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.
[Illustration: A Cuban shoemaker]
[Illustration: Cuban soldiers]
[Illustration: Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: A principal street of Santa Clara]
[Illustration: The Central Plaza of Santa Clara]
[Illustration: A dairyman, Santa Clara district]
[Illustration: 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.