re are few which contribute more, actually and
potentially, to the world's supplies of greatly used products. One of
the most universally used and prized vegetable products became first
known to mankind from Cuba, and there to this day is most profusely and
most perfectly grown and prepared; while another, one of the most
universally used and essential articles of food, is there produced in
its greatest abundance. There also may be found an immense number and
bewildering variety of the most serviceable articles in both the
vegetable and mineral kingdoms, in noteworthy profusion and perfection,
together with possibilities and facilities for a comparable development
of the animal kingdom.

Nor is the geographical situation of the island less favorable or less
inviting than its natural resources. Lying just within the Torrid Zone,
it has a climate which combines the fecund influences of the tropics
with the agreeable moderation of the Temperate Zones. It fronts at once
upon the most frequented ocean of the globe and upon two of the greatest
and most important semi-inland seas. It lies directly between the two
great continents of the Western Hemisphere, with such supremely
fortunate orientation that travel and commerce between them naturally
skirt and touch its shores rather than follow the longer and more
difficult route by land which is the sole alternative. A line drawn from
the heart of the United States to the heart of South America passes
through the heart of Cuba. A line drawn from the mouth of the
Mississippi to the mouth of the Amazon traverses Cuba almost from end to
end. Circled about the island and fronting on the narrow seas which
divide them from it are the territories of no fewer than fourteen
independent national sovereignties. It lies, moreover, directly in the
path of the world's commerce between the two great oceans, the Atlantic
and the Pacific, by the way of that gigantic artificial waterway which,
created largely because of Cuba, was the fulfilment of the world's four
centuries of effort and desire. There is scarcely a more suggestive and
romantic theme in the world's history than this: That Columbus made his
epochal adventure for the prime purpose of finding a passageway from the
Atlantic to the Pacific; or rather from Europe to Asia by way of the
Atlantic, since he assumed the Atlantic and the Pacific to be one; that,
failing to find that non-existent passageway, he found Cuba instead and
imagined th