It was during these years of travel in Europe that I was offered the opportunity of going to America to represent the Throne of Spain at the World’s Fair that was to be held in Chicago to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery. I accepted the invitation with joy. I had no longer my childish idea that if I could only take a boat and sail to America I should be really “free”; but I had still in my mind the household saying that I was “only fit for America,” and I felt sure that I should like the great democracy, and I was eager to see it. It was planned, also, that I should visit Cuba—in the usual administrative hope that a Royal visitor might revive the loyalty of a rebellious colony exasperated by misgovernment. The misgovernment was a thing for which the Royal Family was as little to blame as the Cubans themselves; but I was willing to be made use of, in one of the few ways that royalty can be of use in a constitutional{223} monarchy, and I prepared to see—and be seen by—Cuba, too. There were such stories in Spain of the dangers from yellow fever in the colony that ladies-in-waiting were as reluctant to make the trip as the sailors of Columbus; and though my husband took a large suite of gentlemen, I found only one lady-in-waiting to go with me, and one maid, a faithful old servant who had been in the family for thirty years. We set out, in April, 1893, on board the Reina Maria Cristina from Santander, after the inevitable Te Deum in the cathedral of Santander, a State dinner and reception, an illumination of the harbour, and a choir in a tender to sing us off. There were more Te Deums and receptions and illuminations at the Spanish ports and islands where we called; and at one port we were met by the authorities with a black-bordered protest against the suppression of the local capitan general. The paper was signed by a “defence assembly.” The officials warned us that it would be unwise for us to land. I insisted on it. They went away, and as soon as I understood that they had gone for a police order I went ashore without any escort except our suite, and walked through the crowded streets to the{224} cathedral. This proceeding aroused such a furore of popular enthusiasm that I might have been another Jeanne d’Arc entering a beleaguered town that she had relieved; and for the rest of my trip I had no hesitation about putting aside the officials and trusting myself to the people. At Las Palmas I got on so well that in the cathedral, when the bishop was singing the Te Deum, the crowd forgot they were in church and interrupted him with shouts of “Vive la Infanta!” As a matter of fact, I have found that the danger to royalty comes not from informalities of this sort so much as from the parade of bodyguards and escorts that exasperate the unhappy people by personifying the power of the social conditions that oppress them. It is usually on the most impressive occasions that bombs are thrown.
We arrived outside the wonderful harbour of Havana early in May, and I watched for the first sight of Morro Castle with curiosity. I had heard from my mother that it had cost her grandfather, King Charles IV., such an incredible sum to build that he had longed to see it, as he said, “if only through a keyhole.” I understood that I was the first of the Royal Family to look at it. Certainly,{225} I was the last. And the fact that I should probably be the last was the strongest impression that I got from Cuba.
My first impression, of course, was of the heat. Immediately on my arrival I was visited by a physician, who came to warn me of all the diseases I might catch, and to tell me of all the things that I must do and must not do to avoid them. It was terrifying to listen to him. I had insisted on having cold drinks, and he was sure that cold drinks would be fatal. I had been installed in the palace of the capitan general, and I was going about on the marble floors in my stockinged feet to be cooler. This also I was told was dangerous. “Well,” I said at last, “if I don’t cool myself down, I shall surely die of the heat, anyway, so what matter?” And I decided to do what I wanted and let my natural vitality take care of the consequences. Because of this policy I made what appears to have been a startling impression of energy on the Cubans. There is nothing more popular than energy in a royal person—perhaps because it is so unexpected. I had, for once, the good luck to please by doing what I pleased.
The heat was so great on my first night in the{226} palace that I could not sleep, and being by no means fat, and my bed being without springs—just the stretched canvas of a “petate” fastened on a bed frame—I ached with the hard discomforts of it. At two in the morning I demanded a mattress. My maid sent for one. After a half-hour of waiting a young aide-de-camp appeared, in full uniform, and when I asked why he had come, he replied: “But it is I who have made your bed; if it is wrong, I must fix it.” I roared. He explained that in order to have the bed prepared with all possible care for me, it had been decided that an officer should make it. I told him to send me a mattress, and go back to his sleep. My maid, a simple old soul, was in a state of distraction. “My poor Infanta! My poor Infanta!” she kept wailing. “What will become of her, with no one but these stupid men to look after her!”
When the mattress arrived we arranged it ourselves, and I settled down again; but it made the bed so much hotter that I could not sleep any better than before; and I did not dare to make any more demands for fear of disturbing the officer again. At seven in the morning a deafening uproar of military{227} music suddenly broke out in the salon that adjoined my bedroom, and my maid went wild with panic, crossing and blessing herself and saying frantic prayers. I hurried into a dressing-gown and opened my door on a German regimental band that had received a cable from the Kaiser to serenade me with the traditional “Guten Morgen,” and had marched at once on the palace as if they were going to take a fortress, and were now blowing their trumpets and beating their drums with an obedient diligence that seemed likely to crack the walls. None of the palace servants had understood what this was for; and these servants, by a horrible custom not uncommon in parts of Spain, were convicts who wore leg-chains and worked in the palace as in a prison, going about in livery and bare feet, and dragging their chains on the marble floors. They were as bewildered as my maid, and they were scuttling around as helplessly. As soon as I saw the uniforms that the musicians wore I guessed what had happened; and, the noise drowning my voice, I tried, by smiling and bowing, to reassure the general panic. When the music stopped I got things straightened out, but while it lasted we were a scene from a madhouse or a thea{228}trical burlesque. I went back to my mattress feeling that my first night in Havana had not been too tame.
My day had been more successful, because of a curious accident that had made my arrival almost triumphant. My maid, as we neared the shore, had packed all my gowns but the one I had decided to wear—a striped gown of blue and white, around the collar of which the dressmaker had put a red edging. When I came on deck in it, some one protested at once: “But, Your Royal Highness, that is the uniform of the insurgents!” It seemed impossible, but it was so: they wore just such a blue-and-white stripe with red facings. There was consternation. My trunks had been taken from my state-room. We were nearing shore. No one seemed to know what to do. And while we delayed, talking and arguing, the boat proceeded. It was soon too late to do anything, and I said: “Never mind; it will not matter. No one will notice it.”
But they did. They not only noticed it, but they supposed that I had worn it purposely with I do not know what idea of pleasing the people or showing that the Throne of Spain was above the quarrels of the factions in the island. It aroused incredible en{229}thusiasm. And after that beginning I was received everywhere with the honours of a national hero. Whenever I drove out my carriage was showered with pamphlets of loyal congratulations and poems and panegyrics. At a bullfight given in my honour, not having thought to bring a present for the torero when he made his speech to me from the arena, I threw him one of my finger-rings; he was offered huge sums for it, but refused to sell it, as if it had been Aladdin’s. Everything I did was accepted as admirable—whether I rode horseback at the military review when I wanted the exercise, or received in my arms a little girl who slid down a sort of fire-escape at an exhibition of the volunteer fire brigade, when I was afraid that she might fall and break her neck in my honour if some one did not catch her.
It was evident that I was making “a personal success.” But as soon as I talked to men who knew the situation in Cuba, I was convinced that the success was only personal. For too long had Spain been sending out officials to Cuba who had no ambition but to fill their pockets at the expense of the Cuban people; and the Cubans had made up their minds that they would endure it no longer. In administrative{230} circles, every one who was candid confessed that “it was too late.” In Spain, the people, though the victims of the same sort of corruption, had the consolation of knowing that the government was their own; here the corruption was imposed on them by a government in which they were not represented. In Spain the army could be used to suppress armed rebellion; but here, the army itself was so enfeebled by corruption, so badly led, so wasted by yellow fever, that it was nearly useless. At a dinner to the influential men of the colony I had to change the conversation several times in order to avoid hearing Spain abused. Leaders of both political parties, whether they were for or against Spain, were of the one mind: “It was too late.” Cuba was determined to be free of a maladministration which no sensible person could blame her for refusing to endure. All the sensible people were aware, at last, that the conditions ought to have been corrected, and one could only say to one’s self: “It’s too bad you didn’t think of it sooner.” As we sailed away from the harbour of Havana I was oppressed with the conviction that the Crown of Spain, in my person,{231} was saluting for the last time the Spanish flag flying over that fortress. Cuba was gone.
Steaming northward, the weather turned delightfully cold, and I revelled in it, reviving myself after the strenuously exhausting days of our crowded week in Havana. When we picked up our pilot off Sandy Hook I was on the upper deck, promenading happily in the chill wind in light clothes, and the pilot remarked to one of the boat’s officers that it “was dangerous for that young girl” to be exposed in such a way to such weather. He was told that I was “the Spanish Infanta,” and he laughed uproariously at the idea; and the more seriously the officer assured him of it the more he enjoyed the joke. I saw him looking at me and laughing, so I inquired what was the matter;............