failed. We stormed the forts in 1760, and held
them and held the city till the Seven Years' War was over. I had read
descriptions of the place, but they had given me no clear conception of
what it would be like, certainly none at all of what it was like.
Kingston is the best of our West Indian towns, and Kingston has not one
fine building in it. Havana is a city of palaces, a city of streets and
plazas, of colonnades, and towers, and churches and monasteries. We
English have built in those islands as if we were but passing visitors,
wanting only tenements to be occupied for a time. The Spaniards built as
they built in Castile; built with the same material, the white limestone
which they found in the New World as in the Old. The palaces of the
nobles in Havana, the residence of the governor, the convents, the
cathedral, are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid, as if by some
Aladdin's lamp a Castilian city had been taken up and set down again
unaltered on the shore of the Caribbean Sea. And they carried with them
their laws, their habits, their institutions and their creed, their
religious orders, their bishops, and their Inquisition. Even now in her
day of eclipse, when her genius is clouded by the modern spirit against
which she fought so long and so desperately, the sons of Spain still
build as they used to build, and the modern squares and market places,
the castles and fortresses, which have risen in and round the ancient
Havana, are constructed on the old massive model, and on the same lines.
However it may be with us, and whatever the eventual fate of Cuba, the
Spanish race has taken root there, and is visibly destined to remain.
They have poured their own people into it. In Cuba alone there are ten
times as many Spaniards as there are English and Scotch in all our West
Indies together, and Havana is ten times the size of the largest of our
West Indian cities. Refugees have flocked thither from the revolutions
in the Peninsula. The Canary Islands overflow into it. You know the
people from Teneriffe by their stature; they are the finest surviving
specimens of the old conquering breed. The political future is dark; the
government is unimaginably corrupt--so corrupt that change is
inevitable, though what change it would be idle to prophesy. The
Americans looked at the island which lay so temptingly near them, but
they were wise in their generation. They reflected that to introduce
into an Anglo-Saxon republic so inso