In the suburbs, just within the ring of guardian forts, an “area of cultivation” was set aside, and here the prisoners put up huts of yagua—­comfortless bark shelters, which were well enough, perhaps, in fair weather, but sadly ineffective against wind and rain.  Here, housed with hunger and crowded together in indescribable squalor, they dwelt, seeking comfort in their common wretchedness.  Since they had no farm implements, no seeds, no means whatever of cultivating this ground apportioned to their use, it remained untilled while they grew hungrier day by day.  Outside the lines there were yams, potatoes, edible roots and such, for the Spaniards’ work of desolation had not been quite complete, and no hand can rob the Cuban soil of all its riches; but the pacificos were not allowed to leave the city.

Fish were plentiful in the harbor, too, but to catch them was forbidden.  Sentries were on guard with ready rifles and bared machetes; every morning through the filthy reconcentrado quarter guerrillas drove pack-mules bearing the mutilated bodies of those who had dared during the night to seek food surreptitiously.  Sometimes they dragged these ghastly reminders at the ends of ropes; this, indeed, was a favorite way with them.

Dogs and cats became choice articles of diet, until they disappeared.  The Government did supply one quality of food, however; at intervals, it distributed yucca roots.  But these were starchy and almost indigestible.  From eating them the children grew pinched in limb and face, while their abdomens bloated hugely.  Matanzas became peopled with a race of grotesquely misshapen little folks, gnomes with young bodies, but with faces old and sick.

Of course disease became epidemic, for in the leaky hovels, dirt-floored and destitute of any convenience, there could be no effort at sanitation.  Conditions became unspeakable.  The children died first, then the aged and infirm.  Deaths in the street were not uncommon; nearly every morning bodies were found beneath the portales.  Starving creatures crept to the market in the hope of begging a stray bit of food, and some of them died there, between the empty stalls.  The death-wagons, heavy with their daily freight, rumbled ceaselessly through the streets, adding to the giant piles of unburied corpses outside the city.

Typhoid, smallpox, yellow fever, raged unchecked.  The hospitals were crowded, and even in them the commonest necessities were lacking.  It is believed that men have returned from the grave, but no one, either Spaniard or Cuban, had ever been known to return from one of these pest-houses, and, in consequence, those who were stricken preferred to remain and to die among their dear ones.