The government's report for the year just ended gives the number of
deaths in three hospitals of Matanzas as three hundred and eighty for
the year, which is an average of a little over one death a day. As a
matter of fact, in the military hospital alone the soldiers during
several months of last year died at the rate of sixteen a day. It seems
hard that Spain should hold Cuba at such a sacrifice of her own people.

In Cardenas, one of the principal seaport towns of the island, I found
the pacificos lodged in huts at the back of the town and also in
abandoned warehouses along the water front. The condition of these
latter was so pitiable that it is difficult to describe it correctly
and hope to be believed.

The warehouses are built on wooden posts about fifty feet from the
water's edge. They were originally nearly as large in extent as Madison
Square Garden, but the half of the roof of one has fallen in, carrying
the flooring with it, and the adobe walls and one side of the sloping
roof and the high wooden piles on which half of the floor once rested
are all that remain.

Some time ago an unusually high tide swept in under one of these
warehouses and left a pool of water a hundred yards long and as many
wide, around the wooden posts, and it has remained there undisturbed.
This pool is now covered a half-inch thick with green slime, colored
blue and yellow, and with a damp fungus spread over the wooden posts
and up the sides of the walls.

Over this sewage are now living three hundred women and children and a
few men. The floor beneath them has rotted away, and the planks have