The Fragile Republic 21de los Organos reached twenty-five hundred feet, but the
land dropped off to the rolling plains and shallow valleys
which characterized two-thirds of the island. As one traveled
eastward, the land changed from the red clay highlands of
tobacco-raising Pinar del Rio to the rich plains of Havana
and Matazanas provinces. Then the island widened where
the grasslands of Santa Clara and Camaguey supported sugar
and cattle. Further eastward the hills blended into the rugged
Sierra Maestre of Oriente, with peaks up to eight thousand
feet. The mountains separated the jagged shoreline and pla
teaus from Cape Cruz to Cape Maisi from the fertile Cauto
plain to the north.
Along Cuba's broken, island-bordered coast, tidal basins
and sheer bluffs shared the shore with swamps choked by
mangroves and lignum vitae. Inland the soil nourished over
three thousand species of flora, ranging from royal palms and
white pines to the flowering tangles of a rain forest. In 1907,
after three hundred years of cultivation, 13 million acres of
Cuba's 44,000 square miles were still primeval forest.
The climate was benign, but humid. The mean temperature
was 77°. The seasons were determined by the rainfall, wet
(May to October) and dry (November to April).
On this beautiful and productive land the Spanish planted
a colony in 1512 and brought to it the institutions of Old
Spain. By the nineteenth century Cuba had developed a
national life that was typically Hispanic. Because of the con
tinued domination by Spain, Cuba became even more colonial
after the rest of Latin America won its freedom. The last half
of the century, however, was an era of economic, social and
political upheaval for Cuba, a period of change perhaps accel
erated by the war for independence. Before the economic
realities of the industrial revolution and the ideological spread
of liberalism, the Hispanic institutions began to crack from
political rigidity, and in the eyes of educated Cubans, Spanish
rule was at best capricious and wasteful and lagged behind
the realities of the nation's economic and intellectual growth.
In the late nineteenth century the mechanization of the
sugar industry (a necessity for world competition) brought
more land into the orbits of the sugar mills. The mills them