SCHOOL AND COLLEGE. 
ns 
Belen Church on Compostela street, at the corner of Luz, was built 
by Bishop Diego Evelino de Compostela in 1704. It takes its name from 
Santa Maria de Belen (Our Lady of Bethlehem), patroness in Spain of 
the Franciscan order of Jeronymites. The church and monastery, and 
free school in connection, were maintained by the Franciscan monks for 
nearly a century, and then the buildings were taken by the Government 
for use as barracks. In 1853 they were given to the Jesuits, who formed 
schools, established the College of Belen, set up an observatory reputed 
to be the best organized in Latin America, collected a library rich in prints 
and drawings illustrating Cuban history, and formed a museum of native 
woods and natural history specimens. James Anthony Froude wrote of 
them in 1887, when they had a school of 400 pay pupils and hundreds free: 
“They keep on a level with the age; they are men of learning; they are 
men of science; they are the Royal Society of Cuba.” The Belen arch 
spanning Calle del Sol is one of the picturesque bits of Havana. The 
columns and ceiling of the interior of the church are to be noted. Over the 
high altar is a Holy Family by Ribera. 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE. 
For schools the United States expended in Cuba during the term of the 
government of intervention $10,000,000; this included the building of school 
houses and their equipment, the purchase of text-books, and other expendi¬ 
tures. A public school system was established modeled after that of 
Ohio. Primary instruction is compulsory. A suggestive phase of this 
school work was the conversion into school houses of various institutions 
which in Spanish times had been used for the maintenance of the Spanish 
army of occupation. Thus the Hospital Militar, an enormous building 
near the head of the harbor, which had been a hospital for Spanish 
soldiers, and was a perfect pest house of yellow fever, having a grim record 
of 60 per cent, of deaths among its patients, was cleaned up by the Ameri¬ 
can Sanitary Corps, and the lower story being rented as warehouses, in 
the second floor were established thirty-three school rooms, with their 
accessories and halls, providing accommodations for 2,000 children in daily 
attendance. In like manner the establishment of the Pirotecnia Militar, 
on the elevation near Principe, formerly occupied by Spanish troops, was 
remodeled and fitted for the use of the University of Havana, which found 
here much ampler quarters than in the old monastery on Obispo street. 
The Americans built the handsome Academy of Sciences (Academia de 
Ciencias) at a cost of $38,000, and the School of Arts and Trades at a cost 
ot over $250,000. A thousand Cuban teachers were sent to Harvard Col¬ 
lege in 1900 for a summer normal course, and two hundred more in 1901; 
