Hon. C. W. Russell, an attache of the Department of Justice of the United States, went to Cuba shortly after the order for reconcentration went into effect.  It was his purpose to learn by personal observation how much or how little truth there was in the reports that had come to this country regarding the terrible suffering among the reconcentrados.  He states the result of his investigations as follows: 

“I spent just two weeks in Cuba, visited Havana, went south to Jaruco, southwest to Guines, northeast to Matanzas, eastwardly about two hundred miles through the middle of the country to San Domingo, Santa Clara and Sagua la Grande.  I visited Marianao, a short distance west of Havana, and saw along the railroad thirty or forty towns or stations.  In Havana I visited the Fossos, the hospital prison at Aldecoa, where I talked with the father of Evangelina Cisneros, and a place called the Jacoba.  I found reconcentrados at all three places, and begging everywhere about the streets of Havana.

“The spectacle at the Fossos and Jacoba houses, of women and children emaciated to skeletons and suffering from diseases produced by starvation, was sickening.  In Sagua I saw some sick and emaciated little girls in a children’s hospital, started three days before by charitable Cubans, and saw a crowd of miserable looking reconcentrados with tin buckets and other receptacles getting small allowances of food doled out to them in a yard.  In the same city, in an old sugar warehouse, I saw stationed around the inside walls the remnants of twenty or thirty Cuban families.

“In one case the remnant consisted of two children, seven or eight years old.  In another case, where I talked to the people in broken Spanish, there were four individuals, a mother, a girl of fourteen, and two quite small girls.  The smallest was then suffering from malarial fever.  The next had the signs on her hands, with which I had become familiar, of having had that dreadful disease, the beri-beri.  These four were all that order of concentration had left alive of eleven.  At San Domingo, where two railroads join, the depot was crowded with women and children, one of the latter, as I remember, being swollen up with the beri-beri, begging in the most earnest way of the few passengers.

“San Domingo is little more than a railroad station in times of peace, but at present it has a considerable population, living in cabins thatched with the tops of royal palm trees, composed of the survivors of the reconcentrados.  The huts are arranged close together in a little clump, and the concentration order required and apparently still requires these people to live within a circle of small block houses, commonly dignified in the dispatches by the name of forts.  They had no work to do, no soil to till, no seed to plant, and only begging to live on.  I do not know the exact measure of the dead-line circle drawn around them, but there was certainly nothing within it upon which a human being