"A situation so violent as this, Cuba has been for many years enduring; and, far from any promise of remedy appearing, every day adds new proof that the policy of the mother-country and the ferocity of her rulers will grant neither truce nor rest till she is reduced to the condition of an immense prison, where every Cuban will be watched by a guard, and will have to pay that guard for watching him. In vain have this people exhibited a mildness, a prudence, and even a submission and loyalty, which have been proverbial.
"When the iniquity of the government has not been able to find any ostensible grounds for persecution, it has had recourse to cowardly arts and snares to tempt its victims into some offence. Thus were various individuals of Matanzas entrapped into an ambuscade of the soldiery, by the pretext of selling them some arms, under circumstances which made them believe those arms were necessary for self-defence, against threatened attacks from the Peninsulars. Thus have sergeants and even officers been seen to mingle among the country people, and pass themselves off as enemies of the government, for the purpose of betraying them into avowals of their sentiments to the ruin of many persons so informed against as well as to the disgrace of military honor on the part of those who have lent themselves to so villainous a service.
"If the sons of Cuba, moved by the dread of greater evils, have ever determined to employ legitimate means of imposing some law, or some restraint upon the unbridled excesses of their rulers, these latter have always found the way to distort such acts into attempts at rebellion.
"For having dared to give utterances to principles and opinions, which, to other nations, constitute the foundation of their moral progress and glory, the Cubans most distinguished for their virtues and talents have found themselves wanderers and exiles. For the offence of having exhibited their opposition to the unlawful and perilous slave trade, from which the avarice of General O'Donnell promised itself so rich a harvest of lucre, the latter satiated his resentment with the monstrous vengeance of involving them in a charge of conspiracy with the free colored people and the slaves of the estates; endeavoring, as the last outrage that an immoral government could offer to law, to reason, or to nature, to prove the object of that conspiracy, in which they implicated whites of the most eminent virtue, knowledge, and patriotism, to have been no other than the destruction of their own race.