But Spain could learn no such lessons.  Her cruelty and misgovernment aroused colony after colony to rebellion ending in freedom, but her policies remained unaltered.  One by one possessions of fabulous wealth dropped away until at last this old crone of nations has been left to shiver alone by her fireside, abandoned in her misery by all the children whose memory of her is nothing but that of vicious cruelty.  The only pity to which Spain is entitled, is the pity that is due for her ignorance and her mistakes, not pity for the penalties that these have brought upon her.

Spain was once the intellectual leader of the world, as well as the pioneer of discovery.  Spanish universities were centers of learning long before northern Europe had its intellectual birth.  Spanish mariners sailed every sea and Spanish adventurers explored every land.  If learning and advancement bring obligations, as they are admitted to do, it was Spain’s obligation to be a leader in strife for liberty of mind and body, but the two most notable things in her history are the Spanish inquisition against freedom of thought, and the Spanish ferocities which enslaved a new world for many a year.  Now she has reaped the harvest of her own misdeeds.

The early settlement of Cuba.

Every one knows that Columbus was not looking for a western hemisphere, but for the Orient, and that when he found Cuba he believed he had reached the East Indies and the islands of gold and spice which had been reported from that mysterious land.  His first island discoveries he believed to be the outlying portions of that eastern archipelago and when the natives told him of a greater land near by, which he reached a few days later, he believed that at last he had reached Cipango, as Japan then was called.

The first name given to the island was Juana, in honor of Prince Juan, the son of Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile.  After Ferdinand’s death, in his honor the name was changed to Fernandina.  Still later it received the name of Santiago, as a mark of reverence for the patron saint of Spain, and another change was made a few years afterward, when the inhabitants, as a proof of their piety, called it Ave Maria, in honor of the Holy Virgin.  In spite of all this effort at establishing a Spanish name, the original Indian name of Cuba, which it bore when the great navigator first landed on its shores, has asserted itself triumphantly through all the centuries and is now ineradicable.

According to the accounts given by Spanish writers who were contemporary with the discovery, and the century immediately following, the aboriginal inhabitants of Cuba were a generous, gentle, hospitable people, by no means energetic, but heartily cordial and courteous to the strangers who reached their shores.  The mildness of their climate did not stimulate them to much activity in cultivation of the soil, because tropical fruits and vegetables came with scarcely an effort on the part of the natives.  Their implements and utensils were crude and their life simple.