Slaveholders in the United States; the blacks
there are far more intelligent and more easily governed by moral means."
Africans, the living witnesses of the present existence of the
slave-trade, are seen everywhere; at every step you meet blacks whose
cheeks are scarred with parallel slashes, with which they were marked in
the African slave-market, and who can not even speak the mutilated Spanish
current in the mouths of the Cuba negroes.
One day I stood upon the quay at Matanzas and saw the slaves unloading the
large lighters which brought goods from the Spanish ships lying in the
harbor - casks of wine, jars of oil, bags of nuts, barrels of flour. The
men were naked to the hips; their only garment being a pair of trowsers. I
admired their ample chests, their massive shoulders, the full and muscular
proportions of their arms, and the ease with which they shifted the heavy
articles from place to place, or carried them on their heads. "Some of
these are Africans?" I said to a gentleman who resided on the island.
"They are all Africans," he answered, "Africans to a man; the negro born
in Cuba is of a lighter make."
When I was at Guines, I went out to look at a sugar estate in the
neighborhood, where the mill was turned by water, which a long aqueduct,
from one of the streams that traverse the plain, conveyed over arches of
stone so broad and massive that I could not help thinking of the aqueducts
of Rome. A gang of black women were standing in the _secadero_ or
drying-place, among the lumps of clayed sugar, beating them small with
mallets; before them, walked to and fro the major-domo, with a cutlass by
his side and a whip in his hand, I asked him how a planter could increase
his stock of slaves. "There is no difficulty," he replied, "slaves are
still brought to the island from Africa. The other day five hundred were
landed on the sea-shore to the south of this; for you must know, Senor,
that we are but three or four leagues from the coast."
"Was it done openly?" I inquired.
"_Publicamente_, Senor, _publicamente_;[8] they were landed on the sugar
estate of _El Pastor_, and one hundred and seven more died on the passage
from Africa."
"Did the government know of it?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Of course the government knows it," said he;
"every body else knows it."
The truth is, that the slave-trade is now fully revived; the government
conniving at it, making a profit on the slaves imported from Africa, and
screening from the pursuit of the English the pirates who bring them.
There could scarcely be any arrangement of coast more favorable for
smuggling slaves into a country, than the islands and long peninsulas, and
many channels of the southern shore of Cuba.
