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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.

Cuban travelers

A Cuban milkman

A street of Santiago de Cuba

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.