Condemned to A living death.

Every ten days or so crowds of handcuffed men are driven through the streets of Havana, which they will never tread again, on their way to the transport ship which will convey them to the penal settlements on the African coast.  Many of these men represent the elite of Cuban society.  Seldom is a direct charge brought against them.  Police spies denounce them as Cuban sympathizers.  They are given no trial, that they may prove the charges false.  On administrative order they are sentenced to exile for life, and frequently the source of their misfortune can be traced to private revenge or personal feeling.  Since the beginning of the war at least ten thousand prominent citizens have been torn from their native island, families and friends, and sent to life exile in the filthy, overcrowded, deadly swamps of Fernando Po.  With a little money and good health it is possible to survive in Ceuta, but none ever returns from Fernando Po.  On the 23d of March a large party of citizens of the Matanzas district passed through Havana on their way to the transport.  It was a sad procession.  Hopeless, jaded, despairing men, with arms tied behind them and feet shackled, forced to leave Cuba and face a slow, horrible death.  On the train from Matanzas two of these unfortunates were literally shot to pieces.  The guards reported they tried to escape and were shot in the attempt.  Their fellow-prisoners told a different story.  “The two men were deliberately taken out on the platform between the cars and fired upon.  And the soldiers would give no reason.”  The action could likely be traced to personal revenge.

For three-quarters of a century the misgovernment of Spain in Cuba was a neighborhood shame and scandal to the people of the United States.  Warning off the interference of any other foreign nation, under the policy known as the “Monroe Doctrine,” the American people witnessed the repeated efforts of a less favored nation of this hemisphere to release itself from the grasp of the oppressor.  They witnessed at the periods of each of these revolts their own ships of war patroling the southern coast and the waters adjacent to Cuba to intercept any young Americans whose sympathies might lead them to join the Cuban cause, and they acquiesced, because the law as it stood exacted it.  They witnessed in more than one of these revolts, when some young Americans, who had eluded the vigilance of United States cruisers, landed on the island and were captured by Spanish troops.  These young men stood against the walls of Morro Castle and were shot like dogs, because their government was powerless under the law to aid them.  They witnessed the offers on the part of their government at various times to terminate the continued scandal upon civilized government at one of the doorways of their country by the purchase of the island for a generous sum of money, and the rejections of such propositions by Spain.