Havana is a fool’s Paradise--a lunatic limbo for people with loud
clothes, lots of money, loose morals and light heads. It is the place
where bad folks go to have a good time. The more disreputable a city is,
the more popular it is to high society.
I have visited Havana many times and found the H in its name stood for
Hell, not Heaven. On a recent sojourn I asked a traveling companion what
the state of religion was and if Havana’s morals were improved. “Oh, yes,
there has been a great reformation.” He had scarcely made this gratifying
statement when a young man came up to me and showed some vile postcards
and postals which he offered for sale. This did not happen in a side
street at night, but in Central Park at noon.
Havana has reformed! The city has no “segregation,” but you may walk for
miles along streets to the waterfront and find every other house with a
seductive senorita at the door or window with extended hand or winsome
voice urging you in broken Spanish or English to forsake the counsel of
your mother’s Bible. Regular saloons and concert halls had scores of the
women of the town at the tables sitting with motley men, while glasses
clinked and phonographs scratched their screechy music. This was all bad
enough but the lowest hell was reached when I saw a woman standing in the
doorway offering to sell a girl of about 14 who stood by her side. At the
end of certain streets the police were on watch to keep the women off
the sidewalks, and so maintain an appearance of decency and order. Other
places were unwatched and free.
Havana has reformed! The sporting women of the town advertise in several
of the local magazines, where you find their photos, house address and
some such paragraph in Spanish or in English for the benefit of the
American tourist: “Tourist! Do you wish a good house in Havana, with
plenty of women, pretty and elegant? Go to ---- street, No. ----, ask for
Helena. Go today.” Here’s another: “Artistic Academy. If you want a place
for pleasure and a good time, go to ----, plenty of nice girls.” Another
want ad reads: “Ladies from all nations,” and still another, “Violeta
has moved to ---- street, and with her Parisian arts welcomes the Havana
public.”
Poor pleasure-seekers, whose law is fashion and folly their pursuit!
Bubbles on the wave of pleasure, a tracery on the sand which Time’s tide
will soon erase. Every year the siren voice of Havana calls, “Come in
your private yacht on the Gulf Stream of gold; come with full purse and
empty head and heart; come, you ‘best’ society, that you may be seen at
your worst; come, all ye who would desert the temple of your mind and
soul for this Circe’s palace of fleshy pleasures!”