CHAPTER IV A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT: CUBA The work of Spain--The North American reforms--The future. By turns Spanish and North American, and frequently disturbed by the conflict of these two Americanisms, the history of the "pearl of the Antilles" has been a long political experiment. Its result, the success of one method or the other, will prove the aptitude or the incapacity of the Latins of America in the art of organising a State or instituting a Republic. The last colony, the final vestige of the vast Spanish Empire overseas, Cuba still betrayed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political and moral influence of the mother country. The exuberant and classic land of tobacco and sugar, its tropical opulence attracted pioneers and colonists. Spain therefore fought to retain this country, which she granted in recompense of the audacity of her adventurers and the rapacity of her officials. Its geographical situation, its wealth, its traditions, are all exceptional. The race, imaginative and precocious, is fertile in poets, heroes, and orators. We see generals of thirty, poetical swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses; irreducible guerillas, orators full of tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims, who wander through America relating the miseries of the Spanish tyranny: a gloomy tale which has made the liberated democracies attentive {314} to the fate of their captive sister. Thus Europe used to shudder at the fate of Poland or Ireland. Astonishingly audacious were these soldiers--Garcia, Maceo, Gomez--who defended the national liberty to the death; bitter were the battles, the hand-to-hand conflicts, the wars of skirmishes and outposts. Of the high lineage of Bolivar, San Martin, and Sucre, the last of the Liberators, at once poet, statesman, and warrior, a Gothic knight enamoured of an ideal Dulcinea--the autonomy of Cuba--Marti was the representative leader of the nation. As in the other colonies, freed a century earlier, the action of Spain in Cuba was at once fertile and limited, useful and disastrous. What effort could be more paradoxical than that of loading with fetters, with prohibitions and monopolies, the very cities whose birth and development was the work of Spain? Authoritatively she sought to stamp out the longing for liberty, and in this island consumed by racial hatred--the old hatred of the conquerors and the Creoles--she responded to every revolutionary demand for independence by a terrible policy of repression. One of her governors left the bloody traces of an Alva, the pacificator of Flanders.