The Canton mail. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 18??-1882, 1876-03-18
CUBAN TOLUNTEERS.
The Men ,rho Leare Spain to Serrc ia III
Army ia Cuba.

|
4Tmy ia Cuba.
| A correspondent writing from Spain
says: The system of recruiting for the
army of Cuba is as follows: Each vol
unteer receives on enlistment, $50, he
enlisting for one or two years service; if,
at the end of one year, he likes to en-
gage for another, he receives another $50
| When the lad in bright Cadiz city re-
ceives this sum, knowing that he has
| to embark within a fortnight, and hay
ing no care, no definite love of home
and parents, he goes to the bad for three
days. You see a cab rattling down the
narrow streets of Cadiz, and 10! five
Cuban volunteers peasant lads of
eighteen years. are its occupants; you
enter wine shop and half a dozen OF
these boys come in and buy their tum-
bier of Moutilla or sherry. In three
days they have spent, what with cabs,
wine, women and sweets, every sixpence
of their $50. They are amazingly proud,
even before they are habited as soldiers.
l saw four of them-boys of eighteen or
twenty-sitting on the Cadiz wharf the
other day. A gray-haired, courtly
Spanish gentleman passed, and said:
Are you conscripts ~ No." said the
Spokesman, who had soldiers cap, eve
are militaires." OF tie four, one was
barefooted; one only had military
badge-a blue, red tasseled cap. These
lads are, almost without exception, from
the interior of Andalusia. They cannot
get work; $50 is heaven upon earth;
they have no idea what Cuban life is;
they volunteer, go, and only twenty of
every hundred return at the end of the
fever. If one comes back minus leg or
arm he must beg for his livelihood for
pensions there are none, save for those
who have served for twenty-four years.
The government pays $50 for the passage
and food of each private soldier, and the
boats generally carry 800 men each, and
make the passage to Cuba in sixteen or
twenty days. On board they are not
badly treated. Two days in each week
they have bacon or pork, and during the
rest rancho. e., pottagc of beans, rice
and dried chick peas. They sleep in the
hold on long row of sloping planks,
each man having a rug and a hard
pillow. At seven a. m. all are SUM-
moned upon deck. At shutdown all are
ordered below, and at eight p. m. the
order is passed along the dark and reek-
ing hold: Silence-not a word" The
volunteer in Cuba generally succumbs
to the climate-twenty per cent. only
Git is calculated) return; yet, during
this and last month, no less than twenty
five thousand have been drafted off to
Cuba. 1t is wrong to say that the Cuban
volunteer is ill-treated. The treatment
is not bad. These fellows are well fed.
1t is the climate which kills them.
Among the ranks of these men are found
faces and men of the worst and lowest
criminal type-men who have enlisted
simply because they do not care whether
they live or die, but only want the
" fifty dollars" men who, the moment
they can get into the hold of some vessel
bound for New Orleans, escape to free
state. But the mass, the majority, of
the Cuban volunteers are idle or unfortu-
nate peasant lads, who, spurred on by
the scarcity of work, and tempted by
the promising bait of $50 down, a years
service, and at the end of that $50 more
gratuity if they chose to re-enlist, or a
free passage home, give in their names
and go to Cuba, to be turned into inhu-
man and wicked brutes; to be hardened
by gazing upon fortunes and horrors
which would make their mothers blood
curdle; and then to go into the teeming
-beset military hospital and die.