in Havana a young Spanish officer named Joaquin Ruiz, who had formerly served as a civil engineer, and had been intimately associated with Nestor Aranguren, another young engineer who had become a leader of the Revolutionists and had made himself particularly active and annoying to the Spanish in the Province of Havana. The two were close friends, and were both men of charming personality. The Spanish authorities in Havana determined to use this friendship in an attempt to seduce Aranguren into betraying or at least deserting the patriot cause. So Ruiz was directed to open a correspondence with Aranguren, with a view to securing a personal interview with him. Aranguren wrote to Ruiz that he would be glad to meet him personally, but could not do so if he came on any political errand; and he warned him that for him to come to the Cuban camp with any proposal of Cuban surrender or acceptance of autonomy would subject him to the penalty of death, which would infallibly be carried out. Despite this warning, and presumably against his own better judgment, Ruiz obeyed the orders of his superiors, and undertook the errand. He had no safe conduct. He bore no flag of truce. He went through no agreement between the commanding officers of the respective sides. He went in the circumstances and manner of a spy; and his purpose was to persuade, if possible, a Cuban officer to betray his trust. and become a traitor to his own cause. When in these circumstances Ruiz reached Aranguren, the latter was so distressed that it is said he burst into tears and, embracing his old friend, exclaimed, "Why have you come? It will mean your certain death! I cannot save you!" And such indeed was the case. Aranguren was devoted to his friend, but still more to Cuba. Ruiz was taken before a court martial. He made no defence. He admitted the character and purpose of his errand. And he received the sentence of death with the fortitude of a brave man. An attempt was made by the Spanish authorities to exploit Ruiz as a martyr to Cuban savagery, but it recoiled upon their own heads. It was shown that they had unworthily employed a brave and devoted soldier in a discreditable errand, and that he had been dealt with according to the stern but just rules of war. It was also demonstrated that Cuban patriots were not thus to be corrupted. By a strange turn of fate, only a few weeks later Nestor Aranguren was killed by the Spanish during one of his daring raids against Havana. It was said that he was betrayed by a Spaniard who had become one of his followers for the purpose of avenging Ruiz. His body fell into the hands of the Spanish, and, despite their former assumed wrath over the execution of Ruiz, they treated it with all respect and interred it in the Columbus Cemetery at Havana, close to the grave of Ruiz. This was not the only incident of the sort. Only a few weeks after the death of Ruiz a civilian named Morales went to the camp of Pedro Ruiz, in the Province of Pinar del Rio, with proposals for compromise on the basis of autonomy. He was promptly taken before a court martial, tried, condemned, and put to death. Whether Blanco himself was responsible for this policy of sending emissaries to the Cuban camp with proposals which he would not venture to make openly in an accredited manner to the Cuban government, did not appear. The presumption, because of his known character, is that he was not, and indeed that he was not aware that they were being made. There is even reason for thinking that after the Morales case was brought to his attention, he prohibited any more such clandestine and illegal enterprises. Tragic as the incidents were, and especially regrettable as was the sacrifice of such a man as Ruiz, it was well to have it made unmistakably clear that the Cubans were not inclined to end the war by surrender or by compromise, but were intent upon fighting it out to the end. In such circumstances Blanco strove for the last time to defeat the Cuban national desire for independence. He probably realized in advance the certainty of failure. He had been Captain-General before, succeeding Campos after the Ten Years' War and during the Little War, and he must have known the temper of the Cuban people and the unwillingness of the great majority of them to accept the delusive scheme of autonomy which Spain was fitfully offering, and in which he himself never had any real faith and which, indeed, he had never favored. But he was a loyal Spanish soldier, of the better type, and he was personally as little odious to the Cubans as any Spanish Captain General could be, for he had never been notably tyrannical or cruel. The decree of autonomy was adopted by the Spanish government on November 25, 1897, largely because of the urgings-to use no stronger term-of the United States, and was promulgated by Blanco in Cuba early in December. The scheme provided for universal suffrage; a bi-cameral Legislature consisting of a Council of eighteen elected members and seventeen appointed by the crown, and a House containing one elected member for each 25,000 inhabitants. To this Legislature were nominally committed most of the functions of government. But it was provided that "The supreme government of the colony shall be exercised by a Governor-General." That was the crux of the whole matter. That made the CaptainGeneral, or Governor-General as he was thereafter to be called, the practical dictator of the island. To this entirely illusive and delusive scheme, the remnant of the Autonomist party gave adherence with a devotion worthy of a better cause. The Reformist faction of the Spanish party also, though not so readily, approved it. The intransigent Constitutionalists would have none of it. Tenuous and futile as were its apparent concessions to the Cubans, they were far too much for these insular Bourbons to be willing to grant. They socially ostracised Blanco, and before the system was to go into effect they called a convention at Havana to protest and to foment against it. The president of the party, the Cuban-born Marquis de Apezteguia, was indeed in favor of giving autonomy a trial. But he could not control the party whose other members were almost unanimously against it. They had defeated and expelled Campos. Now they resolved to do the same with Blanco. At the convention Apezteguia was rebuked and repudiated, though left in office. A telegram of sympathy was sent to Weyler. Speeches were made denouncing the United States, its President and its Congress. A resolution was adopted condemning and opposing autonomy, and another declaring that Constitutionalists would not vote nor take any part in public affairs. In the face of these circumstances, Blanco organized his Autonomist Cabinet. The date was January 1, 1898. The place was the historic throne room of the CaptainGeneral's palace. There were present beside the Cabinet the various foreign consuls and the dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church. A small crowd of the people gathered outside, but the public in general paid little attention to the event. Yet the Cabinet which then came into brief existence was a body of men that in other circumstances would have commanded most favorable attention. The nominal head, President of the Cabinet without portfolio, was José Maria Galvez, a lawyer and orator, the author of the Autonomist manifestoes of 1879 and 1895. The real head, the most forceful and influential member, not only, indeed, of the Cabinet but of the whole Autonomist party, was Dr. Rafael Montoro, the "Cuban Castelar" as his ANTONIO GOVIN friends used to call him. He had long been an advocate of real autonomy, he had been the chief founder of the Autonomist party, he had been a Cuban Deputy to the Spanish Cortes, he had signed the Autonomist manifestoes of 1879 and 1895, and he had approved the insular reforms proposed by Canovas del Castillo. As lawyer, orator, scholar, writer, he had no superior if indeed a peer in Cuba. It was the inscrutable tragedy of a great career that he identified himself with the Autonomist movement. He was Minister of Finance. The Minister of Justice was Antonio Govin, also one of the original Autonomists, a man of great courage and ability, who on the failure of the Autonomist regime left Cuba and settled in the United States. Francisco Zayas, an accomplished educator, was made Minister ANTONIO GOVIN Antonio Govin, born at Matanzas in 1849 and deceased in Havana in 1914, was a jurist, publicist, orator and patriot of distinction. He was Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Havana, and was the author of a number of volumes on law and on Colonial history. He was one of the founders and strong advocates of the Autonomist party and a member of the Autonomist cabinet. |