Red Cross contributions and Red
Cross work, with equally gratifying results. In both of these activities
a leading and most efficient part was taken by the women of Cuba. In
subscribing to the loans they were most generous; in canvassing for
subscriptions from others and in collecting and working for the Red
Cross they were indefatigable and irresistible. They made it a point of
patriotic honor, and almost a condition of social acceptability, to
respond in the fullest possible manner to every such call of the war. In
Cuba's domestic struggles, the women had suffered cruelly, and their
sympathies sprang spontaneously and generously toward the lands of
Europe where womanhood was suffering a thousand martyrdoms. Thus as the
manhood of Cuba with a unanimity which the few exceptions only
emphasized rallied to the call of the President to throw the material
and militant might of the Republic on the side of law, of civilization
and of democracy, the womanhood of Cuba, with no less unanimity and
zeal, followed Senora Menocal in the equally necessary and grateful
tasks of the campaign which women even better than men could perform.

No tribute could be too high to render to these devoted women, who were
always ready to make personal sacrifices of time, of strength, of money,
of work, for the cause of humanity. Amid all its historic fiestas and
pageants, Havana has seen no fairer or more inspiring spectacle than
that of the Red Cross women, Senora Menocal at their head, marching in
stately procession through her streets to manifest their devotion to the
cause and to arouse others to equal earnestness. The magnitude of the
sums raised by the women of Cuba for the war loans and for the Red
Cross, and for Cuban hospital units at the front, and the amount of
bandages and other hospital supplies and clothing prepared by them for
the armies "over there," made proud items in Cuban statistics of the
Great War.

Thitherto Cuba had often been engaged in war, but it was always in what
may be termed selfish war, for her own defence against an alien enemy or
for her own liberation from oppressors who, at first kin, had become
alien. Now for the first time it was her privilege to engage in a
greater struggle than any before, and one which was for her own
interests only to the extent to which those interests were involved with
and were practically identical with the interests of all civilized
nations and of world-wide humanity. Said Thomas Jef