The Revolt That Never Was 173Miguelistas and Zayistas' strategy to extort extra jobs from
the Provisional Government. The trouble was that one never
knew when a fanciful revolt might become real. The Military
Information Division did what it could to track down weapons,
and its undercover agents paid seven dollars for a voluntary
turn-in. The agents also bought arms by posing as revolution
aries, but the American officers were aware that the arms they
received were a small percentage of those in Cuban hands.
Much of the frustration, vindictiveness, and passion which
the annexationists hoped to exploit dissolved after la zafra
of 1906-7 began and American troops had occupied the
trouble spots. As the harvest progressed, Magoon's personal
agents and the officers of the Military Information Division
agreed that, despite the alarms, most of Cuba was at work,
business was good, and violence was limited to banditry and
factional name-calling.^16
Even during la zafra, however, economic insecurity in Cuba
troubled the Provisional Government and the tiempo muerto
promised to be worse. Rumors of revolt jarred the domestic
price structure and credit system. During February when an
uprising was feared in Camaguey, campesinos flooded the
market with cattle, driving beef prices down as much as 30
per cent. The profit-makers were the cattle buyers, who, not
incidentally, started the talk.
17
At other levels of competition, as Magoon learned, unrest
was profitable; some Americans talked rebellion in order to
discourage German sellers of sugar refining machinery.^18 The
sugar planters themselves faced fires in their ripe cane fields
from two sources. First, there were professional arsonists who
threatened the fields and extorted money from the planters
or sinecures from the local officials.^19 Secondly, the cane-
cutters would fire the fields, for, being paid by the weight of
the cane they cut, they could harvest enough burned cane
to earn $3.50 to $4.50 a day. Working on the tough green
stalks, they could earn only $1.50 to $2.00 for the same work.^20
Arson in the cane and tobacco fields caused the tension and
the number of armed men in the provinces to increase. To
protect their fields, the planters armed their own excitable