22 



THE CUBA REVIEW. 



An Historical Scene. End of the Second American Intervention. The American Fla I 



Cuban Artillery Rand 



Cuban Artillery 



Cuban Permanent Army 



PRESIDENT JOSE MIGUEL 

 GOMEZ. 



[Condensed from an article in Current 

 Literature.] 



His is the extraordinai-y magnetism of a 

 commanding personality. It is to this per- 

 sonality that he owes the supreme position 

 now his. S'o much, on the authority of Cu- 

 ban newspapers least friendly to him, 

 may be premised with assurance. 



Like all his countrymen native to the great 

 cane-growing province of Santa Clara, Jose 

 Miguel Gomez has a very Latin tempera- 

 ment. He was born and brought up among 

 a people who retain as much of the customs 

 and manners and morals of Andalusia as our 

 own Kentucky mountaineers conserve of the 

 ways and speech of Shakespeare's England. 

 Santa Clara is a species of survival of the 

 Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, its natives 

 revelling in attributes exploited by writers 

 of picturesque romances long ago. Jose 

 Miguel Gomez has the old Castilian manner, 

 an inheritance from a grandmother famed 

 for her beauty. His father was a wealthy 

 plantation owner and cattle-breeder. There 

 was no reason why Jose should not have 

 spent his four years at the university in Ha- 



vana with a post-graduate course at Sala- 

 manca or Toledo, were it not that an innate 

 propensity for revolution impelled him at 

 sixteen to imprison his parents in their pro- 

 vincial mansion and administer the pa- 

 ternal acres as if they were already his 

 by inheritance. Thus did he play before 

 he was of age that revolutionary part 

 which, enacted time and again before 

 provincial audiences, was to crown him 

 at fifty-three with supremacy. 



Viewed merely as a man, there is no 

 doubt in the Cuban journalistic mind that he 

 possesses the requisites of greatness — the 

 boundless fertility of resource, the fine cour- 

 tesy, the spontaneous tact, the complete self- 

 control, the tenacity of will and the intel- 

 lectual power. Had he been called to the 

 bar, he must to-day have been on the Su- 

 preme bench. Had he entered holy orders 

 he would to-day be an archbishop. Gomez 

 is without the distinction of height, but there 

 is a fire in the swarthy countenance, sur- 

 mounted by a mass of grizzling hair and set 

 ofif with a fiercely trimmed mustache, sug- 

 gestive, his admirers think, of Bolivar. His 

 face retains still — he is fifty-three — the poeti- 

 cal beauty it revealed when he won his 

 spurs in his native province by taking up 



