the officers, attorneys, and agents of
the telegraph companies. No representative of the people has ever
opposed it.[15]

[15] Sen. Doc. 291, 54-1, p. 18.

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE CUBANS.

BY THOMAS W. STEEP.

When the recognition of belligerency was argued for the Cubans by the
friends of Cuba in Congress, it became a question of pivotal importance
as to whether the Cubans had a government to recognize as dual to that
of Spain; whether the government, if any, was merely nominal or
chimerical; whether, if existing and operating, it had the potency to
receive recognition and thus justify such action by the United States.

The first thing that attracted my interest on arriving at the war field
of Cuba, in the Province of Santiago, early one sunny morning in
January, was the obsequious ceremony of the government prefecto who
received me and gave me my first roasted _boniato_, upon which I
afterwards so often appeased hunger. I had come out on the field by
crawling beneath the barbed-wire military line around Santiago one night
and marching by stealth in the early dawn to the mountains and over them
to the interior. A body of Cubans escorted me. Fatigued and hungry, the
prefecto's attention in serving coffee and boniatos seemed over-due
kindness. I offered to pay him, but he raised his hands and said, "No!
No!" He was a government officer. From that time on my interest was
enlisted in the study of the civil organization of the Cubans.

When ex-President Cleveland intimated that the civil government
provisional of the Cuban insurgents was puerile and immature, and said
it was, for the most part, a government on paper, he was more correct
than otherwise. In the first place, however, let me say that the Cubans
have a government, that it is not an impractical one, that the people
are loyal to it. To this loyalty, which is so striking for its
widespread prevalence, and so sympathy-eliciting because of the
sacrifices which are made for it by the Cubans, I shall refer later.

The statement made by the ex-President, while for the most part correct,
is superficial, because it does not substantiate its assertiveness. It
is one that any intelligent observer of the anterior conditions of Cuba
last December might have correctly though vaguely made.

The Cuban government is immature. To say that most of it exists on paper
is not sinistrous to an ambitious civil organization which has been in