ar but it had existed during the entire
lifetime of any one living and during the entire lifetime of his
father, grandfather and ancestors for ten generations.

As a result no Cuban had any conception of what honest government,
honest administration, honest taxation, honest dealings were. He not
only had no conception of such things but he believed that what his
family for generations and he during his life had known was the actual
situation everywhere throughout the world. He knew of nothing else.

The city had no drainage system except the {104} open gutter of the
streets--never had had. The water system consisted of an elemental
sort of dam six miles up in the hills outside the city, old, out of
repair, constantly breaking down, and a single 11-inch pipe which had
a capacity of 200,000 gallons a day for the city--something like four
gallons to a person. This was not sufficient for more than one-quarter
of each day. In other words the city at the best was receiving for
years only one-quarter of the water it absolutely needed for
cleanliness.

Plagues and epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, bubonic plague, typhus
and tetanus followed one another in regular succession. The streets
for years had contained dead animals and many times in epidemics dead
human beings--sights to which the citizens had been so accustomed
throughout their lives that they paid no attention to them. The
authorities being accustomed to keeping the public moneys for their
own use spent little or nothing upon public works, cleaning the
streets or making improvements. They did not build; they did not
replace; they only patched and repaired when it was absolutely
necessary. It was {105} a situation difficult to conceive, impossible
to realize. Yet one must constantly bear in mind that there not only
appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary in this, but in reality
there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the accustomed, usual
thing and had been so for centuries.

The sense of personal responsibility to the community was not dormant;
it did not exist. The sense of duty of those who governed to those
whom they governed was not repressed by modern corruption only; it had
ceased to exist altogether. No city official was expected to do
anything but get what he could out of those under him. No citizen knew
anything but the necessity--to him the right--of concealing anything
he had, of deceiving everybody whom he could deceive and of evading
any la