"For having dared to give utterances to principles and opinions, which, to other nations, constitute the foundation of their moral progress and glory, the Cubans most distinguished for their virtues and talents have found themselves wanderers and exiles. For the offence of having exhibited their opposition to the unlawful and perilous slave trade, from which the avarice of General O'Donnell promised itself so rich a harvest of lucre, the latter satiated his resentment with the monstrous vengeance of involving them in a charge of conspiracy with the free colored people and the slaves of the estates; endeavoring, as the last outrage that an immoral government could offer to law, to reason, or to nature, to prove the object of that conspiracy, in which they implicated whites of the most eminent virtue, knowledge, and patriotism, to have been no other than the destruction of their own race. "All the laws of society and nature trampled under foot--all races and conditions confounded together--the island of Cuba then presented to the civilized world a spectacle worthy of the rejoicings of hell. The wretched slaves saw their flesh torn from them under the lash, and bespattered with blood the faces of their executioners, who did not cease exacting from their tortures denunciation against accomplices. Others were shot in platoons without form of trial, and without even coming to understand the pretext under which they were massacred. The free colored people, after having been first lacerated by the lash, were then hurried to the scaffold and those only escaped with life who had gold enough to appease the fury of their executioners. And nevertheless, when the government or its followers has come to fear some rising of the Cubans their first threat has been that of arming the colored people against them for their extermination. We abstain for very shame from repeating the senseless pretences to which they have had recourse to terrify the timid wretches! How have they been able to image that the victims of their fury, with whom the whites of Cuba had shared in common the horrors of misery and persecution, will turn against their own friends at the call of the very tyrant who has torn them in pieces? If the free colored people, who know their interests as well as the whites, take any part in the movement of Cuba, it certainly will not be to the injury of the mother who shelters them in her bosom, nor of those other sons of hers who have never made them feel the difference of their race and condition, and who, far from plundering them, have taken pride in being their defenders and in meriting the title of their benefactors.