THE WORLD’S SUGAR BOWL
Cuba produces more sugar than any other country in the world. During the
season which had just begun at the time of our visit she expected to
furnish four million tons of it. Barely as large as England, being seven
hundred and thirty miles long and varying in width from twenty-two to
one hundred and twenty miles, the island is favored by the fact that the
great majority of her surface is level or slightly rolling, though the
Pico de Turquino rises 8320 feet above the sea. Her soil is largely of
limestone formation, with very little hard rock. She has considerable
deep red earth which, scientists say, is deteriorated limestone without
a trace of lime left in it. Fresh limestone brought down from the hills
and scattered upon this quickly restores its virgin fertility, and it
responds readily to almost any other fertilizers. There are regions in
Cuba where this reddish soil permeates all the surrounding landscape,
including the faces, garments, and offspring of the inhabitants, giving
its color even to their domestic animals. At least four fifths of the
wealth and happiness of her population depends on her chief industry,
and it is natural that everything else should take second place in the
Cuban mind to the production of sugar.
French colonists running away from their infuriated slaves in Haiti
brought with them the succulent cane, and at the same time a certain
love of comfort and various agricultural hints which may still be traced
on some of the older estates. But the industry has been modernized now
to the point where science and large capital completely control its
methods and its output. The saying is that wherever the royal palm grows
sugar-cane will flourish, while the prevalence of guinea-grass is also
considered a favorable sign. As these two growths are well-nigh
universal throughout Cuba, it would seem that the island is due to
become an even greater leader in sugar production that she is already.
The making of a Cuban sugar plantation is a primitive and, from our
Northern point of view, a wasteful process consistent with virgin lands
and tropical fecundity. Thus it seems in many parts of the island,
particularly in the Oriente, the largest and most eastern of Cuba’s six
provinces. Here vast stretches of virgin forest, often three to five
thousand acres in extent, are turned into cane-fields in a few months’
time. The usual method is to let contracts for the entire process, and
to pay fixed sums for completely replacing the forests by growing cane.
Bands of laborers under native _capataces_ begin by erecting in the edge
of the doomed woods their _baracones_, crudely fashioned structures
covered with palm-leaves, usually without walls. Here the woodsmen, more
often Jamaican or Haitian negroes than Cubans, swing their hammocks side
by side the entire length of the building, if the long roof supported by
poles may be called that, a few of them indulging in the comfort of a
_mosquitero_ inclosing their swinging couch, all of them wrapping their
worldly possessions in the hammock by day. Then with machetes and axes
which to the Northerner would seem extremely crude—though nearly all of
them come from our own State of Connecticut—they attack the immense and
seemingly impenetrable wilderness.
The underbrush and saplings fall first under the slashing machetes. Next
the big trees—and some of these are indeed giants of the forest—succumb
before the heavy axes and, denuded of their larger branches, are left
where they lie. Behind the black despoilers the dense green woodland
turns to the golden brown which in the tropics means death rather than a
mere change of season, and day by day this spreads on and on over plain
and hillock into regions perhaps never before trodden by man. The
easy-going planters of the olden days were apt to spare at least the
royal palms and the more magnificent of the great spreading ceibas. But
the practical modern world will have none of this compassion for beauty
at the expense of utility. As an American sub-manager summed up the
point of view of his class, “If you are going to grow cane, grow cane;
don’t grow royal palms.” Everything falls before the world’s demand for
sugar, translated by these energetic pioneers from the North to mean the
unsparing destruction of all nature’s splendors which dare to trespass
upon the domain of His Majesty, the sugar-cane. Mahogany and
cedar—though occasionally the larger logs of these two most valuable of
Cuban woods are carried to the railroad sidings—are as ruthlessly felled
as the almost worthless growths which abound in tropical forests. Here
and there the contractor leaves an immense _caguarán_ standing, in the
hope that he may not be compelled to break several axes on a wood far
redder than mahogany and harder than any known to our Northern
timberlands. But the inspector is almost sure to detect his little ruse
and to require that the landscape be denuded even of these resisting
growths. Logs of every possible size and of a hundred species cut up the
trails over which the sure-footed Cuban horses pick their way when the
first inspection parties ride out through the fallen woodland.
The clearing of a Cuban forest has in it little of the danger inherent
in similar occupations in other tropical lands. Not only are there no
venomous snakes to be feared, but there are few other menaces to the
health of the workmen. Now and again a belligerent swarm of bees is
encountered, along the coast streams the dreaded _manzanillo_ sometimes
demands the respect due so dangerous a growth. The sap of the
_manzanillo_ is said to be so poisonous that to swallow a drop causes
certain death; hands and face sprayed with it by a careless blow of the
ax swell up beyond all semblance to human form. When one of these rare
species is found, the woodsmen carefully “bark” it and leave it for some
time before undertaking the actual felling. But with few exceptions this
is the only vegetation to be feared in a Cuban wilderness. Even the
malarial fevers which follow not the cutting, but the burning, of the
woodlands are less malignant than those of other equatorial regions.
The burning usually takes place during the first fortnight of March, at
the end of the longest dry season. Indeed, extreme care is exercised
that the firing shall not begin prematurely, for the consumption of the
lighter growths before the larger ones are dry enough to burn would be
little short of a catastrophe for the contractors. When at last the
fires are set and sweep across the immense region with all the fury of
the element, fuel sufficient to keep an entire Northern city warm during
the whole winter is swept away in a single day. At first thought it
seems the height of wastefulness not to save these uncounted cords of
wood, these most valuable of timbers, but not only would the cost of
transportation more than eat up their value before they could reach a
market, without this plenitude of fallen forest the burning would not be
successful and the fertility of the future plantation would suffer. The
time is near, however, scientists tell us, when the Cubans must regulate
this wholesale destruction of their forests or see the island suffer
from one of those changes of climate which has been the partial
ruination of their motherland, Spain.
When the first burning has ended, the larger logs remaining are heaped
together and reburned. Some of them, the _júcaro_, for instance,
continue to smolder for months, this tree having even been known to burn
from top to bottom after catching fire thirty feet from the ground.
Though it is usual in the open savannas, plowing is not necessary in
these denuded woodlands. Here all that is necessary is to hoe away the
grass and the bit of undergrowth that remains. The primitive method of
planting in the slave days still survives. In some sections a man sets
out along each of the proposed rows carrying in one hand a long
sugar-cane and in the other a machete. He jabs the cane into the ground
at intervals of about three feet, slashes off the buried end with his
cutlass, and marches on, to repeat the process at every step. More often
nowadays one man goes ahead to dig holes with a heavy hoe, while another
following him drops into each of them a section of cane and covers it
with a stamp of his bare heel. Two joints and sometimes three are
planted in each hole, to insure the sprouting of at least one of them.
There is a more scientific system of planting, in which a rope with
knots given distances apart is used, but the first method is more
prevalent in the feverish haste of the Oriente. The fact that charred
logs and stumps still everywhere litter the ground rather helps than
hampers the growth of the cane, for as these rot they add new fertilizer
to the already rich soil.
Cane requires some eighteen months to mature in the virgin lands of
Cuba, and will produce from twelve to twenty yearly crops without
replanting. So prolific is the plant in these newer sections that when a
lane several meters wide is left between the rows it is often almost
impenetrable a year later. Cane high above the head of a man on
horseback is by no means rare in these favored regions. By the beginning
of our northern autumn the whole island is inlaid with immense lakes of
maturing cane, the same monotonous panorama everywhere stretching to the
horizon; the uniformly light green landscape, often spreading for mile
after mile without a fold or a knoll, without any other note of color
than the darker green of the rare palm-trees that have escaped
destruction, grows fatiguing to the sight. Cane-fields without limit on
each hand, flashing in the blazing sunshine, have a beauty of their own,
though it is not equal to that of a ripening wheat-field with the wind
rippling across it. There is less movement, less character; it has a
greater likeness to an expressionless human face. Yet toward
cutting-time sunrise or sunset across these endless pale green surfaces
presents swiftly changing vistas which are worth traveling far to see.
The “dead season,” corresponding to the Northern summer, is a time of
comparative leisure on the sugar estates. It is then that the higher
employees, Americans in the great majority of cases, take their
vacations in the North; it is then that the Spanish laborers who come
out for each yearly _zafra_ return to enjoy their earnings in their own
land. Then there is time for _fiestas_ among the native workmen and
their families and those from the near-by islands, who frequently remain
the year round, time for “parties” and dances among the English-speaking
residents of the _batey_. The _batey_ is the headquarters of the entire
_central_, as the sugar estate is called in Cuba. It clusters about the
_ingenio_, or mammoth sugar-mill, which stands smokeless and silent
through all the “dead season,” its towering chimneys looming forth
against the cane-green background for miles in every direction. Here the
manager has his sumptuous dwelling, his heads of departments their
commodious residences, the host of lesser American employees their
comfortable screened houses shading away in size and location in the
exact gradations of the local social scale. Usually there are company
schools, tennis-courts, clubs, stores, hospital, company gardeners to
beautify the surrounding landscape. Outside this American town, often
with a park or a flower-blooming plaza in its center, are scores of
smaller houses, little more than huts as one nears the outskirts, in
which live the rank and file of employees of a dozen nationalities. In
the olden days, when many slaves were of necessity kept the year round,
the _batey_ was a scene of activity at all seasons. But the patriarchal
plantation life, the enchantment of the old family sugar-mill where each
planter ground his own cane, has almost wholly disappeared before these
giants of modern industry which swallow in a day the cane that the
old-fashioned mill spent a season in reducing to sugar.
[Illustration: Cuban travelers]
[Illustration: A Cuban milkman]
[Illustration: A street of Santiago de Cuba]
[Illustration: Not all Chinamen succeed in Cuba]
With the expiration of slavery the patrician style of sugar raising died
out. It became necessary, largely for lack of labor, partly for
convenience sake, to separate the agricultural from the other phases of
the sugar industry. The more customary method to-day is to divide the
estate into a score or more of “colonies,” each in charge of, or rented
to, a _colono_, who operates almost independently, at least until the
cutting season arrives. A few companies are run entirely on the
administrative system, directing every operation from planting to
grinding from a central office; some own little land themselves, but buy
their cane of the independent planters in the surrounding region. But
the _colono_ system gives promise of surviving longest. For one thing,
in case of drought or other disaster, the loss falls in whole or part on
the planter instead of being entirely sustained by the company. Even
when the land from which they draw their cane is not their own property,
the companies keep a force of inspectors who ride day after day through
the cane-fields, offering advice to the _colonos_ here, ordering them to
change their methods there, if they are to remain in the good graces of
the central management. The latter keeps in its offices large maps of
all the region from which its mill is fed, noting on each plot the
condition of the soil, the age of the cane, particularly whether or not
it has been burned over, that it may be assigned its proper turn for
cutting when the grinding season begins.
Fires are the chief bugaboo of the sugar growers. All the fields are cut
up into sections by frequent _guardarayas_, open lanes some fifty yards
wide which serve not only as highways, but as a means of confining a
conflagration to the plot in which it starts. In many cases there are
little watch towers set up on stilts from which to give warning in case
of fire, while special employees sometimes patrol the fields during the
drier months. Rural guards of the “O. P.” corps have orders to be
constantly on the lookout for incendiaries; when a fire starts they
immediately surround the field, and woe betide the luckless mortal who
is caught in it, for all Cuba is banded together to punish the man who
wantonly or carelessly brings destruction upon their principal product.
A cane fire is an exciting event, not to say a magnificent sight.
Starting in a tiny puff of vapor where some careless smoker has tossed a
match, from a passing locomotive, or by intention, it quickly gives
warning by the black-brown column of smoke which rises high into the
clear tropical heavens. Whistles, bells, anything capable of making a
noise, join in the din which summons planters, employees, and
neighboring villagers to stem the threatened catastrophe. By the time
the bright red flames begin to curl above the cane-tops men and boys of
every degree, color, and nationality are racing pell-mell from every
direction toward them, _colonos_, overseers, rural guards, Americans,
Chinamen, Spaniards, West Indian negroes, Cubans ranging from the
village _alcade_ to bootblacks. Many of these bring with them machetes,
others catch up clubs, handsful of brush, the tops of banana plants, and
fall to threshing the flames, which by this time are crackling like the
tearing up of thousands of parchments. Men on horseback race up and down
the open lanes, directing the fighters, ordering the cutting of a new
_guardaraya_ there, commanding the lighting of a back-fire yonder. The
air is full of black bits of cane leaves, the sun is obscured by the
grayish-brown smoke which envelops all the struggling, shouting
multitude and covers the field with an immense pall. A gust of wind
sends the flames jumping to another plot, whirlwinds caused by the heat
catch up the sparks and scatter them at random. New-comers join in the
turmoil, indifferent alike to their garments and their skins.
Half-asphyxiated men stumble out to the open air, gasp a few lungsful of
it, and dash back into the fray; the now immense column of smoke can be
seen over half the province. The pungent scent of crude sugar ladens all
the air. Bit by bit the leaping flames decrease under the chastisement
of hundreds of weapons, or confess their inability to leap across a
wider _guardaraya_. The crackling loses its ominous sound, the voices of
men are heard more clearly above it, gradually it succumbs to the noise
of threshing bushes, the last red glare dies out, and the struggle is
over. The motley throng of fighters, smeared, smudged, and torn, emerge
into the open lanes, toss away their improvised weapons, and straggle
homeward in long streams, while sunset paints the now distant
smoke-cloud with brilliant colors, flecked by the little black particles
which still float in the air. The burning of a cane-field does not mean
the complete loss of its crop. Only the leaves are consumed; the parched
canes are still standing. But these must be cut and ground quickly if
their juice is to be turned into sugar; the ringing of the heavy
cane-knives resounds all through the following day, and by night the
field stands forlorn and ugly in its nudity.
One by one during the month of October the mills of the island begin
their grinding. The cutting has started two days before, and incessantly
through the weeks that follow the massive two-wheeled carts, drawn by
four, six, ten, even twelve oxen, drag the canes to the mill, now
straddling the charred stumps and logs which litter new fields for years
after the first planting, now wallowing in the sloughs into which they
have churned the lanes and highways. Or, if the fields are too far away,
the ox-carts halt at railway sidings, where immense hooks catch up their
entire load and deposit them in cane-cars, long trains of which creak
away in the direction of the _ingenio_. The planters are paid on a
percentage basis, from five to seven _arrobas_ of sugar, or its
equivalent in cash at that day’s market quotation, for a hundred
_arrobas_ of cane, a system which gives the _colono_ his share in any
increase in price. The workmen, more than half of whom are foreigners,
are paid by the “task,” their earnings depending on their strength and
diligence. The natives have a reputation for doing less than their
competitors. There are Cubans who work in both the tobacco and sugar
_zafras_, but most of them are content to spend from four to six months
in the cane-fields earning their five to eight dollars a day, and to
loaf and buy lottery tickets the rest of the year. The result is that
the entire island has a toilsome, preoccupied air during our winter
months and a holiday manner throughout the summer.
Grinding time is the antithesis of the “dead season.” Then the dull
sullen grumble of the mill never ceases, _fiestas_ and “_parties_” are
forgotten, all but the higher employees and the field-men alternate in
their twelve-hour shifts between night and day, with little time or
inclination left for recreation. The chimneys of the _ingenios_ belch
forth constant columns of smoke, by night their blaze of electric lights
makes them visible far off across the country. Once dumped in the chutes
the canes have no escape until they have reached the market, or at least
the warehouse, in the form of sugar. Rivers of juice run from beneath
the rollers to the boiling vats; the centrifugals, most often tended by
Chinamen, whirl the thick molasses into grains, great bags of which are
stood end up on the necks of burly negroes and trotted away to the
_almacen_. The porters must be burly, for Cuba still retains the bag
used in slave days, holding thirteen _arrobas_, or two hundred and
seventy-five pounds, and the negroes insist they must run with them to
keep from falling down. It has more than once been proposed to reduce
the size of the bags, but this would require a change all the way back
to India, where jute and bags originate.
From the days of the primitive _trapiche_, when two logs turned by an ox
or a donkey constituted a Cuban sugar-mill, through the period of
individual growing and grinding, when an army of slaves worked under the
whip for the benefit of an ignorant and often lazy and licentious owner
who considered that work his right, down to the immense _ingenio_ and
extensive _batey_ of modern times, Cuba has been more or less exploited
for the benefit of other lands and peoples. Even to-day, when fabulous
wages are paid to the men who do the actual toiling under the tropical
sun, much of the profit from her soil brings up eventually in the
pockets of others. Few are the _centrals_ which do not win back a
considerable portion of the wages they are forced to pay by maintaining
company stores in which the prices are exorbitant, or in selling the
right to maintain them. Many an American manager frankly admits the
injustice of this, yet all assert themselves unable to remedy it. Of the
sums carried off by workmen from other lands the Cubans have no
complaint, admitting that they earn their hire. But there is a growing
tendency to grumble that the island is being more thoroughly exploited
now than in the days of slavery, for it comes to the same thing, they
contend, whether the larger portion of their national riches go to
Spanish masters or to stock-holders who have never set foot on Cuban
soil. Notwithstanding that the island claims more wealth per capita than
any other land on earth, the inhabitants are not satisfied, either with
themselves or with circumstances, as a brief extract from the native
novel already several times quoted will indicate:
They [foreign stock-holders] are the owners of everything, soil and
industry. We abandon it to them with good grace so long as they
leave to us the politics and public careers, that is, the road of
fraud and life with little work. On the other hand they, the
producers, profoundly despise us. It is the case of all
Latin-America. While we gnaw the bone the true exploiter, who is no
Cuban, eats the meat. And if we growl, showing our teeth, all they
have to do is to complain to the diplomats. Then they hand us a
kick, one on each side, and the matter is settled.
In contrast to the United States, Cuba grows wilder, more pioneer-like,
from west to east. The traveler is aware of this increase of wilderness
about the time he passes Ciego de Avila and the line of the old _trocha_
across the island at the slenderest part of its waist, where are still
seen remnants of the long row of forts from sea to sea with which the
Spaniards vainly hoped to keep the rebels in the eastern end of the
island and save at least the advanced and more populous western half
from open rebellion. There are, to be sure, aged towns and _pueblos_ on
the sunrise side of the _trocha_. Camagüey, for instance, could scarcely
be called a parvenu; and Baracoa, on the extreme eastern beach of the
island, is Cuba’s first settlement. But the fact remains that the
traveler feels more and more in touch with primeval nature as he
advances to the eastward.
Small as it looks on the map, it is hard to realize that for vast
distances the island of Cuba is still the unbroken wilderness of the
days of Columbus. Though it is frequently broken by long stretches of
civilization, the virgin forest is always near at hand on this eastward
journey. There are frequent sugar estates, immense stretches of
pale-green cane from horizon to horizon, but they are of the rough,
wasteful, unfinished type of all pioneering. Cattle dot the great
savannas, sleek, contented-looking cattle of a prevailing reddish tinge,
and scarcely bearing out the assertion that the Cuban climate tends to
dwarf their size. These unpeopled savannas are often of a velvety brown,
now gently rolling, more commonly as flat as the sea itself, and
stretching away farther than the eye can follow with the same suggestion
of endlessness. Gazing out across them, one likes to let the imagination
play on the simpler pre-Columbian days when only the _Siboney_ Indians
trekked across them in pursuit of the one four-foot game with which
nature stocked the island, the diminutive _jutía_.
Of a score of striking trees with which these more open regions are
punctuated, the broad-spreading, open-work, lace-like _algarrobo_,
thorny and of slight value, is the most conspicuous, almost rivaling the
ceiba and the royal palm in the ability to etch the sky-line with its
artistic tracery. Stations are far apart and primitive in character in
this region. Now and again one of special interest brings the long
Habana-Santiago train to a laborious and often lengthy halt. There is
Omaja, for example, said to have been settled by immigrants from
Nebraska, and laboring under the Cubanization of the name they brought
with them. It is the same sun-washed collection of simple dwellings and
wide-open pioneer stores as everywhere greets the eye of the Cuban
traveler. Yet the American’s influence is seen in the immense width of
its one street and the more sturdy aspect of its wooden houses, crude,
yet not without the simpler comforts. The Americans of Omaja, like
several other groups that have settled in Cuba, came to plant fruit,
with the accent on the _toronja_, or grape-fruit, so popular on Northern
breakfast-tables, yet so scorned by the rural Cuban. But it was their
bad luck to strike one of those curious dry spots frequent even in the
wettest American tropics, and most of the score who remain have turned
their attention to lumber. There are long rows of sturdy fruit-trees,
however, as heavy with grape-fruit as a Syrian peddler with his pack,
and hundreds of the saffron-yellow spheres lie rotting under the trees.
Lack of transportation answers for many incongruities. Some of the
orchards have been planted with cane, and only the deep-green crests of
the trees gaze out above the pale-verdant immensity. Yet prosperity
seems to have come to some of the settlers despite droughts and scarcity
of rolling-stock, for in the neighborhood of Omaja are several big
farm-houses of the bungalow family which can scarcely be the products of
Cuban taste.
Beyond come more miles of the lightly wooded wilderness, everywhere
spotted with cattle, here and there a large banana plantation, and
frequent half-clearings in the denser forest, heaped with huge logs of
red mahogany and other valuable woods. The railroad itself does not
hesitate to make ties and trestle beams of the precious _caoba_, the
aristocracy of which is much less apparent in its own setting than after
the expense of distant transportation has been added to its cost. Then
again, like a constant reiteration of the main Cuban motif, come the
endless seas of cane, sometimes full-grown and drowning all else except
the majestic palms, sometimes just started in a flood of the bluer young
plants that cannot yet conceal the burned stumps and charred logs of
regions recently deforested. For a while cultivation disappears
entirely, and the dense virgin forest, just as nature meant it to be,
impassable, hung with climbing lianas, draped with “Spanish moss,” its
huger trees bristling with flowerless orchids of green or reddish tint,
its countless species of larger vegetation choked by impenetrable
undergrowth, shuts in the track for many an uninhabited mile.
But hungry mankind does not long endure this unproductive slovenliness
of nature. Gangs of men as varied in color as the vegetation in species
are laying waste new areas of wilderness, and preparing to complete with
fire the work of their axes and machetes in taming the unbroken soil for
human purposes. Half-naked families of incredible fecundity swarm to the
doors of thatch cabins, to gaze after the fleeing train like wild
animals catching their first glimpse of the outside world. It would be
easy to imagine that the clearing away of the forest has uncovered these
primitive dwellings and their denizens, as it has brought to light the
ant-nests in the crotches of the trees. They seem as little a part of
the modern world as the shelter of some prehistoric Robinson Crusoe.
At Cacocúm, the junction for Holguín, up in the hills to the north, the
primitive and the latest advances of civilization mingle together.
Gaping _guajiros_ watch the unloading of apples and grapes, the chief
delicacies of Cuban desserts, that were grown in the northwesternmost
corner of the United States. The tougher breeds of automobiles wait to
whiz immaculate travelers from distant cities away into the apparently
trackless wilderness; inhabitants of those same Robinson Crusoe huts
come down to exchange roasted slabs of the half-savage hogs which roam
the forests for silver coins and crumpled paper bearing the effigy of
American Presidents.
Farther on, we were still more forcibly snatched back to the present and
the modern. The train burst suddenly upon an immense expanse of cane,
beyond which a low range of mountains, black-blue with a tropical
shower, stretched away with ever-increasing height to the southward.
Almost at the same moment we drew up at the station of Alto Cedro,
junction of the line from Nipe Bay, into which a ship direct from New
York had steamed that morning. It had brought one of the first flocks of
migratory human birds that annually flee before the Northern winters,
made doubly rigorous now by a nationwide drought. The Cuban passengers
of the first-class coach were as suddenly and completely swamped under
the aggressive flood of touring Americans as were the native chests and
bundles in the baggage-car beneath a mountain of trunks which flaunted
the self-importance of their owners. The tales of sad mistakes in
picking lottery numbers and debate on the probable _arrobas_ of the cane
_zafra_, in the softened Spanish of Cuba, turned to chatter of the
latest Broadway success and to gurgles of joy at escaping from a
coalless winter, in a tongue that sounded as curiously anachronistic in
this tropical setting as the heavy overcoats with which the new-comers
were laden looked out of place.
The moon was full that evening, and its weird effect was enhanced by a
slight accident that left the car without lights. Royal palms,
silhouetted against the half-lighted sky, stood out even more strikingly
than by day. The moonlight fell with a silvery sheen on the white-clad
negroes who lined the way wherever the train halted, casting dense-black
shadows behind them. Below San Luís junction, where automobiles offered
to carry passengers down to Santiago in less time than the train, the
vegetation grew unusually dense, the most genuinely tropical we had ever
seen in Cuba. Immense basins filled with magnificent clusters of bamboo,
royal palms in irregular, but soldierly, formations along the succeeding
crests, masses of perennial foliage heaped up in the spaces between—all
shimmered in the moonlight as if the earth had donned her richest
ball-dress for some gala occasion. We sped continually downward, snaking
swiftly in and out through the hills despite the frequent anxious
grinding of the brakes. Here we sank into the trough of one of the few
deep railway cuts in Cuba, there we rumbled across viaducts that lifted
us up among the fronds of the royal palms. A white roadway darted in and
out in a vain attempt to keep pace with us. Now we plunged into tunnels
of vegetation, to burst forth a moment later upon a vast rolling plain
washed by the intense tropical moonlight, which seemed to fall on the
humble thatched roofs scattered about it with a curiously gentle,
caressing touch. Our descent grew gradually less swift, the hills
diminished and shrank away into the distance, and at length the lights
of Santiago, which had flashed at us several times during the last
half-hour, spread about us like a surrounding army.
The short stretch between San Luís and Santiago is one of the prettiest
in Cuba. Travelers covering it twice would do well to make one trip in
automobile. It was our own good fortune to pass four times over it under
as many varying conditions. The two-engine climb in the full blaze of
day shows the scene in a far different mood than under the flooding
moonlight; the ascent at sunset has still another temperament; yet it
would be hard to say which of the three journeys more fully emphasizes
the beauty of a marvelous bit of landscape. Possibly the trip by road
has the greatest appeal, thanks chiefly to an embracing view of Santiago
and all its wooded-mountain environment from the crest of a precipitous
headland. In the early days of American occupation a splendid highway
was built, perhaps in the hope that the Cubans would some day be moved
to carry it on across the island to Havana, perhaps that they might have
a sample of real roadway to contrast with their own sad trails. But the
natives do not seem to have taken the lesson to heart. They call the
road “Wood’s Folly,” and though it still retains some of its former
perfection, the condition into which it has already been permitted to
lapse does not promise well for the future. To the Cubans, content,
apparently, to jounce over all but impassable _caminos_, the building of
good highways will probably be long considered a “folly.”
Though comparisons are odious, Santiago is the most picturesque city of
Cuba, so far as we saw it in two months of rambling to and fro over most
of the island. This is due largely to the fact that it is built on and
among hills. Seen from the bay, or from several other of the many points
of vantage about it, the city lies heaped up like a rock pile, the old
cathedral, which some unhappy thought has subjected to a “reforming,”
crowning the heap, which spreads out at the base as if it had lain too
long without being shoveled together again. Several other church-spires
protrude above the mass, but none of them is particularly striking.
Taken separately, perhaps its houses are little different from
prevailing Cuban architecture elsewhere; built as they are on the
natural terraces of the hills, they are lifted into plainer view, each
standing forth from the throng like the features of persons of varying
height in a human crowd. Huge walls from ten to twenty feet high prove
to be merely the foundations of the dwellings above, which look out head
and shoulders over their next-door neighbors below, to be in turn
overshadowed by their companions higher up. Santiago confesses to more
than four centuries of age, and proves the assertion by her appearance.
The medieval architecture which the conquistadores brought with them
direct from Spain has persisted, and has been reproduced in newer
structures more consistently than in Havana. The red-tiled roofs curve
outwardly far over the street with a curiously Japanese effect.
Balconies high above the pedestrian’s natural line of vision prove on
nearer approach to jut out from the ground floor. Sometimes the steep
streets tire with their climbing and break up frankly into broad
stairways. In other places they fall away so swiftly that they offer a
complete vista of multicolored house-walls, plunging at the end into the
dense blue of the landlocked harbor.
Santiago is picturesque because of its quaint old customs, its amusing
contrasts, the fantastic colors of its buildings, and the tumbled world
that lies about it. All Cuban cities offer a motley of tints, but
Santiago outdoes them all in the chaotic jumble of pigments. In a single
block we found house walls of lavender, sap green, robin’s-egg blue,
maize yellow, sky gray, Prussian blue, salmon, tan, vermilion, and
purple. This jumble of colors, with never two shades of the same degree,
gives the city a kaleidoscopic brilliancy under the tropical sun that is
equally entrancing and trying to the eye. Of quaint old customs there is
that of setting the entrance-steps sidewise into the wall of the house,
so that it must be a sharp-eyed resident who recognizes his own doorway.
It is a less open town than others of Cuba, for the steepness of the
streets has raised the windows above the level of the eye, and only here
and there does the stroller catch that comprehensive glimpse of the
interior which elsewhere gives him a sense of intruding upon the family
circle. It has, however, those same wide-open, yet exclusive, clubs
whose members love to lounge in full sight of their less-favored
fellow-citizens. Of contrasts between the old and the new there are
many. Pack-trains of mules and asses pass under the very lee of the
balcony dining-room overlooking the central plaza, where migratory
mortals sup in full-coursed, solemn state. On Saturdays all sorts and
conditions of human misery crawl in and out among luxurious automobiles,
begging their legitimate weekly pittance. There are few Fords in
Santiago; the steepness of her streets make more powerful cars essential
to certain progress. On the other hand, the medieval horse-drawn
carriage rattles and shakes its palsied way though the narrow _calles_
with a musical jangle of its warning bell.
Time was when Santiago was a sink of disease, if not of iniquity. It has
largely recovered from that condition, and its hundred thousand
inhabitants, tainted in the vast majority of cases with the blood of
Africa, no longer live in constant fear of sudden death. The principal
streets are well paved; its dwellings and places of public gathering are
moderately clean, though in the dry winter season dust swirls high and
penetratingly with every gust of wind. The third city of the island in
commercial importance—Cienfuegos having outstripped it in this
respect—it is the second in political significance. Some rate it first
in the latter regard, for it is usually the pot in which is brewed the
most serious causes of indigestion for the Central Government at Havana.
Santiago has always been noted for an Irish temperament that makes it
constitutionally “ag’in’ the gover’ment.”
Outside the center of town its streets are little more than mountain
trails. The houses degenerate to thatched hovels of mud and plaster;
full-blooded negroes loll in dingy doorways, which give glimpses of
contentment with pathetically few of this world’s comforts. Not a few of
these outskirts’ inhabitants are Jamaicans. One recognizes them by their
ludicrous attempts at aloofness from the native black Cubans, by their
greater circumspection of manner. Here and there a group of them,
usually all women, struggle to make some native urchin understand the
error of his ways and the reason for their incomprehensible displeasure,
and patter off, at least loudly discussing his misbehavior in their
heavy, academic English. In these sections the picturesqueness of
Santiago is apt to express itself chiefly in the variety and pungency of
its odors.
Officially the city is “Santiago de Cuba,” so called by its
sixteenth-century founders to distinguish it from its namesake, Santiago
de Compostella in Spain. Foreigners and even the Cubans of the Western
provinces address it familiarly by the first name; the natives of the
Oriente dub it “Cuba.” Walled on all sides by what to the Cubans are
high mountains, it offers a striking panorama from any high point in the
city. In places the ranges of big hills, culminating in Pico Turquino,
are as brown, bare, and nakedly majestic as the Andes; in others they
are half wooded with green scrub forests, above which commonly float
patched and irregular cloud canvases on which the tropical sunsets paint
their masterpieces with lavish and swift hand.
The city cemetery across the harbor is somehow less gruesome than most
Cuban burial-places. For one thing, it is unusually gifted with grass
and trees and the aery forms of tropical vegetation, instead of being
the bare field of most _campos santos_ in Spanish America. Its graves,
however, are family affairs, built of cement and six or eight “stories”
deep, so that the coffins are set one above the other, as their time
comes, in perfect chronological order. Over the top, commonly a bare
three or four feet above the grass, is laid a huge stone slab,
preferably of marble, with immense brass or nickeled rings at each
corner by which to lift it, and space on its top for a poetic epitaph to
each succeeding occupant. As in all Spanish countries, the tombs of all
but the wealthiest inmates are rented for a term of years, at the end of
which time, if the descendants fail to renew the contract, the bodies
are tossed into a common graveyard, to make room for those of greener
memory.
Martí, the Cuban “Father of Liberty,” is buried here, and Estrada Palma,
promoted from humble pedagogue in one of our own schools to first
President of Cuba. But neither holds the chief place in the heart of the
Cuban masses. That is reserved for Macéo, the negro general killed just
before the dawn of independence during a foolhardy scouting expedition
in the woods of Cacahual, in company with a bare half-dozen soldiers.
The gardeners seemed unusually industrious in the cemetery the day of
our visit; it was only next morning that we discovered they were
preparing for the Cuban “Memorial day,” which is observed throughout the
island, with much spouting of poetry and laying on of flowers, on
December 7, the anniversary of Macéo’s death at the hands of the
Spaniards.
San Juan Hill is a mere knoll in comparison with the ranges that
surround it on all sides. A street-car sets one down within a few
hundred yards of it, or one may stroll out to it within an hour along a
very passable highway. The “peace tree,” an immense ceiba under which
the contending generals came to terms, is peaceful indeed now, with only
the twittering of birds to break the whisper of its languid leaves,
except when a flock of tourists swirl down upon it in one of Santiago’s
hired machines and bellow for “Old Jeff” to come and tell them, in the
inimical dialect of our Southern “darky,” the story of his last battle.
From the ugly brick tower which marks the summit of the only Cuban hill
known to the average American, El Caney lies embowered in its
thick-wooded mountain-slope a few miles away, the same dawdling, sleepy
village it was when the Americans stormed it more than twenty years ago.
Morro Castle, unlike its prototype in Havana, is not visible from the
city; nor is the Caribbean itself. As one _chugs-chugs_ down the
landlocked bay, “Cuba” shrinks away, and finally disappears entirely in
a fold of the fuzzy hills, before the ancient fortress, framed in the
bluest of blue seas, comes into sight. Beyond the point where the
_Merrimac_ failed in its perilous mission a sheltered cove, with a
rusted cannon here and there among the bushes, gives landing-place, and
leaves the visitor to scramble upward along an ancient cobbled roadway
completely arched over in place with the rampant vegetation. Nature is
similarly toiling to conceal the old fortress from modern eyes, and bids
fair in time to succeed. The dismal dungeons, the gruesome
death-chamber, are still there, but the decay that has let the sunshine
filter into them here and there has robbed them of their terror, and
left only an imperfect setting for the anecdotes of a bygone age.
Lizards and others of their sort are the only inhabitants of El Morro
now, and through the huge holes in the outer walls made by American
cannon one may gaze out along the Caribbean to the hazy, mountainous
shore where still lie some of the skeletons of Cervera’s fleet.
Whatever else he misses in Santiago, the traveler should not fail to
spend a Sunday evening in the central plaza. It is a small block square,
completely paved in asphalt, and furnished with an equal profusion of
comfortable benches and tropical vegetation. Any evening, except in the
rainy season when the afternoon shower is delayed, will find it a study
in human types; but toward sunset on Sunday it becomes the meeting-place
par excellence of Santiago’s élite. They gather in almost exact order of
social rank, the smaller fry first, then the more pompous citizens,
until, by seven in this “winter” season, the families that the foreign
visitor never sees at any other time of the week stalk past in the
continual procession. The men, formed three or four or even six abreast,
march on the inside, clock-wise; the women saunter in similar formation
around the outer arc of the circle in the opposite direction. A pace of
about a mile an hour is a sign of proper social breeding. Negroes are by
no means lacking in any Santiago gathering, but they are in the minority
at this weekly promenade. The color line is not sharply drawn, but it is
approximate, in that each rank or group has its own gradations of tints.
The women seldom wear hats; the younger girls tie with a single ribbon
the hair that hangs down their backs. Rice powder is in plentiful
evidence on every feminine face, very few of which, candor obliges the
critical observer to admit, can be called attractive. The men, never
robust, more often slender to the point of effeminacy, one and all wear
stiff straw hats, tipped back at exactly the angle approved by the
Latin-American version of Parisian fashion. A felt hat is prima-facie
evidence of a foreigner; a Panama, all but universal in the country
towns, is almost never seen. Swarms of children of all sizes and colors,
the offshoots of the wealthier families, ludicrously overdressed,
scamper in and out with an _abandon_ in inverse ratio to the social
strata to which they belong. Saucy, rather insolent boys of from twelve
to fourteen, dressed like their elders down to the last trousers’
crease, swing their diminutive canes and strut along among the men, who
treat them with that curious oblivion to their immaturity that is
prevalent in all Latin America. Young as they are, they are old enough
to ogle the little girls of similar age in the approved fashion, half
admiringly, half suggestively, with a cynical shadow of a smile that
seems to belie the patent evidence of their age. Nor are the
over-dressed little maids behindhand in the game of mutual admiration
their elders are playing, and they pass the same quick signs of
recognition to their small boy friends as do their older sisters to
their own forward admirers.
If the municipal band plays the _retreta_, this inevitable Sunday
evening is enlivened, but Santiago comes for its weekly promenade
whether there is music or not. By the height of the evening every plaza
bench, the entire quadrangle of stone balustrade backed by the low
grille inclosing the square, are compactly occupied with admiring
citizens or with older promenaders catching their breath after their
undue exertions. Seven-passenger cars filled with elaborately
upholstered matrons deathly pale with rice powder, with a few elderly,
over-slender males tucked in between them, snort round and round the
square; the electric lights among the palm-trees disclose a slowly
pulsating sea of humanity, chiefly clad in white; the murmur of a
thousand low voices resembles the sound of a broken waterfall; the
musical tinkle of the steel triangles of sweetmeat-sellers blends
harmoniously into the suppressed uproar. “Every one worth knowing” knows
every one else in the throng. The straw hats are frequently doffed with
elaborate courtesy; gentle little bows pass incessantly between the two
opposing columns; the language of fans is constantly in evidence. The
requirements of dress are exacting at this general weekly airing. Ladies
of Santiago’s upper circle must indeed find it a problem not to be
detected here too often in the same gown; the men of the town may be
seen hurrying homeward every Sunday afternoon from their café lollings
or their cock-fights to don their spotless best; negroes of both sexes,
starched and ironed to the minute, walk with the circumspection of
automatons just removed from excelsior-packed boxes. From our Northern
point of view, there is much ill-mannered staring, an ogling of the
younger women which, though accepted as complimentary in Cuba, would be
nothing short of insulting with us. But with that exception, and a
tendency of columns a half-dozen abreast not to give way when courtesy
would seem to demand it, there is a general politeness, an evidence of
good-breeding in the slight social amenities of daily life, that it
would be hard to duplicate in our own brusk-mannered land.
The plaza promenade is a more general gathering-place, a more thorough
clearing-house of common acquaintance, than any included in Anglo-Saxon
institutions. Nowhere do the inhabitants of our own cities so thoroughly
mingle together irrespective of class. At the weekly meeting business
men make many of their coming engagements—or explain the breaking of one
arranged the week before. Here old friends who find no other chance to
get together spend an hour talking over old times; here youth forms new
acquaintances, here kindred spirits who might otherwise never have met
make enduring friendships. The exclusiveness of family life wherever
Spanish civilization has set its stamp is offset by the intercourse
fostered by these Sunday evenings in the public plazas. There the first
tender glances pass between youth and maid, to be followed, with due
propriety of delay, by soft words whispered through the _reja_ of her
prison-like home, and finally by his admittance, under parental
supervision, to the chair-forested parlor, whence there is seldom any
other escape than past the altar. There, too, looser characters
sometimes form their attachments, but always with due outward propriety.
The best-behaved city of our own land cannot be freer from visible
evidence of human perversity than the island of Cuba.
Toward eight the plaza throng begins to thin out. The more haughty
ladies of the _vida social_ and their cavaliers stroll away up the
laboriously mounting streets toward the better residential districts.
The second social stratum follows their lead in all but direction,
descending instead the _calles_ that pitch downward toward the harbor.
All but the rattletrap automobiles that ply for hire have snorted away.
The average tint of the promenaders grows steadily darker. Within a half
hour the plaza has become plebeian again both in manner and garb; in
place of the compact throng their remain only a few scattered groups. In
contrast, the luxurious clubs, facing the square, have taken on new
life. The municipal council meets in its wide-open chamber across the
way, a rabble peering in upon it through the heavy iron bars of the
_rejas_. Inside, beneath an elaborate painting of Santiago’s first
alcade—who was none other than the conqueror of Mexico—taking his first
oath of office, politician-faced men of varying degrees of African
ancestry slouch down into their seats with the super-bored attitude of
legislators the world over. On a rostrum backed not by likenesses of
Cuba’s native heroes, but by a portrait of Roosevelt as a young-man and
another of our own President, a kinky-haired orator begins a peroration
that rouses shrill roars of delight from the _reja_-hugging mob far into
the moonlighted tropical night.
Cuba’s patron saint, though she has never received official papal
sanction, is the Virgin of Cobre. The tale of her miraculous appearance
is monotonously similar to that with which most Spanish-speaking peoples
explain their dedication to some particular enshrined doll. Some three
hundred years ago, the legend runs, two men and a negro slave boy from
the village of Cobre, not far from Santiago, went to Nipe Bay to gather
salt. There they found, floating on the water, an image of the Virgin,
bearing the Child on one arm and holding aloft a gold cross. After
various vicissitudes which the mere heretic may pass over in silence the
image was set up in a shrine on the top of Cobre hill, in a church that
had been specially erected for it.
The figure is of wood, about fifteen inches high, and gaudily decorated
with the silks and jewels given by the pious believers. If one may
accept the testimony of the Cubans of the less-educated class,
particularly the fishermen, the _Virgen de Cobre_ has performed many
astounding miracles. At any rate, her priestly attendants have been
richly showered with worldly gifts, and her shrine is surrounded with
costly votive offerings—or was, at least, until some one ran away with
most of them about the time Spanish rule in Cuba was abolished. Pilgrims
still flock to Cobre, especially during the first days of September, and
if they do not leave gifts of value, at least they decorate the church
with crude and amusing drawings depicting the miracles that have been
performed for them, or with wax likenesses of the varying portions of
their bodies that have been cured by her intercession. A _guagua_
crowded with women of the masses jolts out to Cobre from Santiago even
during the off season. Now and then one runs across Cuban women of
similar antecedents wearing copper-colored ornaments and even entire
costumes of that shade, as signs of having dedicated themselves, in
gratitude for her favors, to the Virgin of Cobre. Many a Cuban church
displays a replica of the famous image, with a miniature boat, carved
from wood and bearing the three salt-gatherers, beneath it.
But the world changes, and the time came when the Virgin entered, in all
innocence, into conflict with practical modern forces beyond her
control. Copper was discovered in the hill beneath her. An English
company contracted to make good any damage their mining operations might
cause to the venerated shrine. During their tenure the church suffered
no injury. The mine was worked to what was considered the limit of its
real productiveness under old methods and was then abandoned. When world
conflict suddenly made copper worth increased exertion, Cobre was taken
over by an American syndicate. The mine had meanwhile filled with water.
When the new company began pumping this out, the old supporting timbers
gave way and the church of the Virgin on the hilltop above began to
sink. In time it fell completely out of sight. A new shrine,
monotonously like the spire-less and uninspiring country churches to be
found throughout all Cuba, was erected for the Virgin and her pilgrims
farther down the valley. The Archbishop of Santiago—for the old Eastern
city still remains the religious capital of the island despite Havana’s
greatness—entered suit against the new company on the strength of the
old English agreement. In his innocence of things worldly and geological
the ecclesiastic feared that the tricky Yankees were forestalling him by
washing out the ore in liquid form. An injunction ordered them to stop
pumping, and the mine rapidly filled again with water. At length the
prince of the church won his suit, with damages in excess of the value
of the mine. The Americans abandoned what had become a more than useless
concession, and to-day a mineful of water, colored with copper sulphates
and lapping undetermined streaks of ore, remains the property of the
Virgin of Cobre.
* * * * *
Daiquirí is not, as Rachel was justified in supposing, a cocktail
factory, but an eminently respectable iron mine belonging now to a great
American syndicate. It lies a score of miles eastward along the coast
from Santiago, and may be reached—when the company chooses it shall
be—by a little narrow-gage railroad older than Cuban independence. From
a dusty suburb of the eastern metropolis we traveled thither by
_cigüena_, as Cubans call a Ford with railroad feet. The half-breed
conveyance roared down a dry and rocky cavern to the coast, bursting out
upon the incredibly blue Caribbean beside a forgotten Spanish fortress
all but hidden under the rampant vegetation. For a time the line spins
along on the very edge of the sea, which lashes constantly at the
supporting boulders, and affords the seeker after scenic beauties an
entrancing vista of mountain headlands protruding one after another into
the hazy distance. This coastal region has little in common with the
fertile and richly garbed flatlands of the interior. Jagged coral rock,
known as _dientas de perro_ (dog’s teeth) to the Cubans, spreads away on
the left and here and there rises in forbidding cliffs on the right.
Vegetation is prolific, as always in the tropics, wherever a suggestion
of foothold offers, but it is a dry and thorny growth, a menacing
wilderness that invites few inhabitants. Only one abode of man breaks
the journey, a cluster of sun-faded huts known as Siboney, on a rock
before which stands a monument to the American forces that landed here
for the march on Santiago.
Farther on, where the sea hides its beauty behind a widening strip of
rocks and bristling vegetation, are a few fertile patches densely
covered with cocoanut and banana groves. A cocoanut plantation is the
lazy man’s ideal investment. Once it is planted, he has only to wait
until the nuts drop to have a steady income, taking the trouble to husk
them if he cares to save something on transportation, but needing to
exert himself no further unless thirst forces him to walk up a tree and
cut down one of the green nuts filled with its pint of cool and
satisfying beverage. The mountains rose to ever more impressive heights
as the tireless Ford screamed onward, their culminating peak exceeded
only by the Pico Turquino, peering into the sky from a neighboring
range. Half bare, brown of tint, wrinkled as the Andes, they rise
majestically into the sky, and if they are not high mountains, as
mountains go the world over, they are at least lofty enough to be
cloud-capped in the early mornings and now and then during the day.
Mining villages, of which there are several besides the “mother mine” of
Daiquirí, began to appear, perched on projecting knobs and knolls, long
before we drew up at the port where hundreds of tons of ore are dropped
every week directly into the ships—when ships can be had.
The mines themselves are laid out in full sight between heaven and
earth. For they are open-work mines, each “bench” like the step of a
giant stairway, reminding one of the Inca terraces of Peru.
Steam-shovels gnaw at the two horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters, frequent
explosions rouse the languid mountains to the exertion of sending back a
long series of echoes, and the gravity-manipulated ore-buckets spin
constantly away across the void to the crushers below. Here, too, the
workmen are Spaniards who remain in Cuba only long enough to carry a
villager’s fortune back to their native land, and their labor in the
open air gives them a tint far different from the human moles of most
mining communities. Their houses are pitched high on a conical hill far
above the mine, the married men living on the topmost summit, the
“single village” farther down the slope, no doubt in order to convince
the benedicts that they have risen to higher things. A locomotive
dragged us up to the bit of a town, whence we rode on horseback to the
crest of another foothill, on which stood in splendid isolation the
residence of the bachelor manager. Of the veritable botanical and
zoölogical gardens with which he had surrounded himself, of the beauty
of the scene as the sun sank into the Caribbean far below, the rustling
of the cocoanut palms in the steady breeze, and the distant sounds of
the mining community settling down for the night I need say nothing
except that we regretted we had not a hundred days instead of one to
spend there.
The manager had lived through several revolutions, the latest less than
three years before, and had grown accustomed to have some brakeman or
miner in his employ march into his office at the head of a dozen
ragamuffins and announce that he had been made a colonel overnight.
Luckily our host was quite plainly liked by all classes of the
community, so that such visits were usually mere social calls, and he
had only to congratulate the new military genius, give him a drink and
smoke a cigarette with him as a sign of equality to have him offer the
mine his protection even unto death and stalk merrily away at the head
of his “troops.” On the mountain-sides across a mighty gully and high
above us were still the remnants of old French coffee plantations, with
native squatters in the old houses. By daylight the steep slopes stood
forth like aged tapestries, golden brown in tinge except where they were
dotted with immense mango-trees which looked at this distance like tiny
green bushes. There one may find dogs, cats, cattle, guinea-fowls, pigs,
and coffee all gone equally wild since the days when the plantation
owners fled.
Wedded as it is to its sugar industry, Cuba is nevertheless capable of
producing many other things. Of four-footed game there is little, as in
all the West Indies. The aborigines must have been mainly vegetarians,
for the only animal on the island at the time of the discovery was the
_jutía_, which looks like a combination of rat, opossum, and woodchuck,
lives in mangroves and hilly places, feeds on the bark of trees, and is
so tame and stupid it may be killed with a club. It is still eaten, “its
flesh being much esteemed by those who like it,” as one description has
it, though to the unaccustomed it is oily and insipid. During the last
century deer were introduced, which are fairly plentiful in some parts
of the island and would be more so if there were game laws and any
feasible means of enforcing them. _Jutías_ and _boniatos_ frequently
constituted the entire commissary of the insurgents against the
Spaniards. The latter is a tuber so prolific that an acre, free from
insects, has been known to produce fifty thousand pounds of it in
eighteen months. Its chief rival in the peasant’s garden and on most
Cuban tables is the _malanga_, the _taro_ of the South Seas, easily
distinguishable by its large heart-shaped leaves. Of the feathered
species there is a larger representation than of quadrupeds. Wild
turkeys, called _guanajos_, abound, the flocks of guineas are sometimes
so large as to do serious damage to the crops. The indigenous birds are
distinguished more by their color than by their ability to sing. The
best of them in the latter respect is the _sinsonte_, which not only
imitates the songs of other birds, but has been known to learn short
pieces of music. Snakes are rare and never venomous, the largest being a
species of boa constrictor with a tan-colored skin, so sleepy and
harmless that small boys climb the trees in which it sleeps and knock it
to the ground with sticks. Cuban oysters are much smaller than ours,
though the natives claim they are more succulent and nutritious. There
are lobsters also, but the finest of all Cuban sea foods is the
_congrejo moro_, a huge crab with a beautiful red and black shell.
Little corn is grown, and still less rice, though the latter invariably
makes its appearance at the two daily meals. Vegetables, except for the
_malanga_ and _boniato_, are rare, as in all tropical America; fruit, on
the other hand, almost unlimited. There are twenty varieties of bananas,
seedy oranges may be had anywhere, the mango, pineapple, _mamey_,
_guayaba_, _mamoncillo_, _guanábana_, _chirimoya_, _sapote_ or
_níspero_, the _papaya_, a tree-grown melon superior to our best
cantaloupes and with a taste of honeysuckle, and the grape-fruit are
among the many island delicacies, but only the pineapple and grape-fruit
are cultivated with any attention. Even with all these fruits to choose
from the most familiar Cuban dessert is the apple, imported from our
Northwestern States and retailing at from twenty to thirty cents each.
Unfortunately, though most American fruits arrive in Cuba in perfect
condition, few of those grown in Cuba can endure the journey to the
United States. Lastly, for the ever-present _palma real_ could not be
left out of any mention of Cuban products, this most beautiful of the
island’s trees is as useful as it is incomparable as a landscape
decoration. The royal palm has no bark and the trunk is hollow, so that
with a very little labor it can be fashioned into waterpipes or split
into a rough and ready lumber. The fronds make splendid roofing, light,
yet impermeable. The _yagua_, or leaf base, has a score of uses. Pigs
prefer the oily little nuts which hang in clusters beneath the leaves to
any other food. The branches to which these seeds are attached make good
brooms; salt can be had from the roots; the “cabbage” from which the
leaves gradually form makes an excellent salad, raw or cooked, and
lastly, the lofty tree is peerless as a lightning-rod.
Daiquirí and Cobre by no means exhaust the places of interest in the
mammoth eastern province of Cuba. There are branch railroad lines, for
instance, to the western, northern, and southern coasts of the province,
each several hours from Santiago. On the way to Manzanillo one passes
the village in which the “_Grito de_ Yara” began the revolt against
Spanish rule, and in the neighborhood of which some of the old
revolutionary leaders still live. Antilla, in the north, faces one of
the most magnificent bays in the New World; beyond the town of
Guantánamo, noteworthy for its unbroken chorus of roosters, two little
railways flank the opposite shores of the gulf of the same name, one of
them passing through an entrancing little valley. The other wanders
across a flat, thorny, and rather arid land to Caimanera, noted for its
salt beds and as the nearest place free from the American drought which
reigns perpetually over the station of our marines and sailors holding
our naval base of Guantánamo Bay.
* * * * *
He who comes to Cuba with the rigid American conception of the gulf
separating the African and the Aryan races will find our ward little
inclined to follow our lead in that particular matter. In the Havana
custom-house his belongings will be examined by a black man. The finest
statue in Cuba is that of the negro general, Macéo; had he lived he
would in all probability have been the island’s first president. One
soon becomes accustomed to seeing negroes slap white men on the back
with a familiar “Hello, Jim,” and be received by an effusive handshake.
Sextets gathered for a little banquet at café tables frequently show as
many gradations of color, from a native Spaniard to a full African,
repulsive perhaps for his diamond rings and over-imitation of Parisian
manners, and are served by obsequious white waiters. The majority of
Cuban negroes, however, seem less objectionable than those in the lands
where the color-line is closely drawn. Accustomed to being treated as
equals, many of them have developed a self-respect and a gentlemanliness
rare among our own blacks, or even among our working class of Caucasian
blood. They have, too, a pride in personal appearance scarcely inferior
to that of the sometimes over-dressed white Cubans. Mark Twain once
stated that there is much to be said for black or brown as the best tint
for human complexions; one is often reminded of the remark in noting how
handsome some of these black Cuban dandies look under their stiff straw
hats.
Negroes, of course, are by no means in the majority in the largest of
the Antilles, though most Cubans probably have African blood in their
veins. In the Oriente may still be found traces of the Siboney Indians.
Immigrants from all the varied provinces of Spain, African slaves,
Chinese coolies, creoles from Haiti, Louisiana, and Florida, and a
scattering of many other races have mingled together for generations;
and from this blending of east and west, north and south, tempered by
the tropical climate, emerges the Cuban. To a certain extent all these
types have kept their racial characteristics, but they are only lost
under the overwhelming influence of what may be called the national
Cuban character, which varies little from that of all Latin-Americans.
Like all nations, the islanders have their good and their bad points.
The simple amenities of life are more thoroughly cultivated than in our
own quick-spoken land. Rudeness is rare; courtesy is wide-spread among
all classes. One would scarcely expect to see duplicated in our large
cities the action of a mulatto traffic policeman stationed on the
busiest corner of Havana’s plaza, who waited for a lull in the task
assigned him to cross the street and, raising his cap, corrected a
direction he had given me a moment before. I have heard a woman tourist
who failed to understand one of these immaculate guardians remark
petulantly to her companions, “You’d think they’d make them learn
English, wouldn’t you?” Our native tongue is often useless in Cuba, to
be sure; but how would it be if _they_, whoever they are, required
travelers to learn Spanish before entering a Spanish-speaking country?
The general courtesy is sometimes tempered by unintentional lapses from
what we understand by that word; Cubans call one another, for instance,
and try to call Americans, by a hissing “P-s-t,” which is not customary
in our own good society. They are emotional and excitable; their
necessity for gesticulation frequently requires them to put down a
telephone receiver in order to use both hands; they have little
concentration of attention, and are much given to generalizing from
superficial appearances to save themselves the labor of going to the
bottom of things. Of quick intelligence, they learn with facility when
there is anything to be gained by learning, but memory rather than
thought is their dominant faculty. This last is probably due to the
antiquated methods of the schools, that make the child a mere parrot and
never develop his powers of judgment and comparison, which often remain
inactive and dormant throughout life.
His politeness has its natural counterpart of insincerity until, in the
perhaps too harsh words of one of his own people, “we cultivate
falsehood with a facility which becomes prodigious.” This insincerity is
perhaps natural in a society that lived for centuries under constant
suspicion of infidelity and surrounded by an atmosphere of distrust on
the part of the Spanish rulers. Pride, which often reaches the height of
a virtue among the Spaniards, is apt to degenerate in the Cuban to mere
vanity, making him more susceptible to flattery than to reason. “Our
dominating nervous temperament,” says the native critic quoted above,
“has contributed to make us irritable, sometimes insufferable. On
account of this sensitiveness we have more sensations than ideas, more
imagination than understanding, with the result that when we turn our
attention to anything the pretty is apt to have more importance than the
true or useful. We are better path-followers than originators; we prefer
to triumph by astuteness rather than by reason; we are prodigal, and for
that reason the thirst for riches is our dominant characteristic. The
rascality of our priests, largely from Spain, has made the average
Cuban, if not an atheist, at least a skeptic and indifferent in
religious matters.”
Americans who have lived in Mexico, of whom there are many now in Cuba,
all make comparisons unfavorable to the Cubans. We did not meet one of
them who was not longing for the day when they, men and women alike,
could return to the land of weekly revolutions. “I hear,” said a visitor
from the North, “that the Cubans are rather slippery in business.” “Say
rather,” replied an old American resident, “that they are good business
men, with the accent on the business.” This verdict seems to be almost
unanimous. The Cuban has a habit of beating himself on the chest and
shouting about his _honor_ at the very moment when both he and his
hearers know he is lying. It is natural, perhaps, that the heat of the
tropics should breed hatred for work and cause men to become tricky
instead. But this trickery is less conspicuous in business than in
politics. The war gave Cuba an enormous commercial impulse, yet there
are comparatively few Cubans in commerce. Parents prefer that their sons
adopt professions or enter government service. A Cuban congressman ended
his appeal for a bill authorizing the government to send a hundred
youths abroad each year to study commerce with, “Those who do not
succeed in business can become government agents and consuls.” The
notion of foisting the failures upon the state awakened not a titter of
surprise among his hearers; they had long been used to that custom under
Spanish rule.
The Cubans are always discussing politics, though the great majority of
them have no voice whatever in the government. To an even greater extent
than with us the best men shun political office. The few of this class
who enter politics soon abandon it in disgust and to an ignorant and
avaricious clique are left the spoils. More than one representative has
learned to sign his name after being elected. One admitted in public
debate that he thought the Amazon was in Europe; another scoffed at the
idea that Cuba was entirely surrounded by water. Congressmen go to their
sessions armed, and revolvers are frequently drawn during some heated
controversy. Some of them have been known to take advantage of the
immunity from arrest to refuse to pay their rent and to make attacks
upon women. A recent president was elected on a platform of
cock-fighting, a national lottery, and _jai alai_, this last being the
Basque game of _pelota_, at which gambling flourishes at its best. The
president now in power was apparently all that a president should be
during the first few months of his term; to-day only those on whom he
has showered favors have a good word for him. “The Liberal who ruled
before him was a grafter,” say natives and foreign residents alike, “but
at least he let other people get theirs, while this man grabs everything
for himself. In other words he is as Conservative as the other was
Liberal.” If one is to believe local opinion, Cuba has had but two
honest and efficient rulers since her independence, some say in her
history,—her first elected president and her first American military
governor. Love for the latter is almost universal; one frequently hears
the assertion that, if he could run and honest elections could be held,
he would be elected president of Cuba by an overwhelming majority,
notwithstanding that the average Cuban does not like the average
American.
Graft, known in Cuba as “_chivo_,” is hereditary in the chief of the
West Indies. In olden days Spain looked upon Cuba as a legitimate source
of quick and easy gain. Royal grants were bestowed upon favorites;
titles and positions were created as a means of securing all the profit
possible. The few years of American rule did little to eradicate this
point of view, and the old idea still persists. Political positions are
treated quite frankly as opportunities for amassing private fortunes,
and the man in public life who does not take complete advantage of his
position is openly rated a fool. The reign of “_chivo_” is supreme
through all the grades of officialdom; it is not necessary to seek
examples, they are constantly thrusting themselves upon the attention.
Investigation has shown that half the owners of private automobiles and
many liquor dealers have paid no licenses, but have “fixed it up” with
the inspectors. During a recent hurricane the new sea-wall along the
Malecón in Havana was totally wrecked, though the portion built during
American rule suffered scarcely any damage. The millionaire Spanish
contractor had saved on cement by giving part of the sum which should
have been spent for it to those whose business it was to pass upon his
work. The director of the national lottery made enough in four years to
buy one of the largest sugar _centrals_ on the island, and his position,
you may be sure, did not come to him gratis. A real estate company
offered to furnish the oil and tarvia if the government of Havana would
pave the streets of a new suburb; one fourth of the material was
actually used for that purpose and the rest was sold by the public
officials. The church is not behindhand in the pursuit of “_chivo_.”
Priests demand fabulous sums for marrying, and advise the _guajiros_ and
laboring classes who cannot pay for the ceremony to go without, as
thousands of families have done, many of them having accepted it years
later as Christmas presents to themselves and their children from
American employers. During the recent census conservative enumerators
failed to enroll liberal citizens, thereby depriving them of the right
to vote; and if the tables had been turned, the only difference would
have been that the other party would have lost their ballots. During the
war a chain was lowered each evening across the mouth of Havana harbor
as a protection against submarines; an English captain who knew nothing
of the new rule against entering the port at night was arrested by a
Cuban naval officer and then told that the matter could be “fixed up”
for a twenty-dollar bill.
“Concessions” and “permits” are the chief aids of the “_chivo_”-seeker.
Each morning six men who have a “concession” netting them a neat little
sum for gathering the rubbish floating on the water row across the
harbor and back without touching the acres of flotsam, and hurry away to
their private jobs early in the day. Havana has several new concrete
piers, but they are not used because of “concessions” to the owners of
tumbledown wharves. The same is true of a new garbage incinerator;
lighterage “concessions” cost fortunes in time and money to ships
entering the harbor. Nothing can be built in Cuba without a permit. The
man who wishes to erect a house in Havana draws up his plans and submits
them to the city architects. As often as he comes to get them, he is
informed that “the man who works on these matters is not here now,
but”—and if he takes the statement at par, the plans are placed at the
bottom of the pile again as he leaves; but if he inadvertently slips a
greenback of large denomination among them, the permit is forthcoming
within twenty-four hours. One must have a permit to make the slightest
alterations in house or office. An American who had secured a permission
to paint his house was threatened with arrest for adding a second coat
without another permit, and forced to “fix it up.” When he tried to
erect a fence he found that it could not be constructed of wood, but ten
dollars made the inspector so blind that one erected of that material is
represented on the city maps as made of cement and iron. The man who
examines your baggage upon arrival in Havana will not pass it for hours
or even days unless you accept his offer to have it transported to your
hotel by draymen of his choosing and at his price, and so on, through
all the vicissitudes of life and every branch of daily intercourse. Like
the lianas and parasites which cling to the trees of Cuban forests, the
productive class of the nation is everywhere supporting these useless
hangers-on; and like those giants of the vegetable world the fertility
of the island makes it strong enough to bear the burden without any
serious impairment of its health and prosperity.