Читать книгу Roaming Through the West Indies - Harry Alverson Franck - Страница 7

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cuban shoemaker

Cuban soldiers

Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground

The Central Plaza of Cienfuegos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A principal street of Santa Clara

The Central Plaza of Santa Clara

A dairyman, Santa Clara district

Cuban town scenery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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