If The Slave-Trade Should Make Them Cheap Again, Their Lives
Of Course Will Be Of Less Consequence To Their
Owners, and they will be
subject again to be overtasked, as it has been said they were before.
There is
Certainly great temptation to wear them out in the sugar mills,
which are kept in motion day and night, during half the year, namely,
through the dry season. "If this was not the healthiest employment in the
world," said an overseer to me on one of the sugar estates, "it would
kill us all who are engaged in it, both black and white."
Perhaps you may not know that more than half of the island of Cuba has
never been reduced to tillage. Immense tracts of the rich black or red
mould of the island, accumulated on the coral rock, are yet waiting the
hand of the planter to be converted into profitable sugar estates. There
is a demand, therefore, for laborers on the part of those who wish to
become planters, and this demand is supplied not only from the coast of
Africa, but from the American continent and southwestern Asia.
In one of the afternoons of Holy Week, I saw amid the crowd on the _Plaza
de Armas_, in Havana, several men of low stature, of a deep-olive
complexion, beardless, with high cheek-bones and straight black hair,
dressed in white pantaloons of cotton, and shirts of the same material
worn over them. They were Indians, natives of Yucatan, who had been taken
prisoners of war by the whites of the country and sold to white men in
Cuba, under a pretended contract to serve for a certain number of years.
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