The Fragile Republic 23tionary liberalism of Tomas Estrada Palma and Gonzalo de
Quesada, and the military realism of Maximo Gomez. As a
result of the war Cuban political behavior took a different
shape; added to the traditional Spanish desires for power,
prestige, and gold in government was an addiction to con
spiracy and valorous patriotism. Cuba, with independence,
remained the insurgent state, the political property of its
generales y doctores.^3
Postindependence Cuban society was in some respects static,
in others dynamic. Judged by class attitudes and values, it
remained traditional, divided into an upper class (those who
hired labor) and lower class (those who worked with their
hands).^4 Sixty per cent of the people were illiterate. In terms
of raw population, Cuba had a net growth from 1899 to 1907
of 476,000 people or an increase of 39 per cent.^5 The birth
rate, the single greatest growth factor, jumped from 9.6 per
thousand (1901) to 19.8 (1905). Yet national, racial, and
occupational divisions remained relatively fixed. With the end
of the war, enough Spanish nationals flocked to Cuba to keep
the island's aliens (80 per cent Spanish) at 11 per cent of
the total population. In 1901 alone, 22,000 Spaniards, mostly
unmarried men and boys bound for urban trades or commerce,
entered Cuba. Much of the population which might have
passed economically for a middle class was Spanish. Thus
there remained a Spanish Cuba and a Cuban Cuba, the first
largely urban, commercial-industrial, and economically im
portant. The latter was both urban and rural and politically
dominant. The antipathy of Cuban to Spaniard, exacerbated
by war, continued into the new century.
In occupational terms about half of Cuba's work force (in
1907 some 770,000 in a population of two million) earned its
living from the land. These campesinos (country-people)
were not the typical Indio-Hispanic peasants of Latin America
bound to a paternalistic hacienda or subsistence farm. They
were, rather, predominately a Negro and white rural prole
tariat, earning wages as cane-cutters, tobaccomen, mill hands,
and miners. Though some Cubans remained cattlemen and