"Notwithstanding the disadvantages under which the Cubans have laboured, they have contributed many members to the learned professions. To educate their sons and daughters in the institutions of the United States, England, and France has always been the highest ambition of the creoles of Cuba and Porto Rico. The influence of their educated men is felt in many countries, the most distinguished professor of civil engineering, two leading civil engineers of our navy, and the most eminent authority on yellow fever in our country belonging to this class. Thousands of these people, driven from their beloved Island, have settled in Paris, London, New York, Mexico, and the West Indies, where they hold honourable positions in society, and even the exiles of the lower classes, with their superior agricultural arts, have been eagerly welcomed in countries like Jamaica, Mexico, and Florida, which hope to share with Cuba the benefits of its tobacco culture. "THE NEGROES "In addition to the white creole population, thirty-two per cent. are black or coloured--using the latter word in its correct signification, of a mixture of the black and white. This black population of Cuba has been as little understood in this country as has been the creole, especially by those who have alleged that in case Cuba should gain her freedom the Island would become a second Haiti. The black and coloured people of the Island as a class are more independent and manly in their bearing than their brethren of the United States, having possessed even before slavery was abolished on the Island the four rights of free marriage, of seeking a new master at their option, of purchasing their freedom by labour, and of acquiring property. While the negro shares with the creole the few local rights possessed by any of the inhabitants, their social privileges are greater than here, although a strong caste feeling exists. Miscegenation has also produced many mulattoes, but race mixture is no more common than in this country. "The coloured people of Cuba belong to several distinct classes. The majority of them are descendants of slaves imported during the present century, but a large number, like the negroes of Colombia and the maroons of Jamaica, come from a stock which accompanied the earliest Spanish settlers, like Estevan, the negro, who, with the two white companions of Cabeza de Vaca, first crossed the United States from the Gulf of Mexico to California in 1528-36. The amalgamation of this class in the past century with the Spanish stock produced a superior class of free mulattoes of the Antonio Maceo type, unlike any people in this country with which they can be compared.