The Seattle Post Intelligencer

CUBA.
From the Spanish of Jose Maria Heredia

Fair land of Cuba! on thy shores are seen
Life's far extremes of noble and of mean;
The world of matchless beauty dressed,
And nameless horrors hid within thy breast.

Ordained of heaven the fairest flower of earth
To rise to thy reckless birth!
The tyrant's clamor, and the slave's mad cry,
With the sharp dash in insolent reply:
Such are the sounds that echo on thy plains,
While virtue and vice in unblushing reigns.

Rise, and to power daring heart oppose!
Confront with death the worse than deathlike woes.
Unfailing valor chains the flying fate;
Who dares to die shall win the conqueror's state!

We, too, can leave a glory and a name
Our children's children shall not blush to claim.
To the far future let us turn our eyes,
And up to God's still unpolluted skies!

Better to bare the breast, and undismayed
Meet the sharp vengeance of the hostile blade,
Than on the couch of helpless grief to lie
And in one death thousand deaths to die.

Fearest thou blood? It better in the strife,
From patriot wounds to pour the life-giving stream,
Than let it creeping inglorious through the veins,
Benumbed by sin, and agony and chains!

What hast thou, Cuban! Life itself? Thy sign—
Thy very grave so insecurely thine!
Thy blood, the treasure, poured like tropic rain
From tyrant's hands to feed the soil of Spain.

If it be truth that nations still must bear
The crushing yoke, the stinging fetter wear,
To the people this be heaven's decree
To clasp their shame, or struggle to be free,

From truth I turn—indignant my heart burns.
With freedom's frenzy all my spirit yearns.
That rage which ruled the Roman's soul of fire,
And filled Columbia's patriot sire!

Cuba! thou shalt rise, as pure, as bright,
As thy free air, as full of living light:
Free as the waves that foam around thy strands
Kissing thy shores, and curling o'er thy sands!

—William Henry Hurlbert (1844).