The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1897-01-16
WEYLER'S LATEST EDICT
WILL PROBABLY RAISE A BIG
LEGAL POINT.
America May Be Compelled to In
terfere in Order That Her Citizens
May Be Protected-Bloody Butch
er Simply Insists on Impossibili-
ties.

Key West, Fla, Jan. 15.-Advices
from Havana state that the effect of
/ Weyler's famous edict of the first inst.
is being felt with more intensity in the
provinces of Havana and Matanzas
/ than in that of Pinar del Rio, since
/ those provinces, being more thickly
/ populated and more farms and estates
than the former the wholesale abandon
ment of the properties and the con-
centration of the people in the towns
! will not only augment the misery al
ready prevailing, but also present the
serious inconvenience of lodging so
| many people in towns already full to
overfiowing.
Without discussing Weylers inhuman
measures in thus depriving peaceful
and unotfending citizens of their right
ful means of existence, and budding
them in already crowded spaces, ex-
posed to all he rigors of hunger and
disease, simply for he sake of clearing
the country of so-cailed rebel Sympa-
thiZerS, q legal point has been sprung
by the foreign property owners, especi-
ally the Americans who own large
properties in the provnces of Havana
ana Mdtanzas. which will surely lead
to complications anG claims on the
Spanish government
Weyler distinctly states in his decree
that those who wish to remain on their
properties must exhibit the last tax
bill paid. AS taxes are only levied on
productive industries. and these plant
ers have not been able TO work ON ac-
count of the abnormal conditions in the
provinces since Gomez invasion in
Dec. 1895, no taxes have been collected
since that time. The government
tacitly admitting such unusual circum-
stances or being powerless TO collect
them while the rebels were in posses
sion of the country did not press their
collections, consequently no taxes have
been paid in the country since the date
mentioned. Besides that, Weyler has
unofficially ordered that no sugar crop
should be made. and now he wants
the sugar planters 10 pay taxes on an
industry which they have not been able
to produce.
The result has been that the manager
of the sugar estate San Antonio, near
Madruga, Havana, owned by Mr.. An
tonic Terry, an American citizen re-
siding in Paris. presented himself to
Consul Lee, demanding protection, be-
cause the military commander of
Madruga ordered him to abandon the
place, which is very valuable, worth
S500.000 because he did not present the
required tax bill. Consul Lee at once
took the case in hand, and simultane-
Ously presented the case to the cap
tain general and the state department
at Washington. No replies have been
received either from Weyler or Sec
retary Olney. To depict the situation
in Pinar del Rio nothing can be better
said than to translate the report made
by the city of that name by a cores
pondent of La Lucha:
The way traversed by the railroad
from Artemisa to Consolation, Del
Suris. is, without exaggeration, the
most chastised and undoubtedly has
suffered most from the rigOrs of war.
The fields wasted and Abandoned;
the bushes and trees destroyed and the
yellow and decayed leaves strewn by
the wind as tears drawn from the
mother earth, panied and anguished
at the folly of men; the huts destroyed:
the stone houses, in other times happy
homes, converted by the hands of
rebels and Spanish alike into heaps of
ruins, the black and fallen walls of
which, covered with lichen, only serve
as a refuge for the lizards and owls:
the cane fields dried up, and covered
with bushes, by the ravages of fire;
the townsville authorities of which are
making great efforts TO remedy the
necessities of the residents-full of
people of poor families. who daily |
troop down from the hills, attenuated |
by hunger and emaciated by the fevers !
in such a way that they resemble |
skeletons risen out of their tombs to |
appear before the final judgment: to !
the right and the left of the road as !
much as he can as the train winds it's |
rapid march, the traveller observes, |
with painful anguish, the desolation /
and ruin within the inextinguishable |
poetry of these exuberant fields, al
ways green with the eternal verdure |
Of spring. as il God, with his eloquence /
would point US that the only thing we
men can do is to destroy the beauties
which surged from his bounteous will"