of the Indians went from bad to worse.

The King learned of this, and was profoundly dissatisfied. In the latter
part of 1529 he demanded to know why reforms had not been effected, and
especially why there had not been made the experiment of granting the
natives entire freedom. Equivocal replies were made, and it was not
until the spring of 1531 that Guzman undertook the experiment. At that
time one of the colonists, who had held some 120 slaves, died, and
Guzman directed that they be set at liberty and be given a chance to
show what they could do as farmers. Every conceivable condition was
imposed upon them which would tend to make the experiment the failure
which Guzman intended that it should be. In the midst of the
experiment, which was to last a year, Guzman was removed from office.
Vadillo, who succeeded him for sixty days, had no authority to do
anything in the premises, and so the completion of the ill-begun
business was left for Manuel de Rojas.

Then began one of the most deplorable passages in all the early history
of Cuba, in which good intentions were frustrated, benevolent purposes
defeated, and the remnants of a race undeservedly doomed to destruction.
Manuel de Rojas should be credited with having been of all men of this
time one of the most honest and able, and most sincere in his desire to
do justice to the native Indians. He saw through the web of trickery and
malign conditions in which they had been enmeshed by those who were
predetermined that the experiment of emancipation should fail, and he
unsparingly denounced it all. The Indians who had been "selected" for
the experiment had in fact not been selected at all, but had been taken
at haphazard, without regard to their fitness; if indeed they had not
been taken largely because of their unfitness. They had, moreover, been
subjected to the instruction and direction of those who seemed more
interested in extorting profit from them than in assisting them to
independence.

Rojas demanded that these abuses should be corrected, and that the
natives should have at least a fair, unhampered chance to show
themselves fit for freedom and Cuban citizenship. As a result of his own
painstaking investigation, he reported to the King that the tales of
Indian insurrections, actual or threatened, which his predecessor had
circulated, were chiefly false; obviously invented for the purpose of
discrediting the Indians. It was the old story: "Give a dog a bad name,
an