PREFACE WITHIN the limits of a single volume, it is impossible to do more than to touch in brief and general outline the incidents and experiences which I have here sought to cover. The work is therefore suggestive rather than exhaustive. Experiences whose full recital would require a volume are necessarily dismissed with a few pages of comment. Volumes might be filled with the story of each year of the intervention. The first four chapters, serving as an introduction to the major purpose, are easily capable of expansion into other volumes; while the brief review of Cuba's experience as an independent republic dismisses in a few words an abundance of material for still other volumes. My information regarding the period of American intervention in Cuba comes primarily and mainly from personal experience as a student of the situation. My visits to the island were made in the capacity of a newspaper correspondent and magazine writer whose work and interest were limited to observation, investigation, and analysis of conditions and processes, in their details and their influences. I arrived in Havana on January 4, 1899, three days after the transfer of Cuba to American control, and remained in the island for four months, visiting the principal cities and making such study as was then possible concerning the welfare of the peasantry in rural areas. In September, 1901, I returned from a trip of sixteen months in the Philippines and South Africa, where I was sent to study and to report the activities of war and the initial steps of reconstruction. In November, of that year, I again went to Cuba, to follow in detail the work of the Constitutional Convention, and to |