HORRIBLE AFFAIR IN HAVANA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 73, 25 March 1872, Page 4

HORRIBLE AFFAIR IN HAVANA.

The Havana correspondent of the New York Herald, writing on a recent date, gives a melancholy account of the butchery that has lately taken place in that city. Ifc seems that it is the custom of the medical students of the university upon the days appointed by their teachers for that purpose to repair to the public cemetery, attached to which is a dead-house where they practice autopsies and hear lectures from their professors. On the afternoon of the 23rd ult., the class of the first year of medicine, comprising some fifty young men, aged from sixteen to twenty years, belonging to some of the .best and most wealthy families in Cuba, were at the cemetery. While there they foolishly commenced " skylarking," breaking the glass cases which covered the niches in some of the graves, and pulling down the wreathes of immortelles and other decorations. Among the tombs thus desecrated was that of Gonvalo Castafino, considered by the Spaniards as a martyr to his country for having been shot in January, 1860, by some Cubans at Key West ; also, the grave of Major Ricardo Guzman, who died of wounds received in the beginning of the insurrection. On the 24th the students revisited the cemetery, where they were all arrested by the guards placed there to intercept them. Unfortunately, two days after a grand parade was held in honor of the Acting Captain-G-eneral, at which over 100,000 volunteers passed in review. At this parade the word was passed round for a disturbance, and on defiling past the Acting Captain-G-eneral the cry was raised to " Death to the students!" Id the evening, when the review was over, crowds of the volunteers assembled in the vicinity of the gaol in which the students were confined, and repeated the demand for their blood. By midnight, nearly 12,000 volunteers were under arms, and insisted on the unfortunate students being immediately tried by court-martial. All attempts to pacify them proving of no avail, a court-martial was formed at two in the morning, composed of six captains of the regular army, and one from each of the battalion of the volunteers, elected by the men — the whole presided over by a colonel. The court sat until two o'clock on the following day. During its progress General Clavigo attempted to leave the building, but was forced back by the volunteers. At the close of the session the sentence was read from a balcony to the crowd. Eight of the students were to be shot, eleven to serve six years in the chain gang, nineteen (o serve four years in the same, four to six months' imprisonment, and only two released. The ..execution of the condemned students took place immediately. Between four and five o'clock, in the afternoon they, were led out from gaol to die. The boys, it is said, met their death bravely and calmly, though some of the youngest trembled and turned pale. One of them, Alonzo Alvarez de la Carapa, endeavored to exculpate his schoolfellows, but in vain. The chaplain of the cemetery did his best to save them, saying that the boys had done nothing to merit such severe proceedings, that they were guilty of only "boyish freaks," and "he implored their pardon, for which conduct he has been removed from his office. The parents and relatives of several of the boys offered large sums of money to save their lives — Campa's father, it. is. said, offered, a million — but the authorities were unable to resist the pressure put upon them by the volunteers, who further satisfied their taste for bloodshed ., by shooting six or eight persons in the streets.