st over shows that sugar to the amount of $800,000 was sent out. In
'94, 154 vessels touched at Matanzas on their way to America. In '95
there were 80 and in '96 there are 16. I always imagined that houses
were destroyed during a war because they got in the way of cannon balls
or they were burned because they might offer shelter to the enemy, but
here they are destroyed, with the purpose of making the war horrible
and hurrying up the end. The insurgents began first by destroying the
sugar mills, some of which were worth millions of dollars in machinery,
and now the Spaniards are burning the homes of the people and herding
them in around the towns to starve out the insurgents and to leave them
without shelter or places to go for food or to hide the wounded. So
all day long where ever you look you see great heavy columns of smoke
rising into this beautiful sky above the magnificent palms the most
noble of all palms, almost of all trees-- It is the most beautiful
country I have ever visited. I had no recollection of how beautiful it
was or else I had not the knowledge of other places with which to
compare it. Nothing out of the imagination can approach it in its
great waterfalls and mossy rocks and grand plains and forests of white
pillars with plumes waving above them. Only man is vile here and it is
cruel to see the walls of the houses with blind eyes, with roofs gone
and gardens burned, every church but one that I have seen was a
fortress with hammocks swung from the altars and rude barricades thrown
up around the doorways-- If this is war I am of the opinion that it is
a senseless wicked institution made for soldiers, lovers and
correspondents for different reasons, and for no one else in the world
and it is too expensive for the others to keep it going to entertain
these few gentlemen-- I have seen very little of it yet and I probably
won't see much more, but I have seen all I want. Remington had his
mind satisfied even sooner--but then he is an alarmist and exaggerates
things-- The men who wear the red badge of courage, I don't feel sorry
for, they have their reward in their bloody bandages and the little
cross on their tunic but those you meet coming back sick and dying with
fever are the ones that make fighting contemptible--poor little
farmers, poor little children with no interest in Cuba or Spain's right
to hold it, who have been sent out to die like ants before they have
learned to hold a mauser, and wh