at he had found therein the fulfilment of his dreams; that
four centuries later that passageway was artificially provided through
the enterprise and energy of a power which in his day had not yet come
into existence; and that this transcendent deed was accomplished largely
because of Cuba and because of the conflict through which that island
violently divorced herself from the imperial sovereignty which Columbus
had planted upon her shores.

Lying thus in a peculiar sense at the commercial centre of the world,
between North America and South America, between Europe and Asia,
between all the lands of the Atlantic and all the lands of the Pacific
and subject to important approach from all directions, we must reckon
it not mere chance but the provision of benevolent design that Cuba at
almost all parts of her peculiarly ample coastline is endowed with a
greater number of first-rate harbors than any other country of the
world. In recognition of these facts and of their gradual development
and application to the purposes and processes of civilization, is a
theme worthy to pique the interest and to absorb the attention of the
most ambitious historian, whether for the mere chronicling of conditions
and events, or for the philosophical analysis of causes and results.

All these things, however, fascinating as they are and copious as is
their suggestion of interest, are after all only a minor and the less
important part of the real History of Cuba, such as I must endeavor to
write. Without the Cuban people, Cuba would have remained a negligible
factor in the equations of humanity. Without the people of the island,
"what to me were sun or clime?" The genial climate, the fecund soil, the
wealth of mines and field and forest, the capacious harbors and the
encircling seas, all would be vanity of vanities. Nor is it for nothing
that I have suggested differentiation between the Cuban People and the
Cuban Nation. Without the development of the former into the latter, all
these things could never have hoped to reach their greatest value and
utility. The Cuban People have existed for four centuries, the Cuban
Nation in its consummate sense for less than a single generation. Yet in
the latter brief span more progress has been made toward realization of
Cuba's possibilities and destinies than in all those former ages. It is
a circumstance of peculiar significance that almost the oldest of all
civilized communities in the Western Hemisphere