As to this dictum, the Cuban negro may eventually do his fair share toward the industrial development of the Island, but it can only be as a result of a considerable change in his habits and a greatly increased degree of efficiency. At present, extensive employers of labor pronounce him inefficient, unreliable, and difficult of control. It is not to his credit that they should import labor at great trouble and expense in preference to employing him. If capitalists have ceased to be apprehensive regarding the negro of Cuba, which is by no means certain,--it is not because he has suddenly ceased to have a desire for disturbance, with its attendant opportunities for loot, but because they have greater confidence in the ability and inclination of the authorities to suppress outbreaks with promptness, born of the ever-present fear of American intervention, or a demand on the part of foreign property interests for some share in the administration of affairs. Though individuality is not one of the negro characteristics, the perpetuation of racial traits and temperament are pronouncedly characteristic wherever they may be found and under whatever conditions. The negro may be three centuries removed from his transplanted ancestor, he may have more than one strain of white blood in his composition, he may have adopted the most approved customs of the country in which he lives, and may be to all outward appearances the most highly civilized of beings, but for all that African nature is strong in him. Moreover its promptings are not repressed from principle, but from motives of self-interest. Given the opportunity to indulge them without fear of consequences, and he will follow his inclinations unrestrainedly. For that reason one-third of Cuba’s population must be as great a source of anxiety as is the colored element of our southern States. This is not to say that there are any good grounds for the sometimes expressed fear that Cuba may become a second Haiti, controlled by the blacks, but is intended to convey the belief, that in the negroes of the Island there is a constantly present source of possible trouble. The majority of Cuban negroes are descendants of slaves imported during the past century, but a large number, like the maroons of Jamaica, come from a stock which accompanied the earliest Spanish adventurers and shared their hardships and dangers in a companionship that often approached a condition of friendship and equality. Such a one was Estavan, the negro who, with Cabeza de Vaca, crossed the continent of North America, from the Gulf of Mexico to California, in the years between 1528 and 1536. From this stock sprang the free mulattoes of the Antonio Maceo type, a class superior to any that our colored population contains.