XXI Cuba — The Fortress of La Cabaña
Havana,
December 2nd.
The candle end Captain MacIrvine held in his hand had burned so low that his fingers were scorching. My last match was burned up. We should have to grope our way out. Just at that moment a dim flicker of a distant light gleamed far down the low, narrow tunnelway. It came nearer, it grew larger; a man was there,—a soldier—yes, a Cuban officer, a lieutenant of infantry. With him were two ladies; one older than he, whose face, sweet, but oh, so sad! was furrowed with deep lines. Her hand trembled on her escort’s arm. The other woman was younger, quite as young as the lieutenant, and comely to look upon. “Si, Señor,” replied the lieutenant to a query, “I do have one box of the match. Take of them one half. Take of them all. I do know the way out.” He handed MacIrvine a box of small wax tapers. Tears were streaming down the elder woman’s face; the younger gave a sob. The three passed on and turned up the steep ascent to the left. We were in the pitch dark again.
“Who is he? Who are they?” I asked. “He is the officer now in command of this fortification; they are his mother and sister,” MacIrvine replied, half divining my question. “He is of a prominent Cuban family. They were people of wealth. The family were at dinner one evening. A Spanish guard called at the house, sent in a card to the father, who was an eminent judge. He left the table and went to the door. He was arrested and brought here, hatless and in his slippers. When the family went to ascertain why he did not come back to finish his coffee, they learned that he had been taken to La Cabaña. They never saw him again. The Spanish authorities reported that he had ‘escaped.’ In fact, he was brought down here into one of these dungeons, and was walled up alive. These loose rock walls you are now looking at, filling these low arches along this passageway, all tell the same tale. Behind every one of these walls, one or more Cubans have been immured alive. Their bones still rot there.”
When a man was walled in, no record was kept of the dungeon; the guards were subsequently changed and often sent to another fortress. No one might know the victim’s burial place, where he was immured with only a jug of water, a loaf of bread; and the rats robbed him of half of these. Oblivion in life, oblivion in death.
We were in the deepest, darkest dungeonway of the gigantic fortress, La Cabaña, which crowns the height across the bay from Havana. The passage was about four feet wide. Along one side were narrow, low arches, some three feet in span. Most of these arches were wholly filled with a wall of large loose rock. Air might pass through between the chinks, and the rats and lizards could crawl through; an empty rat, not one full-fattened on the dead within. A few of these walls had been torn down, and the scattered bones which sharp teeth had not destroyed had been utterly gathered together and buried in the beautiful cemetery of the city. But most of these walls were yet untouched, the story of their unknown dead forever lost. My foot hit something, I bent down and picked up the tibia of a human arm; the rats had dragged it through the wall. I laid it back gently on a projecting shelf of rock, my soul filled with horror, at the tale of Spanish cruelty it told.
We were a long way from daylight. We had crossed a moat within the giant fortress. We had passed many cave-like chambers built into the massive masonry—the casemates where soldiers and officers had lived in ease. We had entered a small room with stone seats on either hand. It was the outer guardroom of the series of dungeons behind. We had pushed open an immense iron grating which swung on rusty hinges like a door. We had come into a vast vaulted chamber, flagged with huge stones, the center of the floor being lower than the sides, making the drain. Along the walls on either hand, all the way, at a height of about seven feet, were heavy iron rings. To these rings the prisoners had been chained. Sometimes the chains were riveted to iron collars welded about the neck. A man might stand on tiptoe in comfort. When his toes gave out the collar pinched his neck; he sometimes died overnight before the jail guard discovered that his toes were weak. Into this great chamber hundreds of Cuban patriots had been crowded. No air could enter but through the narrow grated door,—no light could penetrate but the faint glimmering that drifted in through the small outer doorway. Those who might die were brought to the grating by any of their fellow-prisoners whose fetters enabled them to move. The great chamber still stank with the reek of blasted mortality. But this was not all. At the far end of the vast room was yet another grated door, now swung open upon rusting hinges. We passed into a second chamber, lower and longer than the first, obscure with perpetual gloom. The faintest gleam of God’s sweet day could be scarcely discerned through the distant door-grating of the first chamber. Here, too, men had been chained to iron rings at intervals along either side. With our lighted candle end, we scanned the massive walls and tried here and there to make out the faintly remaining legend, in faulty Spanish script, of the hapless creature who had graven here his dying word. In this remote dungeon, men were pent up to die of meagre food, of putrid water, of perpetual darkness, and of the foul hot air that crept in from the outer dungeon.
I thought surely we should have no further horrors yet to see. But Captain MacIrvine knew the way. He had been among the first American soldiers to enter La Cabaña and to discover the mysteries of these unknown and sometime forgotten dungeons. At the far end of the second chamber, he pushed open a heavy solid iron door. He entered a narrow passage barely three feet wide and so low that I had to stoop. “Mind where you set your foot. Take care of your head. Go slow,” he cried warningly; and we found ourselves going down a steep decline. The air was dank and fetid. My throbbing head was dull and heavy. Before our approach scurried a too venturesome rat. I stepped upon the slimy body of a lizard. My ear detected the retreat of hosts of scorpions as they clicked their cumbrous claws, but I heard the dismal winging of no bats; here was too deadly an atmosphere for even these to live. We came abruptly to a rock-wall, loose, but firmly set in a low arched depression. The passage widened and turned at right angles, both right and left. It was here we saw the approaching light and met the Cuban officer and the ladies.
When we found our way out to the clear, sweet sunshine again, and I looked into the blue sky arching over my head, and scented in my nostrils the fragrant breeze which swept up from the sea, and then looked up and beheld floating spotless and resplendent, above me and above La Cabaña and above Cuba, now free, my beloved flag, the flag of my own free land, the Stars and Stripes, my heart quickened. I choked a little, and I knew what Cuba and the world had gained through the blood and tears poured out by my country in order that Spanish tyranny should be forever expelled from its last stronghold this side the sea.
Captain MacIrvine and I had met that afternoon near the gateway of the customshouse in Havana, by the water side. We had taken one of the curious, blunt-ended, awning-covered rowboats, which will hold a dozen passengers, and which everywhere crowd along the quays. We had hired the old Cuban waterman for the afternoon, and bade him row us to the water stage of La Cabaña, set us ashore and then meet us at the water gate of El Moro, three hours later in the afternoon. He was brown and withered, with grim square jaw and fine dark eyes. He was a Cuban patriot. He had himself spent nigh two years in the gloomy dungeons of the fortress, his family having long given him up for dead; and all because in his secret heart he dared to love Cuba Libre.
La Cabaña is the largest Spanish fortification in the New World. It has been several centuries in growing to its immense dimensions. Crowning the heights across the bay from the city of Havana, its record of compulsory guests is a record of three centuries of the grief and agony of a race. Eighteen to twenty millions of dollars in gold have been spent upon its vast and massive walls and ramparts, its moats and fosses. Impregnable was it deemed to be by the Spanish engineers, and the United States did not have to try what its strength might be in fact. Up the narrow, slanting, rock-paved causeway from the water side to the stern stone portals of the single entrance have passed a long procession of Cuban patriots—men and women, mere boys and white-haired men; and few are they who ever came out again. They died in the dungeons by scores, and their bodies were buried in trenches, or, borne through the subterranean passage to the ramparts of El Moro, were there thrown to the sharks in the open sea. Those of lesser note who dared yet to live, were taken by platoons to a scarred and dented wall and shot to death. This spot is hallowed ground to the free man of to-day. We stood before it with uncovered heads. A little fence stakes it in, a bronze tablet is set against the bullet-battered wall of rock. The grass before us, so luxuriant, has been drenched with the noblest blood of Cuba’s patriots. The Cuban soldier guarding the gateway watched us lift our hats before the sacred and consecrated plot of martyred earth. He bowed to us respectfully as we re-entered, and it seemed to me that there was a deeper, kindlier glitter than casual greeting in his black eye.
A great garrison of regular troops was always kept in military readiness in La Cabaña; now a single company of Cuban infantry occupies the fortress. Cuba free and fifty Cuban soldiers in La Cabaña; Cuba a Spanish province and fifty thousand bayonets to garrison and hold Havana down, one single town!
Many ancient guns yet adorn the ramparts of La Cabaña, the newer artillery having been removed to Spain, or, some say, sunk in the sea. The old chapel now serves for a sleeping room for the Cuban guard. The bell which tolled so often for the lost souls of the condemned is now gone. The fount of holy water is a receptacle for junk. The well-worn flight of steps ascending to the roof, no longer responds to the tread of the thousands of feet that used to press them. Right over the chapel, near the place where swung the bell, stood the garrote where, it is said, more than sixty thousand throats have been clasped and crushed by the iron grips. Perhaps nowhere in the world have so many souls been shriven as in the chapel of La Cabaña, and nowhere have so many lives gone out as by this dread instrument of death. And yet, as we stood on this high platform, with the balmy air of now free Cuba filling our lungs, and watched the Cuban soldiery pacing their beat in the park below, it seemed, in the serene and restful humor of the day, almost incredible that only three short years ago, at most but four, here had been enacted a daily tragedy of cruelty and horror which no human pen will ever be adequate actually to portray.
Back in the year 1894, when I had bought a few Cuban bonds, and in 1896, when I had raised the Cuban flag on my McKinley pole at Coalburg, I had felt in a dim way that I was doing a thing entirely right; but it was not until I stood upon the ramparts of La Cabaña, and considered the monstrous pitilessness of Spanish rule, and saw within the focus of my vision the demonstrated proof of cruelty beyond all conception in the present age,—only then, did I fully realize how God had guided the hearts and thews of my countrymen in rendering forever impossible the continuance of these iniquities.
From La Cabaña we wandered across a stretch of grassy sward a quarter of a mile, to the parapets of El Moro. Builded upon a profound rock foundation it guards the angle of the land between the open sea and the far shore of Havana Bay. Above it, as above La Cabaña, floats the starry flag. Within it resides a sturdy, clean-cut, trim-built garrison of our own boys in blue. It did me good to see them. Vigorous and businesslike they looked. Young men, well-kept, clear-eyed, expressing in their look and gait the easy mastery of the youthful, giant power whose simple uniform they wear. El Moro was never a prison fortress, although there are said to be dungeons yet undiscovered, dug deep into the rock base on which it stands. Nor is it now a fort which could withstand an attack by modern guns. But in the ancient time it was an impregnable pile, and stands to-day, a fine example of what the military art taught men to build in centuries gone by.
Most of the guns are old and out of date, notably a dozen of immense size known among the soldier boys as the “Twelve Apostles,” while just one or two of modern make poke their noses toward the city and the sea.
From El Moro we descended to the water’s edge, and finding our boatman, were ferried across to the tranquil city. The sun was sinking behind the highlands in the west; the azure sky had grown to purple all barred with gold and red. The golden light of eventide illumined the city as with an aureole. It seemed to me a hallowing benison over Cuba now forever free.