luble an element as a million
Spanish Roman Catholics alien in blood and creed, with half a million
blacks to swell the dusky flood which runs too full among them already,
would be to invite an indigestion of serious consequence. A few years
since the Cubans born were on the eve of achieving their independence
like their brothers in Mexico and South America. Perhaps they will yet
succeed. Spanish, at any rate, they are to the bone and marrow, and
Spanish they will continue. The magnitude of Havana, and the fullness of
life which was going on there, entirely surprised me. I had thought of
Cuba as a decrepit state, bankrupt or finance-exhausted by civil wars,
and on the edge of social dissolution, and I found Havana at least a
grand imposing city--a city which might compare for beauty with any in
the world. The sanitary condition is as bad as negligence can make
it--so bad that a Spanish gentleman told me that if it were not for the
natural purity of the air they would have been all dead like flies long
ago. The tideless harbour is foul with the accumulations of three
hundred years. The administration is more good-for-nothing than in Spain
itself. If, in spite of this, Havana still sits like a queen upon the
waters, there are some qualities to be found among her people which
belonged to the countrymen and subjects of Ferdinand the Catholic.

The coast line from Cape Tubiron has none of the grand aspects of the
Antilles or Jamaica. Instead of mountains and forests you see a series
of undulating hills, cultivated with tolerable care, and sprinkled with
farmhouses. All the more imposing, therefore, from the absence of marked
natural forms, are the walls and towers of the great Moro, the fortress
which defends the entrance of the harbour. Ten miles off it was already
a striking object. As we ran nearer it rose above us stern, proud, and
defiant, upon a rock right above the water, with high frowning bastions,
the lighthouse at an angle of it, and the Spanish banner floating
proudly from a turret which overlooked the whole. The Moro as a
fortification is, I am told, indefensible against modern artillery,
presenting too much surface as a target; but it is all the grander to
look at. It is a fine specimen of the Vauban period, and is probably
equal to any demands which will be made upon it. The harbour is
something like Port Royal, a deep lagoon with a narrow entrance and a
long natural breakwater between the lagoon and the ocean;