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[Illustration: 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
[Illustration]
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
CHAPTER PAGE
I OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 3
THE AMERICAN WEST INDIES
II RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 25
III CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 50
IV THE WORLD’S SUGAR-BOWL 76
V UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 106
VI THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 128
VII HITHER AND YON IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 149
VIII THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 189
IX TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 207
X SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 229
XI OUR PORTO RICO 256
XII WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 280
XIII IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 304
THE BRITISH WEST INDIES
XIV THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 339
XV “LITTLE ENGLAND” 360
XVI TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 381
XVII AFRICAN JAMAICA 403
THE FRENCH WEST INDIES AND THE OTHERS
XVIII GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES 439
XIX RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 449
XX ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 475
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Shade-grown tobacco in Porto Rico _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress 16
A policeman of Havana 16
Cuba’s new presidential palace 17
Venders of lottery tickets in rural Cuba 32
The winning numbers of the lottery 32
Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects 33
Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abajo
district. The large building is a tobacco barn, the
small ones are residences of the planters 33
A Cuban shoemaker 56
Cuban soldiers 56
Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground 57
The Central Plaza of Cienfuegos 57
A principal street of Santa Clara 64
The Central Plaza of Santa Clara 64
A dairyman, Santa Clara district 65
Cuban town scenery 65
A Cuban residence in a new clearing 114
Planting sugar-cane on newly cleared land 114
Hauling cane to a Cuban sugar-mill 115
A station of a Cuban pack train 115
Cuban travelers 80
A Cuban milkman 80
A street of Santiago de Cuba 81
Not all Chinamen succeed in Cuba 81
The entire enlisted personnel of the Haitian Navy 112
A school in Port au Prince 112
The central square and Cathedral of Port au Prince on
market day 113
Looking down upon the market from the cathedral platform 113
A Haitian gendarme 128
The president of Haiti 128
A street in Port au Prince 129
The unfinished presidential palace of Haiti, on New
Year’s Day, 1920 129
A Haitian country home 144
A small portion of one collection of captured _caco_ war
material 144
The _caco_ in the foreground killed an American Marine 145
Captain Hanneken and “General Jean” Conzé at
Christophe’s Citadel 145
Ruins of the old French estates are to be found all over
Haiti 160
A Haitian wayside store 160
The market women of Haiti sell everything under the
sun—A “General” in a Haitian market 161
There are still more primitive sugar-mills than these in
Haiti 161
A corner of Christophe’s Citadel. Its situation is such
that it could only be well photographed from an
airplane 176
The ruins of Christophe’s palace of San Souci 176
The mayor, the judge, and the richest man of a Haitian
town in the bush 177
Cockfighting is a favorite Haitian sport 177
The plaza and clock tower of Monte Cristo, showing its
American bullet hole 192
Railroading in Santo Domingo 192
The tri-weekly train arrives at Santiago 193
Dominican _guardias_ 193
Gen. Deciderio Arias, now a cigar maker, whose
revolution finally caused American intervention in
Santo Domingo 208
A bread seller of Santo Domingo 208
The church within a church of Moca 209
The “holy place” of Santo Domingo on top of the Santo
Cerro where Columbus planted a cross 209
A Dominican switch engine 224
A Dominican hearse 224
American Marines on the march 225
A riding horse of Samaná 225
Advertising a typical Dominican theatrical performance 240
A tree to which Columbus tied one of his ships, now on
the wharf of Santo Domingo City 240
The tomb of Columbus in the cathedral of Santo Domingo
City 241
Ponce de Leon’s palace now flies the Stars and Stripes 256
Thousands of women work in the fields in Porto Rico 256
Air-plants grow even on the telegraph wires in Ponce 257
A hat seller of Cabo Rojo 257
There is school accommodation for only half the children
of our Porto Rico 272
The home of a lace-maker in Aguadilla 273
The Porto Rican method of making lace 273
The place of pilgrimage for pious Porto Ricans 288
Porto Rican children of the coast lands 288
The old sugar-kettles scattered through the West Indies
have many uses 289
A corner in Aguadilla 289
The priest in charge of Porto Rico’s place of pilgrimage 296
One reason why cane-cutters cannot all be paid the same
wages 296
A procession of strikers in honor of representatives of
the A. F. of L. 297
“How many of you are on strike?” asked Senator Iglesias 297
The new church of Guayama, Porto Rico 304
A Porto Rican ex-soldier working as road peon. He
gathers the grass with a wooden hook and cuts it with
a small sickle 304
Porto Rican tobacco fields 305
Charlotte Amalie, capital of our Virgin Islands 305
A corner of Charlotte Amalie 320
Picking sea-island cotton, the second of St. Croix
products 320
A familiar sight in St. Croix, the ruins of an old sugar
mill and the stone tower of its cane-grinding
windmill 321
A cistern in which rain water is stored for drinking
purposes 321
Roseau, capital of beautiful Dominica 352
A woman of Dominica bringing a load of limes down from
the mountain 352
Kingstown, capital of St. Vincent 353
Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, with its statue
of Nelson 353
The Prince of Wales lands in Barbados 368
The principal street of Bridgetown, decorated in honor
of its royal visitor 368
Barbadian porters loading hogsheads of sugar always take
turns riding back to the warehouse 369
There is an Anglican Church of this style in each of the
eleven parishes of Barbados 369
The turn-out of most Barbadians 384
A Barbadian windmill 385
Two Hindus of Trinidad 385
Trinidad has many Hindu temples 400
Very much of a lodge 400
At the “Asphalt Lake” 401
There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt
field 401
As I passed this group on a Jamaican highway, the woman
reading the Bible was saying “So I ax de Lard what I
shall do” 416
“Draw me portrait please, sir!” The load consists of
school books and a pair of hobnail shoes 416
A very frequent sight along the roads of Jamaica 417
Our baggage following us ashore in one of the French
islands 417
Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica 432
A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe 432
A woman of Guadeloupe 433
The town criers of Pointe à Pitre 433
In the outskirts of Guadeloupe’s commercial capital 448
Fort de France, capital of Martinique 448
The _savane_ of Fort de France, with the Statue of
Josephine, once Empress of the French 449
Women of Martinique 464
A principal street of Fort de France with its cathedral 464
The shops of Martinique are sometimes as gaily garbed as
the women 465
Empress Josephine was born where this house stands 465
The St. Pierre of to-day with Pélée in the background 472
The cathedral of St. Pierre 473
The present residents of St. Pierre tuck their houses
into the corners of old stone ruins 473
The harbor of Curaçao 480
A woman of Curaçao 480
The principal Dutch island is not noted for its verdure 481
A Curaçao landscape 481
MAP
The itinerary of the author 48
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.
[Illustration: St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress]
[Illustration: A policeman of Havana]
[Illustration: 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