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Cuba in War Time by Richard Harding Davis
page 65 of 68 (95%)
thoroughly concerning it. She should not act on the reports of the
hotel piazza correspondents, but send men to Cuba on whose judgment and
common sense she can rely. General Fitzhugh Lee is one of these men,
and there is no better informed American on Cuban matters than he, nor
one who sees more clearly the course which our government should
pursue. Through the consuls all over the island, he is in touch with
every part of it, and in daily touch; but incidents which are
frightfully true there seem exaggerated and overdrawn when a
typewritten description of them reaches the calm corridors of the State
Department.

More men like Lee should go to Cuba to inform themselves, not men who
will stop in Havana and pick up the gossip of the Hotel Ingleterra, but
who will go out into the cities and sugar plantations and talk to the
consuls and merchants and planters, both Spanish and American; who can
see for themselves the houses burning and the smoke arising from every
point of the landscape; who can see the bodies of "pacificos" brought
into the cities, and who can sit on a porch of an American planter's
house and hear him tell in a whisper how his sugar cane was set on fire
by the same Spanish soldiers who surround the house, and who are
supposed to guard his property, but who, in reality, are there to keep
a watch on him.

He should hear little children, born of American parents, come into the
consulate and ask for a piece of bread. He should see the children and
the women herded in the towns or walking the streets in long
processions, with the Mayor at their head, begging his fellow Spaniards
to give them food, the children covered with the red blotches of
small-pox and the women gaunt with yellow fever. He should see hundreds
of thousands of dollars' worth of machinery standing idle, covered with
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