Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Shade-grown tobacco in Porto Rico

ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES

BY

HARRY A. FRANCK

Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Zone Policeman 88,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” etc., etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

BY THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1920

Copyright, 1920, by

The Century Co.

TO

MY WIFE, RACHEL,

WITH WHOM THIS WAS THE BEGINNING

OF A FAR LONGER JOURNEY, AND

TO

MY SON, HARRY,

WHO JOINED US ON THE WAY

FOREWARNING

Some years ago I made a tramping trip around the world for my own pleasure. Friends coaxed me to set it down on paper and new friends were kind enough to read it. Since then they have demanded more—at least so the publishers say—but always specifying that it shall be on foot. Now, I refuse to be dictated to as to how I shall travel; I will not be bullied into tramping when I wish to ride. The journey herewith set forth is, therefore, among other things, a physical protest against that attempted coercion, a proof that I do not need to walk unless I choose to do so. To make broken resolutions impossible, I picked out a trip that could not be done on foot. It would be difficult indeed to walk through the West Indies. Then, to make doubly sure, I took with me a newly acquired wife—and we brought back a newly acquired son, though that has nothing to do with the present story.

I will not go so far as to say that I abjured footing it entirely. As a further proof of personal liberty I walked when and where the spirit moved me—and the element underfoot was willing. But I wish it distinctly understood from the outset that this is no “walking trip.” Once having broken the friends who flatter me with their attention of expecting me to confine myself to the prehistoric form of locomotion—I shall probably take to the road again to relieve a chronic foot-itch.

The following pages do not pretend to “cover” the West Indies. They are made up of the random pickings of an eight-months’ tour of the Antilles, during which every island of importance was visited, but they are put together rather for the entertainment of the armchair traveler than for the information of the traveler in the flesh. While the latter may find in them some points to jot down in his itinerary, he should depend rather on the several thorough and orderly books that have been written for his special benefit.

Harry A. Franck.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES

CHAPTER I
OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES

We concluded that if we were to spend half a year or more rambling through the West Indies we would get sea-water enough without taking to the ships before it was necessary. Our first dream was to wander southward in the sturdy, if middle-aged, gasolene wagon we must otherwise leave behind, abandoning it for what it would bring when the mountains of central Cuba grew too difficult for its waning vigor. But the tales men told of southern highways dampened our ardor for that particular species of adventure. They were probably exaggerated tales. Looking back upon the route from the eminence of automobile-infested Havana, we are of the impression that such a trip would have been marred only by some rather serious jolting in certain parts of the Carolinas and southern Georgia, and a moderately expensive freight-bill from the point where lower Florida turns to swamps and islands. If our people of the South carry out the ambitious highway plans that are now being widely agitated, there is no reason that the West Indian traveler of a year or two hence should hesitate to set forth in his own car.

The rail-routes from the northeastern states are three in number, converging into one at something over five hundred miles from the end of train travel. Those to whom haste is necessary or more agreeable than leisure may cover the distance from our greatest to our southernmost city in forty-eight hours, and be set down in Havana the following dawn. But with a few days to spare the broken journey is well worth the enhanced price and trouble. A truer perspective is gained by following the gradual change that increasing length of summer gives the human race rather than by springing at once from the turmoil of New York to the regions where winter is only a rumor and a hearsay.

In the early days of October the land journey southward is like the running backward of a film depicting nature’s processes. The rich autumn colors and the light overcoats of Pennsylvania advance gradually to the browning foliage and the wrap-less comfort of the first autumn breezes, then within a few hours to the verdant green and simpler garb of full summer. There are reservations, however, in the change of human dress, which does not keep pace with that of the landscape. Our Southerners seem to be ruled in sartorial matters rather by the dictators of New York fashions than by the more fitting criterion of nature, and the glistening new felt fedora persists far beyond the point where the lighter covering would seem more suitable to time and place.

To the Northerner the first item of interest is apt to be the sudden segregation of races in the trains leaving Washington for the South. From the moment he surreptitiously sheds his vest as he rumbles across the Potomac the traveler finds his intercourse with his African fellow-citizens, be they jet black or pale yellow, circumscribed by an impregnable wall that is to persist until all but a narrow strip of his native land has shrunk away behind him. Only as superior to inferior, as master to servant, or as a curiosity akin to that of the supercilious voyager toward the “natives” of some foreign land, is his contact henceforth with the other race. Stern placards point out the division that must be maintained in public buildings or conveyances; custom serves as effectually in private establishments; the very city directories fetch up their rear with the “Colored Department.”

The tourist’s first impression of Richmond will largely depend on whether his train sets him down at the disreputable Main Street station or at the splendid new Union Depot on the heights of Broad Street. Unfortunately, the latter is as yet no more nearly “union” than it is, in spite of a persistent American misnomer, a “depot,” and his chances of escaping the medieval landing-place are barely more than “fifty-fifty.” But his second notion of the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy cannot but be favorable, unless his tastes run more to the picturesque than to modern American civilization. He may at this particular season grumble at a sweltering tropical heat that appears long before he bargained for it, but the hospitable Richmonder quickly appeases his wrath in this regard by explaining that some malignant cause, ranging from the disturbance of the earth’s orbit by the war just ended to a boiling Gulf Stream, has given the South the hottest autumn in—I hesitate to say how many decades. Nor, if he is new to the life below Mason and Dixon’s Line, will he escape a certain surprise at finding how green is still the memory of the Confederacy. The Southerner may have forgiven, but he has not forgotten, nor does he intend that his grandchildren shall do so.

In that endless stretch of sand, cotton, and pine-trees which is locally known as “Nawth Cahlina, sah,” there are other ways of passing the time than by watching the endless unrolling of a sometimes monotonous landscape. One can get into conversation, for instance, with the train-crew far more easily than in the more frigid North, and listen for hours to more or less verdant anecdotes, which the inimitable Southern dialect alone makes worth the hearing. Or, if wise enough to abandon the characterless cosmopolitan Pullman for the local atmosphere of the day coach, one may catch such scraps as these—of special interest to big-game hunters—from the lips of fellow-passengers:

“Say, d’ you hear about Bud Hampton?”

“What Bud done now?”

“Why, las’ week Bud Hampton shot a buck niggah’t weighed ovah two hunderd pound!”

This particular species of quarry seemed to grow blacker with each succeeding state. The two urchins in one-piece garments who lugged our hand-bags up the slope in Columbia made coal seem of a pale tint by comparison. At the corner of a main street so business-bent as to require the constant attention of a traffic policeman they steered us toward the door of a somewhat weather-worn establishment.

“This the best hotel?” I queried, a bit suspicious that the weight of their burdens had warped their judgment. “How about that one down the street?” It was a building of very modern aspect, looming ten full stories into the brilliant Southern heavens.

“Dat ain’ no hotel, sah,” cried the two in one breath, rolling their snow-white eyeballs, their black toes seeming to wriggle with pride at the magnificence it presented, “dat’s de sky-scrapah!”

It was in Columbia that we felt for the first time irrevocably in the South. Richmond had been merely an American city with a Southern atmosphere; South Carolina’s capital was the South itself, despite its considerable veneer of modern Americanism. One must look at three faces to find one indubitably white. Clusters of mahogany-red sugar-canes lolled in shady corners, enticing the black brethren to exercise their powerful white teeth. Goats drowsed in patches of sand protected from the insistent sunshine. Motormen raised their caps with one hand and brought their dashing conveyances to a sudden halt with the other at the very feet of their “lady acquaintances,” whose male escorts returned the greeting with equal solemnity. I puzzled for some time to know what far-distant city this one, with its red soil stretching away to suburban nothingness from the points where the street paving petered out, with its goats and sugar-cane, its variegated complexions, and frank contentment with life, was insistently recalling to memory. Then all at once it came to me. Purged of its considerable American bustle, Columbia would bear a striking resemblance to Asunción, capital of far-off Paraguay. Even the wide-open airiness of its legislative halls, drowsing in the excusable inoccupancy of what was still mid-summer despite the calendar, carried the imagination back to the land of the Guaraní.

An un-Northern spaciousness was characteristic of the chief hostelry, with its ample chambers, its broad lounging-room, its generously gaping spitoons, offering not too exacting a target to the inattentive fire of Southern marksmanship. The easy-going temperament of its management came as a relief from the unflinching rule-of-thumb back over the horizon behind us. The reign of the old-fashioned “American plan,” synonymous with eating when and what the kitchen dictates rather than leaving the guest a few shreds of initiative, had begun again and was to persist for a thousand miles southward. But can some trustworthy authority tell us what enactment requires that the “choicest room” of the “best hotel” of every American city be placed at the exact junction-point of the most successful attempt to concentrate all its twenty-four hours of uproar? I ask not in wrath, for time and better slumber have assuaged that, but out of mere academic curiosity. In the good, old irresponsible days of my “hobo” youth the “jungle” beyond the railroad yards was far preferable to this aristocratic Bedlam.

The “sky-scrapah” loomed behind us for half an hour or more across the mighty expanse of rolling sand-and-pine-tree world, with its distance-purple tinge and its suggestion of the interior of Brazil, which fled northward on the next lap of our journey. The cotton-fields which interspersed the wilderness might have seemed patches of daisies to the casual glance, rather sparse and thirsty daisies, for this year the great Southern crop had sadly disappointed its sponsors. Powder-dry country roads of reddish sand straggled along through the endless stretches of scrub-pines, carrying here and there the sagging buggy and gaunt and dust-streaked horse of former days. I relegate the equine means of transportation to the past advisedly, for his doom was apparent even in these sparsely cultivated and thinly peopled regions. Before a little unpainted, wooden negro church that drifted by us there clustered twenty-eight automobiles, with a bare half-dozen steeds drooping limply on their weary legs in the patches of shade the machines afforded them. King Cotton, abetted by his royal contemporaries overseas, has drawn no color-line in deluging his favors on his faithful subjects. Forests of more genuine trees replaced the scrub growth for long spaces farther on; here and there compact rectangles of superlatively green sugar-cane contrasted with the dead-brown patches of shriveled corn. In the smoking compartment of the coach placarded “White” shirt-sleeves and open collars were the rule, but the corresponding section of the “Colored” car indulged in no such disheveled comfort. The negroes of the South seem more consistent followers of Beau Brummel than their white neighbors.

We descended at Savannah in a hopeful frame of mind, for a recent report announced it the most nearly reasonable in its food prices of the fifty principal cities of our United States. Georgia’s advantage in the contest with starvation was soon apparent. At the desk of the hotel overlooking a semi-tropical plaza the startled newcomer found staring him in the face a dire threat of incarceration, in company with the recipient, if he so far forgot himself as to offer a gratuity. There was something strangely familiar, however, about the manner of the grandson of Africa who hovered about the room to which he had conducted us, flecking away a speck of dust here, raising a curtain and lowering it again to the self-same height over yonder. I had no desire to spend even a short span of my existence in a Southern dungeon, along with this dusky bearer of the white man’s burdens. But he would have made a most unsuitable spectator to the imperative task of removing the Georgian grime of travel. Enticing him into a corner out of sight of the key-hole I called his attention to the brilliancy of a silver coin. Instead of springing to a window to shout for the police, he snatched the curiosity in a strangely orthodox manner, flashed upon us a row of dazzlingly white teeth, and wished us a pleasant evening. Possibly I had read the anti-tipping ordinance too hastily; it may merely have forbidden the public bestowal of gratuities.

A microscopic examination might possibly have proved that the reckoning which was laid before us at the end of dinner showed some signs of shrinkage; to the naked eye it was quite as robust as its twin brothers to the North. But of course the impossibility of leaving a goodly proportion of the change to be cleared away with the crumbs would account for Savannah’s low cost of living. The lengthening of the ebony face at my elbow as I scraped the remnants of my bank-note together might have been due to the exertions of the patent-leather shoes that sustained it to contain more than their fair share of contents. But it seemed best to make sure of the source of dismay; we might have to eat again before we left Savannah.

“I understand you can’t accept tips down here in Georgia?” I hazarded, reversing the usual process between money and pocket. The increasing elongation of the waiter’s expression branded the notion a calumny even sooner than did his anxious reply:

“Ah been taking ’em right along, sah. Yes, sah, thank you, sah. Dey did try to stop us makin’ a livin’, sah, but none of de gen’lemans do’n ferget us.”

I can highly commend the anti-tipping law of Georgia; it gives one a doubled sense of adventure, of American freedom from restraint, reminiscent of the super-sweetness of stolen apples in our boyhood days.

We liked Savannah; preferred it, perhaps, to any of the cities of our journey southward. We liked the Southern hospitality of its churches, consistent with their roominess and their wide-open windows. We were particularly taken with the custom of furnishing fans as well as hymn-books, though we may have wondered a bit whether the segregation of the colored people persisted clear beyond St. Peter’s gate. We were especially grateful to the genius of Oglethorpe, who had made this a city of un-American spaciousness, with every other cross street an ample boulevard, which gave the lungs and the eyes a sense of having escaped to the open country. Perhaps it was these wooded avenues, more than anything else, that made us feel we were at last approaching the tropics, where life itself is of more real importance than mere labor and business. Had we settled there, we should quickly have attuned ourselves to the domesticity of her business customs,—breakfast at nine, dinner from two to four, giving the mind harassed with the selling of cotton or the plaints of clients time to compose itself in household quiet, supper when the evening breezes have wiped out the memory of the scorching sun. We liked the atmosphere of genuine companionship between the two sections of the population, despite the line that was sternly drawn between them where social intercourse might otherwise have blended together. The stately tread of the buxom negro women bearing their burdens on heads that seemed designed for no other purpose fitted into the picture our imaginations persisted in painting against the background of the old slave-market, with its barred cells, in defiance of the assertion of inhabitants that not a black man had ever been offered for sale there.

The man who conducted us to the top of Savannah’s “sky-scrapah”—for every Southern city we visited boasted one such link between earth and heaven—was still frankly of the “rebel” turn of mind for all his youthfulness. He deplored the abolition of slavery. In the good old days a “niggah” was as valuable as a mule to-day; no owner, unless he was a fool, would have thought of abusing so costly a possession any more than he would now his automobile. The golden age of the negro was that in which he was inspected daily, as soldiers are, and sternly held to a certain standard of outward appearance and health. To-day not one out of ten of them was fit to come near a white man. Laziness had ruined them; their native indolence and the familiarity toward them of white men from the North had been their downfall. The South had no fear of race riots, however; those were things only of the North, thanks to the Northerner’s false notion of the “nigger’s” human possibilities. Why had the black laborers who had raised this pride of Savannah to its lofty fifteen stories of height always lifted their hats to him, their foreman, and addressed the Northern architects with the disrespect of covered heads? Wise men from “up east” soon learned the error of their ways in the treatment of the “niggah,” after a few weeks or months of Southern residence. Slavery, in principle, was perhaps wrong, but it was the only proper system with negroes. Besides, we should not forget that it was not the South that had introduced slavery into the United States, but New England!

Many things, I knew, were chargeable to our northeastern states, but this particular accusation was new to me. Yet this son of the old South was a modern American in other respects, for all his out-worn point of view. His civic pride, bubbling over in a boasting that was not without a suggestion of crudity, alone proved that. Savannah was destined to become sooner or later the metropolis of America; it was already second only to New York in the tonnage of its shipping. I cannot recall offhand any American town that is not destined some day, in the opinion of its proudest citizens, to become the leader of our commercial life, nor one which is not already the greatest something or other of the entire country. No doubt this conviction everywhere makes for genuine progress, even though the goal of the imagination is but a will-o’-the-wisp. What breeds regret in my soul, however, is the paucity of our cities that aspire to the place of intellectual leadership, as contrasted with the multitude of those which picture themselves the foremost in trade and commerce.

Possibly Savannah will some day outstrip New York, but I hope not, for it has something to-day the loss of which would be an unfortunate exchange for mere metropolitan uproar and which even its own leisurely ambitious people might regret when it was too late. This view from its highest roof, with its chocolate-red river winding away to the sea sixteen miles distant, and inland to swampy rice-fields and the abodes of alligators, that can be reached only by “báteau,” with its palm-flecked open spaces and its freedom from smoke, raised the hope that it might aspire to remain what it is now incontestably, a “city of trees” and a pleasant dwelling-place.

There were suggestions in the over-languid manner of some of its poorer inhabitants that the hookworm was prevalent in Savannah. Well-informed citizens pooh-poohed the notion, asserting that “hookworm is just a polite Northern word for laziness.” The particular sore spot of the moment was the scarcity of sugar. From Columbia onward it had been served us in tiny envelopes, as in war-days. That displayed in store windows was a mere bait, for sale only with a corresponding quantity of groceries. All of which was especially surprising in a region with its own broad green patches of cane. The unsweetened inhabitants explained the enigma by a reference to “profiteers,” and pointed out the glaringly new mansions of several of this inevitable war-time gentry. Others asserted that the ships at the wharves across the river were at that very moment loading hundreds of tons of sugar for Europe and furnishing even Germany with an article badly needed at home. An old darky added another detail that was not without its significance:

“Dey ’s plenty of sorghum an’ merlasses right now, sah, but de white folks dey cain’t eat nothin’ but de pure white.”

Men of a more thoughtful class than our guide of the “sky-scrapah” had a somewhat different view of the glories of the old South.

“Slavery,” said one of them, “was our curse and in time would have been our ruination. Not so much because it was bad for the negroes, for it wasn’t, particularly. But it was ruining the white man. It made him a haughty, irresponsible loafer, incapable of controlling his temper or his passions, or of soiling his hands with labor. We have real cause to be grateful that slavery was abolished. But that does not alter the fact that right was on our side in the war with the North—the right of each State to dissolve its union with the others if it chose, which was the real question at issue, rather than the question of holding slaves, though I grant that we are better off by sticking to the union. If the South had won, the United States would be to-day a quarrelsome collection of a score of independent countries, unprogressive as the Balkans.”

On a certain burning question even the most open-minded sons of the South were of the prevailing opinion.

“Whatever the North may think,” said one of this class, “we are forced to hold the fear of lynching constantly over the negro. In the North you are having far more trouble with them than we. And why? Because you depend on the authorities to curb them. Down here a serious crime by a negro is the general, immediate business of every man with a white skin. We cannot have our wives or daughters appearing on the public witness-stand to testify against an attacking negro. The surest, fairest, most effective, and least expensive means of dealing with a black scoundrel is to hang him at once from the nearest limb and go home and forget it. It seems to be the prevailing notion in the North that we are more apt than not to get the wrong man. That does not happen in one case out of a hundred. Our police and our deputy sheriffs know the whole history, the habits, character, and hiding-place of every nigger in their districts. When one of the bad ones commits a serious crime, they know exactly where to look for him, and the citizens who go with them take a rope along. Without lynching we would live in mortal terror day and night. As it is, we have far less trouble with the negroes than you do in the North, and the vast majority of them get along better with us than they do with you.”

Good friends squandered a considerable amount of time and gasolene to show us the region round about Savannah. Despite their warning that this floor-flat coast land was not the real Georgia, we found the mile after mile of cream-white roads, built of the oyster-shells that hang like the bluffs of mountain spurs above its coastal waters, teeming with interest to Northern eyes. The endless festoons of Spanish moss alone gave us the sense of having found a new corner of the world. Sturdy live-oaks were untroubled by these draperies of vegetation, though other trees seemed gradually to waste away beneath them. The dead-brown fields of corn had passed the stage where they would have been cut and shocked in the North, and the ears hung limply, awaiting the hand of the picker. Corn-stalks do not tempt animals that can graze all through the winter. The “crackers” whose ramshackle abodes broke the semi-wilderness carried the memory back to the peasants of Venezuela or of the Brazilian hinterland; their speech and their mode of life were but a degree less primitive, curious anachronisms in the bustling, ahead-of-date America of to-day. Here and there we passed what had once been a great plantation of the South, productive now chiefly of aggressive weeds. One such busy estate of slavery days had been revamped and partly restored to its pre-war condition. By a new generation of Southern planters? No, indeed! It is to-day the rendezvous of slangy, dollar-worshipping youths from the North, who bring with them clicking cameras and pampered movie stars. Thus is the aggressive modern world constantly treading on the heels of the leisurely past.

Through the first hint of the brief southern twilight there came marching toward us under the festooned trees a long double-column of negroes, dressed in dingy cotton garments, with broad black-and-white stripes, clanging chains pending from their waists to their legs, shovels over their broad shoulders, and flanked by several weather-browned white men in faded khaki, carrying rifles. To our unaccustomed eyes they seemed a detail of some medieval stage-setting, long since abolished from the scenes of real life, at least in our western world. Our hosts, however, accepted the group as a consistent bit of the landscape, scarcely noticeable until our interest called their attention to it.

“One of our far-famed Georgia chain-gangs,” laughed the man at the wheel, “which so frequently arouse the wet-eyed pity of your Northern philanthropists. A little experience with the ‘poor victims’ usually shows them that the system is not so satanic as it looks from the strained perspective of the North. You can take my word for it that at least half those niggers steal something else as soon as possible, once they are freed, so they can come back again to this comfortable life of irresponsibility and three square meals a day.”

The scarcity of towns farther south was less surprising within sight of the soil they must feed on than in the geographies of our school-days. The region reminded me of tropical Bolivia, with its thinly wooded pampas alternating with swamps, its reddish, undomesticated-looking cattle grazing through a wilderness scattered with palm-trees. Gaunt razor-backed hogs foraged savagely for nourishment among the forest roots about each “cracker’s” weather-painted hermitage. Other signs of animal life were rare, except the first buzzards of the tropics we were approaching, lazily circling over the tree-tops. The single grass-grown track sped constantly away behind us, as if even this way-station local saw few reasons to halt in so uncultivated a landscape. One of those narrow reddish rivers that seem to form the boundaries between all our southern states rumbled past beneath us, and the endless brown, swampy flatlands of Florida, punctuated here and there with clusters of small wooden houses, inconspicuous in their drab setting as animals of protective coloring, rolled incessantly away into the north.

Jacksonville, the “gateway to Florida,” is not so Southern in aspect as Savannah. The considerable percentage of Northerners among its inhabitants and its bustling pursuit of material fortune give it a “business-first” atmosphere we had not encountered since leaving Richmond. Negroes, too, were scarcer in proportion to white men, and destined to become more so as we proceeded, a phenomenon equally noticeable in Brazil as the traveler approaches the equator. The reason, of course, is plain, and similar in the two countries. In slavery days neither our most southern state nor the region of the Amazon were far enough developed to draw many shiploads of Africans, and their more recent exploitation has brought an influx of fortune-seekers, chiefly white in color. The creamy shell roads about “Jax,” as the tendency to short cuts and brevity has dubbed Florida’s most northern city, race smoothly away in all directions through endless vistas of straight yellow pines, interspersed with patches of lilac-hued water hyacinths, and strewn with spider-like undergrowth that quenches its thirst from the humid air. To the casual glance, at least, the sandy soil does not hold great promise, but it is highly productive, for all that. As proof thereof it is sufficient to mention that the saw-mills that furnished lath at a dollar a thousand a few years ago command eight times that in these days of universally bloated prices.

Trainmen in light khaki garb pick up the south-bound express for its long run of more than five hundred miles through the peninsular state. A brick highway, inviting to motorists, parallels the railroad for a considerable distance, and surrenders its task to an efficient, if blacker, route farther on. There are other evidences than this that Florida is more conscious of her appeal to Northern excursionists than are several of her neighbors along the Atlantic seaboard.

St. Augustine is perhaps more attractive, in her own way, than even Savannah, at least to the mere seeker after residential delights. But she is scarcely a part of the American South, as we of the North picture it. The nasal twang of our middle West, or the slurred “r” of New England are far more often heard on her streets and verandas than the leisurely drawl of what was once the Confederacy. Tasks that would fall only to the lot of the black man in Georgia or the Carolinas are here not beneath the dignity of muscular Caucasian youths. Above all she has a Spanish tinge that marks her as the first connecting-link with the vast Iberian civilization beyond. The massive fortress fronting the sea, the main square that still clings to its ancient name of “Plaza de la Constitución,” carry the thoughts as quickly back to the days of buccaneers and the dark shadows of the Inquisition as those where the Castilian tongue holds supreme sway. Here the very stones of protective walls and narrow back streets are impregnated with rousing tales of conscienceless governors from old Spain and revolts of the despised criollos against the exactions of the ruling “Goths.”

But St. Augustine is, of course, genuinely American at heart for all its origin, and even its scattering of negroes are proudly aware of their nationality.

“Look like dat some ovehseas equipment you got dah, sah,” said the grinning, ink-complexioned youth who carried my musette to a chamber filled with inviting sea breezes.

“Yes, indeed, George. Why, were you over there?”

“Ya-as, sah. Ah sure help run dem or’nry Germans home. Dey hyeard a-plenty from d’ shells we sent on fo’ dem—from Bohdeoh.”

The memory of the war he had waged in Bordeaux caused a broad streak of ivory to break out across his ebony face as often as he caught sight of us until the “ovehseas equipment” had again disappeared in the direction of the station.

Occupation, to St. Augustine, seems to be synonymous with the unremitting pursuit of tourists. Her railway gates are the vortex of a seething whirlpool of hotel-runners and the clamoring jehus of horse and gasolene conveyances. An undisturbed stroll through her streets is out of the question, for every few yards the pedestrian is sure to hear the gentle rumble of wheels behind him and a sugary, “Carriage, sah? All de sights in town fo’ two dollars, sah, or a nice ride out to——” and so on for several minutes, until the wheedling voice has run through the gamut of sanguinity, persuasiveness, and shriveled hope, and died away in husky disappointment, only to be replaced a moment later by another driver’s honeyed tones.

Ponce de Leon, seeking the fountain of youth, failed to recognize in St. Augustine the object of his quest. Could he return to-day, he would find that at least the immortality of fame has been vouchsafed him, for his name flourishes everywhere, on hotel façades, shop fronts, and cigar-boxes. Perhaps, too, he was near the goal of physical permanence without suspecting it. At least, if assertion be accepted as proof, St. Augustine is without a peer in longevity. “The oldest” is the title of nobility most widely prevalent in all the region. The oldest town, with the oldest house, flanked by the dwelling of the oldest woman, who attends the oldest church, linked to her residence by the oldest street, and visible to possessors of the oldest inducement to human endeavor, leaves the gaping traveler no choice but to accept the assertion of its inhabitants that here is to be found the oldest everything under the sun, or at least in the United States, which is the same thing, for surely no one would be so unpatriotic as to admit that other lands or planets could outdo us in anything we set out to accomplish. Even “old Ponce,” dean of the six thousand saurians—count them if you dare to doubt—that sleep through the centuries out at St. Augustine’s “Alligator Farm” confesses, through the mouth of his keeper from upstart Italy, to five hundred unbroken summers, and placidly accepts the honor of being “the oldest animal in captivity.” One stands enraged at the thought that if “Ponce” cared to open his capacious mouth and speak, he might tell an eager world just what Hernando de Soto wore when his boat glided over his everglade home, or what were the exact words with which his human namesake acknowledged his inability to prolong his butterfly existence by finding the waters of immortality. Small wonder, indeed, that he dares raise his scaly head and yawn in the face even of insurance agents.

The trolley that carries “Ponce’s” visitors across the wastes of brackish water and worthless land separating St. Augustine from the open sea is virtually a private car to the rare tourist of October days. This comatose period of the year gives the bather the sense of having leased the whole expanse of the Atlantic as his own bath-tub. For the native Floridians, however widely they may extoll their endless stretch of coast-line, seem to make small use of it themselves.

For hundreds of miles southward the eyes of the traveler weary at the swamp and jungle sameness of the peninsular state. The Gulf Stream and the diligent coral have built extensively, but they have left the job unfinished, in the indifferent tropical way. Grape-fruit farms and orange-groves break forth upon the primeval wilderness here and there, yet only often enough to emphasize its unpeopled immensity. Even Palm Beach has nothing unusual to show until the holidays of mid-winter bring its vast hostelries back to life. One loses little in fleeing all day onward at Southern express speed.

Miami, however, is worth a halt, if only for a glimpse of the United States in full tropical setting. There the refugee from winter will find cocoanuts nodding everywhere above him; there he may pick his morning grape-fruit at the door; and he need be no plutocrat to have his table graced with those aristocratic fruits of the tropics, the papaya and the alligator-pear. He cannot but be amused, too, at the casual Southern manners of the street-cars, the motorman-conductors of which make change with one hand and govern their brakes with the other, or who retire to a seat within the car for a chat with a passenger or the retying of a shoelace, while the conveyance careens madly along the outskirt streets.

Thanks, perhaps, to its sea breezes, Miami seemed no hotter than Richmond, though it was a humid, tropical heat that forced its inhabitants to compromise with Dame Fashion. As far north as Savannah a few eccentric beings ignored her dictates to the extent of fronting the July weather of October in white suits and straw hats, but they had a self-conscious, hunted manner which proved they were aware of their conspicuousness. In southern Florida, however, it was rather those who persisted in dressing by the calendar who attracted attention, and there were men of all occupations who dared to appear in public frankly devoid of the superfluous upper garment of male attire.

Some thirty miles south of Miami the “Dixie Highway,” capable and well-kept to the last, disappears for lack of ground to stand on. The soldierly yellow pines give way to scrub jungle, and swamps gain the ascendency over solid earth. Amphibious plants cover the landscape like armies of ungainly crabs or huge spiders. Compact masses of dwarf trees and bristling bushes cluster as tightly together as Italian hilltop villages, as if for mutual protection from the ever-increasing expanses of water. Wherever land wins the constant struggle against the other element, the gray “crabs” of vegetation stretch away in endless vistas on each hand. White herons rise from the everglades at the rumble of the train, and wing their leisurely way into the flat horizon. A constant sea breeze sweeps through the coaches. At rare intervals a little wooden shack or two, sometimes shaded by half a dozen magnificent royal palms, keeps a precarious foothold on the shrinking soil; but it is hard to imagine what means of livelihood man finds in these swampy wastes.

St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress

A policeman of Havana

Cuba’s new presidential palace

The mainland ends at Jewfish, a cluster of three or four yellow wooden cabins, and for more than a hundred miles the traveler experiences the uncouth sensation of making an ocean voyage by rail. Strangely enough, however, there is more dry land for a considerable distance after the continent has been left behind than during the last twenty miles of mainland. The swamps disappear, and the gray coral rock of the chain of islands along which the train speeds steadily onward sustains a more generous vegetation than that of the watery wastes behind. Gradually, however, the grayish shallows on either hand turn to the ultramarine blue of the Caribbean, and the score of island stepping-stones along which the railroad skips grow smaller and more widely separated, with long miles of sea-washed trestles between them. Within an hour these have become so narrow that they are invisible from the car windows, and the train seems to be racing along the surface of the sea itself, out-distancing ocean-liners bound in the same direction. Brazil-like villages of sun-browned shacks surrounded by waving cocoanut palms cluster in the center of the larger keys, as the Anglo-Saxon form of the Spanish cayo designates these scattered islets of the Caribbean. The names of the almost unpeopled stations grow more and more Castilian—Key Largo, Islamorada, Matacumbe, Bahia Honda, Boca Chica. In places the water underneath is shallow enough for wading, and shades away from light brown through several tones of pink to the deepest blue. The building of a railroad by boat must have been a task to try at times the stoutest hearts, and the cost thereof suggests that the undertaking was rather a labor of love than a hope of adequate financial return.

The Cuban tinge of the passengers had steadily increased from Jacksonville southward; now the “White” car showed many a complexion that was suspiciously like those in the coach ahead. As with the Mexican passengers of our southwest, however, the “Jim Crow” rules are not too rigorously applied to travelers from the lands beyond. Indeed, the color-line all but fades away during the long run through Florida, partly, perhaps, because of the increasing scarcity of negroes. By the time the traveler has passed Miami, African features become almost conspicuous by their rarity.

Toward the end of the three-hour railway journey by sea, land grows so scarce that platforms are built out upon trestles to sustain the stations. The wreckage of a foundered ship lies strewn here and there along the edge of sandy spits across which we rumble from sea to sea. The pirates of olden days would scarcely believe their eyes could they awake and behold this modern means of trespassing on their retreats. Hundreds of palm-trees uprooted by the hurricane of the month before marked the last stages of the journey, the islands became larger and more closely fitted together, and as the sun was quenching his tropical thirst in the incredibly blue sea to the westward, the long line of a city appeared in the offing and the railroad confessed its inability to compete longer with its rivals in ocean transportation.

Key West, fifteen hundred miles south of New York, is a quaint mixture of American and Latin-American civilization, with about equal parts of each. Its wooden houses of two or three stories, with wide verandas supported by pillars, lend tropical features to our familiar architecture. The Spanish tongue, increasingly prevalent in the streets from St. Augustine southward, is heard here as often as English. The frank staring that characterizes the Americas below the United States, the placid indifference to convenience typified in the failure of its trolley-cars to come anywhere near the railroad station, the tendency to consider loafing before a fruit-store or a hole-in-the-wall grocery a fitting occupation for grown men, mark it as deeply imbued with the Spanish influence. Small as the island is, the town swarms with automobiles, and the chief ambition of its youths seems to be to drowse all day in the front seat of a car and trust to luck and a few passengers at train- or boat-time to give them a livelihood. Doctors and dentists announcing “special lady attendant” show that the Latin-American insistence on chaperonage holds full sway. The names of candidates for municipal offices, from mayor to “sexton of the cemetery,” are nearly all Spanish. As in the towns along our Mexican border, the official tongue is bilingual, and Americans from the North are frankly considered foreigners by the Cubanized rank and file of voters. Freight-cars marked “No sirve para azucar” (“Do not use for sugar”) fill the railroad yards; the very motormen greet their passengers in Spanish.

The resident of the “Island City” does not look forward with dread to his winter coal-bill. Not a house in town boasts a chimney. But this advantage is offset by his year-long contest with mosquitos and the absence of fresh water. The railroad brings long trains of the latter in gigantic casks; the majority of the smaller householders depend upon the rains and their eave-troughs. As in all tropical America, the scarcity of vegetables restricts the local diet. Fish, sponges, and mammoth turtles are the chief native products, with the exception, of course, of an industry that has carried the name of Key West to every village of our land.

Of the two principal cigar factories we visited one was managed by a Cuban and the other by an American. The employees are some seventy per cent. natives of the greatest of the West Indies, and Spanish is the prevailing tongue in the workshops. There, as in the city itself, the color-line shows no evidence of existence. Each long table presents the whole gamut of gradations in human complexions. Piece work is the all but invariable rule, and the notion of striking for shorter hours would find no adherents. The cigar-maker begins his daily task at the hour he chooses and leaves when he has wearied of the uninspiring toil. This does not mean that the tables are often unoccupied during the daylight hours, for the citizen of Key West, like those in every other corner of this maltreated and war-weary world, finds the ratio between his earnings, whatever his diligence, and the demands made upon them, constantly balancing in the wrong direction, despite a long series of forced wage increases within the last few years. Not only the pianist-fingered men who perform the most obvious operation of cigar-making, that of rolling the weeds together in their final form, but those who separate the leaves into their various grades and colors by spreading them around the cloth-bound edge of a half-barrel, the women who deftly strip them of their central stem, even those who box and label the finished product, all have the fatness of their pay envelope depend on the amount they accomplish.

Cigar-making came to Key West as the most obvious meeting-place of material, maker, and consumer thirty-five years ago. To-day its factories are almost too numerous for counting. The largest of them are broad, low, modern structures facing the sea and ventilated by its constant breezes; the smallest are single shanty rooms. The raw material still comes chiefly from Cuba, but that from our own country, as far away as Connecticut, has its place in even the best establishments. Though women predominate in several of the processes, the actual making is almost entirely in the hands of men—and their tongues, I might add, for they do not hesitate to lend the assistance of those to the glue with which the consumer’s end is bound together. The average workman rolls some two hundred cigars a day. Men, too, sort the damp and bloated cigars into their respective shades of colors and arrange them in boxes, which are placed under a press. From these they are removed by women and girls, a dozen labels hanging fan-wise from their lower lips, and each cigar is banded and returned to the box in the exact order in which they were taken from it. Stamped with the government revenue label precisely as one affixes the postage to a letter, the boxes are placed in an aging and drying room—theoretically at least, though the present insistency of demand often sends them on their way to the freight-cars the very day of their completion.

The wrapper is of course the most delicate and costly of the materials used, being now commonly grown under cheese-cloth even in sun-drenched Cuba. The by-products from the maker’s bench are shipped northward to cigarette factories. Imperfect cigars are culled out before the boxing process and consumed locally, being given out to the “general help” to the extent, in the larger factories, of five or six thousand a month. The workman, however—and here we find the present day tyranny of labor maintained even in this far-flung island of our southern coast—is paid for every cigar he makes, though he may find himself invited to seek employment elsewhere if his average of “culls” is too persistently high. It is said that the makers of candy never taste the stuff they supply a sweet-tooth world; the same may almost be said of the cigarreros of Key West. If they smoke at all in the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the factories, they are far more apt to be addicted to the cigarette than to the product of their own handicraft. The smoker, by the way, who visits Key West is doomed to disappointment; cigars are no cheaper there than in the most northwestern corner of our land. Nor should he bring with him the hope of sampling for once the brands beyond his means. The factories treat their swarms of visitors with every courtesy—except that of tucking a cigar, either of the five-cent or the dollar variety, into a receptive vest pocket.

The cigar-makers of Key West have one drain upon their income which is not common to other professions. Each one contributes a small sum weekly to the support of a “reader.” A superannuated member of the craft sits on a platform overlooking the long roomful of eagle-taloned manipulators of the weed and reads aloud to them as they work. The custom has all the earmarks of being a direct descendant of the doleful dirge with which negro and Indian laborers, in the Old as well as the New World, are still in some regions urged on to greater exertion. But the reader’s calling has lost its romantic tinge of earlier days. Those we heard were not droning the poetry or the colorful tales of the Castilian classics, but read from a morning newspaper printed in Spanish, with special emphasis on the successful struggles of the “working class” against “capitalists” the world over.

The hurricane that vented its chief fury on the Florida keys early in September was still the chief topic of conversation in Key West. For two days the inhabitants had been without electricity, gas, or transportation; in most houses even the bread gave out. The damage was wide-spread, sparing neither the pipe-organs of churches nor the mattresses of family bedrooms. Many a house was reduced to a mere heap of broken boards. Sea-walls of stone were strewn in scattered bits of rock along the water-fronts; the roofs of some of the stanchest buildings bore gaping holes that carried the memory back to Flanders and eastern France.

Two other routes to the Caribbean converge on this one through Key West, those by way of New Orleans and Tampa. The ferry, for it is little more than that, which connects the southernmost of our cities with Havana is the chief drawback of the overland journey. In the first place its rates testify to its freedom from competition, fifteen dollars and tax for a bare ninety miles of travel. It is as if our ocean-liners demanded $500 for the journey to Liverpool, without furnishing food or baths on the way. Then, as though the continued exactions of passport formalities long after any suitable reason for them had passed were not sufficiently troublesome to the harassed passenger, his comfort is everywhere second to that of the steamer personnel, while the outstretched palm invites special contribution for even the most shadowy species of service. But once the door of his breathless stateroom is closed behind him, a brief night’s sleep, if the inexplicable uproar with which the crew seems to pass its time during the journey permits it, brings him to the metropolis of the West Indies. A glimpse through the port-hole at an unseasonable hour shows the horizon dotted at regular intervals by the arc-lights of Havana’s Malecón, and by the time he has reached the deck, these have faded away in the swift tropical dawn, and the steamer is nosing its way through the bottle-mouth of the harbor under the brow of age-and-sea-browned Morro Castle. There ensues the inevitable wait of an hour or two until the haughty port doctor rises and dresses with meticulous care and leisurely sips his morning coffee. When at last he appears, his professional duty does not delay the long file of passengers, for the simple reason that his attention is confined to the incessant smoking of cigarettes behind his morning newspaper. Passports, so sternly required of the departing American, are not even worthy of a glance by the Cuban officials; the custom examination is brief and unexacting. Once he has escaped the aggressive maelstrom of multicolored humanity which welcomes each new-comer with hopeful shrieks of delight, the traveler quickly merges into the heterogeneous multitude that is as characteristic as its Spanish style of architecture of the cosmopolitan capital of Cuba libre.

THE AMERICAN WEST INDIES

CHAPTER II
RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA

A constant procession of Fords, their mufflers wide open, were hiccoughing out the Carlos III Boulevard toward the Havana ball-park. The entrance-gate, at which they brought up with a snort and a sudden, bronco-like halt that all but jerked their passengers to their feet, was a seething hubbub. Ticket-speculators, renters of cushions, venders of everything that can be consumed on a summer afternoon, were bellowing their wares into the ears of the fanáticos who scrimmaged about the ticket-window. Men a trifle seedy in appearance wandered back and forth holding up half a dozen tiny envelopes, arranged in fan-shape, which they were evidently trying to sell or rent. The pink entradas I finally succeeded in snatching were not, of course, the only tickets needed. That would have been too simple a system for Spanish-America. They carried us as far as the grand stand, where another maelstrom was surging about the chicken-wire wicket behind which a hen-minded youth was dispensing permissions to sit down. He would have been more successful in the undertaking if he had not needed to thumb over a hundred or more seat-coupons reserved for special friends of the management or of himself every time he sought to serve a mere spectator.

We certainly could not complain, however, of the front-row places we obtained except that, in the free-for-all Spanish fashion, all the riffraff of venders crowded the foot-rests that were supposedly reserved for front-row occupants. Nine nimble Cubans were scattered about the flat expanse of Almendares Park, backed by Príncipe Hill, with its crown of university buildings. Royal palms waved their plumes languidly in the ocean breeze; a huge Cuban flag undulated beyond the outfielders; a score of vultures circled lazily overhead, as if awaiting a chance to pounce upon the “dead ones” which the wrathful “fans” announced every time a player failed to live up to their hopes. On a bench in the shade sat all but one of the invading team, our own “Pirates” from the Smoky City. The missing one was swinging his club alertly at the home plate, his eyes glued on the Cuban zurdo, or “south-paw,” who had just begun his contortions in the middle of the diamond. The scene itself was familiar enough, yet it seemed strangely out of place in this tropical setting. It was like coming upon a picture one had known since childhood, to find it inclosed in a brand new frame.

I reached for my kodak, then restrained the impulse. A camera is of little use at a Cuban ball game. Only a recording phonograph could catch its chief novelties. An uproar as incessant as that of a rolling-mill drowned every individual sound. It was not merely the venders of “El escor oficial,” of sandwiches, lottery-tickets, cigars, cigarettes, of bottled beer by the basketful, who created the hubbub; the spectators themselves made most of it. The long, two-story grandstand behind us was packed with Cubans of every shade from ebony black to the pasty white of the tropics, and every man of them seemed to be shouting at the top of his well-trained lungs. I say “man” advisedly, for with the exception of my wife there were just three women present, and they had the hangdog air of culprits. Scores of them were on their feet, screaming at their neighbors and waving their hands wildly in the air. An uninformed observer would have supposed that the entire throng was on the verge of a free-for-all fight, instead of enjoying themselves in the Cuban’s chief pastime.

“Which do you like best, baseball or bull-fights?” I shouted to my neighbor on the left. He was every inch a Cuban, by birth, environment, point of view, in his very gestures, and he spoke not a word of English. Generations of Spanish ancestry were plainly visible through his grayish features; I happened to know that he had applauded many a torero in the days before the rule of Spain and “the bulls” had been banished together. Yet he answered instantly:

“Baseball by far; and so do all Cubans.”

But baseball, strictly speaking, is not what the Cuban enjoys most. It is rather the gambling that goes with it. Like every sport of the Spanish-speaking race, with the single exception of bull-fighting, baseball to the great majority is merely a pretext for betting. The throng behind us was everywhere waving handsful of money, real American money, for Cuba has none of her own larger than the silver dollar. Small wonder the bills are always ragged and worn and half obliterated, for they were constantly passing, like crumpled waste-paper, from one sweaty hand to another. The Platt Amendment showed incomplete knowledge of Cuban conditions when it decreed the use of American money on the island; it should have gone further and ordered the bills destined for Cuba to be made of linoleum. Bets passed at the speed of sleight-of-hand performances. The fanáticos bet on every swing of the batter’s club, on every ball that rose into the air, on whether or not a runner would reach the next base, on how many fouls the inning would produce. Most of the wagers passed so quickly that there was no time for the actual exchange of money. A flip of the fingers or a nod of the head sufficed to arrange the deal. There were no dividing lines either of color or distance. Full-fledged Africans exchanged wagers with men of pure Spanish blood. Cabalistic signs passed between the grandstand and the sort of royal box high above. Across the field the crowded sol, as the Cuban calls the unshaded bleachers, in the vocabulary of the bull-ring, was engaged in the same money-waving turmoil. The curb market of New York is slow, noiseless, and phlegmatic compared with a ball-game in Havana.

Close in front of us other venders of the mysterious little envelopes wandered back and forth, seldom attempting to make themselves heard above the constant din. Here and there a spectator exchanged a crumpled, almost illegible dollar bill for one of the sealed sobres. My neighbor on the left bought one and held it for some time between his ringed fingers. When at last a runner reached first base he tore the envelope open. It contained a tiny slip of paper on which was typewritten “1a base; 1a carrera” (1st base; 1st run). The purchaser swore in Spanish with artistic fluency. I asked the reason for his wrath. He displayed the typewritten slip and grumbled “mala suerte”; then, noting my puzzled expression, explained his “bad luck” in the patient voice of a man who found it strange that an American should not understand his own national game.

“This envelope, which is bought and sold ‘blind’—that is, neither I nor the man who sold it to me knew what was in it—is a bet that the first run will be made by a first baseman, of either side. But the man who has just reached first base is the rrri’ fiel’, and the first baseman is the man who struck out just before him. If he had made the first run I should have won eight dollars. But you see what chance he has now to make the first carrera. Cursed bad luck!”

“Rrri’ fiel’,” however, “died” in a vain attempt to steal third base, and his partner from the opposite corner of the garden was the first man to cross the home-plate. Instantly a cry of “Lef’ fiel’” rose above the hubbub and the erstwhile venders of envelopes began paying the winners. A lath-like individual, half Chinaman, half negro, whom the fanáticos called “Chino,” took charge of the section about us, and handed eight greasy bills to all those whom luck had favored, tucking the winning slips of paper into a pocket of his linen coat. But these simple little wagers were only for “pikers.” There were men behind us who, though they looked scarcely capable of paying for their next meal, were stripping twenty and even fifty dollar bills off the rolls clutched in their sweaty hands and distributing them like so many handbills.

The game itself was little different from one at home. The Cuban players varied widely in color, from the jet-black third baseman to a shortstop of rice-powder complexion. Their playing was of high order, quite as “fast” as the average teams of our big leagues. Cubans hold several world championships in sports requiring a high degree of skill and swiftness. The umpire in his protective paraphernalia looked quite like his fellows of the North, yet behind his mask he was a rich mahogany brown. His official speech was English, but when a dispute arose he changed quickly to voluble Spanish. The “bucaneros,” as the present-day pirates who had descended upon the Cuban coast were best known locally, won the game on this occasion; but the day before they had not scored a run.

Baseball—commonly pronounced “bahseh-bahl” throughout the island—has won a firm foothold in Cuba. Boys of all colors play it on every vacant lot in Havana; it is the favorite sport of the youthful employees of every sugar estate or tobacco vega of the interior. The sporting page is as fixed a feature of the Havana newspapers as of our own dailies. Nor do the Cuban reporters yield to their fellows of the North in the use of base-ball slang. Most of their expressions are direct translations of our own vocabulary of the diamond; some of them are of local concoction. Those familiar with Spanish can find constant amusement in Havana’s sporting pages. “Fans” quite unfamiliar with the tongue would experience no great difficulty in catching the drift of the Cuban reporter, though it would be Greek to a Spaniard speaking no baseball, as a brief example will demonstrate:

EL HABANA DEJO EN BLANCO

A LOS PIRATAS

José del Carmen Rodríguez realizó varios doubleplays sensacionales

BRILLANTE PITCHING DE TUERO

El catcher rojo, Miguel Angel González, cerró con doble llave la segunda base a los corredores Americanos

Primer Inning

Bucaneros—Bigbee out en fly al center. Terry, rolling al short, out en primera. Carey struck out. No hit, no run.

Habana—Papo out en fly al catcher. Merito muere en rolling al pitcher. Cueto lo imita.

Segundo Inning

Bucaneros—Nickolson, rolling al tercera, es out al pretender robar la segunda. Cutshaw batea de plancha y es safe en primera. Barber out en rolling á la segunda, adelantando Cutshaw. Carlson out en fly al catcher. No hit, no run.

Habana—Juan de Angel Aragón out en linea al center. Hungo se pasea. Calvo hit y Hungo va a segunda. Torres se sacrifica. Acosta, con las bases llenas, es transferido y Hungo anota. González out en foul al pitcher. Un hit, una carrera.

Thus the Havanese “reporter de baseball” rattles on, but his reports are not snatched from the hands of newsboys with quite the same eagerness as in the North. For the Cuban fanático is not particularly interested in the outcome of the game itself. A bet on that would be too slowly decided for his quick southern temperament. He prefers to set a wager on each swing of the pitcher’s arm, and with the last “out” of the ninth inning his interest ceases as abruptly as does the unbroken boiler-factory uproar that rises to the blue tropical heavens from the first to the last swing of the batter’s club.

The visitor whose picture of Havana is still that of the drowsy tropical city of our school-books is due for a shock. He will be most surprised, perhaps, to find the place as swarming with automobiles as an open honey-pot with flies. A local paragrapher asserts that “a Havanese would rather die than walk four blocks.” There are several perfectly good reasons for this preference. The heat of Cuba is far less oppressive than that of our most northern states in mid-summer. Indeed, it is seldom unpleasant; but the slightest physical exertion quickly bathes the body in perspiration, and nowhere is a wilted collar in worse form than in Havana. Moreover, one must be exceedingly nimble-footed to trust to the prehistoric means of transportation. The custom of always riding has left no rights to the pedestrian in the Cuban capital. The chances of being run down are excellent, and the result is apt to be not merely broken ribs, but a bill for damages to the machine. Hence the expression “cojemos un For’” is synonymous with going a journey, however short, anywhere within the city. Your Havanese friend never says, “Let’s stroll around and see Perez,” but always, “Let’s catch a Ford,” and by the time you have succeeded in slamming the door really shut, there you are at Perez’s zaguan.

Fords scurry by thousands through the streets of Havana day and night, ever ready to pick up a passenger or two and set them down again in any part of the business section for a mere twenty-cent piece—a peseta in Cuban parlance. More expensive cars are now and then seen for hire; by dint of sleuth-like observation I did discover one Ford that was confined to the labor of carrying its owner. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule, and the rule is that the instant you catch sight of the familiar plebeian features of a “flivver” you know, even without waiting to see the hospitable “Se Alquila” (“Rents Itself”) on the wind-shield, that you need walk no farther, whatever your sex, complexion, or previous condition of pedestrianism. They are particularly suited to the narrow streets that the Spaniard, in his Arabic avoidance of the sun, bequeathed the Cuban capital. There is many a corner in the business section which larger cars can turn only by backing or by mounting one of the scanty sidewalks. The closed taxi of the North, too, would be as much out of place in Havana as overcoats at a Fourth of July celebration. A few of the horse carriages of olden days still offer their services; but as neither driver, carriage, nor steed seems to have been groomed or fed since the war of independence, even those in no haste are apt to think twice or thrice, and finally put their trust in gasolene. Hence the Ford has taken charge of Havana, like an army of occupation.

Unfortunately, a Ford and a Cuban chauffeur make a bad combination. The native temperament is quick-witted, but it is scantily gifted with patience. In the hands of a seeker after pesetas a “flivver” becomes a prancing, dancing steed, a snorting charger that knows no fear and yields to no rival. Apparently some Cuban Burbank has succeeded in crossing the laggard of our northern highways with the kangaroo. The whisper of your destination in the driver’s ear is followed by a leap that leaves the adjoining façades a mere blur upon the retina. A traffic jam ahead lends the snorting beast wings; it has a playful way of alighting on all fours in the very heart of any turmoil. If a pedestrian or a rival peseta-gatherer is crossing the street twenty feet beyond, your time for the next nineteen feet and eleven inches is a small fraction of a second over nothing. Brake linings seem to acquire a strangle hold from the Cuban climate. If the opening ahead is but the breadth of a hand, the Havana Ford has some secret of making itself still more slender. I have never yet seen one of them climb a palm-tree, but there is no reason to suppose that they would hesitate to undertake that simple feat, if a passenger’s destination were among the fronds.

The newspapers run a daily column for those who have been “Ford-ed” to hospitals or cemeteries. What are a few casualties a day in a city of nearly half a million, with prolific tendencies? There are voluminous traffic and speed rules, but he would be a friendless fellow who could not find a compadre with sufficient political power to “fix it up.” Death corners—billboards or street-hugging house-walls from behind which he may dart without warning—are the joy of the Cuban chauffeur. Courtesy in personal intercourse stands on a high plane in Havana, but automobile politeness has not yet reached the stage of consideration for others. Traffic policemen, soldierly fellows widely varied in complexion, looking like bandsmen in their blue denim uniforms, are efficient, and accustomed to be obeyed; but they cannot be everywhere at once, and the automobile is. They confine their efforts, therefore, to a few seething corners, and humanity trusts to its own lucky star in the no-man’s-lands between.

The private machines alone would give Havana a busy appearance. All day long and far into the night the big central plaza is completely fenced in by splendid cars parked compactly ends to curb. Toward sunset, especially on the days when a military band plays the retreta in the kiosk facing Morro Castle and the harbor entrance, an endless procession of seven-passenger motors files up and down the wide Prado and along the sea-washed Malecón, two, or at most three, haughty beings, not infrequently with kinky hair, lolling in every capacious tonneau. Liveried chauffeurs are the almost universal rule. The caballero who drives his own car would arouse the wonder, possibly the scorn, of his fellow-citizens; once and once only did we see a woman at the wheel. There is good reason for this. The man who would learn to pilot his own machine through the automobile maelstrom of Havana would have little time or energy left for the pursuit of his profession. Moreover, the Latin-American is seldom mechanic-minded. The cheaper grades of cars are not in favor for private use. Wire wheels are almost universal; luxurious fittings are seldom lacking. Even the unexclusive Ford is certain to be decked out in expensive vestiduras,—slip-covers of embossed leather that remind one of a Mexican peon in silver-mounted sombrero.

The cost of a car in Havana is from twenty to thirty per cent. higher than in the States, which supplies virtually all of them. A dollar barely pays for two gallons of gasolene. Licenses are a serious item, particularly to private owners in Havana, for the fee depends on the use to which the car is put. Fords for hire carry a white tag with black figures and pay $12.50 a year. Private cars bear a pink chapa at a cost of $62.50. Tags with blue figures announce the occupant a government official or a physician. Then, every driver must be supplied with a personal license, at a cost of $25. In theory that is all, except a day or two of waiting in line at the municipal license bureau. In practice there are many little political wheels to be oiled if one would see the car free to go its way the same year it is purchased.

Once the visitor has learned to distinguish the tag that announces government ownership, he will be astounded to note its extraordinary prevalence in Havana. Even Washington was never like this. Government property means public ownership indeed in Cuba. If one may believe the newspapers of the Liberal party,—the “outs” under the present administration,—the explanation is simple. “Every government employee,” they shriek, “down to the last post-office clerk who is in personal favor, has his own private car, free of cost; not only that, but he may use it to give his babies an airing, to carry his cook to market, or to take the future novio of his daughter on a joy ride.”

The new-comer’s impressions of Havana will depend largely upon his previous travels. If this is his first contact with the Iberian or the Latin-American civilization, he will find the Cuban capital of great interest. If he is familiar with the cities of old Spain, particularly if he has already seen her farthest-flung descendants, such as Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz, he will probably call Havana “tame.” The most incorrigible traveler will certainly not consider a visit to this most accessible of foreign capitals time wasted. But his chief amusement will be, in all likelihood, that of tracing the curious dovetailing of Spanish and American influences which makes up its present-day aspect.

Both by situation and history the capital of Cuba is a natural place for this intermingling of two essentially different civilizations, but the mixture is more like that of oil and water than of two related elements. The ways of Spain and of America—by which, of course, I mean the United States—are recognizable in every block of Havana, yet there has been but slight blending together, however close the contact. Immigrants from old Spain tramp the streets all day under their strings of garlic, or jingle the cymbals that mean sweetmeats for sale to all Spanish-speaking children. Venders of lottery-tickets sing their numbers in every public gathering-place. On Saturdays a long procession of beggars of both sexes file through the stores and offices demanding almost as a right the cent each which ancient Iberian custom allots them. The places where men gather are wide-open cafés without front walls, rather than the hidden dens of the North. Havana’s cooking, her modes of greeting and parting, her patience with individual nuisance, her very table manners are Spanish. Like all Spanish-America, her sons and daughters are highly proficient in the use of the toothpick; like them they are exceedingly courteous in the forms of social intercourse, irrespective of class. As in Spain, life increases in its intensity with sunset: babies have no fixed hour of retirement; midnight is everywhere the “shank of the evening”; lovers are sternly separated by iron bars, or their soft nothings strictly censored by ever vigilant duennas.

Vendors of lottery tickets in rural Cuba

The winning numbers of the lottery

Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects

Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abaja district. The large building is a tobacco barn, the small ones are residences of the planters

The very Government cannot shake off the habits of its forebears, despite the tutelage of a more practical race. Public office is more apt than not to be considered a legitimate source of personal gain. As in Spain, a general amnesty is ever smiling hopefully at imprisoned malefactors. The Spanish tendency to forgive crime, combined with the interrelationship of miscreants and the powers that be, has not merely abolished, in practice, all capital punishment; it tends to release evil-doers long before they have found time to repent and change their ways. Men who shoot down in cold blood—and this they do even in the heart of Havana—have only to prove that the deed was done “in the heat of the moment” to have their punishment reduced to a mere fraction of that for stealing a mule. The pardoning power is wielded with such Castilian generosity that the genial editor of Havana’s American newspaper wrathfully suggests the “loosing of all our distinguished assassins,” that the enormous cárcel facing the harbor entrance may be replaced by one of the hotels sadly needed to house Havana’s “distinguished visitors.”

Amid all this the island capital is deeply marked, too, with the influence of what Latin-America calls “the Colossus of the North.” One sees it in the strenuous pace of business, in the manners and methods of commerce. The dignified lethargy of Spain has largely given way to the business-first teachings of the Yankee gospel. Billboards are almost as constant eyesores in Havana and her suburbs as in New York; huge electric figures flash the alleged virtues of wares far into the soft summer nights. Blocks of office buildings, modern in every particular, shoulder their way upward into the tropical sky. With few exceptions the sons of proud old Cuban families scorn to dally away their lives, Castilian fashion, on the riches and reputations of their ancestors, but descend into the commercial fray.

One sees the American influence in many amusing little details. The Cuban mail-boxes are exact copies of our own, except that the lettering is Spanish. Postage-stamps may be had in booklet form, which can be said of no other foreign land. Street-car fares are five cents for any distance, with free transfers, rather than varying by zones, as in Europe. Barbers dally over their clients in the private-valet manner of their fellows to the north. Department stores operate as nearly as possible on the American plan, despite the Spanish tendency of their clerks to seek tips. Cuban advertisers struggle to imitate in their newspaper and poster announcements the aggressive, inviting American manner, often with ludicrous results, for they are rarely gifted with what might be called the advertising imagination. In a word, Havana is Spain with a modern American virility, tinged with a generous dash of the tropics.

I have said that the two opposing influences do not mix, and in the main that rule strictly holds. A glance at any detail of the city’s life, her customs, appearance, or point of view, suffices to determine whether it is of Castilian or Yankee origin. But here and there a fusing of the two has produced a quaint mongrel of local color. Havana bakes its bread in the long loaves of Europe, but an American squeamishness has evolved a slender paper bag to cover them. The language of gestures makes a crossing of two figures, a hiss at the conductor, and a nod to right or left, sufficient request for a street-car transfer. The man who occupies the center of a baseball diamond may be called either a pitcher or a lanzador, but the verb that expresses his activity is pitchear. Shoe-shining establishments in the shade of the long, pillared arcades are arranged in Spanish style, yet the methods and the prices of the polishers are American.

Barely had we stepped ashore in Havana when I spied a man in the familiar uniform of the American Army, his upper sleeve decorated with three broad chevrons. I had a hazy notion that our intervention in Cuba had ceased some time before, yet it would have been nothing strange if some of our troops had been left on the island.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” I greeted him. “Do you know this town? How do I get to—”

But he was staring at me with a puzzled air, and before I could finish he had sidestepped and hurried on. I must have been dense that morning, after a night of uproar on the steamer from Key West, for a score of his fellows had passed before I awoke to the fact that they were not American soldiers at all. Cuba has copied nothing more exactly than our army uniform. Cotton khaki survives in place of olive drab, of course, as befits the Cuban climate; frequent washings have turned most of the canvas leggings a creamy white. Otherwise there is little to distinguish the Cuban soldier from our own until he opens his mouth in a spurt of fluent Spanish. He wears the same cow-boy sombrero, with similar hat-cords for each branch of the service. He shoulders the same rifle, carries his cartridges in the old familiar web-belt, wears his revolver on the right, as distinct from the left-handed fashion of all the rest of Latin-America. He salutes, mounts guard, drills, stands at attention precisely in the American manner, for his “I. D. R.” differs from our own only in tongue. The same chevrons indicate non-commissioned rank, though they have not yet disappeared from the left sleeve. His officers are indistinguishable, at any distance, from our own; they are in many cases graduates of West Point. An angle in their shoulder-bars, with the Cuban seal in bronze above them, and the native coat of arms on their caps in place of the spread eagle, are the only differences that a close inspection of lieutenants or captains brings to light. From majors upward, however, the insignia becomes a series of stars, perhaps because the absence of generals in the Cuban Army leaves no other chance for such ostentation.

The question naturally suggests itself, “Why does Cuba need an army?” The native answer is apt to be the Spanish version of “Huh, we’re a free country, aren’t we? Why shouldn’t we have an army, like any other sovereign people? Poor Estrada Palma, our first president, had no army, with the result that the first bunch of hoodlums to start a revolution had him at their mercy.”

These are the two reasons why one sees the streets of Havana, and all Cuba, for that matter, khaki-dotted with soldiers. She has no designs on a trembling world, but an army is to her what long trousers are to a youth of sixteen, proof of his manhood; and she has very real need of one to keep the internal peace within the country, particularly under a Government that was not legally elected and which enjoys little popularity.

There were some fourteen thousand “regulars” in the Cuban Army before the European War, a number that was more than tripled under compulsory service after the island republic joined the Allies. To-day, despite posters idealizing the soldier’s life and assuring all Cubans that it is their duty to enlist, despite a scale of pay equalling our own, their land force numbers barely five thousand. Many of these are veterans of the great European war,—as fought in Pensacola, Florida. Some wear fifteen to eighteen years’ worth of service stripes diagonally across their lower sleeves; a few played their part in the guerilla warfare against the Spaniards before the days of independence, and have many a thrilling anecdote with which to overawe each new group of “rookies.” In short, they have nearly everything in common with our own permanent soldiers—except the color-line. I have yet to see a squad of white, or partly white, American soldiers march away to duty under a jet-black corporal, a sight so commonplace in Havana as not even to attract a passing attention.

Havana has just celebrated her four-hundredth birthday. She confesses herself the oldest city of European origin in the western hemisphere. Her name was familiar to ocean wayfarers before Cortés penetrated to the Vale of Anáhuac, before Pizarro had heard the first rumors of the mysterious land of the Incas. When the Pilgrim Fathers sighted Plymouth Rock, Havana had begun the second century of her existence. In view of all this, and of the harried career she led clear down to days within the memory of men who still consider themselves youthful, she is somewhat disappointing to the mere tourist for her lack of historical relics. This impression, however, gradually wears off. Her background is certainly not to be compared with that of Cuzco or of the City of Mexico, stretching away into the prehistoric days of legend; yet many reminders of the times that are gone peer through the mantle of modernity in which she has wrapped herself. From the age-worn stones of La Fuerza the bustle of the city of to-day seems a fantasy from dreamland. In the underground passages of old Morro, in the musty dungeons of massive Cabaña, the khaki-clad soldiers of Cuba’s new army look as out of place as motor-cars in a Roman arena. The stroller who catches a sudden unexpected glimpse of the cathedral façade is carried back in a twinkling to the days of the Inquisition; Spain herself can show no closer link with the Middle Ages than the venerable stone face of San Francisco de Paula. The ghosts of monks gone to their reward centuries ago hover about the post-office where the modern visitor files his telegram or stamps his picture postals. The British occupied it as a barracks when they captured Havana in the middle of the last century, whereby the ancient monastery was considered desecrated, and has served in turn various government purposes; yet the shades of the past still linger in its flowery patio and flit about the corners of its capacious, leisurely old stairways.

Old Havana may be likened in shape to the head of a bulldog, with the mark of the former city wall, which inclosed it like a muzzle, still visible. The part thus protected in olden days contains most of Havana’s antiquity. Beyond it the streets grow wider, the buildings more modern, as one advances to the newer residential suburbs. Amusing contrasts catch the eye at every turn within the muzzled portion. Calle Obispo, still the principal business street, is a scant eighteen feet wide, inclusive of its two pathetically narrow sidewalks. The Spanish builders did not foresee the day when it would be an impassable river of clamoring automobiles. They would be struck dumb with astonishment to see these strange devil-wagons housed in the tiled passageways behind the massive carved or brass-studded doors of the regal mansions of colonial days, as their fair ladies would be horrified to find the family chapels turned into bath-rooms by desecrating barbarians from the North. Office buildings that seem to have been bodily transported from New York shoulder age-crumbled Spanish churches and convents; crowds as business-bent as those of Wall Street hurry through narrow callejones that seem still to be thinking of Columbus and the buccaneers of the Spanish main. Long rows of massive pillars upholding projecting second stories and half concealing the den-like shops behind them have a picturesque appearance and afford a needed protection from the Cuban sun, but they are little short of a nuisance under modern traffic conditions. Old Colón market is as dark and unsanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day’s purchases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. One may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial Havana never tasted.

The city is as brilliantly lighted as any of our own, by dusky men who come at sunset, laboriously carrying long ladders, from the tops of which they touch off each gas jet as in the days of Tacón. Ferries as modern as those bridging the Hudson ply between the Muelle de Luz and the fortresses and towns across the harbor; but they still have as competitors the heavy old Havana rowboats, equipped, when the sun is high, with awnings at the rear, and manned by oarsmen as stout-armed and weather-tanned as the gondoliers of Venice. Automobiles of the latest model snort in continual procession around the Malecón on Sunday afternoons, yet here and there a quaint old family carriage, with its liveried footmen, jogs along between them. Many a street has changed its name since the days of independence, but still clings to its old Spanish title in popular parlance. A new system of house numbering, too, has been adopted, but this has not superseded the old; it has merely been superimposed upon it, until it is a wise door indeed that knows its own number. To make things worse for the puzzled stranger, the two sides of the street have nothing in common, so that it is nothing unusual to find house No. 7 opposite No. 114.

Havana is most beautiful at night. Its walls are light in color, yellow, orange, pink, pale-blue, and the like prevailing, and the witchery of moonlight, falling upon them, gives many a quaint corner or narrow street of the old city a resemblance to fairyland. But when one hurries back to catch them with a kodak in the morning, it is only to find that the chief charm has fled before the grueling light of day.

The architecture of the city is overwhelmingly Spanish, with only here and there a detail brought from the North. The change from the wooden houses of Key West, with their steep shingled roofs, to the plaster-faced edifices of Havana, covered by the flat azoteas of Arab-Iberian origin often the family sitting-room after sunset, is sharp and decided. Among them the visitor feels himself in a foreign land indeed, whatever suggestions of his own he may find in the life of the city. The tendency for low structures, the prevalence of sumptuous dwellings of a single story, the preference for the ground floor as a place of residence, show at a glance that this is no American city. Yet the single story is almost as lofty as two of our own; the Cuban insists on high ceilings, and the longest rooms of the average residence would be still longer if they were laid on their sides. To our Northern eyes it is a heavy architecture, but it is a natural development in the Cuban climate. Coolness is the first and prime requisite. Massive outer walls, half their surfaces taken up by immense doors and windows, protected by gratings in every manner of artistic scroll, defy the heat of perpetual summer, and at the same time give free play to the all but constant sea breezes. The openness of living which this style of dwelling brings with it would not appeal to the American sense of privacy in family life. Through the iron-barred rejas, flush with the sidewalk, the passer-by may look deep back into the tile-floored parlor, with its forest of chairs, and often into the living-rooms beyond. At midday they look particularly cool and inviting from the sun-drenched street; in the evening the stroller has a sense of sauntering unmolested through the very heart of a hundred family circles.

Old residents tell us that Havana is a far different city from the one from which the Spanish flag was banished twenty years ago. Its best streets, they say, were then mere lanes of mud, or their cobbled pavements so far down beneath the filth of generations that the uncovering of them resembled a mining operation. Along the sea, where a boulevard second only to the peerless Beira Mar of Rio runs to-day, the last century left a stenching city garbage-heap. The broad, laurel-shaded Prado leading from the beautiful central plaza to the headland facing Morro Castle was a labyrinthian cluster of unsavory hovels. All this, if one may be pardoned a suggestion of boasting, was accomplished by the first American governor. But the Cubans themselves have continued the good work. Once cleaned and paved, the streets have remained so. Buildings of which any city might be proud have been erected without foreign assistance. In their sudden spurt of ambition the Cubans have sometimes overreached themselves. A former administration began the erection of a presidential palace destined to rival the best of Europe. About the same time the provincial governor concluded to build himself a simple little marble cabin. Election day came, and the new president, after the spendthrift manner of Latin-American executives, repudiated the undertaking of his predecessor, which lies to-day the abandoned grave of several million pesos. The governor of the province was convinced by irrefutable arguments that this half-finished little cabin was out of proportion to his importance, and yielded it to his political superior. It is nearing completion now, a thing of beauty that should, for a time at least, satisfy the artistic longings even of great Cuba. For it has nothing of the inexpensive Jeffersonian simplicity of our own White House, fit only for such plebeian occupants as our Lincolns and Garfields, but is worthy a Cuban president—during the few months of the year when he is not occupying his suburban or his summer palace.

Havana has grown in breadth as well as character since it became the capital of a free country. While the population of the island has nearly doubled, that of the metropolis has trebled. Víbora, Cerro, and Jesús del Monte have changed from outlying country villages of thatched huts to thriving suburbs; Vedado, the abode of a few scattered farmers when the Treaty of Paris was signed, has become a great residential region where sugar-millionaires and successful politicians vie with one another in the erection of private palaces, not to mention the occasional perpetration of architectural monstrosities. Under the impulse of an ever-increasing and ever-wealthier population, abetted by energetic young Cubans who have copied American real-estate methods, Havana is already leaping like a prairie fire to the crests of new fields, which will soon be wholly embraced in the conflagration of prosperity.

One of the purposes of Cuba’s revolt against Spain was the suppression of the lottery. For years the new republic sternly frowned down any tendency toward a return of this particular form of vice. To this day it is unlawful to bring the tickets of the Spanish lottery into the island. But blood will tell, and the mere winning of political freedom could not cure the Cuban of his love for gambling. Private games of chance increased in number and spread throughout the island. The Government saw itself losing millions of revenue yearly, while enterprising persons enriched themselves; for to all rulers of Iberian ancestry the exploitation of a people’s gambling instinct seems a legitimate source of state income. New palaces and boulevards cost money, independence brings with it unexpected expenditures. By the end of the second intervention the free Cubans were looking with favor upon a system which they had professed to abhor as Spanish subjects. The law of July 7, 1909, decreed a public revenue under the name of “Lotería Nacional,” and to-day the lottery is as firmly established a function of the Government as the postal service.

There are two advantages in a state lottery—to the government. It is not only an unfailing source of revenue; it is a splendid means of rewarding political henchmen. Colectorías, the privilege of dispensing lottery-tickets within a given district, are to the Cuban congressman what postmasterships are to our own. The possession of one is a botella (bottle), Cuban slang for sinecure; the lucky possessor is called a botellero. He in turn distributes his patronage to the lesser fry and becomes a political power within his district. The whole makes a splendidly compact machine that can be turned to any purpose by the chauffeur at the political wheel.

The first and indispensable requisite of a state lottery is that the drawings shall be honest. Your Spanish-minded citizen will no more do without his gambling than he will drink water with his meals; but let him for a moment suspect that “the game is crooked” and he will abandon the purchase of government tickets for some other means of snatching sudden fortune. The drawing of the Cuban lottery is surrounded by every possible check on dishonesty. By no conceivable chance could the inmost circle of the inner lottery councils guess the winning number an instant before it is publicly drawn. But there is another way in which the game is not a “fair shake” to the players, though the simpler type of Cuban does not recognise the unfairness. The average lottery, for instance, offers $420,000 in prizes. The legal price of the tickets is $20, divided into a hundred “pieces” for the convenience of small gamblers, at a peseta each. Thirty thousand tickets are sold, of which 30% of the proceeds, or $180,000, goes to the government or its favorite henchmen. That leaves to begin with only fourteen of his twenty cents that can come back to the player. Then the law allows the vender 5% as his profit, bringing the fractional ticket up to twenty-one cents. If that were all, the players would still have even chances of a reasonable return. But the “pieces” are never sold at that price, despite the law and its threat of dire punishment, printed on the ticket itself. From one end of the island to the other the billeteros demand at least $30 a billete; in other words the public is taxed one half as much as it puts into the lottery itself to support thousands of utterly useless members of society, the ticket-sellers, and instead of getting two-thirds of its money back it has a chance of rewinning less than half the sum hazarded. The most optimistic negro deckhand on a Mississippi steamboat would hardly enter a crap game in which the “bones” were so palpably “loaded.” Yet Cubans of high and low degree, from big merchants to bootblacks, pay their tribute regularly to the Lotería Nacional.

Barely had we arrived in Havana when the rumor reached me that the billeteros could be compelled to sell their tickets at the legal price, if one “had the nerve” to insist. I abhor a financial dispute, but I have as little use for hearsay evidence. I concluded to test the great question personally. Having purchased two “pieces” at the customary price, to forestall any charge of miserliness, I set out to buy one at the lawful rate. A booth on a busy corner of Calle Obispo, a large choice of numbers fluttering from its ticket-racks, seemed the most promising scene for my nefarious project, because a traffic policeman stood close by. I chose a “piece” and, having tucked it away in a pocket, handed the vender a peseta.

“It is thirty cents,” he announced politely, smiling at what he took to be my American innocence.

“Not at all,” I answered, blushing at my own pettiness. “The price is twenty cents; it is printed on the ticket.”

“I sell them only at thirty,” he replied, with a gesture that invited me to return the ticket.

“The legal price is all I pay,” I retorted. “If you don’t like that, call the policeman,” and I strolled slowly on. In an instant both the vender and the officer were hurrying after me. The latter demanded why I had not paid the amount asked.

“The law sets the price at twenty cents,” I explained. “As a guardian of order, you surely do not mean to help this man collect an illegal sum.”

The policeman gave me a look of scorn such as he might have turned upon a millionaire caught stealing chickens, and answered with a sneer:

“He is entitled to one cent profit.”

“But not to ten cents,” I added triumphantly.

The guardian of law and order grunted an unwilling affirmative, casting a pitying glance up and down my person, and turned away with another audible sneer only when I had produced a cent. The vender snatched the coin with an expression of disgust, and retains to this day, I suppose, a much lower opinion of Americans.

This silly ordeal, which I have never since had the courage to repeat, proved the assertion that the Cubans may buy their lottery-tickets at the legal price, but it demonstrated at the same time why few of them do so. Pride is the chief ally of the profiteer. The difference between twenty cents and thirty is not worth a dispute, but the failure of the individual Cuban to insist upon his rights, and of his Government to protect them, constitutes a serious tax upon the nation and enriches many a worthless loafer. With some forty lottery drawings a year, this extra, illegal ten cents a “piece” costs the Cuban people the neat little sum of at least $12,000,000 a year, or four dollars per capita.

The drawings take place every ten days, besides a few loterías extraordinarias, with prizes several times larger, on the principal holidays. They are conducted in the old treasury building down near the end of Calle Obispo. We reached there soon after seven of the morning named on our tickets. A crowd of two hundred or more heavy-mouthed negroes, poorly clad mestizos, and ragged, emaciated old Chinamen for the most part, were huddled together in the shade at the edge of the porch-like room. A policeman—not the one whose scorn I had aroused—beckoned us to step inside and take one of the seats of honor along the wall, not, evidently, because we were Americans, but because our clothing was not patched or our collars missing. At the back a long table stretched the entire length of the room. A dozen solemn officials, resembling a jury or an election board, lolled in their seats behind it, a huge ledger, a sheath of papers, an ink-well and several pens and pencils before each of them. At the edge of the room, just clear of the standing crowd of hopeful riffraff, was a similar table on which another group of solemn-faced men were busily scribbling in as many large blank-books, with the sophisticated air of court or congressional reporters. Between the tables were two globes of open-work brass, one perhaps six feet in diameter, the other several times smaller. The larger was filled with balls the size of marbles, each engraved with a number; the smaller one contained several thousand others, representing varying sums of money.

Almost at the moment we entered a gong sounded. Four muscular negroes rushed forth from behind the scenes and, grasping two handles projecting at the rear, turned the big globe over and over, its myriad of little balls rattling like a stage wind-storm. At the same time an individual of as certain, if less decided, African ancestry, solemnly shuffled the contents of the smaller sphere in the same manner. Then the interrupted drawing began again. Four boys, averaging eight years of age, stood in pairs at either globe. At intervals of about thirty seconds two of them pulled levers that released one marble from each sphere, and which long brass troughs or runways deposited in cut-glass bowls in front of the other two boys. The urchin on the big globe side snatched up his marble, called out a long number—in most cases running into the tens of thousands—and as his voice ceased, his companion opposite announced the amount of the prize. Then the two balls were spitted side by side on a sort of Chinese reckoning-board manipulated by another solemn-faced adult, who now and again corrected a misreading by the boy calling the numbers.

For the hour we remained this monotonous formality went steadily on, as it does every ten days from seven in the morning until nearly noon, ceasing only when all the balls in the smaller sphere have been withdrawn. Each of these represents a prize, but as considerably more than a thousand of them are of one hundred dollars each—or a dollar a “piece”—the almost constant “con cien pesos” of the prize-boy grew wearisome in the extreme. The men at the reporters’ table scribbled every number feverishly with their sputtering steel pens, but the “jury” at the back yielded to the soporific drone of childish voices and dozed half-open-eyed in their chairs—except when one of the major prizes was announced. Then they sat up alertly at attention, and inscribed one after another on their massive ledgers the number on the ball which an official held before each of their noses in turn, while the patch-clad gathering outside the room shifted excitedly on their weary feet and scanned the “pieces” in their sweaty hands with varying expressions of disgust and disappointment. Now and then the boys changed places, but only one of them, of dull-brown complexion and already gifted with the shifty eye of the half-caste, performed his task to the general satisfaction. The others were frequently interrupted by a protest from one of the recorders, whereupon the number that had just been called was emphatically reread by an adult, amid much scratching of pens in the leather-bound ledgers. If the monotony of the scene was wearisome, its solemnity made it correspondingly amusing. An uninformed observer would probably have taken it for at least a presidential election. Rachel asserted that it reminded her of Alice in Wonderland, but as my education was neglected I cannot confirm this impression. What aroused my own wonder was the fact that some two score more-or-less-high officials of a national government should be engaged in so ridiculous a formality, and that a sovereign republic should indulge in the nefarious profession of the bookmaker. But to every people its own customs.

If I had fancied it the fault of my own ear that I had not caught all the numbers, the impression would have been corrected by the afternoon papers. All of them carried a column or more of protest against the “absurd inefficiency” of the boys who had served that morning; most of them made the complaint the chief subject of their editorial pages. The Casa de Beneficencia—an institution corresponding roughly to our orphan asylums—was solemnly warned that it must thereafter furnish more capable inmates to cantar las bolas (“sing the balls”) on pain of losing the privilege entirely. Not only had the “uninstructed urchins” of that morning made mistakes in reading the numbers—a dastardly thing from the Cuban point of view—but had pronounced many of them in so slovenly a manner that “our special reporters were unable to supply our readers with correct information on a subject of prime importance to the entire republic.” Beware that it never happened again! It was easy to picture the poor overworked nuns of the asylum toiling far into the night to impress upon a multi-complexioned group of fatherless gamins the urgent necessity of learning to read figures quickly and accurately, if they ever hoped to become normal, full-grown men and perhaps win the big prize some day themselves.

Winning tickets may be cashed at any official colectoría at any time within a year, but such delays are rare. Barely is the drawing ended when the venders, armed with the billetes of the next sorteo, hurry forth over their accustomed beats to pay the winners and establish a reputation not so much for promptitude as for the ability to offer lucky numbers. The capital prize, $100,000 in most cases, is perhaps won now and then by some favorite of fortune, instead of falling to the Government, collector of all unsold winners, though I have never personally known of such a stroke of luck during all my wanderings in lottery-infested lands. Smaller causes for momentary happiness are more frequent, for with 1741 prizes, divisible into a hundred “pieces” each, it would be strange if a persistent player did not now and then “make a killing.” But even these must be rare in comparison to the optimistic multitude that pursues the goddess Chance, for on the morning following a drawing the streets of Havana are everywhere littered with worthless billetes cast off by wrathy purchasers. Wherefore an incorrigible moralist has deduced a motto that may be worth passing on to future travelers in Cuba:

“Buy a ‘piece’ or two that you may know the sneer of Fortune, but don’t get the habit.”

Three days before the wedding of my sister, mama, she and I went to the house of my future brother-in-law to put Alice’s things in order. The novio was not there. He had discreetly withdrawn to a hotel and only came home now and then for a few moments to give orders to the servants. If he found us there he greeted us in the hall and did not enter the rooms except as we invited him. As there were no women in his family we had to occupy ourselves with all these matters.

“Listen, my daughter,” said mama, one night, after the novio had gone, “when to-morrow you take leave of your fiancé do not pass beyond the line marked on the floor by the light of the hall lamp.” My sister started to protest, “But, mama, what is there wrong in that?” “Nothing, daughter, but it is not proper. Do as I tell you.” Alice, though slightly displeased with the order, always obeyed it thereafter.

These two quotations from one of Cuba’s latest novels give in a nutshell the position of women in Cuba. Like all Latin-American countries, especially of the tropics, it is essentially a man’s country. One of the great surprises of Havana is the scarcity of women on the streets, even at times when they swarm with promenading men. The Cuban believes as firmly as the old Spaniard that the woman’s sphere is strictly behind the grill of the front window, and with few exceptions the women agree with him. The result is that her interest in life beyond her own household is virtually nil. The “Woman Suffrage Party of Cuba” recently issued a pompous manifesto, but it seems to have won about as much support on the island as would a missionary of the prohibition movement. In the words of the militants of the sex in Anglo-Saxon lands, “the Cuban woman has not yet reached emancipation.”

The clerks, even in shops that deal only in female apparel, are almost exclusively male. The offices that employ stenographers or assistants from the ranks of the fair sex are rare, and those usually recruit such help in the United States. Except on gala occasions, it is extremely seldom that a Cuban girl of the better class is seen in public, and even then only in company with a duenna or a male member of her immediate family, and few married women consider it proper to appear unaccompanied by their husbands, despite American example. As another Cuban waiter has put it, “One of our greatest defects is the little or entire lack of genuine respect for women. Though we are outwardly extremely gallant in society and sticklers for the finer points of etiquette and courtesy, we almost always look upon a woman merely as a female and our first thought of at least a young and beautiful woman is to imagine all her hidden perfections. The instant a lady comes within sight of the average Cuban gathering all eyes are fixed upon her with a stare that in Anglo-Saxon countries would be more than impertinent, which pretends to be flattering, but which at bottom is truly insulting.” He does not add that the women rather invite this attention and feel themselves slighted, their attractions unappreciated, if it is not given. Yet of open offenses against her modesty the Cuban lady is freer than on the streets of our own large cities. Even in restaurants and gatherings where those of the land never appear, an American woman is treated, except in the matter of staring, with genuine courtesy by all classes.

The custom of living almost exclusively in the privacy of her own home has given the Cuban woman a tendency to spend the day in disreputable undress. Their hair dishevelled, their forms loosely enveloped in a bata or in a slatternly petticoat and dressing-sack, usually torn and seldom clean, their toes thrust into slippers that slap at every step, they slouch about the house all the endless day. Unless there are guests they never dress for lunch, seldom for dinner, but don instead earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and an astonishing collection of finger rings, powdering their faces rather than washing them. During meals the favorite topics of conversation are food and digestion; if one of them has had any of the numerous minor ailments natural to a life of non-exertion, it is sure to be the subject of a cacophonous discussion that lasts until the appearance of the inevitable toothpicks. Servants, with whom they associate with a familiarity unknown in Northern homes, are numerous, and leave little occupation for the mothers and daughters. The women never read, not even the newspapers, and their minds, poorly trained to begin with in the nun-taught “finishing schools,” go to seed early, so that by late youth or early middle age their faces show the effects of a selfish, idle existence and a life of continual boredom. But lest I be accused of being over-critical, let me quote once more the native writer already introduced:

In one of the interior habitations a piano sounded, beaten by a clumsy hand that repeated the same immature exercise without cessation. There was general discussion in the dining-room at all hours of the day, mingled with the shrieks of a parrot which swung on a perch suspended from the ceiling and the constant disputes of the children, who were snatching playthings from one another, heaping upon each other every class of verbal injury. The mother sewed and the older children tortured the piano during entire hours, or polished their nails with much care, rubbing them with several kinds of powders. When they had finished these occupations they slouched from one end of the house to the other, throwing themselves in turn upon all the divans or into the cushioned rocking-chairs and yawning with ennui. Their skirts fell from their belts, loosened by the languid and lazy gait. The mother did not want the girls to do anything in the house for fear they would spoil their hands and lose their chances of marriage. On the other hand, in the afternoon when the hour of visits drew near the time was always too short to distribute harmoniously the color on their cheeks and lips and to take off the little hair papers with which they artificially formed their waves or curls during the day.

This continual hubbub seems to be customary to every household; all intercourse, be it orders to servants or admonitions to the insufferable children, being carried on by yelling. And there are no worse voices in the world than those of the Cuban women. Whether it is due to the climate or to the custom of reciting in chorus at school, they have a timbre that tortures the ear-drums like the sharpening of a saw, and all day long they exercise them to the full capacity of their lungs. Under no circumstances is one of them given the floor alone, but the slightest morsel of gossip is threshed to bits in a free-for-all whirlwind of incomprehensible shrieking.

On the other hand, the Cuban woman accepts many children willingly, and in accordance with her lights is an excellent wife and mother. Indeed, she is inclined to be over-affectionate, and given to serving her children where they should serve themselves, with a consequent lack of development in their characters. The boys in particular are “spoiled” by being granted every whim. The men are much less often at home than is the case with us, and seldom inclined to exert a masculine influence on their obstreperous sons. The result is a lack of self-control that makes itself felt through all Cuban manhood, a “touchiness,” an inclination to stand on their dignity instead of yielding to the dictates of common sense.

But if she is slouchy in the privacy of her own household, the Cuban woman is quite the opposite in public. The grande toilette is essential for the briefest appearance on the streets. American women assert that there is no definite style in feminine garb in Cuba, and I should not dream of questioning such authority, though to the mere masculine eye they always seem “dressed within an inch of their lives” whenever they emerge into the sunlight. But it does not need even the intuition of the sometimes unfair sex to recognise that a life of physical indolence leaves their figures somewhat dumpy and ungraceful, seldom able to appear to advantage even in the best of gowns. Nor is it hard to detect a sense of discomfort in their unaccustomed full dress, which makes them eager to hurry home again to the negligée of bata and slippers.

If the men monopolize other places of public gathering, the churches at least belong to the women. There are few places of worship in Havana, or in all Cuba, for that matter, that merit a visit for their own sake. Though most of them are overfilled with ambitious attempts at decoration, none of these is very successful. A single painting of worth here and there, an occasional side chapel, one or two carved choir-stalls, are the only real artistic attractions. But several of them are well worth visiting for the side-lights they throw on Cuban customs. As in Spain, every variety of diseased beggar squats in an appealing attitude against the façades of the more fashionable religious edifices during the hours of general concourse. Luxurious automobiles, with negro chauffeurs in dazzling white liveries, sweep up to the foot of the broad stone steps in as continual procession as the narrow streets permit, but the passengers who alight are overwhelmingly of the gown-clad gender. Within, the perfume of the worshipers drowns out the incense. A glance across the sea of kneeling figures discloses astonishingly few bare heads. The Cuban men, of course, are “good Catholics,” too, but they are apt to confine their church attendance to special personal occasions. The church has no such influence in public affairs in Cuba as in many parts of the continent to the southward; so little indeed, that public religious processions are forbidden by law, though sometimes permitted in practice. If the Jesuits are still a power to be reckoned with, so are los masones, and the mere proof of irreligion is no effective bar to governmental or commercial preferment.

[Click anywhere on map for high resolution image.]

WEST INDIES

A deaf person would probably enjoy Havana far more than those of acute hearing. I have often wondered why nature did not provide us with earlids as well as eyelids. A mere oversight, no doubt, that would not have been made had the Cuban capital existed when the first models of the human being were submitted. Havana may not hold the noise championship of the world, but at least little old New York is silent by comparison. Unmuffled automobiles beyond computation, tramcars that seem far more interested in producing clamor than speed, bellowing venders of everything vendible, are but the background of an unbroken uproar that permeates to every nook and cranny of the city. Honest hotel-keepers tell you frankly that they can offer every comfort except quiet. Even in church you hear little but the tumult outside, broken only at rare intervals by the droning voice of the preacher. It is not simply the day-time uproar of business hours; it increases steadily from nightfall until dawn. In olden days the sereno, with his dark lantern, his pike, pistol, bunch of keys, whistle, and rope, wandered through the streets calling out the time and the state of the weather every half-hour. His efforts would be wasted nowadays. The long-seasoned inhabitants seem to have grown callous to the constant turbulence; I have yet to meet a newcomer who confesses to an unbroken hour of sleep. If you move out to one of the pensions of Vedado, the household itself will keep you constantly reminded that you are still in Havana. The Cubans themselves seem to thrive on noise. If they are so unfortunate as to be denied their beloved din, they lose no time in producing another from their own throats. After a week in Havana we took a ferry across the harbor and strolled along the plain behind Cabaña Fortress. For some time we were aware of an indefinable sensation of strangeness amounting almost to discomfort. We had covered a mile or so more before we suddenly discovered that it was due to the unaccustomed silence.

CHAPTER III
CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST

Steamers to Havana land the traveler within a block or two of the central railway station, so that, if the capital has no fascination for him, there lies at hand more than four thousand kilometers of track to put him in touch with almost any point of the island. The most feasible way of visiting the interior of Cuba is by rail, unless one has the time and inclination to do it on foot. Automobiles are all very well in the vicinity of Havana, but the Cuban, like most Latin-Americans, is distinctly not a road builder, and there are long stretches of the island where only the single-footing native horses can unquestionably make their way. There is occasional steamer service along the coasts, and with few exceptions the important towns are on the sea, but even to visit all these is scarcely seeing Cuba.

The railroads are several in number and as well equipped as our second-class lines. One ventures as far west as Guane; there is a rather thorough network in the region nearest the capital; or the traveler may enter his sleeping-car at Havana and, if nothing happens, land at Santiago in the distant “Oriente” some thirty-six hours later. Unfortunately something usually happens. The ferry from Key West brings not only passengers, but whole freight trains, and among the curious sights of Cuba are box-cars from as far off as the State of Washington basking in the tropical sunshine or the shade of royal palms hundreds of miles east of Havana. First-class fares are higher than those of our own land, but some eighty per cent. of the traveling public content themselves with the hard wooden benches of what, in spite of the absence of an intervening second, are quite properly called third-class. Freight rates are said to average five times those in the United States. Women of the better class are almost as rarely seen on the trains as on the streets of Havana, with the result that the few first-class coaches are sometimes exclusively filled with men, and all cars are smoking-cars.

There are sights and incidents of interests even in the more commonplace first-class coaches. In the November season, when the mills of the island begin their grinding, they carry many Americans on their way back to the sugar estates, most of them of the highly skilled labor class in speech and point of view. Now and again a well-dressed native shares his seat with his fighting-cock, dropping about the bird’s feet the sack in which the rules of the company require it to be carried and occasionally giving it a drink at the passengers’ water-tank. At frequent intervals the gamester shrilly challenges the world at large; travelers by Pullman have been known to spend sleepless nights because of a crowing rooster in the next berth. Train-guards in the uniform of American soldiers, an “O. P.” on their collars—this being the abbreviation of the Spanish words for “Public Order”—armed with rifle, revolver, and a long sword with an eagle’s-head hilt in the beak of which is held the retaining strap, strut back and forth through the train, usually in pairs. Most of them are well-behaved youths, though the wide-spread corps on which the government largely depends to overawe its revolutionarily inclined political opponents is not wholly free from rowdies. The trainboy and the brakemen have the same gift of incomprehensible language as our own, and only a difference in uniform serves in most cases to distinguish the name of the next station from that of some native fruit offered for sale. The wares of the Cuban train vender are more varied than in our own circumspect land. Not only can he furnish the bottles that cheer, in any quantity and degree of strength, but also lottery tickets, cooked food, and oranges deftly pared like an apple, in the native fashion. There is probably no fruit on earth which varies so much in its form of consumption in different countries as the orange.

But it is in third-class that one may find a veritable riot of color. Types and complexions of every degree known to the human race crowd the less comfortable coaches. There are leather-faced Spaniards returning for the zafra, fresh, boyish faces of similar origin and destination, Basques in their boinas and corduroy clothes, untamed-looking Haitians sputtering their uncouth tongue, more merry negroes from the British West Indies, Chinamen and half-Chinamen, Cuban countrymen in a combination shirt and blouse called a chamarreta, men carrying roosters under their arms, men with hunting dogs, negro girls in purple and other screaming colors, including furs dyed in tints unknown to the animal world, and a scattering of Oriental and purely Caucasian features from the opposite ends of the earth. Perhaps one third of the throng would come under the classification of “niggers” in our “Jim Crow” States; Southerners would be, and sometimes are, horrified to see the blackest and the whitest race sharing the same seat and even engaged, perhaps, in animated conversation. In a corner sits, more likely than not, an enormous negro woman with a big black cigar protruding from her massive lips at an aggressive angle and a brood of piccaninnies peering out from beneath her voluminous skirts like chicks sheltered from rain by the mother hen. All the gamut of sophistication is there, from the guajiro, or Cuban peasant, of forty who is taking his first train-ride and is waiting in secret terror for the first station, that he may drop off and walk home, to others as blasé as the entirely respectable, cosmopolitan, uninteresting travelers in the chair-car and Pullmans behind.

There are express trains in Cuba, those that make the long journey between the two principal cities sometimes so heavy with their half dozen third, their one or two first-class, their Pullman, baggage, express, and mail-cars, that it is small wonder the single engine can keep abreast of the time-table even when washouts or slippery, grass-brown rails do not add to its troubles. Section-gangs are conspicuous by their scarcity, and those who contract to keep the tracks clear of vegetation by a monthly sprinkling of chemicals do not always accomplish their task. But there is nothing more comfortable than loafing along in the wicker chairs to be found in one uncrowded end of the first-class coach, without extra charge, with the immense car-windows wide open, far enough back to miss the inevitable cinders, through the perpetual, palm-tree-studded summer of the tropics. Even the expresses are, perhaps unintentionally, sight-seeing trains, though they are frequently more or less exasperating to the hurried business man. But, then, one has no right to be a hurried business man in the West Indies.

The slower majority of trains dally at each station, according to its size, just about long enough to “give the town the once over”; or, if it is large enough to be worth a longer visit, one is almost certain to catch the next train if he sets out for the station as soon as it arrives. The scene at a Cuban railway station is always interesting. Except in the largest towns, most of the population comes down to see the train go through, so that the platform is crowded half an hour before it is due, which usually means an hour or two before it actually arrives. The new-comer is apt to conclude that he has little chance of getting a seat, but he soon learns by experience that few of these platform loungers are actual travelers. The average station crowd is distinctly African in complexion, though perhaps a majority show a greater or less percentage of European ancestry. Pompous black dames in gaudy dresses, newly ironed and starched, with big brass earrings and huge combs in their frizzled tresses, their fingers heavy with a dozen cheap rings, stand coyly smoking their long black cigars. A man with his best rooster under one arm and his best girl on the other stalks haughtily to and fro among his rivals and admirers. An excited negro with a gamecock in one hand waves it wildly in the air as he argues, or tucks it under an armpit while he wrestles with his baggage. A colored girl in robin’s-egg blue madly powders her nose in a corner, using a pocket mirror of the size of a cabinet photograph. Guajiros in chamarretas with stiffly starched white bosoms which give them a resemblance to dress shirts that have not been tucked into the trousers, a big knife in a sheath half showing below them, the trousers themselves white, or faintly pink, or cream-colored, even of gay plaids in the more African cases, their heads covered with immense straw hats and their feet with noiseless alpargatas, gaze about them with the wondering air of peasants the world over. Rural guards of the “O. P.” strut hither and yon, making a great show of force both in numbers and weapons. Children of all ages add their falsetto to the constant hubbub of chatter. Here and there a worn-out old Chinaman wanders about offering dulces for sale. A negro crone engaged in that unsavory occupation technically known as “shooting snipes” picks up an abandoned cigar or cigarette butt here and there, lighting it from the remnant of another and dropping that into a pocket. The first-class waiting-room is crowded, but the departure of the train will prove that most of the occupants have come merely to show off their finery or examine that of their neighbors. A white-haired old negro man wheels back and forth in the bit of space left to him a white baby resplendent with pink ribbons. When the train creaks in at last, would-be baggage carriers swarm into the coaches or about departing travelers like aggressive mosquitoes. The racial disorderliness of Latin-Americans, and their abhorrence of carrying their own bags, make this latter nuisance universal throughout the length and breadth of the island. It is of no use for the American traveler to assert his own ability to bear his burdens; no one believes him, and they are sure to be snatched out of his hands by some officious ragamuffin before he can escape from the maelstrom. In some stations a massive, self-assertive negro woman “contracts” to see all hand baggage on or off the trains, keeping all the rabble of ragged men and boys, some of them pure white, in her employ and collecting the gratuities herself in a final promenade through the cars.

Sometimes the train stops for a station meal, the mere buffet service on board being uncertain and insufficient. Then it is every one for himself and hunger catch the hindmost, for one has small chance of attracting the attention of the overworked concessionary if the heaping platters with which the common table is crowded are empty before he can lay hand upon them. Then he must trust to the old Chinamen who patiently stand all day along the edge of the platform, or even well into the night, slinking off into the darkness with their lantern-lighted boxes of sweets and biscuits only when the last train has rumbled away to the east or west.

We were invited to spend a Sunday at a big tobacco finca in the heart of the far-famed Vuelta Abajo district in Cuba’s westernmost province. With the exception of Guanajay the few towns between Havana and Pinar del Rio, capital of the province of the same name, have little importance. The passing impression is of rich red mud, a glaring sunshine, and a wide difference between the rather foppish, over-dressed Havanese and the uncouth countrymen in their bohíos, huts of palm-leaves and thatch which probably still bear a close resemblance to those in which Columbus found the aborigines living. Then there are of course the royal palms, which grow everywhere in Cuba in even greater profusion than in Brazil. The roads are bordered with them, the fields are striped with their silvery white trunks, their majestic fronds give the finishing touch to every landscape.

Pinar del Rio itself has the same baking-hot, glaring, dusty aspect of almost all towns of the interior in the dry season, the same curious contrasts of snorting automobiles and guajiros peddling their milk on horseback, the cans in burlap or leaf-woven saddlebags beneath their crossed or dangling legs. Beyond, the mixto wanders along at a jog trot, now and then stopping for a drink or to urge a belligerent bull off the track. Here a peasant picks his way carefully down the car steps, carrying by a string looped over one calloused finger two lordly peacocks craning their plumed heads from the tight palm-leaf wrappings in which their bodies are concealed; there a family climbs aboard with a black nursegirl of ten, whose saucer eyes as she points and exclaims at what no doubt seems to her the swiftly fleeing landscape show that she has never before been on a train. Tobacco is grown in scattered sections all over Cuba, but it is most at home in the gently rolling heart of this western province. Being Sunday, there was little work going on in the fields, but when we passed this way two days later we found them everywhere being plowed with oxen, birds following close on the heels of the plowmen to pick up the bugs and worms, women and children as well as men transplanting the bed-grown seedlings of the size of radish tops. Time was when the narcotic weed had all this region to itself, but the lordly sugar-cane is steadily encroaching upon it now, daring to grow in the very shadow of the old, brown, leaf-built tobacco barns.

Don Jacinto himself did not meet us at the train, but his giant of a son greeted us with an elaborate Castilian courtesy which seemed curiously out of keeping with his fluent English, interlarded with American college slang. How he managed to cramp himself into the driving seat of the bespattered Ford was as much of a mystery as the apparent ease with which it skimmed along the bottomless Cuban country road or swam the bridgeless river. I noted that it bore no license tag and, perhaps unwisely, expressed my surprise aloud, for Don Jacinto’s son smiled quizzically and for some time made no other answer. Then he explained, “Those of us who are old residents and large property holders in our communities do not bother to take out licenses; besides, they are only five dollars here in the country, so it is hardly worth the trouble.”

Our host, a lordly-mannered old Spaniard who had come to Cuba in his early youth, received us on the broad, breeze-swept veranda of his dwelling. It was a typical Spanish country house of the tropics, low and of a single story, yet capacious, rambling back through a large, wide-open parlor, a dining-room almost as extensive, and a cobbled patio to a smoke-blackened kitchen and the quarters of the dozen black domestics who were tending the pots or responding with alacrity to the slightest hint of a summons from Don Jacinto or his equally imperious son. The living rooms flanked the two larger chambers, and were as tightly closed as the latter were wide open. The guest room opening directly off the parlor contained all the conveniences that American influence has brought to Cuba, without losing a bit of its Castilian architecture. There were of course neither carpets nor rugs in the house, bare wooden floors being not only cooler, but less inviting to the inevitable insects of the tropics. A score of cane rocking-chairs, the same round rattan which formed the rockers curving upward and backward to give the chair its arms, and a bare table, constituted the entire furniture of the parlor. On the unpapered wooden walls hung two framed portraits and a large calendar. Boxes of cigars lay invitingly open in all the three rooms we entered and another decorated the table on the cement-paved veranda.

This last was the principal rendezvous of the household. There a peon dumped a small cartload of mail, made up largely of technical periodicals; there the servants and the overseers came to receive orders. The demeanor of the inferiors before their masters was in perfect keeping with the patriarchal atmosphere of the entire finca. Thus, one easily imagined, plantation owners commanded and servants unquestionably obeyed in the days of slavery. There was a certain comradeship, one might almost say democracy, between the two, or the several, social grades, but it was not one which carried with it the slightest suggestion of familiarity on either side.

Luncheon was a ceremonious affair. Rachel, being the only lady present, was given the head of the table, with Don Jacinto on her right. In theory the ladies of the household were indisposed, but it was probably only the presence of strangers, particularly a male stranger, which kept them from appearing, if only in bata and curlpapers. Below our host and myself, on opposite sides, the company was ranged down the table in careful gradations of social standing, empty chairs separating those who were too widely different in rank to touch elbows. Thus there was a vacant chair between the son of the house and the head overseer and, farther down, two of them separated the company chemist from a sort of field boss. Conversation was similarly graded. The chief overseer did not hesitate to put in a word or even tell an anecdote whenever guests, father or son were not speaking; the chemist now and then ventured a remark of his own, but the field boss ate in utter silence except when some question from the top of the table brought from him a respectful monosyllabic reply. Of the food served on one mammoth platter after another I will say nothing beyond remarking that two thirds of it was meat, all of it well cooked, and the quantity so great that the whole assembled company scarcely made a noticeable impression upon it. Over the table hung an immense cloth fan like the punkahs of India, operated in the same manner by a boy incessantly pulling at a rope over a pulley in the far end of the room. Its purpose, however, was different, as was indicated by its name, espanto-moscas (scare-flies), for Cuba’s unfailing breeze would have sufficed to keep the air cool; but when the wallah suddenly abandoned his task with the appearance of the coffee the flies quickly settled down upon us in a veritable cloud. It may be that the tobacco fields attract them, for they are ordinarily far less troublesome in the West Indies than during our own summers.

A Cuban shoemaker

Cuban soldiers

Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground

The Central Plaza of Cienfuegos

November being merely planting time the finca presented a bare appearance compared with what it would be in March, when the tall tobacco plants wave everywhere in the breeze. Behind the house was a dovecote which suggested some immense New York apartment house, so many were its several-storied compartments. A handful of corn brought a fluttering gray and white cloud which almost obscured the sun. Pigeons and chickens are kept in large numbers in the tobacco fields to follow the plows and eat the insects which would otherwise destroy the seeds and the young plants. The supply barn was the chief center of industry at this season, with its plows and watering-pots marshaled in long rows, its tons of fertilizer in sacks, its cords of baled cheese-cloth, its bags of tobacco seed, so microscopic in size that it takes four hundred thousand of them to weigh an ounce. The seed-beds were at some distance. There the seed is sowed like wheat and the plants grow as compactly as grass on a lawn until they are about twenty days old, when they are transferred to the larger fields and given room to expand almost to man’s height. For acres upon acres the rolling landscape stood forested with poles on which the cheese-cloth would be hung a few weeks later, the vista recalling the hop-fields of Bavaria in the spring-time. The idea of growing “wrapper” tobacco in the shade, in order to keep the leaves silky and of uniform color, is said to have originated in the United States and to have made its way but slowly in Cuba, where planters long considered a maximum of sunshine requisite to the best quality. To-day it is in general vogue throughout the island.

We whiled away the afternoon on the breezy veranda, where the more important employees of the finca and men from the neighboring town came to discuss the crop, to say nothing of helping themselves to the cigars which lay everywhere within easy reach. There was something delightfully Old World about the simplicity of this patriarchal family life, perhaps because it had scarcely a hint of Americanism and its concomitant commercial bustle. Among the visitors was a lottery vender on horseback, who sold Don Jacinto and his son their customary half dozen “strips,” these being sheets of twenty or thirty “pieces” of the same number. The company doctor parted with thirty dollars for a “whole ticket.” Each had his own little scheme for choosing the numbers, one refusing those in which the same figure was repeated, another insisting that the total of the added figures should be divisible by three, some depending on dreams or fantastic combinations of figures they had seen or heard spoken during the day. The workmen on the estate, as on every one in Cuba, were inveterate gamblers. Not only did they buy as many “pieces” each week as they could pay for, but they all “played terminals,” that is, formed pools which were won by the man guessing correctly the last two numbers of the week’s winning ticket.

We visited tobacco estates in other parts of Cuba and saw all the process except the cutting and curing before we left the island. At Zaza del Medio, for instance, whole carloads of small plants are handled during November. They are very hardy, living for three or four days after being pulled up by the roots from the seed-beds. Strewn out on the station platform in little leaf-tied bundles, they were counted bunch by bunch and tossed into plaited straw saddlebags, to be transported by pack-animals to fields sometimes more than a day’s journey distant. Surrounded on all sides by horizonless seas of sugarcane, the Zaza del Medio region is conspicuous twenty miles off by its tobacco color, not of course of the plants, but of the rich brown of plowed fields and the aged thatch-built tobacco barns. We rode that way one day, our horses floundering through mammoth mud-holes, stepping gingerly through masses of thorny aroma, and fording saddle-deep the Zaza River. Here the small planter system, as distinctive from the big administrative estates of Vuelta Abajo, is in vogue. We found lazy oxen swinging along as if in time to a wedding march, dragging behind them crude wooden plows protected by an iron point. A boy followed each of them, dropping a withered small plant at regular intervals, a man, or sometimes a woman, setting them up behind him. Immense barns made of a pole framework covered entirely with brown and shaggy guinea-grass bulked forth against the palm-tree-punctuated horizon. The similarly constructed houses of the planters were minute by comparison. Here, they told us, tobacco grows only waist high, in contrast to the six feet it sometimes attains in Pinar del Rio province. In February or March the plants are cut off at the base and strung on the poles which lie heaped in immense piles, and hung for two months in the airy barns. Then they are wrapped in yagua and carried back to the railroad on pack-animals. Yagua, by the way, which is constantly intruding upon any description of the West Indies, where it is put to a great variety of uses, is the base of the leaf of the royal palm, the lower one of which drops off regularly about once a month. It is pliable and durable as leather, which it resembles in appearance, though it is several times thicker, and a single leaf supplies a strip a yard long and half as wide.

Rivals, especially Jamaica, assert that the famous tobacco vegas of Cuba are worn out and that Cuban tobacco is now living on its reputation. The statement is scarcely borne out by the aroma of the cigars sold by every shop-keeper on the island, though to tell the truth they do not equal the “Habana” as we know it in the North. This is possibly due to the humidity of the climate. The new-comer is surprised to find how cavalierly the Cuban treats his cigars, or tobacos, as he calls them. Even though he squanders dos reales each for them he thrusts a handful loosely into an outside coat pocket, as if they were so many strips of wood. For they are so damp and pliable in the humid Cuban atmosphere that they will endure an astonishing amount of mistreatment without coming to grief. Contrary to the assertions of Dame Rumor, Cubans do not smoke cigarettes only; perhaps the majority, of the countrymen at least, confine themselves to cigars.

There are cigar-makers in every town of Cuba, though Havana almost monopolizes the export trade. How long some of the famous factories have been in existence was suggested to us by a grindstone in the patio of the one opposite the new national palace. There the workmen come to whet their knives each morning, and they had worn their way completely through the enormous grindstone in several places around the edge. The methods in Havana cigar factories are of course similar to those of Cayo Hueso, as Cuba calls our southernmost city. In one of them we were shown cigars which “wholesale” at fifteen hundred dollars a thousand, though I got no opportunity of judging whether or not they were worth it, either in tobacco or ostentation. The stems of the tobacco leaves are shipped to New York and made into snuff. An average wage for the cigar makers was said to be five dollars a day. They each paid that many cents a week to the factory reader, who entertains the male workmen with the daily newspapers, and the women, by their own choice of course, with the most sentimental of novels. Girls will be girls the world over.

The dreadful habit of using tobacco has progressed since the day when Columbus discovered the aborigines of the great island of Cubanacan smoking, not Habana cigars, but by using a forked reed two ends of which they put in their nostrils and the other in a heap of burning tobacco leaves.

Neither space nor the reader’s patience would hold out if I attempted to do more than “hit the high spots” of our two months of journeying to and fro in Cuba. There is room for a year of constant sight-seeing and material for a fat volume in the largest of the West Indies, though to tell the truth there is a certain sameness of climate, landscape, town, and character which might make that long a stay monotonous despite the glories of at least the first two of these. While he lacks something of that open frankness of intercourse which we are wont to think reaches its height in our own free and easy land, and the exclusiveness of his family life puts him at a disadvantage as an entertainer of guests, the Cuban himself, particularly outside the larger cities, is not inhospitable. But his welcome of visitors from the North is overshadowed by the unbounded hospitality of the American residents of Cuba, whether on the great sugar estates, the fruit farms, in the scattered enterprises of varied nature in all corners of the island, or in the many cities that have become their homes. Merely to enumerate the unexpected welcomes we met with from our own people in all parts of the island would be to fill many pages.

The cities, on the whole, are the least pleasant of Cuba’s attractions. Their hotels, and those places with which the traveler is most likely to come in contact, are largely given over to the insular sport of tourist-baiting even before mid-winter brings its plethora of cold-fleeing, race-track-following, or prohibition-abhorring visitors from the North. Havana, I take it, would be the last place in the world for the lover of the simplicities of life, as for the man of modest income, in those winter months when its hotels turn away whole droves of would-be guests and its already exorbitant prices climb far out of sight from the topmost rung of the ladder of reason. Incidentally Cuba is in the throes of what might be called a “sugar vs. tourists” controversy. Its merchants would like to draw as many visitors as possible, but even its tourist bureau sees itself obliged to “soft pedal” its appeals. If still more visitors come, where is the island to house them? Time was when her more expensive hotels, especially of Havana, stood well nigh empty through the summer and welcomed the first refugees from Jack Frost with open arms, or at least doors. It is not so to-day. Sugar planters from the interior, who would once have grumbled at paying a dollar for a night’s lodging in a back street fonda, now demand the most luxurious suites facing the plaza and the Prado, nay, even house their families in them for months at a time, to the dismay of foreign visitors. Stevedores who were once overjoyed to earn two dollars a day sneer at the fabulous wages offered them now, knowing that a bit of speculation in sugar stocks will bring them many times the amount to be had by physical exertion. The advice most apropos to the modern visitor to Cuba whose tastes are simple and whose fortune is limited would be, perhaps, to come early and avoid the cities.

We found Pinar del Rio town, for instance, far less beguiling than a journey we made from it over the mountain to the Matahambre mines. A peon met us with native horses where the hired Ford confessed its inability to advance farther. Along the narrow trail the vegetation was dense and tropical. Royal palms waved high along the borders of the small streams; red-trunked macicos, yagrumas with their curious upturned leaves showing their white backs, broke the almost monotony of the greenery. Here and there we passed a brown grass hut which seemed to have grown up of itself, a little patch of malanga, boniato, or yuca, the chief native tubers, about it, a dark woman paddling her wash against the trunk of a palm-tree on the edge of a water-hole, several babies in single white garments or their own little black skins scurrying away into the underbrush as we rode down upon them. A few horsemen passed us, and a pack-train or two; but only one woman among the score or more we met was mounted. She was a jet-black lady in a bedraggled skirt and a man’s straw hat, who teetered perilously on her uncomfortable side-saddle, yet who gazed scornfully down her shaded nose at Rachel, riding far more easily astride. Finally, when the sun was high and the vegetation scrubby and shadeless, and we had climbed laboriously up several steep, bare hillsides only to slide down again into another hollow, a cleft in the hills gave us a sudden panorama of the sea, and almost sheer below us lay spread out the mining town. The setting was barren, as is that of most mines, though five years before it had been covered with a pine forest, until a cyclone came to sweep it wholly away and leave only here and there a dead, branchless trunk in a reddish soil that gave every outer indication of being sterile. A network of red trails linked together the offices, the shafts and the reduction plant, the red-roofed houses of the American employees, and the thatched huts of the mine workers.

Mining is not one of Cuba’s chief assets, but this particular spot is producing a high-grade copper. Ore was discovered here by a deer hunter wandering through the forest of pines, but before he could make use of his knowledge the region was “denounced” by another Cuban and still belongs to his family, though there is some bitter-worded doubt as to which branch of it. It goes without saying that the manager is an energetic young American. The laborers are chiefly Spaniards, for the Cubans are too superstitious to long endure working underground. The company builds its own roads, and has installed a telegraph and post-office without government aid, yet it pays full rates on its telegrams or letters. We went far down the shaft into the damp blackness of the eighth and tenth levels, hundreds of feet below the surface, following the galleries and “stopes” to where the workmen were piling the bluish rock into the little iron hand-cars, the dull echoing thud of the dynamiting on some other level sending a shudder through the mountain. All night long the mine worked tirelessly on, the suspended ore-cars swinging down their six-mile cables across the gorge to the loading bins on the edge of the sea.

We followed them in a Ford next morning, from the treeless uplands down through an oak-grown strip where half-wild hogs fatten themselves, unwisely, for the plumper of them are sure to grace native boards during the fiesta of Noche Buena, then along a strip of palms to the Atlantic. A launch scudded down the coast with us to Esperanza, a long range of mountains, rounded in form, gashed with red wounds here and there, looking lofty only because they were so near at hand, seeming to keep pace with us as if bent on shutting us out of the level country behind them. After luncheon in the “best hotel,” with a hen under my chair and a pig under Rachel’s, we Forded to Viñales, the road running for miles under the very lee of a sheer mountain wall, trees, especially of the palm variety, rising everywhere out of the crevices of the soft white rock and seeming to keep their foothold by clutching the wall above with their upper branches. Caves with elaborate stalactite and stalagmite formations gaped beneath them, until we rounded the spur and passed through a sort of mountain portal into the familiar, rolling, dense-grown interior again.

We returned to Pinar del Rio by guagua, a four-seated mail and passenger auto bus such as ply in many sections of rural Cuba. Its driver was as wild as his brethren of Havana, and the contrivance leaped along over the bad roads like a frolicsome goat. Fortunately the usual crowd had missed their ride that morning and we could stretch our legs at ease. Only a leathery old lady who dickered for a reduction in fare, two or three guajiros in their best starched chamarretas, a villager’s shoes which were to be resoled, and two turkeys in palm-leaf cornucopias made up the passenger list. The shrill whistle in place of a horn warned dawdling countrymen to beware, for our chauffeur had scant respect for his fellow-mortals.

Of the several towns which the traveler in Cuba is more or less sure to visit the first is usually Matanzas, both because it is the first place of any importance on the way eastward and because it boasts two natural phenomena that have been widely reported. The town itself, wrapped around the head of a deeply indented bay, has nothing that may not be found in a dozen other provincial towns,—unpaved streets reeking with mud or dust, according to the weather, a cement-floored central plaza gay with tropical vegetation and flanked by portales, or massive arcades, and constant vistas of the more formal hours of family life through the street-toeing window grilles. The pursuit of tourists is among its favorite sports, and not only are the prices and accommodations of hotels infinitely more attractive in the mouths of their runners at the station than at their desks, but the entire town seems to be banded together in a conspiracy to force foreign visitors to hire automobiles. At least we were forced to learn by experience rather than by inquiry that the street-cars carry one two thirds of the way to either of the “sights” for which the place is noted, or that one can stroll the entire distance from the central plaza in half an hour.

The Yumurí valley is, to be sure, well worth seeing. From the hermitage of Montserrat, erected by the Catalans of the island on a slope above the town, the basin-shaped vale has a serene beauty, particularly at sunrise or toward sunset, which draws at least a murmur of pleasure from the beholder. Royal palms, singly and in clumps, dot the whole expanse of plain with their green plumes and silvery trunks and climb the slopes of the encircling hills, which lie like careless grass-grown heaps of cracked stone along the horizon. Even by day the silence is broken only by the distant shouts of a peasant or two struggling with their oxen and plows; the occasional lowing of cattle floats past on the stronger breeze of evening. The Cubans rank this as their most entrancing landscape, but I have seen as pretty views from the abandoned farms of Connecticut. For one thing the colors are not variegated enough in this seasonless land to give such scenes the beauty lent by changing leaves, though much else is made up for by the majesty of the royal palms.

A gentler climb at the other end of town, between broad fields of rope-producing cactus, brings one to a cheap wooden house which might pass unnoticed but for the incongruous rumble of an electric dynamo within it. In sight of the commonplace landscape it is easy to believe the story that the caves of Bellamar remained for centuries unknown until a Chinese coolie extracting limestone for a near-by kiln discovered them by losing his crowbar through a hole he had poked in the earth. To-day they are exploited by the rope-making company which owns the surrounding fields. The main portion of the huge limestone cavern has been fitted with electric lights, which of themselves destroy half the romance of the subterranean chambers; the temperature is that of a Turkish bath, and the stereotyped chatter of the guide grows worse than tiresome. But it would be a pity to let these minor drawbacks repel the traveler from visiting Cuba’s weirdest scene. The cave contains more than thirty chambers or halls, the chief of which is the “Gothic Temple,” two hundred and fifty by eighty feet in extent, its lofty roof upheld by massive white columns. There are immense natural bath-tubs, forming waterfalls, fantastic grottoes and nature-sculptured figures of all shapes and sizes along the undulating central passageway that stretches far away into the unlighted earth. Mounds that look like snow-banks, towering walls that seem shimmering curtains, white glistening slopes down which one might easily fancy oneself tobogganing, so closely do they resemble our Northern hillsides in mid-winter, resound with the cackling voice of the irrepressible guide. Of stalagmites and stalactites of every possible size there is no end, some of them slowly joining together to form others of those mighty columns which seem to bear aloft the outer earth. The caves are admirably fitted, except in temperature, to serve as setting for the more fantastic of Wagner operas.

If the train is not yet due, it is worth while to visit the rope factory near the station. As they reach full size the lower leaves of the henequen plants are cut off one by one and carried to the crushing-house on a knoll behind the main establishment. Here they are passed between grooved rollers, the green sap and pulp falling away and leaving bunches of greenish fibers like coarser corn-silk, which shoot down across a little valley on cables to the drying-field. Looped over long rows of poles, they remain here for several days, until the sun has dried and bleached them to the color of new rope. Massive machines tended by women and men weave the fibers together in cords of hundreds of yards long and of the diameter of binding-twine; similar machines twist three of these into the resemblance of clothes-lines, which in their turn are woven together three by three, the process being repeated until great coils of ship’s hawsers far larger than the hand can encircle emerge at the far end of the room ready for shipment.

A principal street of Santa Clara

The Central Plaza of Santa Clara

A dairyman, Santa Clara district

Cuban town scenery

From Matanzas eastward fruit and garden plots, and the more intensive forms of cultivation, die out and the landscape becomes almost unbroken expanses of sugar-cane. The soil is more apt than not to be reddish. Automobiles disappear; in their place are many men on horseback and massive high-wheeled carts drawn by oxen. On the whole the country is flat, uninteresting, with endless stretches of canefields, palm-trees, and nothing else. A branch line will carry one to Cárdenas, but it is hot, dusty, and dry, as parched as the Carolinas in early autumn, scarcely worth visiting unless one takes time to push on to its far-famed beach long miles away. Far-famed, that is, in Cuba, where beaches are rare and water sports much less popular than might be expected in a land where the sea is always close at hand and summer reigns the entire twelve-month. Now and again some unheralded scene breaks the cane-green monotony. There is the little town of Colón, for example, intersected by the railroad, which passes along the very edge of its central plaza, decorated with a bronze statue of Columbus discovering his first land—and holding in his left hand a two-ton anchor which he seems on the point of tossing ashore.

The older railroad line ends at Santa Clara, one of the few important towns of Cuba which do not face the sea. But the two daily expresses merely change engines and continue, in due season, to the eastward. An energetic Anglo-Saxon pushed a line through the remaining two thirds of the island within four years after American intervention, without government assistance, without even the privilege of exercising the right of eminent domain, though the Spaniards had been “studying the project” for a half century. There are no osteopaths in Santa Clara. They are not needed; a ride through its incredibly rough and tumble streets serves the same purpose. In Havana it is often impracticable for two persons to pass on the same sidewalk; in many of these provincial towns it is impossible. The people of Santa Clara seem content to make their way through town like mountain goats, leaping from one lofty block of cement to mud-reeking roadway, clambering to another waist-high sidewalk beyond, mounting now and then to the crest of precipices so narrow and precarious that the dizzy stranger feels impelled to clutch the flanking house-wall, only to descend again swiftly to the street level, climbing over on the way perhaps a family or two “taking the air” and greeting them with an inexplicably courteous “Muy buenas noches.” The citizens grumble of course at the condition of their streets and make periodical demands upon the federal government to pave them, as in all Latin America. The question often suggests itself, why the dev—, I don’t mean to be profane, whatever the provocation,—but why in—er—the world don’t you get together and pave them yourselves? But of course any newsboy could give a score of reasons why all such matters as that are exclusive affairs of “the government,” and he would pronounce the word as if it were some supernatural power wholly independent of mere human assistance.

In contrast, the central plaza of course is perfectly kept and, though empty by day, is more or less crowded in the evening, particularly when the band plays. Seeing only the crowd which parades under the royal palms in the moonlight, the visitor might come to the false conclusion that the majority of the population is white, and he would make a similar error in the opposite direction if he saw the town only by day. At the evening promenade there is a great feminine display of furs, though it is about cold enough for a silk bathing-suit; the club members have a pleasant custom of gathering in rocking-chairs on the sidewalks before their social meeting-places facing the square. Club life in Cuba follows the lead of family life in the wide-openness of its more public functions, though of course there is more intimate club and family activity far to the rear of the open parlors.

If one is in a lazy mood one rather enjoys Santa Clara, though a hurried mortal would probably curse its leisurely ways, its languid style of shopping, for instance, with chairs for customers, and the invariably male clerks thinking nothing of pausing in the midst of a purchase to discuss the latest cock-fight with a friendly lounger. We voted the place picturesque, yet when we took to wondering what made it so we could specify little more than the crowds of guajiros astride their horses, their produce in saddle-sacks beneath their elevated legs, who jogged silently through the muddy streets. Some of these were so superstitious in the matter of photography that they could only be caught by trickery. In the evening hours almost every block resounded with the efforts of amateur pianists. The Cubans are always beating pianos, but they are strangely unmusical. I have been told that a famous Cuban pianist won unstinted applause in New York, but of the hundreds we heard on the island each and all would almost infallibly have won something far less pleasing.

Musically the Cuban is best at the native danzón, a refinement of the savage African rumba. But every town large or small has its weekly concerts. Perhaps the most amusing one we attended was at the sugar-mill village of Jatibonico. The players were simple youths of the town, as varied in complexion and garb as the invariably tar-brushed promenaders who filed round and round the grass-grown plaza. The instruments were so unorthodox that we paused to make an inventory of them. Besides a cornet played by an energetic youth who now and then made it heard far beyond the reach of the rest of the uproar, there was a trombone and two of what seemed to be half-breeds among horns, the manipulators of which varied the effect by now and then holding their hats over the sound exit. Then there was a cow-horn-shaped gourd which was scraped with a stick, a block of ebony that was periodically pounded by the same man who tortured the bass viol, two kettle-drums which would not be silenced on any pretext, a large metal bowl shaped like a water-jar, that had originally come from Spain filled with butter, in the single opening of which the player alternately blew and sucked, giving a weird, echo-like sound, and, to fill in any possible interstices of sound left, two heathenish rattles. The band had no leader; each played or paused to smoke a cigarette as the spirit moved him, and all played by ear. The unexpected sight of white people among the promenaders caused the entire band to begin a series of monkey-like antics in an endeavor to outdo one another in showing off, until the tomtom effect of the entertainment took on a still more African pandemonium. To this was added the rumble of frequent trains along the near-by track and the vocal uproar of the promenaders, striving to imitate in garb and manner the retreta audiences of the larger cities. Long after we had retired a bugle-burst from the enthusiastic cornet-player now and then floated to our ears through the tropical night, for the amateurs had none of the weariness of professional musicians. When the plaza audience deserted them toward midnight, they set out on a serenading party to the by no means most respectable houses. Some of them sang as well as played, in that horrible harmony of Cuba’s rural falsetto tenors, only one of whom we ever heard without an all but overwhelming desire to fling the heaviest object within reach.

Cienfuegos, on the seacoast south of Santa Clara, is said to derive its name from the exclamation of a sailor who beheld a hundred Indian fires along the beach. It might easily have won a similar designation from some wrathful description of its climate. The town was laid out a mere century ago by a Frenchman named Déclouet, and many of its streets still have French names. It is reputed to be the richest town per capita on earth, though the uninformed stranger might not suspect that from its appearance. It gives somewhat more attention to pavements than some of its neighbors, to be sure, and has electric street-cars. But ostentation of its wealth is not among the faults of Cienfuegos, perhaps because it takes its cue from its wealthiest citizen, who is said to lead by more than a neck all the millionaires of Cuba. Like Mihanovisch in the Argentine, or the first Astor and Vanderbilt in our own land, this financial nabob of Cuba began at the bottommost rung of the ladder, having arrived from Spain in alpargatas and taken to carrying bags of cement on the docks. To-day he is past eighty-five and owns most of the property in Cienfuegos and its vicinity, yet, as one of his fellow-townsmen put it, “if you meet him on the street you want to give him an old suit of clothes.” During the war he was placed on the British black-list, and was forced to come often to a certain consulate in an effort to clear himself, yet he invariably came on foot even though Cienfuegos lay prostrate under its skin-scorching summer noonday. He lived across the bay, and while there were millions involved in the business on hand at the consulate, he invariably persisted in leaving in time to catch the twenty-cent public boat, lest he be forced to pay a dollar and a half for a special launch. He abhors modern ways and in particular the automobile, and refuses to do business with any one who arrives at his office in one. The story goes that for a long time after the rest of the island had adopted them Cienfuegos did not dare to import a single automobile for fear of the wrath of its financial czar.

But if the miser of Cienfuegos holds the palm for wealth, one of his near rivals in that regard outdoes him in political power. He, too, is a Spaniard, or, more exactly, a Canary Islander, like many of the wealthiest men of Cuba. To be born in the Canary Islands and to come to Cuba without a peseta or even the rudiments of education seems to be the surest road to riches. I could not risk setting down without definite proof to protect me the perfectly well-known stories of how “Pote” got his start in life. Though he owns immense sugar estates and countless other properties of all kind throughout the island, he is rarely to be distinguished from any unshaven peon, and even when a new turn of the political wheel brings him racing to Havana in a powerful automobile he still looks like some third-class Spanish grocer. Not until long years after the island became independent did the government become powerful enough to force “Pote” to remove the Spanish flag from his buildings and locomotives, and the “J. R. L.” on the latter still give them the right of way over many a rival cane-grower; for “Pote,” whisper the managers of corporation sugar-mills, has ways of getting his product to the market which those who must explain to auditors and directors higher up cannot imitate.

It is not without significance for the future of Cuba that men of this type, uneducated, unscrupulous, utterly without any ideal than the amassing of millions, wholly without vision, have the chief power in its affairs. Politically the island has been freed from Spanish rule, economically it is still paying tribute not merely in material things, but in spiritual, to the most sordid-minded of the grasping peninsulares.

One other town and I am done with them, for though Sagua la Grande and Caibarien, Ciego de Avila and picturesque Trinidad, at least, are worthy a passing notice, there is something distinctive about Camagüey, though the difference is after all elusive and baffling. For one thing it is more than four hundred years old; for another it is the largest town in the interior of Cuba. Even it, however, did not shun the coast by choice, but ran away from the northern shore in its early youth to escape the pirates, and, to make doubly sure of concealment, changed its name from Puerto Principe to that of the Indian village in which it resettled. Its antiquity is apparent, appalling, in fact. Projecting wooden window grilles, heavy cornices, aged balconies, also of wood, and tiled roofs hanging well over the street, crumbling masonry, all help to prove the city a genuine antique. Few of its streets are straight, few parallel, few meet at right angles, the result being to give the visitor a curiously shut-in feeling. It is said that this civic helter-skelter is due to the fact that the refugees from the harassed coast staked their claims and built their houses at random in their haste to get under cover, though there is a bon mot to the effect that the streets were purposely made crooked to fool the pirates. The town is noted for its tinajónes, in the legitimate sense, that is, for in Spanish the word means not only an immense earthenware jar, but a person with a large capacity for liquid refreshment. Some of these jars would easily contain the largest human tinajón; the majority of them are more than a hundred years old; there are said to be none younger than sixty. They serve the same purpose as our cisterns. Several ancient churches lift their weather-dulled gray walls and towers above the mass of old houses. The majority of these are down at heel, their façades battered and cracked, though the patios or small gardens in their rear are gay with flowers and shrubbery. Most of its streets were once paved, but that, too, was long ago, and during the frequent rainy days one must pick one’s way across them by the scattered cobbles embedded in mud as over a stream on stepping-stones. The railroad once offered to pave at its own expense the slough bordering the station, but the local politicians would not permit it, for the same reason that Tammany prefers to let its own contracts. Even the social customs of Camagüey are ancient. If “any one who is any one” dies, for instance, as they do not infrequently, “everything” closes and all social functions are abandoned, often to the dismay of hostesses. The town is said to be famed for its beautiful women and its skilled horsemen; its color-line is reputed more strict and its negro population less numerous than in the rest of Cuba, at least three of these things being credited to the fact that the region was long given over to cattle rather than sugar-cane, requiring fewer slaves. The casual visitor, however, sees little to confirm these statements.

To-day even Camagüey province has succumbed to the cane invasion, like all Cuba, and the raising of cattle has become a secondary industry. Droves of the hardy, long-horned, brown breed may still be grazing the savanna lands, searching the valleys for tasty guinea-grass, standing knee-deep in the little rivers, but Cuba now imports meat, in contrast to the days when the exporting of cattle was one of her chief sources of revenue. The climate has had its share in bringing this change. Not only does it cause the milk to deteriorate in quantity and quality within a very few years, but the animals decrease steadily in size from generation to generation. Butter, unless of the imported variety, is as rare in Cuba as in all tropical America, and the invariable custom of boiling milk before using makes it by no means a favorite beverage. Besides, the constant drought in the United States does not extend to Cuba. But all these causes are but slight compared with the skyrocketing price of sugar, which is swamping all other industries in the island, nay, even its scenery, beneath endless seas of cane.

Our good hosts of Tuinucú varied their hospitality by bearing us off on a two-days’ horseback journey into the neighboring mountains. A hand-operated ferry and a road that was little more than a trail, except in width, brought us to the Old World town of Sancti Spiritus, founded in 1514 and rivaling in medieval architecture and atmosphere almost anything Spain has to offer. Here a práctico, which corresponds to, but is apt to mean much less than a guide, took the party in charge and trotted away toward the foothills. A group of priests in their somber, flowing gowns and shovel hats grinned offensively at the unwonted sight of ladies riding man-fashion, and the townsmen stared with the customary Latin-American impudence, but the countrymen greeted us with the dignified courtesy of old Castilian grandees. Pack-trains shuffled past in the deep dust now and then, the dozen or more undersized horses tied together from tails to halters. The fact that this left the animals no protection from the vicious flies meant no more to the compassionless guajiros than did the raw backs under the heavy, chafing packs. Cuba, like all Latin America, is a bad country in which to be a horse, or any other dumb animal for that matter. Much of the country was uncultivated, though royal palms and guinea-grass testified to its fertility. Big dark-red oxen or bulls were here and there plowing the gentler hillsides, more of them stood or lay at ease under the spreading ceiba trees. The region was once famed for its coffee, but even the few bushes that are left get no care nowadays and the time is already at hand when they are to give way before the militant sugarcane.

We turned into an old estate where a hundred slaves had once toiled. All but a corner of it was overgrown with bush; the massive old plantation house had lost all its former grandeur except the magnificent views from its verandas. A disheveled family of guajiros inhabited it now, its cobbled courtyard seldom resounded to the hoofs of horses bringing guests to its very parlor door, the broad, brick-paved coffee-floor was grass-grown between its joints, the old slave inclosure had been turned over to the pigs, feeding on palmiche, the berries of the royal palm. The slattern who thrust her head out of the ruined kitchen building had little claim to propriety of appearance, though she answered a joking question as to whether she, too, would ride astride with a fervent, “Not I, God protect me!”

Reminiscences of slave days brought forth the story of “Old Concha” as we rode onward. She had been a slave on Tuinucú estate as far back as any one could remember, still is, in fact, in her own estimation. No one knows how old she is, except that she was married and had several children when the mother of her present mistress was a child. Her own answer to the question is invariably “thirteen.” All day long she potters about the kitchen, though great effort has been made to get her to rest from her labors. She refuses to accept wages, only now and then “borrowing” a peseta, the total averaging perhaps five dollars a year, and being mainly spent for tobacco. Whenever any of the modern servants are remiss in their duties or show a suggestion of impudence she warns them that the “master’s” whip will soon be tingling their legs, then, recalling herself, sighs for the “good old days” that are gone. She is the chief authority on forgotten family affairs, though incapable of keeping the “in-laws” straight. In her early days Concha accompanied her mistress to the United States. Arrived at the dock in New York, she submitted to her first hat, on the warning that she would be conspicuous without it—and raised it to all white people with whom she spoke. A custom officer questioned her right to bring in the fifty large black cigars which she had first attempted to conceal about her person, doubting that they were for her own use. Concha lighted one forthwith and quickly convinced the skeptic of her ability to consume them. It is useless to try to throw anything away at Tuinucú; Concha is certain to retrieve it and stow it away in her little room, with her “freedom paper” and her souvenir hat.

By sunset we were surrounded by mountains, though perhaps those of central Cuba should rather be called ranges of high hills. The little village of Banao was thrown into a furor of excitement by the arrival of “caballeros,” and particularly by the announcement that we planned to camp out on the mountainside. Picnics are as unknown to the Cuban as to the rest of Latin America. Boys swarmed around us and scampered ahead in the swiftly falling darkness to show us a spot well up the slope where water and a bit of open ground were to be found. They told us many lugubrious tales of the dangers of sleeping in the open air and implored us to return instead to the hovels they shared with their pigs and chickens. When it became evident that we were not to be turned from our reasonless and perilous undertaking, they took to warning us at every step against the guao, quite fittingly pronounced “wow!” This is a species of glorified poison ivy, equally well named pica-pica. Drawbacks of this kind are rare in Cuba, however, where there are few poisonous plants, no venomous snakes, not even potato-bugs! The boys remained with us gladly until the last scraps of the camp-fire meal had disappeared, but fled with gasps of dismay at the suggestion that they spend the night there.

The traveler in the West Indies must learn to rise early if he is to catch the best nature has to offer. Noonday, even when less oppressively hot than our own midsummers, thanks to the unfailing trade-wind, is glaring in its flood of colors, insistent, without subtleties. But dawn and sunrise have a grandeur and at the same time a delicacy, as if the light were filtered through gauze upon the green-bespangled earth, which even the gorgeous sunsets and the evanescent twilight cannot equal. As we watched the new day steal in upon us through the dense foliage, it would have been easy to fancy that we had been transported to some fantastic fairyland in which the very birds were bent on adding to the subtle intoxication of the visitor’s senses.

We beat the sun to the grotto of cold, transparent water and by the time it began to express itself in terms of heat were scrambling through the jungle to the nearest summit. Fresh coffee was to be had on many a bush for the picking; and inviting the red berries looked, too, until a taste of them had destroyed the illusion. He who fancies Cuban mountains are not high is due to revise his notions by the time he has dragged himself up the face of one of them through jagged rocks half concealed beneath the matted brush, over veritable hedges of needle-pointed cactus, now and again clutching as the only escape from toppling over backward a treacherous handful of “wow.” Our garments were torn, our hands cut and stinging with pica-pica, our guide had degenerated from the fearless fellow of the night before to an abject creature who asked nothing better than to be left to die in peace by the time we reached the summit; and even then it was no real summit at all, but only the first of half a dozen knobs which formed a species of giant stairway to some unknown region lost in the clouds. In the light of the struggle it had cost us to cover this infinitesimal portion of the scene before us we seemed mere helpless atoms lost in the midst of a ferocious nature which clothed the pitched and tumbled world far beyond where the eye could see in any direction; or, to put it more succinctly in the words of our host, we looked like worn-out fleas caught in the folds of a thick and wrinkled carpet.

The ride homeward was by another road, boasting itself a camino real, but little more than a wide trail for all its claim to royalty. Black ranges studded with royal palms cut short the horizon. Guajiros slipped past us here and there on little native horses of rocking-chair gait; others rode more slowly by perched on top of their woven-leaf saddle-bags, bulging with produce, a chicken or two usually swinging by the legs from them; all bade us a diffident “Muy buenas.” Trees worthy of being reproduced in the stained-glass windows of cathedrals etched the sky-line. The stupid peon who posed as guide, flapping his wings with the gait of his horse like a disheveled crow, knew the names of only the most familiar growths, which would not so much have mattered had he not persisted in digging up false ones from the depths of his turbid imagination. Of the flowers, fruit, and strangely tame long-tailed birds he had as little real knowledge, though he had seen them all his life. Nor did he even know the road; I have never met a Latin-American “guide” who did. A negro boy on horseback singing his cows home from pasture; a peasant in the familiar high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat of braided palm-leaves hooking together tufts of grass with a crotched stick and cutting them off with a machete; children gathering the oily palmiche nuts which are the chief delicacy of the Cuban hog, were among the sights of the afternoon. Next to sugar certainly the most prolific crop in Cuba is babies. Black, brown, yellow, and all the varying shades between, they not only swarm in the towns, but cluster in flocks about the smallest country hut, innocent of clothing as of the laws of sanitation, with no other joy in life than to roll about on the ground inside or around their little homes and suck a joint of sugar-cane. The houses of the peasants, still called by the Indian name of bohío, owe nothing to the outside world, but are wholly built of materials found on the spot, their very furnishings being woven palm-leaf hammocks, hairy cowhide chairs, pots and dishes made from gourds picked from the trees. The gates to many fincas, mildly resembling the entrances to Japanese temples, drew the eyes to more commodious residences as we neared Sancti Spiritus once more, each casa vivienda of a single low story covered with a tile roof which projected far out over the earth-floored veranda surrounding it. Nor were these much different from the humbler bohíos except in size, and perhaps an occasional newspaper to keep their owners somewhat in touch with the outside world.

The day died out as we were jogging homeward along the dusty flatlands between endless vistas of sugar-cane. But as I have not the courage to try to describe a Cuban sunset I gladly yield the floor to the native novelist known to his fellow-countrymen as the “Zola of the Antilles,” who has no fear of so simple a task:

The sun agonized pompously between incendated clouds. Before it opaque mountains raised themselves, their borders dyed purple, orange, and violet. The astra itself was not visible, hidden behind its blood-streaked curtain, but one divined its disk in the great luminous blot which fought to tear asunder the throttling clouds; and on high, light, white cupolas, like immense plumages, were floating, reddened also, like the dispersed birds of a great flock that had been engaged in sanguinary combat. A vast silence had established itself, the solemnity of the evening which was rapidly expiring, with that brevity of the twilight of the tropics, which is similar to a scenic play arranged beforehand. On the blue-gray line of the sea the clouds had floundered in an immense stain of violet color, furrowed with obscure edges which opened themselves like the spokes of a gigantic wheel, in a dress of whitish blue, raising itself to the rest of the heavens. The disk of the sun was no longer evident; but, far off, some separate little clouds seemed to be touched by a lightly purple dyestuff. The picture changed with the celerity of an evening sunset on the stage, visibly obscuring itself, and by degrees, as if in that stage setting some one were shutting off, one after the other, the electric batteries, until the scene had been left in darkness. In a few minutes the great violet stain, formerly full of light, passed through all the tones of color, to convert itself into a great lake, without brilliance, in which swam lead colored flocks of birds dyed with black. The delicate dyestuff which embroidered for an instant the remote little clouds had suddenly rubbed themselves out. Only an enormous white plume, stretched above the place in which the sun had sepulchered itself, persisted in shining for a long time like a fantastic wreath suspended over the melancholy desolation of the crepuscule. Afterward that went out also.

CHAPTER IV
THE WORLD’S SUGAR BOWL

Cuba produces more sugar than any other country in the world. During the season which had just begun at the time of our visit she expected to furnish four million tons of it. Barely as large as England, being seven hundred and thirty miles long and varying in width from twenty-two to one hundred and twenty miles, the island is favored by the fact that the great majority of her surface is level or slightly rolling, though the Pico de Turquino rises 8320 feet above the sea. Her soil is largely of limestone formation, with very little hard rock. She has considerable deep red earth which, scientists say, is deteriorated limestone without a trace of lime left in it. Fresh limestone brought down from the hills and scattered upon this quickly restores its virgin fertility, and it responds readily to almost any other fertilizers. There are regions in Cuba where this reddish soil permeates all the surrounding landscape, including the faces, garments, and offspring of the inhabitants, giving its color even to their domestic animals. At least four fifths of the wealth and happiness of her population depends on her chief industry, and it is natural that everything else should take second place in the Cuban mind to the production of sugar.

French colonists running away from their infuriated slaves in Haiti brought with them the succulent cane, and at the same time a certain love of comfort and various agricultural hints which may still be traced on some of the older estates. But the industry has been modernized now to the point where science and large capital completely control its methods and its output. The saying is that wherever the royal palm grows sugar-cane will flourish, while the prevalence of guinea-grass is also considered a favorable sign. As these two growths are well-nigh universal throughout Cuba, it would seem that the island is due to become an even greater leader in sugar production that she is already.

The making of a Cuban sugar plantation is a primitive and, from our Northern point of view, a wasteful process consistent with virgin lands and tropical fecundity. Thus it seems in many parts of the island, particularly in the Oriente, the largest and most eastern of Cuba’s six provinces. Here vast stretches of virgin forest, often three to five thousand acres in extent, are turned into cane-fields in a few months’ time. The usual method is to let contracts for the entire process, and to pay fixed sums for completely replacing the forests by growing cane. Bands of laborers under native capataces begin by erecting in the edge of the doomed woods their baracones, crudely fashioned structures covered with palm-leaves, usually without walls. Here the woodsmen, more often Jamaican or Haitian negroes than Cubans, swing their hammocks side by side the entire length of the building, if the long roof supported by poles may be called that, a few of them indulging in the comfort of a mosquitero inclosing their swinging couch, all of them wrapping their worldly possessions in the hammock by day. Then with machetes and axes which to the Northerner would seem extremely crude—though nearly all of them come from our own State of Connecticut—they attack the immense and seemingly impenetrable wilderness.

The underbrush and saplings fall first under the slashing machetes. Next the big trees—and some of these are indeed giants of the forest—succumb before the heavy axes and, denuded of their larger branches, are left where they lie. Behind the black despoilers the dense green woodland turns to the golden brown which in the tropics means death rather than a mere change of season, and day by day this spreads on and on over plain and hillock into regions perhaps never before trodden by man. The easy-going planters of the olden days were apt to spare at least the royal palms and the more magnificent of the great spreading ceibas. But the practical modern world will have none of this compassion for beauty at the expense of utility. As an American sub-manager summed up the point of view of his class, “If you are going to grow cane, grow cane; don’t grow royal palms.” Everything falls before the world’s demand for sugar, translated by these energetic pioneers from the North to mean the unsparing destruction of all nature’s splendors which dare to trespass upon the domain of His Majesty, the sugar-cane. Mahogany and cedar—though occasionally the larger logs of these two most valuable of Cuban woods are carried to the railroad sidings—are as ruthlessly felled as the almost worthless growths which abound in tropical forests. Here and there the contractor leaves an immense caguarán standing, in the hope that he may not be compelled to break several axes on a wood far redder than mahogany and harder than any known to our Northern timberlands. But the inspector is almost sure to detect his little ruse and to require that the landscape be denuded even of these resisting growths. Logs of every possible size and of a hundred species cut up the trails over which the sure-footed Cuban horses pick their way when the first inspection parties ride out through the fallen woodland.

The clearing of a Cuban forest has in it little of the danger inherent in similar occupations in other tropical lands. Not only are there no venomous snakes to be feared, but there are few other menaces to the health of the workmen. Now and again a belligerent swarm of bees is encountered, along the coast streams the dreaded manzanillo sometimes demands the respect due so dangerous a growth. The sap of the manzanillo is said to be so poisonous that to swallow a drop causes certain death; hands and face sprayed with it by a careless blow of the ax swell up beyond all semblance to human form. When one of these rare species is found, the woodsmen carefully “bark” it and leave it for some time before undertaking the actual felling. But with few exceptions this is the only vegetation to be feared in a Cuban wilderness. Even the malarial fevers which follow not the cutting, but the burning, of the woodlands are less malignant than those of other equatorial regions.

The burning usually takes place during the first fortnight of March, at the end of the longest dry season. Indeed, extreme care is exercised that the firing shall not begin prematurely, for the consumption of the lighter growths before the larger ones are dry enough to burn would be little short of a catastrophe for the contractors. When at last the fires are set and sweep across the immense region with all the fury of the element, fuel sufficient to keep an entire Northern city warm during the whole winter is swept away in a single day. At first thought it seems the height of wastefulness not to save these uncounted cords of wood, these most valuable of timbers, but not only would the cost of transportation more than eat up their value before they could reach a market, without this plenitude of fallen forest the burning would not be successful and the fertility of the future plantation would suffer. The time is near, however, scientists tell us, when the Cubans must regulate this wholesale destruction of their forests or see the island suffer from one of those changes of climate which has been the partial ruination of their motherland, Spain.

When the first burning has ended, the larger logs remaining are heaped together and reburned. Some of them, the júcaro, for instance, continue to smolder for months, this tree having even been known to burn from top to bottom after catching fire thirty feet from the ground. Though it is usual in the open savannas, plowing is not necessary in these denuded woodlands. Here all that is necessary is to hoe away the grass and the bit of undergrowth that remains. The primitive method of planting in the slave days still survives. In some sections a man sets out along each of the proposed rows carrying in one hand a long sugar-cane and in the other a machete. He jabs the cane into the ground at intervals of about three feet, slashes off the buried end with his cutlass, and marches on, to repeat the process at every step. More often nowadays one man goes ahead to dig holes with a heavy hoe, while another following him drops into each of them a section of cane and covers it with a stamp of his bare heel. Two joints and sometimes three are planted in each hole, to insure the sprouting of at least one of them. There is a more scientific system of planting, in which a rope with knots given distances apart is used, but the first method is more prevalent in the feverish haste of the Oriente. The fact that charred logs and stumps still everywhere litter the ground rather helps than hampers the growth of the cane, for as these rot they add new fertilizer to the already rich soil.

Cane requires some eighteen months to mature in the virgin lands of Cuba, and will produce from twelve to twenty yearly crops without replanting. So prolific is the plant in these newer sections that when a lane several meters wide is left between the rows it is often almost impenetrable a year later. Cane high above the head of a man on horseback is by no means rare in these favored regions. By the beginning of our northern autumn the whole island is inlaid with immense lakes of maturing cane, the same monotonous panorama everywhere stretching to the horizon; the uniformly light green landscape, often spreading for mile after mile without a fold or a knoll, without any other note of color than the darker green of the rare palm-trees that have escaped destruction, grows fatiguing to the sight. Cane-fields without limit on each hand, flashing in the blazing sunshine, have a beauty of their own, though it is not equal to that of a ripening wheat-field with the wind rippling across it. There is less movement, less character; it has a greater likeness to an expressionless human face. Yet toward cutting-time sunrise or sunset across these endless pale green surfaces presents swiftly changing vistas which are worth traveling far to see.

The “dead season,” corresponding to the Northern summer, is a time of comparative leisure on the sugar estates. It is then that the higher employees, Americans in the great majority of cases, take their vacations in the North; it is then that the Spanish laborers who come out for each yearly zafra return to enjoy their earnings in their own land. Then there is time for fiestas among the native workmen and their families and those from the near-by islands, who frequently remain the year round, time for “parties” and dances among the English-speaking residents of the batey. The batey is the headquarters of the entire central, as the sugar estate is called in Cuba. It clusters about the ingenio, or mammoth sugar-mill, which stands smokeless and silent through all the “dead season,” its towering chimneys looming forth against the cane-green background for miles in every direction. Here the manager has his sumptuous dwelling, his heads of departments their commodious residences, the host of lesser American employees their comfortable screened houses shading away in size and location in the exact gradations of the local social scale. Usually there are company schools, tennis-courts, clubs, stores, hospital, company gardeners to beautify the surrounding landscape. Outside this American town, often with a park or a flower-blooming plaza in its center, are scores of smaller houses, little more than huts as one nears the outskirts, in which live the rank and file of employees of a dozen nationalities. In the olden days, when many slaves were of necessity kept the year round, the batey was a scene of activity at all seasons. But the patriarchal plantation life, the enchantment of the old family sugar-mill where each planter ground his own cane, has almost wholly disappeared before these giants of modern industry which swallow in a day the cane that the old-fashioned mill spent a season in reducing to sugar.

Cuban travelers

A Cuban milkman

A street of Santiago de Cuba

Not all Chinamen succeed in Cuba

With the expiration of slavery the patrician style of sugar raising died out. It became necessary, largely for lack of labor, partly for convenience sake, to separate the agricultural from the other phases of the sugar industry. The more customary method to-day is to divide the estate into a score or more of “colonies,” each in charge of, or rented to, a colono, who operates almost independently, at least until the cutting season arrives. A few companies are run entirely on the administrative system, directing every operation from planting to grinding from a central office; some own little land themselves, but buy their cane of the independent planters in the surrounding region. But the colono system gives promise of surviving longest. For one thing, in case of drought or other disaster, the loss falls in whole or part on the planter instead of being entirely sustained by the company. Even when the land from which they draw their cane is not their own property, the companies keep a force of inspectors who ride day after day through the cane-fields, offering advice to the colonos here, ordering them to change their methods there, if they are to remain in the good graces of the central management. The latter keeps in its offices large maps of all the region from which its mill is fed, noting on each plot the condition of the soil, the age of the cane, particularly whether or not it has been burned over, that it may be assigned its proper turn for cutting when the grinding season begins.

Fires are the chief bugaboo of the sugar growers. All the fields are cut up into sections by frequent guardarayas, open lanes some fifty yards wide which serve not only as highways, but as a means of confining a conflagration to the plot in which it starts. In many cases there are little watch towers set up on stilts from which to give warning in case of fire, while special employees sometimes patrol the fields during the drier months. Rural guards of the “O. P.” corps have orders to be constantly on the lookout for incendiaries; when a fire starts they immediately surround the field, and woe betide the luckless mortal who is caught in it, for all Cuba is banded together to punish the man who wantonly or carelessly brings destruction upon their principal product.

A cane fire is an exciting event, not to say a magnificent sight. Starting in a tiny puff of vapor where some careless smoker has tossed a match, from a passing locomotive, or by intention, it quickly gives warning by the black-brown column of smoke which rises high into the clear tropical heavens. Whistles, bells, anything capable of making a noise, join in the din which summons planters, employees, and neighboring villagers to stem the threatened catastrophe. By the time the bright red flames begin to curl above the cane-tops men and boys of every degree, color, and nationality are racing pell-mell from every direction toward them, colonos, overseers, rural guards, Americans, Chinamen, Spaniards, West Indian negroes, Cubans ranging from the village alcade to bootblacks. Many of these bring with them machetes, others catch up clubs, handsful of brush, the tops of banana plants, and fall to threshing the flames, which by this time are crackling like the tearing up of thousands of parchments. Men on horseback race up and down the open lanes, directing the fighters, ordering the cutting of a new guardaraya there, commanding the lighting of a back-fire yonder. The air is full of black bits of cane leaves, the sun is obscured by the grayish-brown smoke which envelops all the struggling, shouting multitude and covers the field with an immense pall. A gust of wind sends the flames jumping to another plot, whirlwinds caused by the heat catch up the sparks and scatter them at random. New-comers join in the turmoil, indifferent alike to their garments and their skins. Half-asphyxiated men stumble out to the open air, gasp a few lungsful of it, and dash back into the fray; the now immense column of smoke can be seen over half the province. The pungent scent of crude sugar ladens all the air. Bit by bit the leaping flames decrease under the chastisement of hundreds of weapons, or confess their inability to leap across a wider guardaraya. The crackling loses its ominous sound, the voices of men are heard more clearly above it, gradually it succumbs to the noise of threshing bushes, the last red glare dies out, and the struggle is over. The motley throng of fighters, smeared, smudged, and torn, emerge into the open lanes, toss away their improvised weapons, and straggle homeward in long streams, while sunset paints the now distant smoke-cloud with brilliant colors, flecked by the little black particles which still float in the air. The burning of a cane-field does not mean the complete loss of its crop. Only the leaves are consumed; the parched canes are still standing. But these must be cut and ground quickly if their juice is to be turned into sugar; the ringing of the heavy cane-knives resounds all through the following day, and by night the field stands forlorn and ugly in its nudity.

One by one during the month of October the mills of the island begin their grinding. The cutting has started two days before, and incessantly through the weeks that follow the massive two-wheeled carts, drawn by four, six, ten, even twelve oxen, drag the canes to the mill, now straddling the charred stumps and logs which litter new fields for years after the first planting, now wallowing in the sloughs into which they have churned the lanes and highways. Or, if the fields are too far away, the ox-carts halt at railway sidings, where immense hooks catch up their entire load and deposit them in cane-cars, long trains of which creak away in the direction of the ingenio. The planters are paid on a percentage basis, from five to seven arrobas of sugar, or its equivalent in cash at that day’s market quotation, for a hundred arrobas of cane, a system which gives the colono his share in any increase in price. The workmen, more than half of whom are foreigners, are paid by the “task,” their earnings depending on their strength and diligence. The natives have a reputation for doing less than their competitors. There are Cubans who work in both the tobacco and sugar zafras, but most of them are content to spend from four to six months in the cane-fields earning their five to eight dollars a day, and to loaf and buy lottery tickets the rest of the year. The result is that the entire island has a toilsome, preoccupied air during our winter months and a holiday manner throughout the summer.

Grinding time is the antithesis of the “dead season.” Then the dull sullen grumble of the mill never ceases, fiestas and “parties” are forgotten, all but the higher employees and the field-men alternate in their twelve-hour shifts between night and day, with little time or inclination left for recreation. The chimneys of the ingenios belch forth constant columns of smoke, by night their blaze of electric lights makes them visible far off across the country. Once dumped in the chutes the canes have no escape until they have reached the market, or at least the warehouse, in the form of sugar. Rivers of juice run from beneath the rollers to the boiling vats; the centrifugals, most often tended by Chinamen, whirl the thick molasses into grains, great bags of which are stood end up on the necks of burly negroes and trotted away to the almacen. The porters must be burly, for Cuba still retains the bag used in slave days, holding thirteen arrobas, or two hundred and seventy-five pounds, and the negroes insist they must run with them to keep from falling down. It has more than once been proposed to reduce the size of the bags, but this would require a change all the way back to India, where jute and bags originate.

From the days of the primitive trapiche, when two logs turned by an ox or a donkey constituted a Cuban sugar-mill, through the period of individual growing and grinding, when an army of slaves worked under the whip for the benefit of an ignorant and often lazy and licentious owner who considered that work his right, down to the immense ingenio and extensive batey of modern times, Cuba has been more or less exploited for the benefit of other lands and peoples. Even to-day, when fabulous wages are paid to the men who do the actual toiling under the tropical sun, much of the profit from her soil brings up eventually in the pockets of others. Few are the centrals which do not win back a considerable portion of the wages they are forced to pay by maintaining company stores in which the prices are exorbitant, or in selling the right to maintain them. Many an American manager frankly admits the injustice of this, yet all assert themselves unable to remedy it. Of the sums carried off by workmen from other lands the Cubans have no complaint, admitting that they earn their hire. But there is a growing tendency to grumble that the island is being more thoroughly exploited now than in the days of slavery, for it comes to the same thing, they contend, whether the larger portion of their national riches go to Spanish masters or to stock-holders who have never set foot on Cuban soil. Notwithstanding that the island claims more wealth per capita than any other land on earth, the inhabitants are not satisfied, either with themselves or with circumstances, as a brief extract from the native novel already several times quoted will indicate:

They [foreign stock-holders] are the owners of everything, soil and industry. We abandon it to them with good grace so long as they leave to us the politics and public careers, that is, the road of fraud and life with little work. On the other hand they, the producers, profoundly despise us. It is the case of all Latin-America. While we gnaw the bone the true exploiter, who is no Cuban, eats the meat. And if we growl, showing our teeth, all they have to do is to complain to the diplomats. Then they hand us a kick, one on each side, and the matter is settled.

In contrast to the United States, Cuba grows wilder, more pioneer-like, from west to east. The traveler is aware of this increase of wilderness about the time he passes Ciego de Avila and the line of the old trocha across the island at the slenderest part of its waist, where are still seen remnants of the long row of forts from sea to sea with which the Spaniards vainly hoped to keep the rebels in the eastern end of the island and save at least the advanced and more populous western half from open rebellion. There are, to be sure, aged towns and pueblos on the sunrise side of the trocha. Camagüey, for instance, could scarcely be called a parvenu; and Baracoa, on the extreme eastern beach of the island, is Cuba’s first settlement. But the fact remains that the traveler feels more and more in touch with primeval nature as he advances to the eastward.

Small as it looks on the map, it is hard to realize that for vast distances the island of Cuba is still the unbroken wilderness of the days of Columbus. Though it is frequently broken by long stretches of civilization, the virgin forest is always near at hand on this eastward journey. There are frequent sugar estates, immense stretches of pale-green cane from horizon to horizon, but they are of the rough, wasteful, unfinished type of all pioneering. Cattle dot the great savannas, sleek, contented-looking cattle of a prevailing reddish tinge, and scarcely bearing out the assertion that the Cuban climate tends to dwarf their size. These unpeopled savannas are often of a velvety brown, now gently rolling, more commonly as flat as the sea itself, and stretching away farther than the eye can follow with the same suggestion of endlessness. Gazing out across them, one likes to let the imagination play on the simpler pre-Columbian days when only the Siboney Indians trekked across them in pursuit of the one four-foot game with which nature stocked the island, the diminutive jutía.

Of a score of striking trees with which these more open regions are punctuated, the broad-spreading, open-work, lace-like algarrobo, thorny and of slight value, is the most conspicuous, almost rivaling the ceiba and the royal palm in the ability to etch the sky-line with its artistic tracery. Stations are far apart and primitive in character in this region. Now and again one of special interest brings the long Habana-Santiago train to a laborious and often lengthy halt. There is Omaja, for example, said to have been settled by immigrants from Nebraska, and laboring under the Cubanization of the name they brought with them. It is the same sun-washed collection of simple dwellings and wide-open pioneer stores as everywhere greets the eye of the Cuban traveler. Yet the American’s influence is seen in the immense width of its one street and the more sturdy aspect of its wooden houses, crude, yet not without the simpler comforts. The Americans of Omaja, like several other groups that have settled in Cuba, came to plant fruit, with the accent on the toronja, or grape-fruit, so popular on Northern breakfast-tables, yet so scorned by the rural Cuban. But it was their bad luck to strike one of those curious dry spots frequent even in the wettest American tropics, and most of the score who remain have turned their attention to lumber. There are long rows of sturdy fruit-trees, however, as heavy with grape-fruit as a Syrian peddler with his pack, and hundreds of the saffron-yellow spheres lie rotting under the trees. Lack of transportation answers for many incongruities. Some of the orchards have been planted with cane, and only the deep-green crests of the trees gaze out above the pale-verdant immensity. Yet prosperity seems to have come to some of the settlers despite droughts and scarcity of rolling-stock, for in the neighborhood of Omaja are several big farm-houses of the bungalow family which can scarcely be the products of Cuban taste.