Martinez Campos during the Ten Years'
War built the first trocha just west of the Cubitas Mountains
where the waist of the island is narrowest. It was Campos's hope,
by means of this artificial barrier, to confine the operations of
the insurgents to the eastern end of Cuba, but in that he failed,
as likewise he failed in the results gained by his efforts to
concentrate the rural population in the cities. Not until Weyler's
time were these two methods of pacification, the trocha and the
concentration camp, developed to their fullest extent. Under the
rule of the Butcher several trochas were constructed at selected
points, and he carried to its logical conclusion the policy of
concentration, with results sufficiently frightful to shock the
world and to satisfy even Weyler's monstrous appetite for cruelty.
Although his trochas hindered the free movement of Cuban troops
and his prison camps decimated the peaceful population of several
provinces, the Spanish cause gained little. Both trenches and
prison camps became Spanish graveyards.
Weyler's intrenchments cost millions and were elaborately
constructed, belted with barbed wire, bristling with blockhouses
and forts. In both the digging and the manning, however, they cost
uncounted lives. Spanish spades turned up fevers with the soil,
and, so long as raw Spanish troops were compelled to toil in the
steaming morasses or to lie inactive under the sun and the rain,
those traitor generals--June, July, and August--continued to pile
up the bodies in rotting heaps and to timber the trenches with
their bones.
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