Lying thus in a peculiar sense at the commercial centre of the world, between North America and South America, between Europe and Asia, between all the lands of the Atlantic and all the lands of the Pacific and subject to important approach from all directions, we must reckon it not mere chance but the provision of benevolent design that Cuba at almost all parts of her peculiarly ample coastline is endowed with a greater number of first-rate harbors than any other country of the world. In recognition of these facts and of their gradual development and application to the purposes and processes of civilization, is a theme worthy to pique the interest and to absorb the attention of the most ambitious historian, whether for the mere chronicling of conditions and events, or for the philosophical analysis of causes and results.
All these things, however, fascinating as they are and copious as is their suggestion of interest, are after all only a minor and the less important part of the real History of Cuba, such as I must endeavor to write. Without the Cuban people, Cuba would have remained a negligible factor in the equations of humanity. Without the people of the island, "what to me were sun or clime?" The genial climate, the fecund soil, the wealth of mines and field and forest, the capacious harbors and the encircling seas, all would be vanity of vanities. Nor is it for nothing that I have suggested differentiation between the Cuban People and the Cuban Nation. Without the development of the former into the latter, all these things could never have hoped to reach their greatest value and utility. The Cuban People have existed for four centuries, the Cuban Nation in its consummate sense for less than a single generation. Yet in the latter brief span more progress has been made toward realization of Cuba's possibilities and destinies than in all those former ages. It is a circumstance of peculiar significance that almost the oldest of all civilized communities in the Western Hemisphere should be the youngest of all the nations. It will be a task of no mean magnitude, but of unsurpassed profit and pleasure, to trace the deliberate development of that early colony into this late nation, and to observe the causes and forces which so long repressed and thwarted the sovereign aspirations of the Cuban People, and also, more gratefully, the causes and forces which inevitably, in the slow fullness of time, achieved their ultimate fulfilment in the secure establishment of the Cuban Nation.