Cushin Alejandro Castro to Caleb Cushing, August 23, 1875

Mr. Castro to Mr. Cushing.

Most Excellent Sir: I have acquainted myself fully with the note your excellency has been pleased to address to me on the 18th of the present month in consequence of the promotion to the rank of mariscal de campo obtained by the brigadier of the Spanish army, Don Juan Burriel. Your excellency lays down, and recognizes as a general rule, that neither your excellency, nor your Government, may interfere in the changes and promotions which the government of which I have the honor to form part may deem it convenient to order and carry into effect with respect to the military or civil functionaries dependent upon it, and in obedience to this incontrovertible principle you give assurance that your Government might have hesitated to go beyond the limits of some purely friendly indication in the case of the concession of military honors on the part of a foreign government to subjects who might have attracted attention to themselves by reason of acts of exceptional cruelty or violence. But referring thereupon to the case of Don Juan Burriel, which gives motive to your communication, and with reference to the executions ordered by the same in Santiago de Cuba, and of the reclamations of which they were the object, you recall the compromises contracted by the Spanish government to submit to a formal investigation the conduct of the authorities who, in those melancholy occurrences, might have infringed the laws of the land or the obligations of treaties, imposing upon them the punishments to which they might have rendered themselves amenable, if in effect they were proved to be culpable.

The government of His Majesty, which voluntarily contracted the compromises which your excellency justly invokes, recalls them likewise, in its turn, and finds itself firmly resolved to fulfill them, without the higher grade to which General Burriel has been elevated exempting him from the responsibility he may have contracted, or either augmenting or diminishing his means of defense.

In effect, if the necessities of the war and of army organization on the one hand, and, on the other, the consideration that it was not allowable to the government to anticipate in a certain sense the result of the pending judgment, counseled it to promote to the next higher grade a general officer, neither with reference to that has it been possible to take into account the memories evoked by your excellency, nor can the act to which you refer have the least influence on the consequences of the investition, which continues pending, or on the juicio de residencia to which it may give occasion.

Both matters are following, and will follow, their due course, without other delays than those inevitable in this class of proceedings. Justice will pronounce its judgment, and be this what it may, the government of His Majesty will enforce its execution without other considerations than those imposed upon it by its own dignity and the rigorous fulfillment of its pact.

I believe, Mr. Minister, that these frank explanations will be sufficient to demonstrate to your excellency the true and only character of the step to which you have deemed it convenient to call my attention; and as for the urgency of bringing to the most speedy termination possible the affair, of which the fact which now occupies us is only a mere, although important, incident, the government of His Majesty shares fully in this opinion, and will omit none of the means within its reach, to the end that your desires may remain speedily satisfied. With this object it has already incited the zeal of the high consultative body, to whose elevated and impartial criterion are already submitted the acts which have originally given origin to the present controversy.

I improve this opportunity to repeat to your excellency the assurances of my most distinguished consideration.