Brinas and Marquez Sterling, all journalists, were deported.  The liberty of the press was and still is a myth.  El Pais, the Autonomist organ, was criminally prosecuted in 1889 because it denounced the appointment of one of the sons of the president of the Havana Court of Appeals to a place which he could not lawfully hold.

What liberty of association the Cubans enjoyed may be judged from the fact that a delegate of the government had to be present at their meetings, with power to dissolve them whenever he saw fit to do so.

No Cuban was able to obtain a place in the administration unless he was rich enough to go to Madrid and there become acquainted with some influential politician.  Even so, Cubans seldom succeeded in being appointed to places of importance.

The Cuban exiles in Key West, New York and other cities in the United States, and in Costa Rica, Honduras, Santo Domingo and other parts of Spanish America, had been planning a new uprising for several years.  The desire of the Cubans for national independence was quickened by what they suffered from Spain’s misgovernment.  For two or three years the exiles in the United States and Spanish American countries, veterans of the war of 1868-78, and younger champions of free Cuba, organized clubs, collected a war fund, purchased munitions of war and laid plans with their compatriots in Cuba for a new struggle for independence.  There were 140 revolutionary clubs in North and South America, Cuba and other West India islands, affiliated under the name of the revolutionary party, ready to