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IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

BY
H. G. DE LISSER

KINGSTON
THE GLEANER COMPANY LTD.

1910

PREFACE

CUBA, Jamaica, Panama: those are the countries dealt with in this
little work.
On Panama I have written very briefly. The present importance
of that Republic lies chiefly in its being the scene of a great undertaking
which, when finally accomplished, should bring about far-reaching changes
in the industrial and economic position of the West Indian Islands. The
principal route to the Canal, on its Atlantic side, is the Windward Passage,
and that Passage is commanded by Cuba and Jamaica. Hence it follows
that Cuba and Jamaica have, geographically and strategically, a close
connection with Panama. Because of this, and because I believe that
those two islands must reap directly most of whatever benefit there is
to be derived from the opening of the Canal, I have added to a work
on Cuba and Jamaica a chapter on Panama.
Why has this book been written ? To give those who do not know
the West Indies some idea of their people, their appearance, and the
manners and customs that prevail in them. Cuba is a Spanish, Jamaica
an English island. They are near neighbours, but their development
has taken place along different lines, their people are different, and so is
their future. And the contrast they present, even as regards configuration,
topography, and scenery, is most interesting.
I have added a few notes which I hope will prove of some service
to tourists.
Most of the following chapters first appeared in the Daily Gleaner, the
leading West Indian newspaper.
H. G. DE L.
KINGSTON, JAMAICA.
December 14, 1909.
V

1 3796

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD I

CHAPTER II
HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY 23

CHAPTER III

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY 37

CHAPTER IV
THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS 62

CHAPTER V

KINGSTON, THE GATEWAY OF JAMAICA .

CHAPTER VI

THE AMUSEMENTS OF JAMAICA 97

CHAPTER VII

PEOPLE AND POLITICS 112

CHAPTER VIII

ON THE ROAD 125

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER IX
PAGE
THROUGH A BEAUTIFUL LAND 137

CHAPTER X

A VISIT TO PANAMA I53

CHAPTER XI

HINTS TO TOURISTS 63

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE
THE MORRO CASTLE AND MALECON, HAVANA 8

THE MALECON WITH RESIDENCES IN THE DISTANCE. 6

MILK VENDOR, CUBA 24

MAKING LOVE, CUBA 28

THE PRADO, HAVANA 32

THE CATHEDRAL, HAVANA 40

COUNTRY HOUSE WITH AVENUE OF ROYAL PALMS 44

BRINGING CANES TO THE FACTORY, CUBA 48

A COUNTRY SCENE, CUBA 56

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA 64

KING STREET, KINGSTON 80

TOWN OF MANDEVILLE, JAMAICA .88

ROARING RIVER, JAMAICA 96

ROAD TO BOG WALK 112

BANANA PLANTATION 120

JAMAICAN PEASANTS IN THE FIELD 124

THREE JAMAICA SCENES 128

TOWN OF PORT ANTONIO 132

x ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE
COFFEE PULPING, JAMAICA 36

NATIVE BOY PICKING COCOA-NUTS 136

THE SQUARE, MONTEGO BAY 144

THE FORT, MONTEGO BAY 144

CULEBRA CUT, ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 56

DEE STREET, COLON 156

CHAPTER I

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

QUITE forty miles away a fan-like glare flamed bright against the horizon, looking
as though it rose out of the depths of the tropic sea. To the right of us and
but dimly discernible in the light of the stars and the crescent moon was a
long low-lying shadow which we knew to be the north-western coast of Cuba;
around us were the starlit waters of the Caribbean; above us a sky studded
with a million distant suns and streaked here and there with heavy clouds from
the heart of which gleamed forth at intervals broad sheets of pallid lightning.
The freshening wind whipped the surface of the sea to foam. Here and there
from the looming shadow-like land a friendly lighthouse sent forth its rays of
warning. We went slowly, very slowly, for we could not enter the harbour of
Havana before sunrise; but the fascination of the city was already upon us, and
so we stood for hours on the deck of the vessel watching the lights come closer
into view.
I had passed near the island of Cuba on previous occasions and had gazed
with curiosity on its terrace-like slopes and on the numerous islets and cays
that cluster along its extensive line of coast. The largest of the West Indian
islands, the most important strategically and the most fertile, it had always
had for me an appeal of the strongest. It was Spain's last possession in these
waters. It is the latest of all the Spanish-American republics. Before it became
free some bloody revolutions had to be suppressed and more than one fierce
battle fought; and in the end, as fate would have it, the freedom of Cuba was
not won by the same means by which the rest of Spanish-America attained
its independence.
Province after province of the old Spanish dominions in the New World rose
and proclaimed its independence after Napoleon I. had driven the Spanish
kings from the throne of Spain and put his own feeble brother in their place.
Not one of them chose to return to its old allegiance when the Spanish sovereign
Ferdinand came back to his own. They fought to preserve the freedom they
had won, and Europe and America left them to win or lose as fate should decide.

2 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

They won; but Cuba chose to remain loyal, and so to Cuba was given the
title of "The Ever Faithful Isle."
But the time came when "The Ever Faithful Isle" in its turn became
weary of oppression and misgovernment. Something of that story I shall tell
later on-the last chapter of it is already known to all the world. The revolution
which began in 1895 lasted until February, 1898. In that month a new phase
of the struggle was entered upon, for, with the blowing up of the Maine in
Havana Harbour, American intervention followed as a matter of course.
Intervention was sure to come; that it came so dramatically was but an accident
in the procession of events. For seventy years the eyes of American statesmen
had been turned towards Cuba. For seventy years-for longer than seventy
years-the Spaniard had realized that the day would come when he should
have to fight for the last remnant of his vast dominions in the West. The
signal for the final struggle was given on the night of February 15, 1898, and
a few months later the fleet of Spain under Admiral Cervera lay a wreck and
captive along the coast of Santiago. In the West Indies the reign of the
Spaniard closed amidst the thunder of cannon and the shrieks of drowning men.
The world which Columbus had discovered for Spain was finally lost when,
weeping like a child, Admiral Cervera stepped on board the conqueror's ship
and handed him his sword.
Something of all this passed through my mind on the night when I first
saw the lights of Havana flaring on the distant sky, and realized that at last
I was about to see the city and country I had so often longed to see. We crept
forward at a snail's pace, and one by one the passengers dropped off to sleep
in their cloth chairs upon the deck. But with the glimmer of daylight in the
east, with the first paling of the stars and lightening of the sky, we were awake
and trembling with anticipation. At three o'clock in the morning the great
lamps along the foreshore of the city could be distinctly seen, blazing in a
magnificent crescent. At five o'clock the lamps had all gone out, and there
appeared along the sea-front the noble esplanade which forms part of the sea-wall
of Havana. On the north behind this a long row of yellow-white houses rose,
following the curve of the crescent shore and stretching away to the west.
On our left a dark-grey fortress surmounted by a lighthouse jutted out into
the sea and completely commanded the entrance to the harbour; straight in
front of us was a narrow opening, and to the right of it another fort. This
was La Punta, that on the left was the famous Morro Castle of Havana, a
fortress massive and stately, and with the dignity that comes of age and of
historic associations.
Before we pass between these ancient forts and into the harbour of Havana,
we have already received an indelible impression of the city as one sees it from
the sea. We have seen before us a bay whose blue waters pale into pearly
green as they roll shoreward and break into surf against the shelving coral

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

coast. We have seen the sea-wall promenade that the Americans built, and the
flat-roofed houses; we have seen a city that rises from the sea and has put
on its best robes to greet the stranger. It is a city which seems proudly conscious
of its splendid appearance, its fine situation, and its reputation as being the
first and best amongst .the West Indian capitals. The men who built this part
of Havana built well, for on those who have seen it it leaves an unforgettable
impression. And as this picture prints itself on the retina of the mind, we pass
between the forts, and into the sheltered, spacious harbour of Havana.
Let me try to make you see it with the eye of the imagination and with
the aid of such poor powers of description as may be at my command. No
one has ever yet described a city or a scene as it actually is : it is the province
of the painter to catch and fix for us the world of colour and of form and
light. Yet a writer may put down the impressions be receives from some
beautiful landscape or from some interesting spectacle of human life and activity;
and such a spectacle is that which the harbour of Havana presents. The city
itself is built upon a peninsula, a large part of which is composed of alluvial
sediment. The entrance to its harbour is but a thousand feet wide, but further
on the harbour widens to a mile and a half : in length it is something over
three miles. On its western shore lies the city, and one may see at a glance that
Havana is but a little above the level of the sea, the ground rising gently from
the water-edge into low wooded hills to the south and west. On the left-hand
side of the harbour as you steam inwards are the fortifications of the Morro and
Cabana. These follow the line of the low hills that protect the harbour, and
further in there are still other fortresses. All these may have been excellent
defences in the days of wooden ships. To-day their usefulness is gone, but their
picturesque effect is undeniable.
The Spaniards knew the value of Havana. Early in the sixteenth century Don
Diago de Velasquez called it "The Key of the New World," and commanding as
it does the straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, this name has a certain
poetic appropriateness. The forts with their hundreds of embrasures stand
out grey patches in the midst of green, and opposite to them Havana appears
as a mass of yellowish, red-tiled houses interspersed with patches of green.
Green, too, is the water of this harbour, an oily, sickly, darkish green, horrible
to look at and horrible to think about. For centuries the filth and sewage of the
city has flowed upon it. Once it was 40 feet deep, now it is but eighteen
or twenty, and the bottom of it is a bed of slime undisturbed by the trifling rise
and fall of the tide. Except when strong winds blow, the water here is calm
and, as Havana is one of the busiest ports of tropical America, the shipping of
the world is represented here.
There they lie, the ships of all the nations. A great Frenchman is anchored
in the centre of the harbour and is flying the yellow quarantine flag; two
Americans boats are being laden with sugar; the flag of Spain floats from that

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

vessel yonder; our own ship flies the Union Jack, and there are other steamers
and barges and schooners everywhere. On the Havana side of the harbour a
hundred lighters lie with furled sails-a very forest of large flat-bottomed boats
and rakish masts. Fine ferry-boats steam across at regular intervals, bearing
freight and passengers to the little town of Regla, which is situated opposite to
Havana and is one of the city's suburbs. Pert little steam launches flit hither
and thither among the large craft, impudently demanding the right of way;
heavy barges pursue their lumbering course from one point to the other with
solemn indifference; and everywhere are the stout, strong passenger boats with
each its single boatman, its awning over the stern seats, and its shoulder of sail.
How bright and animated is the appearance of it all! The boats with their
awnings and their sails have reminded some voyagers of the canals of Venice;
and here, too, the city rises from the shore, and from the surface of the water
one may catch a glimpse of long, narrow streets, and church towers, and avenues
of trees. From the roof of Havana's Chamber of Commerce there rises a
splendid dome, and from the dome there springs a golden figure which holds
your attention for a moment as the vessel passes by. Along the low sea-wall
are wharves and covered iron piers, splendidly built and kept in good condition.
A busy harbour it is, and the entrance to a prosperous city. And looking down
upon it all are the weather-worn fortresses which the Spaniards built, but which
could not prevent The Key of the New World" from passing into other and alien
hands.
Havana does not wake to business as early as the sea-coast towns of Europe
and America; so though you may come to anchor a little after six o'clock, it may
be some time before you are free to go ashore. There are many preliminaries to
be gone through. First the doctor comes on board and examines the ship's
papers; then he inspects you personally to ascertain your health. He is satisfied
and leaves; then comes another official (called, I believe, the Captain of the
Port), and I think he brings with him about twenty-five inspectors," all dressed
in neat crash uniforms and caps, and most of them looking as if they would
be much happier with some real work to do. It takes the chief inspector quite
a time to examine the ship's papers. He must know the quantity and contents
of all the passengers' trunks, as well as the quantity and kind of cargo in the ship ;
he wants duplicates of every form, and if a single name is misspelt, or a wrong
initial set down on the duplicate, the form may have to be made up all over again.
If this official is satisfied, he leaves two or three of his subordinates on board
to watch proceedings, and betakes himself to his launch and to another ship.
Now, you think, we can land at last; but you are soon undeceived; for though
you may have come successfully through the scrutiny of the doctor and the
examination of the inspector, you have yet to reckon with the immigration agent.
This officer will want to know your status in society and your object in coming
to this country, and unless he grants permission you cannot go ashore. So we:

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

wait for the immigration agent while a hot hate of Cuban official routine springs
up in our hearts; and no wonder, for now the sun is shining full upon the water
and yonder the green avenues seem to promise a grateful place of rest. Still,
even in Cuba, the immigration agent does arrive at last, and after satisfying
himself that we are not Chinamen or penurious labourers he says we may land;
on which we discover that the launch which is to take us ashore is nowhere
to be seen. We therefore find ourselves either. compelled to remain on board
a little longer or to take one of the boats that have gathered in scores around the
ship. The launch will come later on, we know, but some of us will not wait for
it. We have had enough of Cuban procrastination. So we spring into a guadano
and are pulled towards the shore. In a few minutes we are treading on Cuban
soil.
In every land the traveller is greeted by hosts of porters anxious to assist him
(for a consideration) in his passage through the Custom House. In Havana it is
the same, though of the ten or twelve persons who surrounded me as I landed I am
not sure which were employed by the Government and which were gentlemen of
independent and irresponsible position. I only know that I saw a four-hundred-
weight trunk carefully deposited on the top of my light valise, which had been
placed on the truck used to take the luggage from the wharf to the Custom House.
I did not approve of this arrangement, but my attempts at remonstrance were
evidently misinterpreted as signs of complete approval, for, after nodding at me
encouragingly, the porter shouted "Vamos and away he went to where, in the
centre of a square formed by low counters, the Custom House officials of the
Republic were standing. Then commenced an excited dialogue between the hotel
agent who claimed me as his own, and the Custom House officer who was much
perturbed by the neckties I had brought with me. The Cuban Customs regulations
allow the traveller to bring with him clothing to the value of twenty pounds,
and I am sure that the things I had were not worth quite that. Yet he could
not away with those three new ties. He pointed to them fiercely. I explained
that a civilised man was usually expected to wear ties; the hotel agent called
down the vengeance of heaven upon every one who could make a fuss about
a few ties. The official eventually yielded, and after still another official had
satisfied himself that the trunk and valise I had landed with corresponded to
the number of packages I had reported to the ship's officer as belonging to me,
I was allowed to go my way.
We had been outside of Havana from about four o'clock in the morning,
and had we arrived at half-past six the evening before we should still have
been obliged by the harbour regulations to wait until six the next morning before
entering the port. We had anchored in the centre of the harbour at about twenty
minutes after six. Yet we did not leave the Custom House before a quarter
to ten, and for all this waste of time we had to content ourselves with the reflection
that it was "the custom of the country." "The custom of the country !" It is a

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

phrase that you hear every day in Cuba. There is no reason why large ships
should not go alongside the wharves, for the draught of water is deep enough to
accommodate them. But the lightering interests are powerful enough to insist upon
the maintenance of an obsolete and annoying system which costs the consumers
of Havana over 500,000 a year, and the reason is that lighterage is a custom of
the country. Every good purpose could be served, and time and money saved,
by having one set of officers to look over the papers of the ship. But it
is apparently a custom of the country to find public employment for the
largest possible number of persons. Still, all these numerous officials were
polite, for politeness is also a custom of the country. It is a custom which
the stranger appreciates, and so one soon comes to address even one's porter
as "senior" and "caballero"-as sir" and "gentleman"-and to permit him to
take, on request, a light from one's cigar. To refuse to let him do so would
be to offend against a custom of the country.
1'

From the roof of the Belen College I am looking down upon and over
the city of Havana, and with me is a Jesuit priest who relates the history
of this institution and tells me something about his Order and his life.
"I leave for Spain on Thursday," he is saying; and I ask, "Are you glad
to return home?"
"It is all the same to me," he answers; then he adds: "It is the second
rule of our Order that one place must be to us the same as another; we
are to have no preferences."
He pauses, then continues: "In Spain, in the winter, I can work harder
than I work here; but here the climate is genial, and one feels warm and
pleasant all the year round; so, you see, there is no reason for preferences.
The body can be ruled by the mind. One may be happy anywhere."
As he spoke of the genial climate of Cuba he waved his arm towards
the city which lay stretched out in silence and bright sunshine at our feet.
I followed the motion of his arm. There to the west, on an eminence commanding
the city, was an old Spanish fort, the Castillo del Principe, and to the south
and west were the low, sloping hills that form the background of Havana.
To the east was the harbour, to the north the Gulf of Mexico; on every
side were the houses and the streets and the plazas; and gazing down upon
them all, upon the red-tiled roofs, the solid square and rectangular houses,
the avenues and the narrow thoroughfares-the city seemed to me to be
still dreaming the dreams of the eighteenth century, and not yet to have
wakened to the bustle and activity of to-day.
There is an old Havana and a new. The old books will tell you that once
the city was all to the east, along the eastern edge of the harbour, and was
surrounded by a thick wall and defended by a fort. The wall has disappeared

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

but the fort is still there, and near it still cluster the public buildings of Havana;
its president's palace, its cathedral, and its "Templete," which marks the spot
where was celebrated the first Mass sung in Havana. There, too, within
what was once the boundaries of the old city, are the narrow business
streets of Cuba and the solid stone buildings a single storey high. And
there is the Plaza des Armas, where once the Spanish band played at night,
and the soldiers paraded in the day. To the north and south and west
the city has spread out. It grew outside of the walls, and as it grew its
streets widened, its open spaces multiplied, and elegant houses were built
in its suburbs and on either side of the broad tree-shaded avenue which
now runs through the present centre of the town. It is growing still; it is
spreading itself out in new suburbs; and as one saunters about this Spanish-
American city, one comes upon instant evidences of the changes that are
taking place.
From the heights of La Fuerza or the Belen College the city seems asleep
or but half-awake; but in the streets below there is activity and movement.
The stranger in Havana, after leaving the Custom House (which once was
a church that the English desecrated), finds himself in a narrow street
which runs along the whole harbour front and on which are built some of
the great business houses of the city. Above this street is the only bit of
elevated railroad track to be found in Havana; and following this tract,
which soon descends to the level of the ground, we catch glimpses of the
sea. The sea is everywhere here: to the east it looks a sickly green, to
the north it shines in the sunlight-a sheet of limpid blue. And running
at right angles to the water-front are a number of other paths that lead into
the city. I call them paths, for they look as though they had been hewn
out of a solid block of houses, so narrow are they and so steeped in shadow,
except when the sun is high above the roofs. They were laid out so as to
exclude the sun, so as to shut out its fierce rays and its fiercer glare; they
were built only for pedestrians too, and by a people who could not imagine
an era of hurry or of electric cars.
I love to stand at the beginning of one of these streets and gaze down
into its cool dark depths. I see on either hand a number of small stores and
shops, nearly all of one storey, that open on a level with the street. So high
and spacious are their entrances, you might almost imagine that the side of
them which fronts the street had been lifted away ; yet in many of these shops
there is always something of gloom except at the brightest hours of the day.
The street itself seems decked out as for a festival. The Spaniard has painted
his house here as he has painted it in Mexico and the Canaries; and red and blue
and yellow are the colours with which he has adorned the walls. The effect
is quaintly pleasing, and the holiday quality of the scene is heightened by
the festoons of cloth and the canopies hung out above. The canopies are

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

for the comfort of those who work in or patronise the shops; the festoons
that look like banners at a distance are shop-signs setting forth that here is
the best emporium for Parisian goods, and there the best opticians in the world.
Sign follows sign; you walk or drive under scores of them. They flutter in
the breeze, they challenge your attention; they make of gaudy-coloured Havana
a picture-city adorned with flags. And sauntering along the tiny sidewalk
where all must walk in single file, you see exposed in the windows hats that
are still the fashion in Paris and robes which you may have seen this season
in the stores in Regent Street. And you notice that each of these shops has a
fancy name, such as "The Hope," or "The Dove," or "The Grand," for the
Spaniard loves to give fine-sounding names to everything he owns.
But one does not go to Havana to buy goods from Paris or London or Spain;
so the shops that will entice you are those in which Cuban fans are sold, or Cuban
souvenirs; shops in which Spanish girls, and perhaps a Cuban girl also, will
be found, and where you may buy a fan for fifty cents or five dollars from
a quiet, pretty, tired-looking girl who never hurries and is never impatient ..
only fatigued.
In this narrow street are all the other evidences of the commercial life
of Havana. I think the Cubans must love three places above all others: the
barber shops, the cafds, and the tobacconist shops. These are everywhere in
this city of three hundred thousand persons, as numerous nearly as the
houses themselves. I sit in a cafe, and opposite is a sumptuously fitted-out "hair-
dressing saloon," with its high, adjustable, plush-covered chairs, its huge mirrors,
and its stock of cosmetics and tonics, all infallible cures for baldness.
I see the barber at his business; I see him stopping every now and then
to admire the work of his hands, for he is an artist. I watch the stream of
life as it flows by, and it occurs to me that there are but few women in the
streets of Havana. The heat keeps them indoors, and the custom of the country.
The seclusion of women was a custom which the Moors brought with them
to Spain and which the Spanish adopted willingly. I have only to walk a
little further on, and I shall see houses whose heavy doors are studded with
great brass- or iron-headed nails, and whose high, wide windows are barred
with iron grills. Behind those doors and barred windows are the women;
and if I sit here till evening I shall see them going in twos and threes to the shops.
At this hour they are dressed in their loose dressing-gowns, and are whiling
away the long hot hours in sleep or in some of those light feminine occupations
that make no great demand upon their energy. In temperate countries the
women work; in tropical countries the peasant women work also; but the women
of the better classes rest. In Cuba, too, women have not yet entirely ceased to
be the property of men, and the barred windows and massive doors are a sign
of their subordination.
I also notice that there are very few black men and women in this

4!

4~1 I

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Tf-iE rNit.f- f CAILE ANiD NIALECCN H.'A ANA.

it ,-

F~c~a~3
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1

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD 9

street. Somehow, the idea prevails in other countries that Cuba, like the
British West Indies, is a land of black or dark-coloured men, whereas it is
for the most part a country of white and light-coloured men, and is steadily
becoming whiter. At any rate, though they are here to the number of some
thirty thousand, you do not see large crowds of negroes in the streets of
Havana. But swarthy Cubans constantly pass up and down ; Spaniards go by;
victorias drawn by fine strong horses roll and clatter over the hard pavement.
Carts drawn by pairs of mules, and sometimes by teams of mules, creak slowly
along, and as they pass you hear the tinkling of the bells hung round the
necks of the mules, and see the broad red bands and the tassels with which the
halters are trimmed. The Cuban muleteer loves his animals, if the appearance
of these mules be any proof of care and affection. People of the Latin race
are not renowned for taking thought of the patient brutes that serve mankind
so well; yet the horses and the mules I saw in Havana, and even the dogs,
showed as it seemed to me no trace of ill-treatment. Just the reverse.
The sing-song voices of boys hawking the daily papers break upon the
air at intervals with shrill insistence, and now and again the electric car goes
by. The car tracks of this city are of a narrow gauge, and many of the
lines are laid down in single tracks on one side of the street. Sitting in a
car, you may shake hands with or talk to a friend in the near-by shop or
house, without troubling to move from your seat. On the side opposite to
this single track all wheeled traffic is brought to a standstill when a car is
passing, and this for fear of accidents. And there are other streets through
which only one line of victorias or landaus may drive, for there is not space
enough for two. How, then, does the crowd move about?" one imagines
some one accustomed to the thronged thoroughfares of London or New York
asking; but there are no busy crowds in Cuba. There are people in the streets,
but the tide of human beings that flows across Brooklyn Bridge in the evening,
or along Piccadilly or the Strand when the day's work is done-nothing like
that will you see in any Cuban town. Indeed, to one coming from the cities
of Europe or America the streets of Havana will seem almost deserted and
empty. Yet Havana is a populous city, and in its warehouses and shops an
immense amount of business is done.
In the cafe with me, seated round the little marble-topped tables, the
customers are talking and reading and sipping refreshing drinks. Two or
three are playing dominoes, and have thrown off their jackets so as to be
more at ease in their absorbing occupation. Some talk politics. I hear the
names of Zayas, of Gomez; I hear the word "Americano" pronounced with
bitter emphasis. The Cuban is by nature an eloquent talker, and politics
to him, as to every other Spanish-American, are as the very breath of life.
The newspapers are full of politics, the cafes are full of politics; yet I witness
no unseemly demonstration; even the gestures of the talkers are not violent.

io IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

I catch such expressions as "el progress del pais," and I gather that, in the
opinion of that bearded man opposite, the country is not progressing under
the present Government. From another speaker I learn that it is. But these
differing opinions are given quietly, and however long these men may remain
in this cafe, they will leave sober, for drunkenness is not a vice of the Cuban.
Behind the long, high counter stand the bar-tender and his assistants, all
Spanish. For if the Spaniard has lost his political supremacy in Cuba, he
still retains his superior commercial position: all the retail business of the
country is in his hands, and every one is agreed as to his competence and
ability -as a man of business. He is a polite salesman with a democratic
freedom of manner which no wise man would deprecate. He serves you
drinks, native, Spanish, or American, with commendable quickness, and most
of his mixtures are good. At one end of his counter is piled a great heap
of tropical fruits : pineapples and melons, with mangoes and bananas and
soursops and cocoanuts. You ask for pina fria," and he takes a pineapple
and peals it and cuts it into large chunks and pounds it up with white sugar
and ice and water, and hands the concoction to you in a huge, thick tumbler, and
you find it delicious. He will do the same with tangerine or melon ; he will
mix you a white almond drink of sickly sweetness, or an orangeade of
refreshing flavour. Or you may have coffee, with milk or without; an excellent
tonic which acts as a stimulus on the heart and nerves. But, for myself, I
prefer the fruit drinks to any, and I love the Cuban cafes for their sake.
At the end of an hour or so I leave my seat and wander towards what was
once the principal plaza of the town. I emerge from a narrow street upon
a square, and in the square is a park with benches and a marble statue, and
planted out with laurel trees and royal palms and flowering shrubs. Before
it is the immense yellow-white building of the Administration, with its lofty,
imposing colonnade. To one side of the square is the building where the Senate
meets. This square is almost deserted, though here, too, are one or two cafsf
in which a few men sit, and in the park some idlers lounge upon the benches.
A mulecart passes every now and then, its tinkling bells making music as it moves.
A soldier, a policeman, or a public officer comes forth from the palace. Suddenly
a shadow falls over the peaceful, quiet square, and looking up I notice that
dark clouds are drifting across the brilliant blue above. Then a muttering
sound warns me of the approaching thunderstorm, and in a few moments the
rain begins to fall. I seek shelter; and for an hour or two I watch the rain
pour down in great sheets, and see the paved narrow streets of old Havana
transformed into muddy streams.

When does Havana appear at its best? I have seen it in the early morning,
swept, clean, and preparing for the business of the day. In wagonettes drawn

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

by stout pairs of horses, in victorias, in street cars and on foot I have seen its
workers going out to work, its shops opening, its caft proprietors arranging
chairs for the morning coffee, and its newsboys shouting and singing the names
of the papers they sell. I have seen it at midday when the sun blazed down
upon it, and when its streets were almost deserted and nearly every one had
sought the shelter of its canopies and colonnades. And I have seen it in the
evening when the sun was going down and a refreshing coolness seemed to
steal over its plazas and along its thoroughfares ; again, I have seen it at night
when it has adorned itself with a thousand lights and has sent out its young
men and women to listen to the music of the band. Havana is then at
its gayest and brightest, and striving to be what it so proudly asserts that it is-
the Paris of the West Indies. I like to see Havana then ; but, better still, I like
to see Havana after rain has fallen and just when evening is beginning to shade
into night. For then its skies are laminated with delicate pinks and with gold
and crimson, and the painted city shines in that luminous atmosphere like a city
of one's dreams.
The Havana that spreads itself out beyond the old city walls contains many
beautiful homes and a splendid promenade. At different points along this
promenade (the Prado it is called) are the principal parks of the city ; to the
south is the Columbus Park with its Royal palms and its fountains ; to the north is
the old fortress of La Punta, now partly remodelled into a pleasure resort for music
lovers. In between these termini stands the statue of the Indian Woman in India
Park; it is called La Habana, and is supposed to be symbolical of Havana. And
there is a statue of Jos6 Marti, the Cuban patriot who inspired the last Cuban
struggle for freedom and who died in one of the first battles fought in 1895.
They have erected Marti's monument in Central Park, where it ought to be, for
this is the finest and best situated plaza in Havana. Round it are built some of
the great stores and clubs and hotels of the city, and when it is lit up at nights
it is a patch of green over which a web of light has been thrown. There are
other parks in Havana, and many squares plainly planted out in grass and
surrounded with laurels. These are not beautiful, but in time, I suspect, the
Havanese will make pretty plazas of them. At present their Prado is their
pride and their delight; and stretching westward from the southern end of it is
the Malecon, the sea-wall which was built during the governorship of General
Leonard Wood, and which, with the fine mansions to the south of it, and the
green and blue waters of the Gulf to the north, is one of the finest drives in all
Tropical America.
The Prado with its avenue of laurels, and, in between these laurels, its beds
of lace-plant and other shrubs, is to Havana what the Champs Elysees are to Paris.
I will not compare the two. There is nothing in all Havana comparable to
the great drive that leads from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe;
nothing like the fountains and gardens to the south of the Champs Elysees, between

12 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

which you pass to the splendid bridge that spans the Seine, and on to where the
golden dome of the Invalides rises serenely in the air. But Havana's Prado has a
beauty of its own, and its people are right to love it; and the houses they have
erected here are worthy of the avenue, built as they have been with taste and
architectural effect. In front of each is an arcade or colonnade, with Doric or
Ionic columns. Massive doors of cedar or mahogany open on a hall paved with
marble, and a marble stairway leads to the upper floor. The house is built
round an open space, or patio as it is called, and this is filled with shrubs and
palms, and perhaps a fountain; and on this patio the living-rooms open, so
that the garden is always at one's feet, while above is the sky. Colonnades
strike the dominant note in Cuban architecture. Clearly the Spaniard planned
that Havana should be a city of shade, a city where one might walk for hours
and yet be safe from the rays of the sun. And he built his houses of stone,
and so lofty that a single storey might look as high as two storeys, and a three-
storey building might wear the appearance of a palace. As you pass up and
down the Prado at night you will see these houses lit with electric lamps, and
through the open doors and the beautiful iron-work of the barred windows you
will catch a glimpse of elegantly furnished drawing-rooms, in each of which a
number of well-dressed persons are sitting, in which some one may be playing a
piano, and about which small fresh-looking palms are so arranged that these rooms
look like conservatories filled with graceful, laughing women.
Most of the houses in Havana are of one story, and in these three-fourths of the
population live. The city is said to be one of the most crowded in the world, and
this and the democratic habits of the Spaniard have worked together to bring
about a close contiguity of rich and poor, palace and hovel. Fine residences may
be found in the business quarter of the town. In the houses that face the Malecon,
even along the Prado itself, I have seen places inhabited by people of the slums.
In a very short time the Prado will have purged itself of these, and the Malecon
quarter will follow its example; but to-day, as one walks along the sea-wall, one's
eyes are constantly offended by glaring advertisements of Tivoli Beer or of Lecha
Condensada stuck up on a gigantic hoarding next to some mansion with its arcade
of rare and beautiful design.
This mixture of mansions, hovels, and advertisement hoardings, in the best
residential section of Havana, spoils its appearance. True, it may be touching to
think of rich and poor as living together in brotherly unity; but proximity does not
always mean unity (it may come to mean hatred), and then there is the inartistic
effect of the glaring incongruity. But let such reflections be. I am writing of
Havana as it is, as one sees it at night when it is wrapped in its garment of dark-
ness and the stars; and not of as I think it should be.
At this hour, though you see a few men here and there in the houses, you will
find most of them in the cafes, and many are dining there as they dine in the cafls
of Paris. But whereas in Paris you will find the cafd tables and the restaurants

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

crowded with women also, you will see very few of Havana's women dining in the
open air. Here is where Havana fails to be like Paris, in spite of its ambition, for
it is the custom of the country for women to dine at home. This custom will
slowly yield before the revolutionary influence of the vigorous American; for his
women dine in cafds and restaurants with him, and Havana's daughters behold the
miracle. Already a few are following the example.
All the old customs are beginning to feel the influence of the foreigner. I stand
at the corner of a street, and in a balcony above are two girls, pretty, with nicely
fitting white robes and with chestnut hair puffed in front and neatly gathered in a
coil on the crown of their heads, and tied round with blue ribbon. The light
shines on them from the room behind; in the street below is a young man who
keeps watch, steadily pacing to and fro. He is a lover; perhaps he has met one of
these girls at a ball given by the club of which their brother or father is a member.
There are many clubs all over Cuba-Clerks' Clubs, Conservative Clubs. Liberal
Clubs, and the like-and these give balls and parties, and at these many young
people meet one another. The next step in the path of love is the parade before
the house, and perhaps the serenade ; and then, if the lady likes her suitor, she will
go to the window and the courtship will begin in good earnest. It is a Spanish
custom and not confined to Cuba, and it amuses the stranger who is not accustomed
to such public love-making. But some of the travelled Cubans are beginning to
dislike it.
It is not decent," said one of these to me. "Why can't a man go into a house
and talk to a girl if he wants to talk to her ?"
"Ah, but it is so picturesque," I objected. "There are your iron bars, you
know, and there is your bright-eyed beauty behind them, watched over by mamma
and papa and the whole family of aunts and sisters. Then outside is your bold
lover in the light of the moon; and at last, moved by his unwearied attention, she
lets her womanly heart triumph over her maidenly modesty, and she rises and goes
to the window and he pours forth his love in spite of all the listeners in the world.
I like that."
It is not decent," replied my friend.
I have no argument to advance against the compelling plea of decency. In
time it will become not decent" to pay one's court at the window and in the open
street, and then the streets of Havana will no more be enlivened with the lover's
presence and the sound of his guitar. But I feel that the Cuban girl loves to sit
there and see him pass; and I have seen her eyes brighten with pleasure when
some bold stranger has looked up at her with open admiration in his gaze.
Form is of importance in Cuba; one bows down before custom and fashion;
so the Cuban girl impassively looks in front of her as you stare. But
the tell-tale eyes betray her; in the flash and twinkle of them, and perhaps
in the faint half-smile that plays about her lips, you read the thoughts of her
heart.

14 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

But "it is not decent," so the time may come when to look may give offence:
decency createth a multitude of sins.
In the dimly lighted streets in the centre of the city friends are talking to one
another at the doors and windows. A party or gathering of some sort has broken
up, and I meet a number of persons pouring out of a small building : I notice they
are all women. In another part of the town a dark street is lined on either hand
with houses with each its heavy door, and in every door a wicket, and at every
wicket a woman. This is the famous San Cedro of Havana, the street of ill-fame;
and some of the women here, if you met them in the Prado, you would think to be
daughters of the best houses in Havana. Some are beautiful. Many are graceful.
.The Spanish woman has learnt or has inherited the art of walking, and so some of
the women of the San Cedro will move with the mien of queens. There is no noise
in this quarter, no unseemly demonstration, nothing vulgar. The police rules here,
but I doubt if it would be much different even if the police were kind. A Haytian
general, bent upon sacking Port-au-Prince, advised his ragamuffin army to pillage
in good order," calling them his children as he gave this good advice. The women
of San Cedro follow their calling "in good order," so that no scandal shall result.
And thither come the youth of Havana, and many who have long passed the age of
youth. Married men come here. That, too, is a custom of the country. I have not
heard it spoken of as not decent."
Havana's residences have spread out into the suburbs, and it is in one of these
(the newest) that I find a portion of twentieth-century Havana. In the older
suburbs, in the Cerro and in Jesus del Monte, you see the old type of the Havanese
suburban house ; massive single-story houses fronting the street, and each with its
colonnade. Some of them are great buildings with gardens attached, gardens in
which fan-palms grow and Royal palms; and laurels and crotons and flaming poin-
cianas. Some of the owners of these bear the names of the old nobility of' Spain
and these houses have sheltered some of the proudest families of Cuba. They
have been built as family mansions, built solidly and with no sparing of expense, as
they used to build in the British West Indies and never will do again.
But the suburb that one hears most about in Havana is Vedado; its praises
are sung by every visitor, and one American writer has even called it an earthly
paradise. I do not know what Paradise is like, but I suspect it is not a com-
promise between Spanish and American styles of domestic architecture. And
this, amongst other things, is what Vedado is. It is in the Vedado buildings that
I see most clearly the influence of the dominant American; for Vedado is unlike
the Cerro or Jesus del Monte, is being laid out differently, and is being resorted to
by many of the wealthy foreign residents of Havana.
This suburb lies to the west of the city, a few miles distant. To the north it
overlooks the sea, and was once, indeed, a favourite bathing-place of visitors and
the wealthier classes. It is a comparatively new suburb, the land has not yet all
been taken up; large open spaces are seen here and there, and most of the houses

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD 15

have a new, bright appearance that but few of them wear in the city. Vedado has
been laid out in avenues of laurels; its principal street is a boulevard, on either side
of which its finest houses stand. They have paved the streets with macadam and
laid down a system of concrete curbs and gutters. It is connected with the city by
the cars, and some of its houses are really beautiful. Many rise to two storeys, and
sometimes the second storey is smaller than the first, so that one part of the house
stands as it were inside of the other. Many of the doors are beautifully carved and
ornamented, and open on a lofty portico supported by Ionic columns of stone.
Some of these residences are surrounded by verandahs, and these verandahs again
are shaded by deep-green lattice curtains when the glare of the sun is at its fiercest.
And gardens are everywhere, for here, unlike in the Cerro or Jesus del Monte, or
the other near-by suburbs of Havana, the houses do not open on the street or run
along in one continuous block. They are all detached, all standing in their own
grounds; and some of these grounds have been planted out as gardens, and these
gardens are railed in by handsome iron fences; and so these spacious, ornamented
buildings speak eloquently of comfort within and of the opulence of their owners.
But the taint of jerry-building is on Vedado. I see in Vedado houses that the
old Spaniard would never have built. The style is Spanish, but the material is
cheap; and the wooden palings surrounding these cheap houses-surely they were
an invention of the jerry-builder. No defence can be offered for these wretched
grey or white palings : they are out of place in a Spanish-American city. And
even many of the iron fences here are frail and mean-looking. They suggest
hurry and cheapness and modernity. They suggest also the twentieth-century
Havanese suburb that will be created as the population grows. These houses are
cooler than those in the city; air and light and the blue sea are the common pos-
sessions of Vedado. But the little villa with its pathetic aping of the style of the
great house is in Vedado also, and it will be found in increasing numbers in every
new suburb that is built.
A part of the seashore of Vedado has been made into baths. The hard
coral rock has been cut into squares, with an opening in front through which the
sea ebbs and flows continually, and a bath-house has been built around and over
these excavations. The water here is always cool and clear, and, in one great
rectangular bath, swimming is an easy and delightful exercise. Once the fashion-
able bathing-place of Havana was where the Malecon now stands; looking over
the embankment one can still see the coral baths filled with pale green water, but
now fallen into decay. To-day the baths are at Vedado; and at Marianao, some
miles away, is the shore-bathing resort of Havana.

To the south-west of Havana lies the suburb, or, more properly, the village of
Marianao. It is separated from the city and from Vedado by a large track of waste
land, and in travelling over this you obtain some idea of what the site of the city

16 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

itself was once like. The old writers on Cuba tell us that outside the city walls
there were swamps and evil-smelling places, and in rough weather the waters of the
Gulf of Mexico would roll in upon the land. There were no gutters to carry off
the storm waters when it rained, and the filth and garbage of the city that did not
find its way into the harbour was often thrown outside the walls and lay there in the
sun, rotting and reeking, and breeding hideous forms of life. The saturated soil
teemed with rank vegetation, and this gave the refuge to myriads of flies and
mosquitoes which preyed upon the people and spread the germs of disease. So
Havana lived and moved and had its being on what in rainy weather must have
been little better than a marsh; and driving to-day along the road that leads to
Marianao one feels that even now the city is perilously near a breeding-place of
disease.
On leaving Vedado the car emerges on an open undulating plain, and in the
distance one sees the low hills that rise to the south of Havana. On your right
are cultivated fields in which vegetables are grown; to your left you see the
tall chimneys of some factory; standing out singly or in groups, like cays and
islets in a sea of green, are a few large trees ; and houses appear here and there;
and cattle and horses occasionally. The car rushes between living walls of
rank vegetation, which are sometimes high enough to obscure the view. You
have passed over a low bridge that spans a slow-flowing, mud-coloured river
that empties itself into the sea upon the right and makes a swamp of acre
upon acre of the low-lying neighboring country. You have passed an
ancient fort which is said to have defied the pirates in the past; and though
you are but a mile or two from Vedado, it is as though you were in a
country almost deserted, so few are the signs of life everywhere. The
driver leaves his brake and leans carelessly against the rail that separates him
from the passengers in the car. The conductor comes inside and sits down
to smoke a cigar and to talk with a friendly passenger. The car goes at full
speed; presently, riding across the open country to a red-roofed house surrounded
by royal palms which I see in the distance, is a troop of Cuban cavalry, a fine
body of men whose khaki uniforms, slouch hats and long swords, and whose
martial appearance as they trot along mounted on their strong, fine-looking,
well-kept horses, make a splendid picture in that landscape of green and
blue.
In the days of the Spaniard thousands of soldiers were to be seen by night
and day in the streets of Havana and in other towns. Their uniforms brightened
the scene, the music of their bands and the sound of their bugles were heard
everywhere. At one time there were quite 2oo,ooo of them in Cuba, and they were
the mighty instrument and symbol of Spain's predominance in that land. Now
they are all gone; and though one sees a good many soldiers in Cuba to-day,
and in Havana especially, their number is by no means out of proportion
to the rest of the population. The army is but 4,000 strong, and is for the

Lk~1

THE MALECON. WITH RESIDENCES IN THE DISTANCE.

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

most part composed of men with well-formed features and athletic appearance.
I think they must choose the pick of Cuba's men for the army. When one
sees a troop of them riding across open country, as I saw them on the morning
I went to Marianao, one must admit that, in looks at least, they compare favour-
ably with almost any soldiers in the world.
Nearing Marianao one catches a glimpse of a group of red-roofed houses
that look like a manufacturing dep6t, and in front of these is the sea. Then comes
Marianao, and one enters the village through an avenue of great trees whose
over-arching branches completely shut out the rays of the sun. We climb up
a low hill with houses on either side of the street. A policeman, big, black,
and the picture of good nature, is leaning against a wall and talking to a rather
well-favoured mestizo girl; a few black women lounge about smoking; a cafd or
two hang out the announcement that there the traveller may have board and
lodging; the shops are deserted; a few dogs stray aimlessly about. In a word,
Marianao is a village asleep.
Yet it is a summer resort for the fashionable folk of Havana, and some of
its houses are as handsome as any you will see in the suburbs near the city.
They stand in the midst of their gardens, with high iron fences surrounding them;
and as you pass you may see the ladies of the house seated in rocking-chairs
on the broad verandahs with little children about them, and black nurses. These
nurses are said to look after their charges well, and a neater lot of women servants
it would not be possible to find anywhere in the tropics. They are well paid
too, and the children they care for look strong and healthy-healthier by far than
those who live in the crowded houses of the city.
The city houses, in truth, where 95 per cent. of the population live, are
not places where one would expect children, or even men and women, to
thrive and be strong. The wonder is that any escaped the periodical epidemics of
smallpox and cholera and yellow fever which time and again broke out in the city
of Havana. The soil was sodden with the leaking and the filth of centuries;
many of the streets were unpaved; open gutters took the waste water to the bay,
and from each gutter came the horrible smell of stale soap-water and kitchen
refuse. The latrine system was primitive: a pit situated next to the kitchen and
belching odours into the living-rooms. Thus every courtyard of the poorer sort of
house was a wretched, evil-smelling place, and on these courtyards all the living-
rooms of the single-story rectangular tenement opened. Everything came in and
went out by the one door that opened on the street; and in the little cells that
faced one another and opened on a level with the ground many families lived.
Many families still live in them--overcrowding is common in Havana, is, indeed, a
custom of the city. It costs a great deal to build a house of stone, and so long as
one of these places is habitable it will be tenanted. It is no wonder consumption is
the most prevalent ordinary disease in Havana to-day in spite of the tropical
climate and the pure air that blows from the Gulf; yet yellow fever has

18 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

disappeared and smallpox, and one sees the reason of this as one peeps into or
walks through some of the houses in the poorer quarters of Havana.
Most of the thousands of courtyards have been paved with flag-stones or brick,
many of the streets are paved with brick or asphalt, and the modern sewer system,
though not yet completed, embraces a great section of the city.
The crowded tenements of Havana do not look unclean now, with their paved
courtyards and drains. I peep into them, one after the other as I pass, and I see
naked or half-naked children playing and crawling about the yard, and women
washing and doing their domestic work. There are no patios here, no tasteful
arrangements of palms and ferns and flowers and fountains; yet there are a
few palms and shrubs ranged in pots and pans around the courtyards; these
redeem these places from utter sordid ugliness, and testify to the unconquerable
craving of a city population for the green things of the field and the forest. The
furniture of these rooms is a bed sometimes of iron, often of wood ; sometimes a
" cot" only, which is simply a piece of rough canvas stretched over a light wooden
frame that can be opened and closed at will. There are a few rocking-chairs,
a table or two, and a wooden cupboard in which is stored the crockery of the
house. In this room, with its flooring raised but a few inches above the ground,
a family of five or six persons may live, and when the door is closed at night I
imagine that the heat must be infernal.
Havana is clean on the surface and filthy beneath, is what some of the foreign
residents in the city are fond of saying, but they exaggerate. The poorer classes
have certainly not yet learnt the value of cleanliness, but the house-to-house
inspection by sanitary officers is not altogether a paper precaution, and the streets
at any rate, are well kept. As one drives through them after nightfall, one finds the
dirt and rubbish of houses and shops all packed into receptacles or neatly heaped
up on the sidewalk awaiting the street-cleaner's cart. And all day long the members
of the sanitary corps may be seen sweeping the streets and taking the refuse away
in their hand-carts. Havana, too, is excellently supplied with an abundance of
good water from the Vento Reservoir, and its sewers are flushed and its drains
disinfected regularly. The Government knows that an outbreak of yellow fever or
any other epidemic would mean a grave remonstrance from, and perhaps the
intervention of, the United States; so it does try to keep Havana clean. Inter-
vention will come sooner or later, but at present, at any rate, it does not seem
likely that the alleged neglecting of the sanitary condition of Havana will be the
cause of it.
There is a Chinese quarter in Havana, as there is in every important city in the
world. There are mean streets in Havana; streets in which are little shops with
fly-blown meat hung out for sale, or with piles of vegetables and fruit exposed, or a
miscellaneous stock of groceries. They are never very busy, these places. They
must make a profit, but quietly, for hurry and bustle are not characteristic
of them. The flies love them, for they swarm there by the thousand, but the

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

customers do not mind the flies. And so the beef is sold, and the vegetables;
and if the fly has his meal first well, there is enough left for God's other
creatures.
Most of the book-shops of Havana are situated in a busy thoroughfare facing
Central Park on the east; here the books and papers are displayed on counters set
out on the piazza. The literary tastes of the reading population, if one may judge
by the literature displayed for sale, are not such as the Society for the Promotion of
Christian Knowledge would approve of. Pornographic literature abounds. French
novels translated into Spanish, Spanish novels as bad as, or if anything a little
worse than, these translations, you will find in plenty in Havana. On their
coloured covers one is treated to scenes in which a conventional devil with flames
and fork may be represented as triumphant or enraged, or one sees masked
men stabbing a half-clothed woman to death, while the title of the book gives
a clue to its contents. There are other works, of course. Don Quixote" seems
to be a favourite, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories are here also,
and American tales of the Wild West. And there are anti-theological works in
abundance.
It is easy to see that the newspapers are well read here. There are a good
many published in Havana. Two (the Havana Daily Post and the weekly Havana
Telegraph) are in English; La Lucha has an English section also; then
there are the Diario de la Marina, and the Triunfo, and others; and the
offices of these are all fitted out with linotype machines and modern engraving
apparatus. The Press is perfectly free in Cuba, and is outspoken; but now
and then, unhappily, editors are shot at by angry politicians, and this makes
the work of newspaper editing a little difficult at times. The weekly illustrated
papers contain cartoons of public men and pictures of public events, and seem
to have a large clientele. In Havana, as elsewhere, the newspaper bids fair
to beat the book out of the field; that is, of course, the sort of book that is
something better than rubbish.
Yet they have a fine National Library in Havana (which is hardly ever used);
and one or two other public libraries. The guide-books never omit to tell you that
the volumes in the National Library are all richly bound; so, I may add, are those
in the Centro Dependientes, a Clerks' Club that has over 20,000 members and the
finest club-house in Havana. The building is of three storeys and faces the Prado.
You pass through a lofty doorway, with magnificently carved'doors of cedar,
and enter on the first floor of the house by a marble staircase, with richly worked
rails. The splendid, spacious ballroom of this club, with its painted ceiling,
its glitter of electric lamps, its cushioned seats, its marble floor, its mirrors ranged
on either side of the room, and the veined marble arches supporting the lofty
roof is a pleasure saloon of which any palace in the world might well be proud.
Now in this club there is a library, and through this library I was permitted
to look by the obliging librarian. It is not large, but the books are beautifully

20 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

kept, the room is cool and spotlessly clean, and the leather-upholstered chairs
are comfortable. On the shelves were ancient treatises on Spanish-America,
and Plato's works, and some of the works of modern European authors. Dickens
was there, and Victor Hugo; Balzac and Goethe and Zola. Mr. H. G. Wells is
there-they have bound his "Anticipations" and his "First Men in the Moon"
together, and near him stands Ribot's psychological studies; and there are
histories of literature and the lives of great generals. I could add to the list,
but these names are enough to show that the Clerks' Association of Havana is
catholic enough in its literary tastes; or rather, I should perhaps say, catholic
in its selection of books for its library. For as I took up book after book and
looked at its beautiful binding, as I opened Dumas' novels and remarked how
new they were, I was reminded of Porthos' famous will, in which was mentioned
Porthos' library of eight thousand volumes-" all uncut." The Centro Depen-
dientes of Havana has a fine library-all unread. I left the library and went
to the bar. The businesslike appearance of that institution showed that it was
by no means "all unused."
When one mentions bars, one is reminded of the ways and habits of those who
serve at them; now it will always strike a stranger as peculiar that even in the bars
of the best hotels in Cuba he will often find the assistants working in their shirt-
sleeves. The waiters at the hotels, too, will come to you in the act of putting on
their dress jackets, and, so far as I can remember, none of the boys who worked at
the hotel I stopped at wore anything like a livery. I think I can remember seeing
two coachmen in livery in the streets of Havana-there may have been more,
but I do not recollect having noticed them. Servants in Spanish-America, in
fact, do not like to wear anything that might seem a badge of private service.
But the saying in Havana amongst the foreigners is that if you put a Cuban in
an official's uniform you may pay him half the salary he could earn in private
employment. His dignity is enhanced by the outward and visible signs of
public office. He is then more than a man: he is a public functionary, however
humble.
Perhaps the Government had this in mind when they gave their police
force a grey-blue uniform with caps to match. This uniform may have been
designed by the Americans or the Cubans (I do not know which), but, at any
rate, it is a handsome one, and the men look well in it. Havana has about
a thousand policemen-an extraordinary number. But the police are intended
to do more than protect property and see that the laws are obeyed. Armed,
every one of them, with a heavy revolver, feared and respected because of
the support they receive from the Government, seen everywhere-in the street
cars, in the streets, in the parks-they are really a semi-military force which
would be most effective in crushing one of those dmeutes for which the cities
of Spanish-America are famous. They are well paid too (though they wear
uniforms), and well looked after. Sometimes, late at night, I have seen one

THE KEY OF THE NEW WORLD

of their officers sitting motionless on his horse at the top of some street, his
cloak thrown across his shoulders, his left hand on his hip, and his eye surveying
the scene before him as though he were a general on a battle-field. He carries
himself proudly : perhaps he is aware of his statuesque appearance, and delights
in it. He knows how much he and his colleagues of the force stand for in
this city, but I do not think he takes undue advantage of his knowledge and
position. He must be obeyed-that is well understood-but he does not officiously
interfere with one. And he and his subordinates do keep order in Havana,
where, I may say in passing, the stranger is perfectly safe at any hour of
the night or day.
What, indeed, you cannot but remark in Cuba, and especially in Havana,
is the politeness of all the public functionaries. They show an urbanity and
a readiness to help that win your good opinion at once. On the day I visited
the Palace where (as I have said before) the President lives and the public
offices are situated, a parliamentary committee was busy revising the Budget
for 1910, and at first there was some difficulty about allowing strangers to
go through the principal rooms of the building. But when the object of my
visit was explained, one of the officials in charge remarked that, after all, I
could not disturb the members of the Committee by simply passing through
or near their room. Later on, when I met one of the Under Secretaries of
State, he expressed his regret that the President was away on vacation, and
presented me with a splendid Atlas of Cuba and a copy of the last Cuban
Census, giving at the same time a copy of this work to each of the five
gentlemen of my party.
It was in this Under Secretary's office that I met and had a talk with
Pino Guerra, about whom the world has heard something. It was he who,
in 1906, went out into the bush, and put himself at the head of the movement
which had as its result the overthrow of President Palma's second Government and
the intervention of the United States for a second time in Cuba. A more unassum-
ing, simple-looking man I have never met. He was placed by Governor Magoon
in command of the Rural Guards, or army, after the revolution; General Magoon's
idea being to make him, the most popular guerilla leader in Cuba, responsible
for the maintenance of peace in Cuba. This revolutionist become a Major-
General, was dressed in a khaki uniform on the day I saw him-there was
no difference between his dress and that of a common soldier, his sword
even, with its plain leather scabbard, was of the same pattern as the common
army sword.
Pino Guerra is a little above middle height and is sparely built. He looks
you straight in the eyes when speaking to you, and smiles frankly. In complexion
he is swarthy; the thin, hooked nose betokens energy, and if the upper lip
is too short to give the impression of inflexible will, the strong, prominent
chin and firmly closed mouth leave you no two opinions as to his strength

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

of character. Pino Guerra's eyes seem to me to indicate a strain of Indian
blood in his veins, but this may be a mere fancy of mine, for I have met
Englishmen and Americans of great force of character who have the same
half-closed, gleaming, rather oblique eyes.
People speak of him in Havana as a political factor of the first importance.
He himself does not seek to give you any such impression. I told him that
I had heard much about him and had read his statement in the North
American Review, written while he was still a rebel in arms, and setting
forth the reasons why he was leading a revolt against the Government of Cuba.
He smiled at this, somewhat deprecatingly, as though what he had done was
of little consequence. I asked him what he thought of the political future of
Cuba. He told me he believed it would be peaceful. Did he think the United
States would again intervene in Cuban affairs? No; he saw no reason why
it should, and had no fears that it would. He believed, too, that the next
Presidential election would be conducted with perfect fairness and that the
will of the people would prevail. I suppose he could not have been expected to
say anything different from this; but now, when I come to think of it, I really
had no right to ask him these questions, and he could with perfect courtesy
have refused to answer me. What struck me about the man, too, was this,
that he talked with real modesty and as though he were the humblest servant
of the Administration. I know that Pino Guerra can be different when he likes:
men with a face like his can make their power and authority felt, and their
will obeyed, very effectively indeed. But I specially mention his demeanour
and his politeness here, because I found it characteristic of Cuban officials
and soldiers generally. It was characteristic of the white officer who allowed
me to go through the old fortress of La Punta, and equally of the well-set-up
black soldier who showed we what was interesting in that place.

CHAPTER II

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY

ONE morning the sound of bells awoke me. The insistent clanging of them
broke loudly on the morning silence; from all parts of the city the sound
seemed to come, peal answering peal as though the bells called to one another.
I slipped out of bed, wondering what this continuous ringing could mean.
At first I thought of the mule-carts and the tinkling of the bells hung round
the necks of the splendid brutes I admired so much, but in a moment I
dismissed them: this noise was far louder than any the mules could make.
Then suddenly I remembered that this day was Sunday, and that these were
the church bells calling the faithful to early mass. In fifteen minutes I had
dressed and swallowed a cup of black coffee, and was standing on the piazza
of the hotel waiting for a victoria to come in sight.
The city still lay sleeping as it seemed, wrapped in a mantle of dark grey
clouds. A fine rain was falling, the trees in Central Park were covered with
shining drops of water, and in the concrete gutters thousands of bubbles were
formed by the pattering drops of rain. All was deserted and quiet, except
for the pealing of the bells which was waking the city and calling it to
prayer. Presently Havana would awake; indeed, as I stood there I saw that
it was waking. The passing street cars contained passengers; one, two, many
victorias appeared. I hailed one of these: in a few moments I was being rapidly
driven through the narrow streets to where the Merced Church is situated.
Men leaned here and there against the tall columns of the arcades and
colonnades, two or three women covered with mantillas and holding umbrellas
were hurrying on, evidently to some favourite church. We passed under a
great dark arch that is one of the picturesque features of the city, the Arch
of the Jesuit College; then we turned once or twice and stopped before a
large edifice standing near the end of a narrow deserted street.
From within came the sound of an organ. I entered; in front was the
high altar blazing with lights and rich with flowers and variegated colours;
on either hand ran a row of marble columns sweeping up into arches and

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

supporting the lofty roof above. Behind these columns were the chapels and
side-altars of the church, some of the latter decorated richly. The scent of
incense filled the building and hung upon the moisture-laden air; at the altar
officiating was a grey-haired priest; and scattered about the church were some
seventy worshippers who knelt devoutly while the solemn chant went on.
This church, La Merced, is reputed to be the most wealthy and the most
aristocratic in Havana. It has one of the largest congregations, and the finest
church orchestra in the city; it can seat hundreds; but at this morning's mass
there were but seventy persons present at the most, and most of them were
women. The spacious aisles looked empty, the kneeling worshippers here and
there mainly serving to call one's attention to the empty seats, and the lights on
the altar, but throwing into relief as it were the thick shadows which shrouded the
building. From the gallery above the main entrance to the west, where the organ
stands, a singer with a strong, fine baritone voice chanted the responses, and every
now and then a woman would steal across the church to one of the side-altars, and,
fixing her eyes upon some image there, would lose herself in contemplation and
prayer, as though there were nothing else in all the world except herself and her
saint. As the service went on I had time to look about quietly. The women were
dressed plainly in black and white, and though one or two of them wore hats,
the rest wore black mantillas which draped their shoulders and covered their
heads. One or two of these women were black, and these sat with the rest,
for there is no colour line drawn in Cuba in either the theatre or the church.
The few men present sat near the doors that led to the street, and one or two
of them slipped out towards the end of the service. On a few chairs to the left
about five little girls sat waiting, all dressed in white, and veiled, and with white,
slender wands in their hands. These were to make their first communion that
morning, and presently they were taken in front of the altar by a woman clothed
in black, and there they knelt and took the sacrament, while the congregation
looked on. This ceremony over, I left the Merced and went to the Cathedral.
From what I had already seen I did not think that the people of Havana greatly
cared to go to church.
The Cathedral of Havana stands in one of the oldest parts of the city and faces
a square. The tide of life and activity has, so to speak, flowed by it and left it
stranded; other churches have sprung up in other parts of the city, and have
acquired fame as the most wealthy church or the church which the prettiest
women prefer, or where the best preaching may be heard. These have been built
with a greater attempt at show, or in better localities, while the Cathedral of
Havana is surrounded by shabby-looking buildings, and its square is paved with
rough stones and has not a single tree growing in it. Yet Havana's Cathedral has
a certain dignity which none of the others possesses. It is not old, having been
built but some two hundred years ago on the site of an older church; but time has
not dealt kindly with it, and as one comes upon it with its dome and its two square

IJr

MILK VENDOR, CUBA.

1-~I ..;i.

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY 25

towers rising into the sky and marks where the rain has beaten great holes in the
limestone blocks of which it is built, and sees its huge, dilapidated wooden door
studded with rusted iron nails, and the two plain smaller doors on either side
of this, and the heavy, dark-grey colour which the passing years have stamped
upon it, one is at first inclined to believe that centuries have gone since its stones
were first laid, and that man and the elements have warred against it and left
it half a ruin.
You enter the Cathedral by a broad flight of steps, and pass into a sort of
vestibule that opens on the right and left into the interior of the church. Here
you see at a glance that those who built this cathedral aimed at nothing like
picturesque effect, but rather at a solid simplicity; so the weather-beaten appear-
ance of the Cathedral without is matched by the austere coldness of its interior,
and even the paintings on its vaulted roof have faded into a sober harmony with
the cold, bare walls and heavy marble columns of the aisles. The high altar on
which, to-day, a few candles are burning, is in keeping with the sombre appearance
of the church. Here, at any rate, is none of that garishness and that tawdry tinsel
which so constantly offend the eye in too many Spanish-American churches.
Behind and on either side of the altar are arranged the choir stalls of black,
polished mahogany, and the walls of this chancel are inlaid with slabs of black
marble, so that the gleaming lights on the altar shine out against a background
of semi-darkness.
There are side-altars here, and one or two paintings, and a covered niche
in which the remains of Columbus are believed to have reposed until they were
removed to Spain in 1898. But San Domingo still claims that the bones of the
great Genoese are in the Cathedral of the city which Columbus founded himself,
and which is the oldest in all Spanish-America. I leave this dispute to those
interested in it; but I think the Cathedral of Havana was no unfitting resting.
place for Columbus, since he seemed to have loved Cuba best of all the islands that
he discovered for Spain.
In the Cathedral on the Sunday of which I write a special service in honour
of some saint was being held. I noticed as I entered that only about one-third
of the interior was provided with seats, and this added to the bare and drear
appearance of the church. But what was more significant than this was the
number of worshippers. I counted them: twelve in all-nine women and three
men. At the altar were three priests, all robed in vestments of white silk
embroidered with gold. They wore the tonsure; and attending at the altar was
one other man dressed in ordinary clothes, and two acolytes, each not more,
I should say, than about fourteen years of age. As the service proceeded, one
of these acolytes swung a silver censer with rhythmical motion, the smoke of the
incense burning within it filling the aisles with its pungent, oppressive scent.
Then by degrees, as the minutes slipped by, a few other persons straggled into
the building, and after an hour had passed there were twenty-five persons in the

26 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

congregation. But still the ceremony went on with its full wealth of ritual,
so that you might have thought that the church was crowded to overflowing, and
that this long, impressive service was being followed by hundreds of devout and
eager listeners.
Then something happened which showed me that the demon of anger could
not altogether be exorcised even by the presence of the Blessed Sacrament upon
the altar.
The moment came for reading a portion of the Scriptures, and one of the
priests, a sharp-faced, elderly man, found on turning round that the acolyte had
not brought the Bible. He spoke to the boy, then seizing him by the arm, gave
him a sharp push and sent him off to bring the book. On the boy returning with
it, the old man caught hold of it and pulled it sharply out of his hands, pushing
him away as he did so. No one seemed disturbed by the incident; perhaps it was
not uncommon. But whatever spell of impressive solemnity there may have been
about the ceremony was broken for me by that open display of temper on the
part of this priest in the very act of officiating at the altar, and in performing one
of the most sacred duties imposed upon the priesthood of his Church.
The first part of the service lasted an hour. That over, the door to the left
of the altar opened, and, preceded by an acolyte, a young-looking priest came in.
For a minute or two he stood with the others before the altar, just a little behind
them, then he went towards the pulpit, and his colleagues sat down within the
altar rails. Mounting into the pulpit he began by praying inaudibly, muttering
a few words. Then he rose and made the sign of the cross, and then he prayed
again. Presently he began to preach in a scarcely audible voice. He continued
thus for about a minute, then his voice rose, and rose louder, and in a little while
he was rapidly pouring out his sermon to his few patient listeners and the empty
spaces of the church. A soldier stole in to listen, then went his way. An old
woman peeped in at the door, and then came further in. He seemed to notice
nothing, the words came rolling in a steady torrent from his lips, while his right
arm cut the air in emphatic gestures. A life without religion, he insisted, could
only end in shadows and night; but his rhetoric never deepened into fervour or
rose to high eloquence; one might have thought he had studied this sermon by
heart, and perhaps he had.
He preached for fifteen minutes, then stopped; muttered another prayer, and
then went on again. The sermon must have lasted half an hour. But at last it
was over, and when he came down and rejoined his colleagues the four of them
disappeared into the robing-room, and in the interval a boy went round with an
armful of huge wax candles and handed each of us one. We lit them with wax
vespers, the crackling sound given off by these as they ignited seemed strangely
out of place in a cathedral. In a little while the doors of the robing-room opened,
and the two acolytes appeared holding aloft two great silver candlesticks in which
candles blazed, and between them came a priest with a massive silver crucifix, and

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY

after him a boy swinging a censer, and behind them all the three officiating priests
marching under a canopy held by four men who had been amongst the congrega-
tion. They paused before the altar, and we were motioned to take our places near
them. Then turning their faces to the north they led the procession, chanting, and
as we moved away the organ in the gallery above the entrance thundered forth in
a tremendous burst of music, and the great bells in the towers broke into clamorous
peals.
Slowly we moved, a straggling crowd of thirty-four souls in all. Mingled with
the chant, and the pealing of the bells, and the sound of the organ, was the steady
patter of the rain as it beat down upon the roofs and on the hard pavement
outside; mingled with the smoke from the censer was the smoke given off by the
candles we bore in procession round the church. It was a pathetic contrast:
the full-dress ritual, the splendid robes of the priests, the music of the organ, the
clanging of the bells, the noise of the rain, and the volume of smoke that went
curling and floating up to the cold, painted, lofty roof, and then this handful of
women and men straggling with irregular steps in the wake of the crucifix held
high before them, and looking as though they took but little interest in the service
or the chant.
It was over at last. We stopped before an altar of the Virgin, and the priests
took sacrament from the sacred chalice, and we extinguished our candles and
gave them back, and went out once more into the streets and the rain. I had been
in the Cathedral upwards of two hours. I had assisted at a special service with
a handful of worshippers. I had seen but a few of Havana's people at church,
and if I was inclined to think it was the rain which prevented them attending
that day, I was to learn later on that rain is no hindrance in Havana when
pleasure calls to its people.
The following day I asked a Jesuit priest about the religious condition of the
country. "The men have no religion," he said, "though many of the women
have. There is very little of real religion here."

Some writers have written as though Havana were a city of churches and
temples, but I should say that compared with many another Spanish-American
city, and considered positively from the point of view of population, it has but
an ordinary number of places of worship. The Catholic churches number less
than twenty; and it is only since the end of the Spanish dominion in Cuba that
Protestants have been allowed to build a church in Havana, or in any part of the
island. Intolerance was rife in the island. No Protestant ceremony could
be performed in public, not even the burial service; and this rigid rule was never
relaxed. The Church was supported by the State. A yearly contribution of some
400o,ooo (,8o,ooo) was paid out of the Cuban Treasury to the ecclesiastical
authorities; and all the higher ecclesiastics, as well as most of the priests,

28 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

were Spaniards. The island was divided, as it still is, into two dioceses,
the eastern and the western; at the head of the eastern diocese was the
Archbishop of Santiago, at the head of the western was the Bishop of
Havana, and both these prelates received a salary of $18,ooo a year before the
Church was disestablished under the new regime. In addition to the aid it
received from the State, the Church in Cuba acquired riches by the same means
that have helped to make it so wealthy an institution in many lands. Devout
ladies gave of their substance to Holy Church, rich men dying bequeathed
property to the representatives of God on earth; the property of the priests
multiplied, they owned estates, they became powerful; but whenever the Spanish
Government was in difficulties, or thought it was, it did not hesitate to plunder
the Church. So what it gave with one hand it often took back with another
a little later on, and the religious orders were the chief sufferers.
Still, the Church in the days of the Spaniards was never very poor. The
authorities in Spain must have clearly perceived that the Spanish ecclesiastics
in Cuba formed a strong factor in favour of the continued domination of Spain;
hence they were treated well, and no prelate in Cuba was by any chance of any
other nationality but Spanish. The Cubans felt this deeply; they saw that their
sons, however talented and distinguished, could no more hope to rise to place
and power in the Church than in the Army or the Public Service ; little wonder
it was, therefore, that the Church had little influence upon them. The Cubans
are Catholics nominally, and when not positive unbelievers or Free Masons, they do
subscribe to the doctrines of their Church. But the men are mostly indifferent to
religion, and if there is no open hostility shown to the Church, that is because the
Church has largely ceased to be Spanish and has become Cuban.
After the Spaniard was driven from Cuba and the Church disestablished,
a Spaniard was sent to Havana as Bishop. He did not remain for long. The
people would not tolerate him; they had not forgotten that Spanish prelates were
once the instruments of Spanish tyranny, or at the very least the symbols of it.
So they hissed him and threw stones at his carriage, and eventually he was recalled
and a Cuban put in his place. A good many of the priests in Cuba are still Spanish
of course, but as time goes on their proportion will steadily decrease. And, if one
may judge by all the signs of the times, the influence of the Catholic religion
will steadily lessen also, as it is lessening in Spain, as it has lessened in France.
My friend the Jesuit told me that there was little real religion in Cuba.
The poor attendance at the churches, the cessation of imposing religious processions
through the streets, a recent suggestion on the part of some Cuban politicians
that such processions should be forbidden by law-all this shows what is
the influence and status of religion in Cuba. The statistics of illegitimacy
might also be regarded as indicating the prevailing religious indifference;
but I should not take that view myself. A religion may be believed quite
fervently, and yet may fail to influence the morals of a community to any remark-

jl:

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'4,

4~H

MAKING LOVE. CUBA.

-*V* -1.

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*28

HIP

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY 29

able extent. Belief is one thing, its influence on conduct is quite another; and
so, though reliable statistics are lacking, I am satisfied that the people of Cuba
were not more moral when they had greater faith in the doctrines of the
Church.
Yet the priests continue their ministrations, the Jesuits labouring hard especially.
This Order is now building two new churches in Santiago; their college (the
Belen) in Havana is the leading educational institution in the city for gentlemen's
sons under eighteen years of age; here they not only teach languages and
literature, but something of the physical sciences as well; here, also, they make
the meteorological and astronomical observations which have gained for their
college a world-wide reputation. I went through this institution when I was
in Havana: the priest who took me round was a Spaniard who spoke English
fairly well; he was a genial, cultured man whom it was a pleasure to meet. Like
all the brethren of his Order, he was dressed in full black, with black boots
and cap, a sombre figure moving about the squares and corridors of the large,
rambling building.
Eight hundred boys are educated there, he told me, a large number being
boarders. The fathers can take no black scholars, for that would injure the school,
but they have Sunday classes for the black boys of the city, at which the catechism
is taught: class and caste prejudice will not allow them to go farther. These
priests, following the established policy of their Order, do everything in their
power to influence the boys in their charge in favour of the Church; they are
incessant in their watch over them; they treat them kindly, looking well to their
comfort, and they try to shield them from all irreligious and immoral suggestions.
No part of a boarder's life is left unsupervised. In the chapel, in the schoolroom,
in the playground, in the sleeping corridor, the watchful eye of the Jesuit
father is upon them; and so the atmosphere of the institution surrounds them and
helps to mould them to the service and "to the greater glory of God."
I spent an interesting hour at the Belen College. I went through its museums,
its library, its art gallery (which contains a fine Christ in the Garden of Geth-
semane), and its Boys' Chapel and the Belen Church. Froude said that the Jesuits
of Havana were the Royal Society of Cuba. They are to-day, perhaps, the
most zealous workers for the cause of Catholicity in Cuba. Their simple life, their
devotion to the ideal of their founder, their unhesitating sacrifice of comfort
and friends and personal ambition to what they believe to be the interests of
the Church, all serve to place them among its best agents and apostles. Yet though
they have been educating the better-class youths of Havana for generations,
Havana's leading men are not the strongest supporters of the Church.

At about one o'clock on the same Sunday that I went to the Cathedral, I
was mingling with the crowd of boys and men that had collected under the

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

colonnades which face Central Park on the east. Many of the shops and stores
had been open for some time; the cafis were doing a good trade, the cigar
sellers and barber-shop keepers looked happy, and every now and then a boy
thrust a red, or green, or yellow programme into my hand. From these
programmes I learnt that the theatres would be having performances that afternoon,
and eventually I decided upon going to the Moulin Rouge," where, it was said,
certain escultural" ladies would delight the audience with exhibitions of dancing
and with songs.
On the programmes of this theatre it is stated that the performances at the
"Moulin Rouge are "for men only "-" dedicada A los caballeros." There are two
of these "men only" theatres in Havana, and they never lack for enthusiastic
audiences. Some time last year a Cuban girl who had been trained in Spain
returned to Havana and was employed at the Payret Theatre to dance and sing;
and to all accounts she performed her part exceedingly well. Yet few cared to see
or hear her; she could not draw a crowd. So, after a while, she left the Payret
Theatre and entered into an engagement for a season with the Moulin Rouge."
She danced before men only, and sang to them; and in a week her fame had
spread all over Havana, and the city was raving about her. The management
of the Payret Theatre saw its opportunity. Overtures were made to the young
actress, and, shortly after, the Payret's bills announced that the "escultural"
young lady would in future perform at the Theatre Payret. The move was a
wise one. Men, women, and children went to see this actress dance. Night
after night she drew thousands, and many had to be turned away from the theatre's
doors. This was significant of the sort of entertainments Havana loves. And while
very pretty variety performances may be attended by audiences numbering from
fifty to a hundred persons, the Alhambra" and the Moulin Rouge have no reason
to complain of lack of patronage. The men of Havana are faithful to them.
Havana's Moulin Rouge" is a sort of barn, with a pit and a long gallery. The
stage is large, the orchestra is divided from the audience by a light rail. In the
pit on this Sunday evening there was a large number of respectable-looking men;
in the crowded gallery there were all sorts and conditions of persons, some of them
the very dregs of the city. Black and yellow and swarthy and white faces peered
down upon the stage. Chinamen, mestizos, negroes, and white Cubans were
huddled up in a whistling, perspiring, malodorous mass that was every moment
growing more impatient. Cries, shrill whistling, impatient exclamations broke out;
the pit was more orderly but was obviously impatient also. And with every
moment the noise became louder, until at last, obeying a signal from some one half-
hidden by the curtain, the orchestra broke into sound.
It might have been the tune of a devil's dance. The music had a fierce, brutal
quality that was clearly intended to arouse every evil passion within the soul
of man. It suggested a wild abandonment to the animal impulses; it hissed out
mad desire; it screamed as if enraged. Then it became staccato, and its harsh

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY 31

pulsations were accompanied by the steady beat of the heels of the sound-intoxicated
men in the gallery. Suddenly it stopped. The curtain rose slowly and the lights
went out. Then on a white sheet was thrown a picture from a cinematograph,
which I must not describe. The real entertainment of the afternoon was yet
to come, however; this was a drama in two acts, and the play bills proudly
announced that the work had been prohibited: in two seconds you quite under-
stood why. Then followed songs and dances, the dancers working themselves
into a perfect frenzy of savage movement from which all suspicion of decency was
abolished; and these sweating, writhing women on the stage were cheered on
to further exertions, by the screaming, applauding, delighted audience which had
now lost all control of itself.
The scene was in strange contrast to that I had witnessed in the Cathedral
that morning-in strange and significant contrast. And much worse scenes
have taken place in Havana. In the month of June, at the "Alhambra," the dancers
came on the stage without clothing, and the cinematograph exhibitions represented
the very last perfection of indecency. Fights occurred amongst those anxious to
obtain a good seat; tickets sold at a vastly increased price; during the perfor-
mances the theatre was a perfect pandemonium. But this was more than the
clergy and the better classes of the city would stand. The Bishop of Havana
gathered round him the best elements of Havana society, and pressure was
brought to bear upon the Government to put an end to these demoralising orgies.
The Government intervened; but what is now permitted is not much worse than
what has been prohibited. And the Government will hardly venture on a further
prohibition.
The Americans tried to put a stop to what they considered were the more
demoralising pastimes of the Cuban people, but what they did is rapidly being
undone by the Cuban Government. The latter declares it is powerless: the
people want cock-fighting and lotteries, and they will have them; so cock-
fighting and lotteries have again been legalised. In time, maybe, the great
bull-ring at Regla will again be the arena of bloody fights between pain-mad-
dened bulls and nimble matadors, but bull-fighting is still prohibida at the
moment that I write. The lust of blood and of money must needs be content
with the excitement of the lottery drawings on Sunday afternoons, and the
cruel combats of infuriated game-cocks.
Sunday in Havana, as in all Latin countries, is the great day for amuse-
ments. The lottery, which has been recently re-established as a state institution,
announces the winning numbers on Sunday afternoon, and its announcements
are feverishly awaited by thousands of persons. This is what the Havana
Telegraph had to say the other day about the opening of the lottery. "Most
extensive preparations are going on for the opening of the lottery; the machine
which served in the old Spanish days has been furbished up and provided
with an electric motor, and all other gambling has been suppressed that there

32 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

may be an accumulation of hard-earned wages on hand to be invested in
lottery tickets. Heretofore all efforts to stop gambling in the clubs of the city
were vain, especially in the political clubs, but now there is no playing in any
of these, not even in the Miguelista Club itself. Gambling has been declared
intolerably immoral, unless you gamble with the Government, in emulation of
the President's virtuous example."
This, of course, is a political outburst; yet it is quite true that the Presi-
dent himself chose the number 1895 for the first drawing of the national
lottery.
The Havana theatres, although large, can claim but little in the way of
appearance. The Havanese are very proud of their Opera House, but I found
it a rather shabby structure capable of seating some three thousand persons,
the entrance to this building being through one of the largest cafes in the
city. It is not singular in this respect. The stranger who is directed to the
Havana Opera House and who finds himself in a large room with a bar at
one end of it, in which scores of men are seated round little tables, smoking,
sipping cool drinks, and talking, may well imagine at first that he has blun-
dered into a public-house. But he has only to walk straight towards the big
doors in the centre of the wall facing the cafi's entrance, and he will find
that he has made no mistake. After giving up his ticket and passing in, he
will see before him a spacious amphitheatre, the pit of which is crowded with
seats, and which is provided with galleries rising vertically one above the other
to the roof. These galleries are all very narrow ; the lower ones are divided
into boxes in which two rows of chairs facing one another are ranged, so that
a company of ladies and gentlemen may comfortably sit in one of these boxes
as they do at home, and talk during the intervals of the play. In a Cuban
house (it is the same in other Spanish-American countries) the ladies sit oppo-
site the men unless related or on very familiar terms, and those who manage
the Cuban theatres have thoughtfully provided that there shall be no divergence
from this custom in a theatre box. These boxes have no curtains; they are
separated from each other by the flimsiest of white railings; you enter them
through a flimsy slat door; and as a rule they are patronised by women.
It is when there is some specially attractive performance at one of these
places that Havana's fashionable folk are seen in all the glory of their war-
paint. A Havanese audience prides itself upon its appreciation of good acting
and singing : the women show their approval by going in hundreds to hear
their favourites, the men express their delight by cheering vociferously, by
throwing bouquets on the stage, and by making presents of jewellery to popular
actresses.
There is always an Italian or Spanish Opera Company cruising about in
Central American and West Indian waters. These companies seem to be as
much a part of these regions of the world as the sky or the sea itself. The

A

F~B~

THE PRADO, HAVANA.

I vlokil

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY

prima donnas are frequently ifat; the tenors, too, have often reached an age
when, in spite of hardships and the vicissitudes of fortune, their abdominal
development indicates that they have long since passed the days of love's young
dream. Yet one must be thankful for what the gods provide, so a West
Indian audience will turn out in thousands to hear a prima donna, aged forty-
five, declare in quavers and high notes that she is on the point of committing
suicide because a cruel uncle prevents her from being united to the dear ob-
ject of her love, who may be fat, florid, and fifty years of age.
Such a company going to Havana does not often leave dissatisfied. Yet
some very good companies have gone to Havana, and not a few "artistes"
who have won fame in Europe have appeared before the footlights of the
Grand Opera House of that city. During the summer there is no opera in
Havana, but there are always variety entertainments at which you are treated
to exhibitions of ballet dancing by an "incomparable" dancer who (so the
programme informs you) delighted and astonished the people of Paris last year;
and then, since even the incomparable one may not suffice, there are views
from a cinematograph, and jokes by a world-famed comedian, also
"incomparable."
And what amuses me about the Havana theatres is the quite cheerful way
in which the audience is permitted to see what is going on upon the
stage before the curtain rises and after it falls. There is always something
the matter with the curtain; it persistently refuses to come right down to the
flooring of the stage, nor does it always hide the wings of the stage from
view. So one, sitting in the pit, sees quite easily what is going on upon the
stage; and if it happens that some one has died in the last scene of an act
you have been witnessing, it is not at all uncommon to see the dead man rise
with remarkable agility and take himself off. The enterprising advertiser has
also made the most of the opportunities which these theatres afford him for
publishing the excellence of his goods to the Cuban world; and so on many
a drop-curtain I have seen flaring advertisements of beer and biscuits, while
the picture of a watch, rising like a sun out of the sea, and sending forth
bright rays of light, haunts my memory like an evil dream. I saw that pic-
ture on the curtain of the Payret Theatre, and remember that underneath it
was the veracious announcement that watches of that make are the best and
the cheapest in the world.
The prices charged at these theatres (except during the Grand Opera season)
are very low. In the course of an evening three entertainments may be given
at the same play-house, each lasting about an hour. You pay a shilling or two
(25 or 50 cents), and at the close of one part of the performance
you leave or buy another ticket as you please. But these variety shows, though
very good for the price, are but poorly attended; you see very few women at
any of them, for example. And the men, as a rule, prefer the "Moulin

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

Rouge" or the "Alhambra." I imagine that the actors and actresses at the ordi-
nary respectable Havana theatre must often ruefully conclude that while respect-
able acting is praised in the press, it is a little too often (like virtue) its own
reward.
From what I have written it will be concluded that the moral tone of
Havana is not high. The watch which mothers and fathers keep over their
daughters, the insistence that all love-making shall be done under the eye of
a relative, the partial seclusion of the women, the disinclination to allow a young
woman to go anywhere alone : all this finds an explanation in the Spanish proverb
which recommends "a brick wall between a male and a female saint." The
Cuban woman is reputed to be a faithful wife and a devoted mother. The
Cuban husband, it is said, regards continence as an admirable thing-for his
women folk. Ten years ago, according to available statistics, 25 per cent. of
the white Cuban children were illegitimate. The percentage amongst the
negroes could not be ascertained, but was believed to be very much higher.
The last Cuban census (whose figures are suspect) gives the proportion of
illegitimates to the rest of the population as something over 12 per cent. The
figures show a truly wonderful improvement, an improvement too good to be
true. So I glanced over the statistics given by the Cuban Government in its
elaborate "Censo de la Republica de Cuba, 1907"-and remember they were
prepared for the perusal of others besides Cubans and residents in the
country.
A foreigner long resident in Havana told me, too, a story which he declared
illustrated a common enough phase of life in Havana. He was staying at a
boarding-house with a number of other persons, and amongst them was a young
couple whom he thought a pattern of mutual affection. They must have lived in
the house for over two years, when one morning he noticed that neither was
present at breakfast. As he had been on fairly friendly terms with them,
he casually inquired of the landlady what had become of Mrs. D-, and was
told that she had left for good; had gone to the country, the landlady thought.
And Mr. D- ? Oh, he was to be married next week Then the landlady,
who had known all along the true relations existing between Mr. D- and his
lady, explained that the gentleman belonged to a very good Cuban family who
wanted him to marry; and he, in order to please them, had severed his
connection with the soi-dissante Mrs. D-, but not one moment before he
thought it absolutely necessary to do so. "And that sort of thing, my dear
sir," said my friend, "is common enough here." He was a great moralist in
words, and so he went on to tell me innumerable other tales reflecting upon
Havana society, to each of which he added a severe remark of condemnation
though I noticed that he told his stories with infinite enjoyment. I doubted
none of them. He was a bachelor who lived in lodgings, and so should
know.

HAVANA AT PRAYER AND AT PLAY

But enough of reflections upon Cuban morality. As I write I think I see a
bevy of Havana's fairest daughters gracefully walking under the shade of the
laurels that form the leafy avenue of the Prado, and this brings to my mind
the memory of a Sunday evening promenade when the sun was sinking, a globe
of gold, and when the stars were beginning, one by one, to peep out of the
pale blue dome above.
"It is something we can all enjoy," said an American to me when speaking
of this Sunday promenade. It is something every one in Havana does enjoy.
It is at this promenade that you see a real crowd in Havana; not a hurrying,
busy crowd, but thousands of pleasure-seekers whose one thought is of the
enjoyment of the evening.
In Central Park and on the Malecon the bands are playing, and as the
dusk deepens the throng of well-dressed people increases. Motor-cars, private
landaus and victorias drive up and down the Prado and along the road that
runs beside the embankment from La Punta to where the Malecon ends. But by
far the greater number of persons are walking about or sitting on the fauteuils
provided by the municipality, and for the use of which a small amount is charged.
Most of the women are bareheaded; and the lithe, sinuous bodies of those that are
still young, with the light from their dark eyes, and their graceful movements, and
their self-conscious, studied look of indifference as they pass groups of young men
who stare with bold admiration at them-all this makes a picture I should not
willingly forget.
The whole blessed family goes out together," a young American remarked in
disgust to me. They will not trust a girl alone." That is true: the whole
blessed family, or most of it, does seem to go out together. And mamma is
generally fat, while the spinster aunt runs to skin and bone ; papa, too, I suspect,
is a bit of a savage where his daughters are concerned. His swagger and the de-
fiant set of the straw hat that he wears seem to utter vague but terrible threats
against those who would venture too far. Still, thank heaven, there is nothing to
prevent your staring; so while the band plays you follow the girls with your eyes,
feeling sure that they also are looking (but furtively) at you.
The Cuban woman, as I have hinted above, has a tendency to grow fat or thin
as she passes from youth to age. But she is pretty and graceful when young, and
for so much the stranger is most thankful. She almost invariably carries a fan, and
has learnt to manipulate it with the same dexterity with which she uses her eyes;
with the slightest motion of her fingers it opens or closes rapidly, and she fans
herself with a series of quick movements fascinating to behold.
Many a young man, I fancy, would, on a promenade night, as he watches these
girls, vote most cheerfully for the abolition of papa and mamma. He would like to
see the girls alone, with their airs and graces, their soft movements and their quick
or languishing glances. And no doubt a future emancipated generation will see
mamma relegated to the company of her contemporaries, and papa sent altogether

36 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

about his business. But that time is not yet; so, meanwhile, "the whole blessed
family," or the major portion of it, strolls up and down the Prado, or along
the Malecon, and the strains from the band fill the tropic night with music and
the moon up above aids the lamps of the city to shed brightness on the scene;
and to the north the waves of the Gulf of Mexico eternally roll shoreward and
break in surf against the shore, and the wind comes stealing over that wide ex-
panse of water, bringing a sweet, refreshing coolness to the pleasure-lovers of this
queen city of the Caribbean;Sea.
And so the hours steal on, and gradually the crowd thins and vanishes, and
Havana retires to rest after a day of prayer and pleasure-or of pleasure merely, as
some observers would say.

CHAPTER III

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

THE harbour of Havana was beginning to awake to the business of the day when,
along with a number of other passengers, I stepped on board the ferry-boat that
was to convey me over to Regla. In this little town was the railway line that
connects Havana with Santiago de Cuba, the capital city of the great Province of
Oriente at the other end of the island. Five years ago it would not have been
possible to go right through the country by train, for although there were several
lines of railway running in Cuba, they were all independent and all disconnected.
To-day they have changed all that : to-morrow they will improve on what they
have already done. Road-building and the extension of the railway system have
begun in good earnest since the dawn of Cuban independence, and so one can
now see Cuba without any considerable difficulty. Ten years ago the ordinary
traveller contented himself with a visit to Havana.
The train did not leave Regla promptly at 7.30, as it was scheduled to do.
The reason was that neither the train nor anything else pays strict attention to
schedule time in Cuba. This contempt for punctuality is one of the customs of
the country which I failed to admire; anyhow we did start at about eight o'clock,
and after pulling out of the station and leaving the little town, we found ourselves
in the open country-in the green undulating plains and under the bright blue
sky of Cuba.
What a contrast to the city it was We had left the narrow streets with their
painted houses behind us, and were now in the midst of cultivated fields dotted
here and there with peasants' houses, interspersed with clumps of heavy-foliaged
trees, cut through by paths which showed red or black according to the nature
of the earth, and watered by dark, gleaming streams that flowed and gurgled
between banks fringed as far as the eye could reach with Royal palms. Here
was where the real wealth of Cuba lay. Here was the soil whose fertility is
so wonderful that it never needs manure, where the cane-farmer does not have
to replant his land with new canes for seven and sometimes for ten years. So
rich is this soil that from the same roots fresh canes will spring and be as full

38 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

of luscious juice as those he gathered last season, and so deep down is this
layer of black or red earth that at some places you must dig for a yard or two
before you reach the hard limestone rock beneath. And nature has in other
ways been kind to this island of Cuba. It has given her a genial climate which
varies slightly as you travel from west to east, and which is almost cold in the
west in winter and never unbearably hot in the summer months. In all the
four seasons of the year it is still a land of bright sunshine and genial temperature :
if not, perhaps, in the towns, then at least in the country districts over whose
whole area the trade winds blow, bringing a refreshing coolness from the sea.
It is a land of placid beauty, smiling, fertile, and with something feminine
about its low wooded hills and purling waters. And it is the soft richness of
the island, its three thousand varieties of plants, its thick carpet of variegated
green, its deep blue skies, and its millions of palms and trees which grow in
luxuriance on its broad plains, in its deep valleys, and on its mountain peaks,
that have gained for it the title of "The Pearl of the Antilles."
The shape of Cuba has been likened to that of a hammer-headed shark.
The similarity exists. From point to point the island is 900 miles long,
and is everywhere less than 1oo miles broad; in one or two places it is
less than 25 miles across. Most of it is flat country, except to the east
and west. In the east a well-defined mountain range sends up lofty peaks,
the highest of which is 8,000 feet; in the west there is also a range
of low mountains, and in the centre of the island, running through it like a
backbone as it were, are spurs of the Sierra de los Organos and groups of
hills; but, on the whole, Cuba is singularly free from mountainous projections.
The island is divided into six provinces. The province to the extreme west,
Pinar del Rio, is the scene of the tobacco industry of Cuba. It is here and in the
farms immediately west of Havana that the tobacco is grown which has made
Cuba famous, and which gives employment to thousands of men and women. I
have already spoken of the tobacconist shops in Havana; and one of the most
interesting sights of that city also is its tobacco factories with their thousands of
workers, both male and female, and their atmosphere of busyness and skill. The
tobacco is cultivated on vegas, or small farms, by men who know their business by
instinct as it seems. Every farm is a little community in itself ; there the houses
of the farmer and his workers are situated, and there the vegetables for home
consumption are grown; sometimes, too, these vegas have gardens for the
common enjoyment of the community, and there are sheds for the cattle, and
the tobacco drying-house.
These vegas are hardly ever larger than forty acres. The men who grow
and tend the tobacco (chiefly white Cubans) know that while the soil and
climate will do much to bring the leaf to perfection and give it the fine flavour
that the connoisseur loves, everything may still be ruined by unskilful handling
or careless sorting, and so they go about their work with something of the

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

care a mother shows in looking after her child. The best quality of leaves is
carefully sorted out from those of slightly inferior quality, and then the better quality
of leaves is sorted out. And so the process continues, until the poorest quality
of the tobacco has been picked out to be used in the making of inferior cigars,
while the finer leaves are all neatly made up into bundles and duly labelled
according to their worth. But the finished work of the grower and sorter
is but the raw material of the man who makes the cigars. A great deal depends
upon him also. He knows it, and takes pride in his work. Seated at innumer-
able tables in some great factory in the capital, with their knives and their
pots of paste at hand, and, with cigars in their mouths, hundreds of these workers
sit for hour after hour in the day, rolling and cutting the cigars that are to go
all over the world. In the centre of the room, perched upon a sort of pedestal,
sits the reader of the factory, the man who is employed by the Company to
read aloud to the men who are at work. It is a curious custom this, but the
cigar-maker is a politician wherever he is found, and wants to hear what
the -newspapers are saying on the topics of the day. So the reader reads
to him as he works, and in listening he manufactures the fine cigars from which
Cuba draws so large a portion of her revenue.
Tobacco is grown in other provinces, as well as in Pinar del Rio; through
all of these, with the exception of Pinar del Rio, the train passes on its way
to Santiago de Cuba. The line I travelled by is a single-track, broad-gauge
railway system owned by an English and Cuban Company; the first-class
cars they provide are fairly comfortable, and are fitted out with straw-covered,
reversible seats and electric lamps (though some are still lighted by kerosene
lamps). The price of a ticket from Havana to Santiago is 5 2s. 6d.
After we have been travelling for ten or fifteen minutes the characteristic
features of the Cuban landscape begin to unroll before our eyes. One may have
read before coming to Cuba of the Royal palm and of how it grows in profusion
in this land; but no amount of description, no piling of adjective upon adjective,
no excess of poetic simile, can give any true idea of what these palms look like
as one sees them rising out of the ground in groups, in single stems, or in countless
thousands for hundreds of miles upon the way. They are fewer in the east than
in the west, and after passing through Havana, Matanzas, and Santa Clara one sees
another variety of palm, a fan-palm which is not as stately as the Royal palm,
but which has nevertheless a beauty of its own, with its crown of short fan-like
fronds shining a dark green in the rays of the sun.
Rank after rank of these Royal palms appear and vanish as the train speeds
past; sometimes they put one in mind of a regiment of soldiers marshalled out
there upon the plain, or of a forest that has not been allowed to grow up at
will, but has been trained and looked after, so that every tree has been given
room enough to spring up towards the sunlight and to spread out its branches
in the air. They strike a note of stateliness, so noble and so graceful is the look

40 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

of them. The wind passes through them, and the long green branches sway here
and there-thousands upon thousands of them moving at one moment. Grass
grows about the roots of them, long, thick, and emerald green; a carpet of beauti-
ful colour from which the slender, grey-white columns rise up and expand into
waving crowns of green.
Reddish-brown penguin hedges show where a careful farmer has sought to
protect his crop. A stream tumbles over its rocky bed, perhaps to join farther
on some river that flows towards the sea. There are many rivers in Cuba; the
country is a land of streams. But so narrow it is that but few of these are
large, and only one or two are navigable for any appreciable distance. The Rio
Cauto is the largest; the others flow chiefly north and south to empty themselves
into the sea. The rainfall in Cuba is copious, and so these rivers supply the
land with the water that it needs; but many of them sink into the limestone
caverns, while others spread themselves out on the low-lying lands of the southern
coast, and thus help to form the vast cienagas, or swamps, of Cuba, where the
crocodile lurks, and savage landcrabs find shelter, and fierce mosquitoes swarm
in millions. Evil places these are: death-traps and poisonous; yet I can imagine
that, in the days gone by, many a fear-maddened slave flying from a daily torture
worse than death may have plunged into them as behind him he heard the
thunder of the hoofs of pursuing horses or the deep, awful baying of the blood-
hounds tracking him to his doom. And to him they may have proved a place
of refuge.
The cattle ploughing in the heavy black soil of the countryside, and the
group of huts near by, tell me that I am passing one of the numerous farms
of Cuba. This is a small one, probably not more than 40 acres; and a glance
at the labouring oxen shows that they are harnessed to a wooden plough, a
crooked branch, one end of which, thrust into the soft earth, turns it up in
heavy lumps which must afterwards be broken by the hoe. A primitive process,
yet it serves the farmer's purpose well. The land is so soft that it yields to
his efforts, the soil is so rich that even a superficial plughing will give him
good returns. Yet it must not be thought that modern agricultural implements are
unknown in Cuba: they are being used more and more every year. I find that in
the three years, 1905-7, Cuba purchased over 172,ooo worth of agricultural
implements from America and the United Kingdom, and it has purchased more
since then. The American may be trusted to preach the value of modern
implements and methods to the Cuban.
Standing at the doors of the huts on this farm are a few women, white,
loosely dressed, but with their hair neatly plaited and parted. One of them
holds a naked child of about five years old in her arms. This custom of leaving
the children to go naked until they are five or six years old is one that will
die hard in Cuba. I don't think it hurts the children much in this sunny
climate, but the sight is a little startling at first. A strong, fine-looking American

;: ~.~?7~-
::
~:~~

lSSiJL TlE CAThEDFIAL JA ANA.

S"f

'C~4

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

from the Southern States, seeing me look at the child, offers some information
on the subject.
"A law has been passed prohibiting mothers to let their kiddies go
naked after four years of age," he tells me, "but nobody obeys it. The laws
here are a joke. Everything here is a joke! Why, in the interior many of
the boys and girls never put on anything before they are sixteen."
My informant was an intelligent man who helped to make the journey
interesting for me. He had been in Cuba for fourteen years, and cordially
disliked the people. He found them a joke, a bad joke apparently, for his
laugh when he spoke of them was not appreciative.
"Yes, sir," he continued, "boys and girls naked up to the age of sixteen.
What do you think of that? And the older men all patriots who fought in
the war of liberation! Everybody here is a patriot and fought in the war
of liberation; and when it came to paying off the army some years ago,
it seemed as though every person in the country had been engaged in
a life-and-death struggle for freedom, and patriotically expected to be paid
for it. I know hundreds of these patriots, and only one of these was a private-
he was not even a sergeant-he insists upon it. I regard that man as something
rare and wonderful, for all the other patriots were either colonels or generals.
One private, sir, to a thousand colonels It is a joke."
I laughed; "But they fought well ?" I suggested.
"They ran away well. I never saw such people for getting out of the
way of an army in my life. You simply couldn't catch them-the patriots!
"The Spaniards fought all right. The Spaniards and we are good friends
now, you know; we appreciate one another and despise the Cubans.
"There is no damned, high-fallutin' nonsense about the Spaniards. But
we all wept over the Cuban before we knew him. General Wood came over
here and talked a lot of nonsense, and spent a lot of money for no good
purpose whatever. They have made him Commander-in-Chief of the United
States Army, because, I suppose, he entertained the Cuban ladies at balls and
dances at the palace in Havana when he was Governor here. He built a
million-dollar road from Santiago to the San Juan hill, so that tourists could
go and see where the bold Roosevelt did the great deed that made him become
President of the United States. We call that road "Wood's Folly" over
here. Fancy building such a road in a country that needs roads to develop
its agriculture It is a joke."
My candid friend relapses into silence, and in the interval I scrutinise
closely the other passengers in the car. There are three or four Americans, a
few Cuban ladies with children, and numbers of men, all Cubans presumably,
who are going on to Matanzas or Camaguey. I stroll into the second-class
carriage; here another type of tropical humanity presents itself for study:
rough-looking men, without their jackets, and swarthy in complexion, and

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

women with figures and faces which indicate that they belong to the working-
classes, are seated here. My friend the Southerner will tell me that the Cuban
woman does not work; but then, he is judging by the American standards, and
judged by those standards even the lower-class Cuban woman does little. But
when I remember that even the simple duties of the home must take up some
time, when I think of the girls who are employed in the tobacco factories of
Havana, and when I call to mind the demands which a tropical climate
makes upon one's energy, I will not agree with any wholesale charge of laziness
brought against either the men or the women of Cuba. I know that in the cities
it is the Spaniard (as I have said before) who is the man of business. I know,
too, that the men in the cities and towns do not seem as robust and are not
so energetic as those who work on the farms and estates. The Latin-American
city-dweller does not love the strenuous life and is not fitted for it; yet, after
all, it is chiefly the native Cuban who grows and manufactures the sugar and
cigars, and who cultivates the fruit, which Cuba exports in such large quantities.
He is a splendid hand at cutting timber. He is fairly good at cattle-raising.
Some railway-men say he is a good hand at heavy railroad work, but others
deny this; so I suppose that some Cubans do navvy work fairly well,
while others do it badly. In the light of all this I cannot refrain from differing
from my Southern friend's opinions on Cubans as a whole.
I look out of the window again, and in the middle distance I see the forests
of palms, and behind these, against the horizon, there runs a low range of
green hills. The sun is now high in the heavens and the heat has stilled the
landscape to sleep. I imagine that out yonder the silence is as the silence of
night, unbroken save by the chirping of some insect or the lowing of the
cattle as they wander about cropping the juicy grass. Picturesque groups of
peasants' huts we pass, a little settlement here and there, with its shops, its
houses, and its vegetable gardens, and before we come to Matanzas we pass
by a great sugar estate with its square and rectangular fields of cane, its
red-roofed factory with the tall iron chimneys rising suddenly into the sky,
its avenue of Royal palms leading up to a low house surrounded by verandahs
and its grove of young cocoanut-trees with their fronds of yellowish-green.
We are in the province of Matanzas, one of the chief sugar districts of the
island. Sugar is grown everywhere in Cuba; it occupies about one-half of the
cultivated area of the country; it gives employment to the bulk of the people:
and while, in other West Indian islands, the cane-sugar industry has fallen upon
evil times, in Cuba it flourishes and has nothing to fear from the competition
of the beet; and no wonder, for what better sugar lands can you find
anywhere ?
I know that Java is said to have some of the best sugar soils in the world;
but this flat, rolling country with its thick layer of vegetable mould, its
numerous fine harbours to the north and to the south, its easy access to the

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

sea from every point; this island of Cuba, I think, has nothing to fear from
Java, which is not even now as important a sugar-producing country as Cuba.
You must remember that the cane can be grown on almost every part of it,
and that of its area of 40,000 square miles (excluding the islands and
cays along the coast) only about 3 per cent. was said to be under cultivation
in 1899. Picture to yourself this island well supplied with roads and an extended
railway system (as it one day will be), and steadily attracting workers from
Spain and the other West Indian islands, and you may form some idea of the
position it will occupy as one of the world's sources of sugar supply. Even
now the larger number of its sugar estates are splendidly equipped with
modern machinery. And the latest process of sugar manufacture will be found
in Cuba to-day.
A large sugar estate is a village, with its barracks for the workers, its 20,
30, or 40 miles of narrow-gauge railway tracks for the train of cars which
bring the canes from the field to the factory, and its hundreds of draught-oxen
and its gangs of labourers. The industry here is carried on upon a grand
scale, with expensive sugar centrals and an enormous output. This one island
alone can supply all the world with the sugar it needs. Yet, fifty years ago,
Cuba produced, not sugar chiefly, but coffee, and only gave up the cultivation
of that berry with reluctance, and in obedience to stern economic necessity.
To-day Brazil is the great coffee-producing country of the world. Fifty
years ago she had already begun to threaten the other coffee-growing countries
with her promise of enormous production. The Cubans saw the danger that
threatened; their coffee plantations had also severely suffered through the hurri-
canes of 1843 and 1845 ; so the ruined cafetals were re-planted in cane, the fruit
trees that once shaded the delicate coffee plant disappeared, and where the tender
shrub had once blossomed into snow-white flowers of delicious perfume, the green
blade of the cane now appeared. Thus an economic revolution took place,
and Cuba, which once had produced great quantities of inferior coffee, began
to produce greater quantities of superior cane sugar, and in the production
of this she will not be beaten by any other tropical country in the world.

And now I notice that the appearance of the country has slightly altered. We
are now running through a valley almost entirely surrounded by hills, and through
this valley a river flows, and here and there are houses and groups of peasants,
and horses and cattle, and plots of cultivated ground, and-but suddenly I cease
to observe the scene, for we have emerged from the valley now, and surely that
stretch of sparkling blue water is the sea, and there, climbing from the shores
of that noble bay up the low sheltering slopes of the hills, is a city-Matanzas
with its red-roofed houses and its six-and-thirty thousand souls.
The train stopped. We had been a little more than two hours upon the way,

44 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

and it was at this station that we should stay for twenty minutes for breakfast.
So we left the train and streamed into the station, and here we sat down to a meal
prepared in Cuban style, which is a style quite different from that which prevails
in the American or the Americanised hotels of Havana.
In the large waiting-room several long tables were set, and heaped upon them
was food of all sorts and descriptions. Great dishes of rice coloured red and
yellow, and cooked with large pieces of fowl or fresh fish, or with shrimps, were
scattered all about. Beef lopped with egg, eggs fried in oil, Cuban steaks swim-
ming in a rich gravy, ripe plantains sliced thick and fried to a golden brown, sweet
potatoes and yams and avocado pears-the tables were laden with all these. And
in the centre of each table, forming a sort of ridge, or backbone, was a row of
bottles and water jars, and claret decanters, and fruit-stands filled with fruits; and
dishes with slices of cream cheese and guava jelly were placed in between those
containing more solid food.
What a mixture it was We sat on benches ranged on either side of the tables,
and while we were being served I looked around me. Cubans of all colours and
complexions were there-black, white, and brown-and some Americans, and a
Chinaman or two. My friend from the Southern States sat next to a negro; I
glanced at his strong-featured, rather proud-looking face-he did not seem
disturbed by the proximity. John Chinaman eats quickly, undisturbing, and
undisturbed. And every one assisted every one else to food and drink, some
of us talking, some eating in silence.
Here, at any rate, we were all on a footing of equality. At the other Fondas in
Cuba you will also find a mixed company-you cannot exclude a man from an
hotel or restaurant in Cuba on account of his race or colour. But in the hotels
frequented by American tourists, I am told that they sometimes charge high
rates to certain guests whom they do not want; or they perhaps discover that
there is not a spare room in the house. But the poorer establishments do not
venture to do this; and, for my part, when I saw a Southerner sitting side by side
with a negro, and near to a Chinaman, without evincing any disapprobation
whatever, I felt that at last the lion was (temporarily) lying down with the lamb.
We ate with remarkable rapidity, having little time to lose. The plates and
glasses were of an extraordinary thickness, of execrable pattern, and clumsy
beyond description. Some of us began with fruit, following this up with fried
eggs; claret mixed with water was the favourite drink, and for dessert we had
bananas and native cream cheese flavoured with slices of guava dulce. I tasted
nearly everything-I paid the penalty afterwards-and I confess I found most
of it good. The dishes were oily beyond description, and some of the meats
had a tendency to sweetness; still they were palatable, and the price of the
breakfast was moderate-an American dollar for each person. This restaurant,
I understand, and the others at the different stations along the line, are either
owned by or run in connection with the Railway Company. The waiters at

T0

A

COUNTRY HOUSE WITH AVENUE OF ROYAL PALMS.

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY 45

Matanzas, I noticed, too, were Spaniards, but at the station eating-houses farther
on they were all Chinamen; and all the cooks were Chinamen.
We left Matanzas at about eleven o'clock, and as the train drew out of the
station I again caught a glimpse of the city and of the bay into which the Yumuri
empties itself. The Valley of the Yumuri is believed to be the most beautiful spot
in all Cuba; here, too, are the famous caves of Bellamar, great limestone caverns
that reach a depth of 400 feet, and which are one of the tourist-shrines of Cuba.
But it is the bay of Matanzas which charmed me, so calm it is, and so beauti-
ful is its surface of blue and frosted silver. And here I may remark on the
peculiar formation of so many of the harbours of Cuba. They are nearly all of
them long and narrow, and entered by a narrow opening, so that the cities built
upon the shores of these bays cannot always be seen from the sea. Santiago de
Cuba, for example, is so completely hidden by the hills on either side of the wind-
ing channel which forms the approach to it, that one may pass near to the coast,
and, but for the presence of the Morro Castle at the entrance of the harbour,
never suspect there was a city within a hundred miles of it. These pouch-like
harbours are formed by the erosion of the limestone rocks by the sea. The reef-
rock that for the most part forms the Cuban coast is hard and resisting, but
immediately behind it is a softer substance : hence the numerous, narrow, protected
bays of the island. The harbour of Cienfuegos, for example, is thought to be one
of the safest in the world ; while that of Santiago de Cuba is one of the most
sheltered and most beautiful that I have ever seen. And many other of Cuba's
harbours make admirable anchorages for ships.
After leaving Matanzas we settle down for a journey of several hours; for
though we shall stop at different stations along the line, the destination of most
of us is Camaguey, and that place we may reach at nine o'clock to-night. My
friendly Southerner is joined by another American who shares his views on the
Cuban situation, thinking it somewhat of a joke; but the newcomer is more
charitable towards the people, and so tells me of their good qualities, which
information I receive most gratefully.
The torpor which follows after a heavy breakfast falls upon all of us. It is
warm in the train, and presently many of the passengers settle themselves down
to sleep in attitudes that suggest the writhing of men stretched out on beds of
torture. The guard comes in, and seeing us all comfortable, or at any rate
resigned, proceeds himself to make the best of the situation, and begins to do
so by sitting down, picking his teeth, and spitting on the floor. He is a Cuban
but speaks English, and he tells you he has lived for some time in Canada and
the United States. Most of the guards on this line speak English (this to facilitate
the American traveller), and all of them are quite prepared to give you any
information in their power with an easy familiarity which is not intended to be
offensive and is not in reality so. Still, any one accustomed to the habits of those
countries where a railway guard is supposed to keep to himself and not mix on

46 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

friendly terms with the passengers, would be a little surprised at the conduct
of the guards on this Cuban railway line. Shortly after this particular one sat
down before me, he pulled a mango out of his pocket, and, pealing it, threw the
skin upon the floor. Slicing off the heavy flesh and judiciously sampling it, he
began to talk, telling me about the country, and the people, and the Americans,
whom he did not seem to love. Another guard was talking to my Southerner
with his right hand resting familiarly on the latter's shoulder, and a cigar between
his lips. Everything and every one suggested a kind of lazy indifference to class
distinctions, to discipline and order; and if there was not much conversation,
that was either because we were lazy or had nothing to talk about; it was not
because we were proud.
The villages we see after passing Matanzas are larger, more numerous, and
of more prosperous appearance than those we passed before. Some of these
settlements are towns, and I know of nothing more interesting in its way
than one of these Cuban towns set down on the railway line, with its church
and its better-class houses, and its huts and its streets and lanes, and perhaps
a tiny park. Colon town, as I remember it, was a town of the better sort:
a pretty place with red-tiled houses, and a plaza with a statue in it, and streets
paved with cobble-stones and macadam ; a place with a mixed population
of whites and negroes and mestizos, who all looked careless and happy, as they
slowly moved about or stood loitering at the thresholds of their doors. But
Esperanza, situated farther on upon the way, was altogether different. Esperanza,
or the village in Esperanza that I saw, is perhaps a typical Cuban settlement
upon which fortune has smiled. It is a mass of roomy huts divided from one
another by narrow lanes. The huts are thatched with the fronds of the Royal
palm, and the sides of them are either built of boards or of the flat end-portion
of the fronds. There are a few tiled houses there, and a church; but the
dominant note of the scene is struck by the grey, painted, comfortable huts,
and the patches of banana-trees and sugar-cane near them. The sun was
shining down upon it all as I saw it on the day of which I write, and the spears
of the cane-plant gave back the light in flashing reflections. Above the village
a flock of vultures (the John Crows) circled and wheeled, and just outside
of its boundaries a few horses and cattle strayed. Two or three shops supplied
the community with its few wants, and before these, as before every village
shop in Cuba, a number of horses were tethered to the poles that support
the projecting eves of the little wooden buildings, each of which is surrounded
by a narrow verandah.
These village shops are all the same. Some of them hang out the sign that
there the traveller may have food, or may have his hair or beard attended to.
" Fonda y Barberia," says one sign; Ropa y Articulos de Fantasia," says another.
So that cloth and clothing and fancy goods may be purchased there, as well
as condensed milk and beef.

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

I imagine, too, that these shops are the gossip-houses and clubs of these
settlements. Men riding from different parts of the adjacent country districts
alight at these places to "pass the time of day" and have a little talk. This
explains the number of saddled horses I see here, and I can picture a gathering
of these caballeros in times of revolution; I can see them spring out of their
high-peaked, hollow, richly worked saddles, each with a long machete hanging
at his side and a gun in his hand, and all gesticulating fiercely, and discussing
the all-absorbing topic of the day. Then I see them moving off in a group,
and trotting across the plain until they are swallowed up in a forest of Royal
palms, or disappear behind the distant horizon. And as I see some of them,
now, jacketless, good-humoured, and armed with the machete, I suspect that
in a tussel they would not prove to be merely the joke that my Southern friend
describes them to me.
It was, I think, at the station which was labelled Colon that a boy led
in a blind beggar, evidently one of the cherished institutions of the town.
The cry for alms rang plaintively through the train, and I noticed that but few
persons refused to assist the beggar. This scene was repeated at more than
one station farther on, and takes place every day, no doubt. You do not hustle
the beggar here and give him to the guardians of the poor; you look upon
him as part of an ordered scheme of life, and give him your pence, and receive
his blessing, quite as a matter of course. But there was something else accepted
as a matter of course also, which I did not appreciate. A man went from car
to car selling papers and illustrated magazines; I thought I would buy one
or two, and I did so. He handed me the papers, and on his giving me the
change of the silver coin with which I had paid him, I looked at his hands.
To my horror, I saw that the man was a leper-the signs of the disease were
all too visible-and I had touched his paper and money I called the Southerner's
attention to his case, and asked him if lepers were not segregated in Cuba.
This gave him an opportunity to launch out upon a description of all the loath-
some diseases of the country, and the carelessness of the authorities in dealing
with them. And here, I am afraid, he was not altogether wrong.
A blind beggar led through the train to plead for alms was a pathetic object,
and illustrated the easy-going kindliness of the people. But a leper allowed
to sell papers on a train was enough to make one sick. The leprosy of Cuba,
fortunately, is said to be non-contagious; nevertheless one does not feel very
happy for some time after one has come into contact with a man suffering from
leprosy or some other dangerous contagious disease.
Santa Clara, the province through which one passes after leaving the pro-
vince of Matanzas, is the largest sugar district of Cuba, and one of the best
cultivated. Signs of its prosperity may be seen in the superior appearance
of its peasants' huts, and in the size of its settlements scattered along the line.
And yet wages are lower in Santa Clara than in almost any other part of the

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

island. I say this on the authority of the latest statistics I have been able to
obtain upon the subject; from them I learn that while in Camaguey, a province
with only four or five sugar estates, the rate of wage for an agricultural labourer
was 3s. 8d. a day in 1907, it was 2s. 9-d. in Santa Clara. On the other hand, it costs
a labourer much less to live in Santa Clara than elsewhere : the average cost
of a month's board for a labourer in Santa Clara is put down at about I i6s. 4d.-
little over 9s. a week. The best paid workers in Cuba are unquestionably those
employed in tobacco growing-but these, of course, are nearly all skilled men.
In the cities, too, the price of labour is high, some domestic servants getting
as much as I ($5) a week.
Wages fluctuate in Cuba as elsewhere, and as the exploitation of the island
continues wages will rise. The country will require a much larger population
than it has if it is to be developed properly, and part of the labour force it requires
must be attracted by high wages. After the independence of the country was
attained in 1898, a stream of emigrants began to pour into Cuba. The census
of 1899 gave the population as 1,572,799 souls; the census of 1907 gives it as
2,o48,980-an almost incredible increase. Now nearly one-third of this population
lives in towns and cities of 8,ooo inhabitants or more. This means (stated
differently) that over 6oo,ooo persons in Cuba are town and city dwellers;
and if we took the towns of I,ooo inhabitants and more, we should find
that the people who live in towns and cities numbered nearly 900,ooo. Many
a town, however, supplies the surrounding country districts with workers; so,
in speaking of the city dwellers, the first figure given above more fairly indicates
the proportion of the urban to the rural and agricultural population.
But even that proportion is entirely too large. The Cuban clearly loves the
life (such as it is) to be found in the streets and plazas of his towns, but the city-
bred man will not do much towards developing his island. As for the Cuban
labourer, although admitted to be good-humoured and imitative and willing,
he is very apt to take offence, and very quick to resent a real or an imagined
insult. Speak harshly to him, and you may find yourself suddenly attacked;
and when he is armed with his machete he is no mean antagonist. He may even
do worse. He may set your cane-fields on fire. The knowledge that this is
possible keeps many a boss to a perfect courtesy; nor does the latter resent
being called by his Christian or his surname by his labourers. For they do not
mean to be discourteous. They merely feel that they are quite the equal of the
man who is placed in charge of them.
I have met many men who have had gangs of these Cubans working under
them, and one and all have told me the same story. The unmarried Cuban, they
say, is almost hopeless as a worker-as an American epigrammatically put it, He
is all necktie and affection." The Cuban youth loves a gaudy-coloured neckcloth,
and he always wants a woman near him : away from his wife or his fiance,
or the woman who stands to him in the relation of wife, he does badly. His

Uipl

1

BRINGING CANES TO -HE FACTORY, CUBA.

- .4

\:'E

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY 49

thoughts are always with "a certain she," even though he may not be constant
to one. Now, women are fewer than men in Cuba. While the gentler sex
preponderates in many other lands, in Cuba it is more than 1oo,ooo less than the
other, and this alone would be a good reason for the not very high moral tone
of the country. So long as this great disproportion continues, too, the Cuban
will always have a liking for the towns, where, naturally, the women prefer
to live.
This preponderance of males in the population has prevailed for over a
century. As the authors of the last census tell us, "En todos los census, los
varones han constituido una mhyoria de los habitantes." In 1841, 58 per cent.
of the population were men; this proportion became 51I8 per cent. in 1899; in
1907 it was put down as 52'5 per cent. And the cause ? The slave trade in
the first place, and emigration in the second. Slaves continued to be taken to
Cuba up to 1845, and most of the slaves imported were men. Shortly after
this commenced the introduction of indentured labourers from China, and in
twenty years some 130,000 of these workers were brought to Cuba. Most of
them were men, and they were so badly treated that, in 1877, the Chinese
Government refused to allow any more of them to be taken to the island.
There are only about ii,ooo of these Chinese in Cuba to-day, and there is now
a law prohibiting the entrance of new arrivals. The others have either died or
have returned home, or have migrated to other lands.
As the Chinese are a disappearing quantity in the Cuban population, I may
deal with them in a few words once for all. They are industrious, law-abiding,
and frugal; they are restaurant-keepers, vegetable gardeners, and cooks. A
few work on the sugar estates, where their services are appreciated, for the
Chinaman does not neglect his work. For example, the cane juice must boil
for a certain length of time before it becomes transformed into the crystals
that are sent abroad. If the liquid is poured out too soon, it is spoilt; if
allowed to boil too long, the crystals are not of the required size and quality.
Now it is just possible that the Cuban, at the very moment his attention should
be fixed upon the boiler, may remember that he wants to light his cigarette.
But the Chinaman stands there watching with a wonderful patience, and at
the right quarter of a second he upsets the boiler, and the sugar is done to
perfection. Still, he is not wanted in Cuba. That island will never be developed
with the help of the Chinese.
Another reason for the preponderance of the male population of Cuba is
the number of male emigrants which has been pouring into the country since
the establishment of Cuban independence. These are chiefly from Spain, and
are the most prized and probably the most valuable element of the Cuban
population. They are splendid workers, and peaceful on the whole, and though
in the past a good number of those who went to Cuba did not always remain
there, the likelihood is that the larger portion of the Spanish emigrants will

50 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

settle for good in the island, where they will merge with the people, who are
of the same race and who speak the same language as themselves.
It will also be apparent that the steady emigration of Spaniards to Cuba
must lead to the gradual disappearance of the darker elements of the Cuban
population. These strangers will seek wives amongst the women of the coun-
try, and the competition of the males for the women will end in a victory for
the white men, who, for one thing, will be better able to support their wives.
As a matter of fact, the coloured element of the population has been steadily
decreasing in proportion to the whites for near upon a century. The negro
never throve in Cuba-he died there easily-and the mixture of the races has
further tended to diminish the numbers of the black man. So we find to-day
that more than two-thirds of the Cubans are put down in the census as white
-a doubtful statement-while the remainder are divided into mestizos and blacks,
the latter being least of all.
The process of miscegenation will continue. Cuba will steadily become
more white, and the strain of black blood in the veins of the people will pro-
bably help them to bear the effects of a tropical climate better than they
otherwise would. It is this island and the colony of Porto Rico that will fur-
nish in the future some most valuable data on the question of white colonisation
in the tropics, a question of some importance to both the white and the darker
races of the world.

Night had fallen when the train drew into the station at Camaguey. From
the station I passed into a street, lit here and there by faintly gleaming lamps.
Except for one or two hotel boys, and a few victoria drivers, I saw no one:
the city was asleep.
The city is always asleep, as I found when I wandered about on the fol-
lowing day-it has been sleeping for over two centuries. What an impression
it made upon me I had read of the independence of its people, of how it
had been one of the centres of revolution in the days when Cuba fought with
Spain for independence, of how it was the "whitest" of Cuban cities, and of
the superior beauty of its women and the bravery of its men. What did I
expect? I cannot tell; yet what I saw in Camaguey was something I had
not expected; for it was all new to me, and strange: a curious city which
lives upon the few traditions it has acquired with time.
It is an inland town, built upon the site of an ancient Indian village whose
name it bears. The name the Spaniards gave it is Puerto Principe; but
Puerto Principe is a seaport to the north; and though once the city itself
was there, fear of the terrible pirates drove its inhabitants to move into the
interior, until they came to where Camaguey now stands.
The whole province of which the city is the capital is also known as Puerto

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

Principe or Camaguey. But even the Cuban might be a little puzzled at first
if you spoke of it by its Spanish designation. In the West Indies there has been
a conflict of names as well as a conflict of races and nationalities, and in many
instances the native names have won. "Cuba" itself is an Indian word, but
the island has been christened many a time. Columbus called 'it "Juana," then
it was renamed Fernandina." Shortly after they named it "Santiago," then "Ave
Maria," then "Alfa y Omega." But there was a district in the central region of the
island called "Cubanacan," and this name, truncated to Cuba, was eventually
bestowed on the whole country. In a somewhat similar manner an Indian
village has given its name to a province and city, and the people of this part
of Cuba are proud to speak of themselves as Camagueyans.
It was early morning when I went out into the streets of Camaguey, and
what first struck me was the silence that seemed to reign everywhere. A few
women were going to church in twos and threes; a man or two loitered at
a shop door ; but what other sign of life was in this city of thirty thousand
souls ? Yes; I remember some other things as I recall that ancient town.
I remember little carts drawn by goats and looked after by boys, which went
about with vegetables and with bottles of milk. And where the Alameda stands,
with its withered-looking trees all covered with dust, I remember seeing a
stray horse or two, and a man who ineffectually tried to persuade himself that
he was trying to catch them. Other scenes rise before me like dark specks on
a white curtain. So I remember that I found the short-circuit electric car after
some search; and saw a few more people here and there ; and-yes, Camaguey is
not dead but sleeping; but one may be excused if at first one is tempted to
write of it as dead.
The streets of this inland city curve about, of their own volition as it seems.
Parallel streets are unknown in Camaguey; the ancient founders of this place
must have hated the straight line and loved the circle. There has been some
attempt at paving these thoroughfares; but where the rough cobble-stone or
the macadam ends, the sand begins; and in a Camagueyan street I have sunk
to the ankles in sand. Most of the houses here are of a single storey, and old;
the walls of many of them are cracked and dilapidated; the low steps leading to the
doors of these places are narrow and encroach upon the tiny side-walks; often,
too, they are broken-fallen to pieces through age and decay.
The wooden window grilles project into the streets. They are big and
clumsy, nothing at all like the plain or fancy iron-work that one sees in Havana.
Where they are broken they have sometimes been patched with pieces of cloth;
but at the best they cannot be intended to secure privacy, for I have no difficulty
in peering into the interior of the living-rooms as I pass along; and there I see
the scantily clothed women lolling in rocking-chairs, and the naked babies crawling
on the floor. There is hardly any furniture in the houses of the poorer sort. One
or two tables, a bed, a few rocking-chairs-that is the inventory. The houses

52 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

of the better sort, I am told, are furnished fairly well; but the doors and windows
of all these are kept closed; and so when I passed through a street where are
situated the houses of the aristocracy of the town, it seemed to me as though
I were in a place deserted by its people.
The one bright thing in all Camaguey is its liquor shops. I saw no customers
in them; nevertheless their shelves were not covered with dust as was the
case with the other retail establishments I saw. Its cathedral and churches,
large though they are, are ugly buildings, and the altars in them are decked
out with artificial flowers and tawdry tinsel. I think it was in the cathedral that
I noticed a score or two of rickety benches painted blue and provided for the
use of worshippers, the entire building looking deserted, squalid, miserable, out
of repair. And the beautiful women of Camaguey ? I saw just nine of them-or,
at least, I saw nine fairly good-looking girls, and I suppose these were representa-
tive of the rest. It was at the corner of a street-No. 35 Calle Soledad, to be
precise, that I came upon something that looked like a little shop, in which
some girls and a man were gathered. I peeped in ; the easels and paintings about
showed me at once that it was an art school-or what is considered such in Cama-
guey-and the ages of the pupils may have ranged from fourteen to twenty-one.
The features of the girls were rather sharp, but their eyes were bright and they
were a merry lot; the pictures scattered about were execrable, and the room
itself, a plain wooden structure, must surely have been used for retail-trade purposes
in the not distant past.
A priest draped in a long brown cloak and wearing sandals on his naked
feet passes up the street. A child or two come out of a house near by, and
run inside again. Every one seems bent upon avoiding the open air: is it that
the habit of seeking shelter-acquired in the days when the fear of pirates was
upon the people of this town-has clung to them through all these generations ?
Strolling back to my hotel I lean against the door, and from here I can
see where the street ends and the open road begins. There are no suburbs
here, no gradual transition from town to country: one ceases and the other begins
abruptly, and the grass grows round the city, disputing its boundaries with it.
Grass grows in the streets of the city, in those silent, deserted streets through
which life moves with such monotony. Camaguey is the great cattle-rearing
province of Cuba, and in travelling through it one passes savannah after savannah
of rich parana or guinea grass, and thousands of cattle. Sometimes the grass
grows so high that nothing else can be seen; even the cattle are hidden by the
long spears. The soil of this province is not so rich as that of other portions
of Cuba, being largely composed of sand; yet it serves its purpose, for Camaguey is
the meat-supplying province of Cuba. Now, as I stand at the door of the hotel
and note where the houses cease and the sand and grass begin, I picture to
myself how easy it would be for all these low and ancient structures to be buried
and forgotten did all these people leave the city for two or three short years.

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY 55

How easy for ruin to overtake this place which strikes such an unharmonious
note in the centre of these green savannahs. The silence and oppression of
vastness are already upon it; yet, in the end, the commercial spirit of the age
will conquer the spirit of the plains; for even in Camaguey two or three new
buildings are being erected, and land agents are there, and a speculation in
land has begun.
Who owns the land in Cuba? Cubans chiefly, but foreigners also own a good
deal of it. An attempt has been made to effect legislation prohibiting foreigners
from acquiring land ; it has proved unsuccessful, and so the transfers of property
continue, much to the annoyance of those far-seeing Cubans who perceive that
the strength of the stranger will be chiefly in his ownership of land. I was told
in Havana that the younger Cubans are hastening to get rid of their possessions,
so that they might go to enjoy the pleasures of Paris. But here, in Camaguey,
I hear a different, and, I believe, a truer tale. It is a land-speculator who tells
it to me, an American whose yearly transactions amount to many thousands
of pounds.
"The Cuban never willingly sells his land," he says; "never sells it until
necessity compels him to do so. When he comes and offers me so many acres,
I know he is in difficulties, and I offer him my own price. 'Oh, no!' he says,
' couldn't think of selling for that, would much rather not sell.' But I don't budge,
for I know what will happen; so he goes home and talks the matter over with
his wife, and turns it over in his mind, and in the end he comes back to me
and we close the bargain. But he only sells under compulsion." That I believe to
be the truth; yet, in spite of this reluctance, some of the land is being sold.
For one thing, not many Cubans have capital enough to develop their properties,
and the temptation to realise on what brings them but little, if any, profit must
always be great.
How do these people live ?" I ask my informant, as we stand together at the
door of the huge hotel that was once a barracks for Spanish troops.
"How do they live? I have been eighteen years in Cuba, and have made
it my ambition to be the best-informed man in the island on Cuban affairs. I
live in this city, and I like it; I know a good many of the people; yet time
after time I have found myself asking the very same question you have asked
me. I am not sure that I can answer it, but I will try. You see those little goat-
carts going about? well, they go from door to door selling vegetables, and a
woman or child will come to the door and will buy a quarter of a cabbage, or
a plantain, or a few bananas, and a small portion of fish or beef is bought at the
shops; but it is chiefly vegetables that these people live upon."
But they must have money to buy these," I said. Where does the money come
from ? I see no one working here, and no signs of industry."
"Well, it is like this. Every man here, more or less, owns a piece of land
or a few head of cattle. Now, a few of them will go into partnership-that is,

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

they will put all their cattle under one man and divide the calves amongst them.
These calves can always be sold, and so a little money comes in in that way.
Then there are one or two sawmills near this town, and a sugar estate, and
the railway shops. All these employ some of the people. And these live upon so
little that they don't require much money. Nobody works very hard in Camaguey."
That was obvious enough; and if the secret of a happy life be a minimum
of exertion and a minimum of wants, I think the lower classes of Camaguey
have learnt that secret.
Great two-wheeled carts drawn by teams of oxen creaked past the hotel,
each taking one or two huge logs of wood to the sawmills. These carts were driven
by swarthy Cubans, each armed with a whip whose thick, tapering leather thong
measures some three or four yards. Dogs sneaked about here and there, big
brutes which must have descended from the hounds that were used to hunt
the slaves in the days gone by. I left my hotel, where the three male guests
had sat down to a game of poker which (so far as I could make out) had been
in progress for a week or two, and strolled towards the end of the street. There
I found a victoria, and taking it, was driven into the open country over what
was by courtesy called a road.
In the last "Census of the Republic" we are given two pictures: one is
called "Un camino primitive en Cuba," the other, "Un camino Cubano de
construction moderna" Only those persons who have had some acquaintance
with an average Cuban road can understand why the Cuban authorities are so
anxious to show the difference between the old roads and those they are now
building. The Spaniard, while he founded substantial and even fine cities,
systematically neglected to build even passable roads in any of the countries he won
from the Indians. Here and there he paved a path, like the famous gold road
across the Isthmus of Panama, in order that the mule trains bearing the gold
and precious stones from the mines might reach the coast safely. But mule
tracks and narrow pathways cut through the forest represented almost all that
was done in the way of road-building for the purpose of facilitating travel and the
development of the country; and this policy of neglecting the means of transit
it was which prevented Spain from easily and completely subduing the Cuban
revolutionists. The Spanish soldiers, though brave, could not reach the enemy,
and so passed most of their time in the towns. The enemy, knowing every
inch of the country and all the defiles of the hills, mocked at the efforts of the
Government. So, from a military as well as an agricultural standpoint, some
good roads would have proved a blessing to Spain. As I plunged and jolted
over the stretch of earth that formed the Camagueyan road, and saw the deep
trenches dug out by the rains, and the great holes here and there, and the hillocks
everywhere; as on every hand was visible an absolute disregard for the con-
veniences of communication; as I perceived that when the rains fell this road
must be entirely impassable by man or beast; I felt that at any rate the American

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

had rendered good service to Cuba by instituting a system of modern road-
building. Next to sanitation, this was one of the real benefits of the American
occupation.
Just outside of the city, hovering on the boundaries of it, and perhaps officially
included as part of it, stands a settlement of huts. One or two great trees over-
shadow them, and the near-by shop marks their comparative independence of the
retailers of the town. I mention them particularly, for I noticed the wide gaps
in the sides of these huts, I saw where the nails had given, and how the rough
planks of unpainted, weather-beaten wood had fallen apart from one another,
and I wondered why no one had troubled to make these places decent once more,
and why the people should be contented to endure the discomforts of rain and
wind when a little exertion might make them comfortable. It could not be
poverty that had caused these huts to fall to ruin. I saw breadfruit and banana-
trees growing near them; the dogs that prowled around did not look ill-fed ; goats
and pigs searched for food here and there, and horses were tethered under the
trees or to broken-down remains of what once may have been fences. It was not
poverty, it was indolence-it was the spirit of mafiana and the spirit of sleep that
had brought about this general neglect; and yet one would have thought that the
misery which the rainy seasons must inevitably bring would have roused any one
to a sense of the necessity of making his habitation rain-tight. When the rains fall
heavily, as they do in May and June and in October in Cuba, the hard earth over
which these huts are built must become sodden, and in this mud their owners must
walk or stand. Yet a few planks laid down and nailed to a beam or two would
constitute some sort of flooring. But no one seems to think of it, and in Cuba
there are hundreds of dwellings like these. I don't wonder now that consumption
is prevalent in Cuba.
And now when I come to look back upon it all, I think that the most interesting
thing I saw in Camaguey was its cemetery, for that seemed to typify the place.
There are two great burial grounds in Havana, and one, which I visited, contains
many splendid monuments and the mausoleums of some of the oldest families of
Cuba. But, I was told, you either bought a piece of burial land for a large sum
of money, or you rented it for so many years-five years for ten dollars-and if you
did not renew your lease the bones of the person interred were taken out and cast
into a ditch-a sort of modern Golgotha made up of the skulls and the skeletons
of the poor. In the Espada Cemetery of Havana are niches which may even now
be rented for a term of years, and all over Cuba this system of grave-renting
prevails. But a Cuban guide-book informed me (with much evident satisfaction
on the part of the writer) that in Camaguey one could rent a grave for twenty
years, a fact which is mentioned to show that the Camagueyans have great respect
for the dead, and love to think of them after they are laid to rest.
Inscribed in Latin above the gate of the Camagueyan Cemetery I visited were
the words : "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." The impressive text,

56 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

the silence, the shadows cast upon the graves and tombs as the light clouds
trailed slowly across the sun, the black-clothed woman and child hanging a
wreath upon a family vault, and weeping silently, the rustle among the grass
and weeds as a great lizard ran from one grave to another, and the occasional
shrill shriek of a blackbird hovering among the branches of a tree, I shall
never forget it all, so sad and so appealing it was, and so symbolic of this still
sleeping city, and perhaps also of the ancient Indian village of which one now
remembers but the name.
I was told that the train would leave Camaguey for Santiago de Cuba at 12.20;
so I went to the station at that hour, and waited until long ,ast one o'clock before
the train arrived. Here, at any rate, were many signs of life. About a hundred
persons had gathered to see some ten men and women leave for other parts of the
country, and these strolled about and lounged, and from the appearance of most
of them I gathered that they were the loafers of the town. Most of them had just
enough energy to live. And though Camaguey may be the whitest of Cuban cities,
the persons who frequent its railway station are of all colours, most of them being
swarthy, many looking emaciated.
A black policeman strolls nonchalantly up and down, a black woman lovingly
caresses her naked baby as she pulls at the stump of a cigar, a man who rents
a stand on the station sells sweet drinks and brandy and claret to those persons
who want to buy. He alone displays some energy; the rest of us are languid,
indifferent. But at last the scream of a steam whistle is heard, and shortly after
the train comes in. Those who are to leave by it take their seats, and presently
we are leaving the city of Camaguey behind. And lo it has put on a new appear-
ance, for there it stands in the distance, red-roofed, substantial-looking, with its
church towers soaring serenely up towards the sky. It stands there, for all the
world like a prosperous, opulent city, and while I stare and wonder at the mirage
which distance and a new point of view have created, it slowly fades from my sight.

Once again we were among the fields and plains, and Camaguey became but
an incident in this journey through the island of Cuba.
And now the monotony of the scenery began to pall upon me, as hour after hour
passed and still we saw the same type of settlements, the same sort of towns, the
same rolling savannahs, and the eternal unvariegated green of the countryside.
Now and then we passed a forest, with its thick, tangled undergrowth, and that
was a relief; but we knew that it would not be before nightfall that we should
reach the eastern end of Cuba, with its mountains and valleys and its noble
forests and its murmuring streams. And as we travelled eastward the heat
increased, and towards evening we found ourselves in the midst of a terrific storm.
This lasted an hour, and when the skies cleared a few stars peeped out, and then
the moon came up and lightened the darkness with a faint silver glow.

A COUNTRY SCENE, CUBA.

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY 57

When should we reach Santiago ? I was positively informed in Havana that
a train leaving Camaguey at the usual hour would arrive between nine and ten
o'clock at night at Santiago. But after night had come on I noticed that the train
had slowed down considerably, and was even stopping every now and then.
These stoppages might be included in the regular itinerary-but then they might
not be. So I thought I would ask the guard when we were likely to reach our
destination. "At ten-or eleven-or twelve," he told me, pausing thoughtfully
as he mentioned each hour, perhaps with the idea of giving me time to choose
the hour I fancied most. Ten, or eleven, or twelve o'clock; and the proper hour
was nine I inquired of a friendly passenger if this train ever kept to its time-
table. He assured me that it did-sometimes.
And then I learnt the cause of the present delay. Something had gone wrong
with the engine, and when the train went at its usual speed there was danger of
fire. The reason why it stopped so often, and blew its whistle (as it now occasion-
ally did), was because another train was coming in the opposite direction, and so
there was the possibility of a collision. "And we would telegraph," added the
guard, "only the telegraph wires are down." A chapter of accidents, truly; but I
was told that there really was not much to complain of. For," said the passenger
who had spoken already, sometimes the bridges are swept away, and we have no
knowledge of it until something begins to happen. You can never tell what may
not have occurred during a heavy rain here." This was not exactly reassuring, and
I began to feel that Cuban travel had many disadvantages.
I bought a cup of black coffee from a boy who went about the train with a
kettle and a wire basket in which, on little hooks, a number of tiny cups were hung.
Afterwards I went to the compartment where he sat and asked him for some beer :
he opened the bottle and handed it to me-there were no glasses on the train. I
went back to my seat, and, sitting down, looked out of the window. It was ten
o'clock, we were in the province of Oriente, the largest province in Cuba ; but I
caught no glimpse of hills or valleys. I saw nothing. Everything was wrapped in
soft darkness as with a mantle or a shroud.
Somewhere on the road, at one of the side stations, we passed the train which
might have collided with us, and therefore were relieved of that anxiety, at any
rate. Ten o'clock passed; then eleven. I must have fallen asleep after that; for
the next thing I heard was a voice asking me if I wanted a boy to take my things
to a hotel. Was this Santiago ? No; Santiago was the next station : I should be
there in a very few minutes. And half an hour afterwards I was indeed in the city
of Santiago. I looked at my watch. It was two o'clock.
Santiago de Cuba, situated at a distance of 869 miles from Havana by the Cuban
railroad, is next to Havana the most important city in the island of Cuba. Driving
through its streets at two o'clock in the morning I remembered that fact; when I
saw it in the light of day I noted also that it was very unlike Havana. I stayed at
the best hotel in the city that night, and several incidents occurred which have

58 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

caused me to remember that experience. First, there was the heat: only in
Colon and Panama have I found it hotter than in Santiago de Cuba. Then
there were the cats, which kept up a lively dispute amongst themselves until
about four o'clock in the morning. After they had retired (whether to rest or not
I do not know) some men in the street, which my bedroom overlooked, began an
argument, from which my attention could only be diverted by the shrill piping of
the mosquitoes in my room. I fell asleep when the dawn was breaking, and was
rather glad that the porter did not come to call me up at six o'clock, as he had most
faithfully promised to do. He never came near me at all-as a matter of fact, he
simply promised and forgot. Later on I was to learn that to trust to the memory
of a hotel servant in Santiago de Cuba was to place one's faith in something
apparently non-existent.
If in Havana the majority of the people one meets are white or light-hued,
in Santiago the majority are black or dark-coloured. The province of Oriente
is the one province of Cuba where the negroes outnumber the whites and
the women outnumber the men; its capital is also one of the hottest of Cuban
cities.
The city of Santiago has in the past been a most important administrative
and revolutionary centre. It is built on the side of a hill, and so its streets run
up and down at steep gradients, or terminate suddenly against high banks of
earth, or break away in precipitous descents of some 30 or 40 feet. You stand
at the top of a street and look down at the shops and houses on either hand.
A little further on in the same street, and you are looking up towards more
houses and more shops. I have a memory of the Archbishop's Palace : that,
too, climbs the hill on which, it is built. I remember seeing a public school near
the hospital, a handsome structure which the Americans say was the work of
General Wood. It overlooks the hospital from the top of an eminence. And
so on of nearly the whole city; only along the sea front is there anything like
a fairly continuous strip of level land. One street of the city, indeed, consists
of seven flights of concrete steps, four steps to each flight, and each flight
ending on a broad platform. Similar constructions will have to be provided
in other parts of Santiago if one is to move freely from one part of the city
to the other. For here and there I have come upon great masses of earth
overgrown with grass and weeds, and up the steep sides of which a goat alone
can climb.
What impression did Santiago de Cuba leave on me ? This is what I had
read of it in a Cuban guide-book: It is to-day clean and healthy, and one
of the most alluring and delightful cities to visit on this side of the Atlantic."
I found it one of the most unhealthy-looking places I had ever seen, and one
of the dirtiest.
They have been doing much to clean Santiago, and already a portion of
its streets have been paved. But most of them are unpaved, and some are

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY

simply the filthiest of gutters with no side-walks and with hardly a dry spot
on which one may place one's feet. In the Calle San Pedro, I remember, I
had to walk between the car-lines which were laid on a track specially paved
for the purpose. On either side were trenches a foot or more deep, and these
were filled with slime and decaying vegetable matter and with soap water
which gave off a horrible stench. Not even in the city of Panama, in its worst
days, had I seen anything to equal this. Most of the houses in Santiago look
old and dilapidated, and the steps leading to them have encroached upon the
narrow streets. So that an unpaved street represents to the newcomer the last
word of wretchedness. Yet as I heard many pipes being played by musical-
minded persons in San Pedro Street, I suppose that any sympathy expended
upon the people of Santiago would be resented as an impertinence.
If I had seen scores of naked babies in the yards of Havana, in the settlements
along the line, and at the railway station at Camaguey, I was to see them in
hundreds in Santiago. They were mostly black here, and they trotted about in
the back streets and besported themselves on the doorsteps with all the modesty
that comes of innocence. The men and women of the city, however, looked
prosperous enough ; and the shops filled with merchandise, and the stir in the
streets and the independent demeanour of the inhabitants of the place, all
showed me that Santiago de Cuba was a thriving city and the capital of a
wealthy province.
The copper mines of Cuba are situated but a few miles from the town,
and the ore is shipped from Santiago. The banana industry is carried on in
this province, hardwoods are cut and exported, and coffee, cocoa, and sugar
are grown. With its high hills and deep valleys, its moist heat and copious
rainfall, the province of Oriente will one day produce magnificent crops of every
kind of tropical product. Its people have great faith in its future; they, indeed,
call themselves Cubans, and call their city Cuba : the other people of the island
they allude to by the name of the provinces from which they come. We are
the Cubans," said one of the inhabitants of Santiago to me. "The only
Archbishop in the country is the Archbishop of Santiago, and this city was the
first capital of the island." All of which is true enough; but Havana will never
lose its primacy. For one thing the geographical situation of Santiago is not
to be compared with that of Havana, even though it lies in the track of the
Panama Canal. Then its people are more backward than the Havanese; and
the city itself, with its 50,000 souls, can never equal Havana in salubrity, nor can
existence be ever as pleasant there as in the capital city of the island.
Indeed, this city of Santiago, despite its history and the aspirations of its
people, still gives every indication of being but a tropical provincial city. And
the dominant note of it all is a good-natured, lazy indifference; thus, in some
of the barber shops I see women suckling their babies, and in some of the
smaller provision shops I see half-clothed children sitting contentedly upon the

60 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

counters. And in the streets I come upon groups of horsemen from the surround-
ing country districts, all contentedly having a talk, and apparently quite oblivious
of the fact that the pedestrians might resent their blocking of the way.
Santiago does not sleep like the city of Camaguey. Here there is some work
to be done, and the people do it. But they do it in a way of their own, and
always (as it seemed to me) with a rocking-chair near at hand. It is not a
city that hustles. But it contains politicians in abundance, and if there is ever
any trouble in Cuba, Santiago will participate in it.
I was booked to leave for Jamaica by the weekly service boat which connects
Kingston with Santiago, and I was informed that the vessel would leave the
wharf at twelve o'clock sharp. At twenty minutes to twelve, accordingly, I was
on board, the arrangement with my hotel being that my luggage should precede
me by at least an hour. But remembering my experience with the hotel porter,
I thought I would inquire if the things had arrived. They were nowhere to be
found. Nobody on the ship had seen or heard anything of them. Had I anytime
to spare ? I asked the purser. "Fifteen minutes," he said ; the vessel would leave
promptly on the stroke of twelve. I had to make up my mind between the risk of
being left by the vessel or losing my clothes. I determined to take the risk
knowing that "promptly" might mean anything in Santiago. I drove rapidly
to the hotel, and was at first assured that my trunks had been taken to the ship,
since the cartman had said that he would take them. That faithful servant, on
my earnest recommendation, was sought for and found. He was very sorry,
but he had quite forgotten my luggage. He could not understand how he had
forgotten it ; it was the most extraordinary thing in the world. In fact, the whole
affair seemed to appeal to him in the light of a most humorous incident, and
he evidently expected to be tipped for his forgetfulness.
I went back to the wharf, trembling with anxiety as to whether I had been
left behind, and in my hurry I gave the cab-driver a five-dollar instead of a one-
dollar bill. I rushed on board, happy that I had secured my baggage and had not
missed the boat. When should we leave ? I inquired; Immediately," I was
gravely informed. It was then half-past twelve o'clock. We left at two.
While waiting until we should immediately leave, I had time to reflect upon
the peculiar monetary system of Cuba. When in Havana, I had found that
Spanish and American and even French money circulated freely, while all about
the city were the shops of the money-changers who, to judge by the number of
them, must do an active business. Cuba has no currency of her own, Spanish
gold and silver having been the coinage of the island for centuries. American
money was always accepted in Cuba, and often American gold was at a high
premium ; then, with the independence of the island, came a proposition to make
the American dollar the standard currency of the country. This proposition has
not been acted on, and in Havana I found that the Spanish coinage still held
first place, in the retail business transactions of the city at any rate. My surprise

THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRY 61

may therefore be imagined when I found they would not accept Spanish silver
from me in the shops of Santiago de Cuba. And everywhere in that city you will
find the sellers demanding American money.
Indeed, although it is but little more than ten years since Spanish soldiers
swarmed in the streets of Santiago de Cuba, the Spanish copper coins seemed to
have completely disappeared, for some of the people to whom I showed them did
not know what they were. I gave a boy some; he handed them back to me,
saying that not even the money-changers would have them. Yet in Havana they
are the means by which all small purchases are made.
The inconvenience of this refusal to accept Spanish money in Santiago will be
better understood when the reader is told that the smallest American nickle coin
in use in the city is a five-cent piece; so that if any article costs but a cent you
must purchase five at a time, or take a sort of promissory note in lieu of the
change from the petty retailer. The shops must benefit immensely by the lack of
coins of a small denomination, for I noticed that they insisted on selling a pair of
things for five cents, on the ground that it was impossible to sell one alone. Why
the Government of Cuba does not make Spanish coins legal tender in Santiago as
well as in Havana is a problem that perhaps only the Cuban mind can solve.
Perhaps the Americans will eventually settle this currency question for the
Cubans.

CHAPTER IV

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS

IT was at the Payret Theatre in Havana that I witnessed one night a significant
demonstration of Cuban political feeling. Several items of the programme
were performed ; then came a rather pretty feature of the evening's entertainment.
This consisted of a band of girls marching round the stage to the tune of the
national anthems of the leading countries of Europe and America, and displaying
by means of little white shields the names of the rulers of these countries. On
each shield was painted a letter, and as the girls moved round the stage to
the sound of the music, these letters were arranged to form the name of each
ruler. One after another the national anthems were played; then came the
Marseillaise, and I think I detected a faint murmur of appreciation from the
spectators. "Yankee Doodle" followed, and the name of "William Taft" stood
out in bold letters on the shields : it was received in deadly silence. The first
bar of the Spanish anthem next came from the orchestra, and the letters held
in front of us spelt out "Alfonso XIII." You might have thought that that monarch
himself had entered the theatre Men and women, the audience broke into
loud cheering, and I do not think they cheered Jos6 Miguel Gomez, President
of Cuba, more, when his name followed that of the young sovereign of Spain.
Ten years ago they would have hissed Alfonso XIII. and applauded the
President of the United States. But the glamour of American intervention has
passed, the sober reality of American domination has daily to be faced. And
this people who fought for their freedom and who hoped for complete
independence fear now that they have but made an exchange of masters. "The
future is dark," said a Cuban to me one day (he had been the head of an
important revolutionary Junta in the last revolution) ; "the future is very dark."
We were in Santiago de Cuba, and he was showing me a new suburb laid
out by the Americans and being built in the American style. He seemed to
think that even this suburb contained a vague, dark hint of the future that
threatened-it was American, and it signified the presence of the Americans in
the land.

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS 63

But to understand the Cuban situation to-day we must go back a little into the
history of the past.
In my opening remarks I told of how Cuba had come to win the title of
"The Ever Faithful Island." This title was bestowed upon the island because
of the famous oath of fealty which every member of the Provincial Councils
swore to their true sovereigns after ,Napoleon had expelled them from the throne
of Spain; but when the legitimate dynasty was restored, the Cubans discovered
that they had to deal with men who were incapable of ruling, and with a nation
to whom the bitter lessons of colonial misfortune had taught no wisdom. In 1825
came the royal decree that struck so terrible a blow at the aspirations of those
Cubans who had hoped for some progress towards political freedom. That
degree gave to the Governor-General of Cuba all the powers and authority
belonging to the Governor of a city in a state of siege. It gave to him "the
most ample and unbounded power, not only to send away from the island any
persons in office, whatever be their occupation, rank, class, or condition, whose con-
tinuance therein your Excellency may deem injurious, or whose conduct, public
or private, may alarm you, replacing them with persons faithful to his Majesty,
and deserving of all the confidence of your Excellency; but also to suspend
the execution of any order whatsoever, or any general provision made concerning
any branch of the administration, as your Excellency may think most suitable to
the royal service." Those words, conferring the power of a despot upon the
Governor-General of Cuba, proclaimed also the doom of the sovereignty of Spain
in the last of her great American possessions.
Two years before the promulgation of this royal decree, an uprising had
actually been attempted, but had been prevented with no great difficulty. After
the promulgation of the decree, revolutionary sentiment spread apace, and dis-
content with Spanish domination grew. But the curse of slavery was upon the
land ; at the back of every white man's mind was the fear that a revolutionary move-
ment once started might lead to the freeing of the slaves; and the terrible
warning of Hayti, the island not 50 miles from Cuba, was sufficient to make
the Cubans bear in impotent rage a tyranny from which they would otherwise
have tried to free themselves.
So the cause of Cuban independence languished, but was never wholly forsaken.
The ill-fated expeditions of Narcisco Lopez, the Venezuelan, and Colonel
Crittenden, the American, showed that the more daring spirits in Cuba were
prepared to make an effort towards the freedom of their native land. These
had planned to join Lopez and Crittenden, but the former, although he actually
landed at Cardenas in 1850, had to re-embark his men and was nearly captured
by a Spanish warship as he fled to Key West. The next year he landed again
on Cuban soil and fought a disastrous battle with the Spanish troops near Havana.
Crittenden and his American associates were shot, Lopez was garroted on the
September I, 1851.

64 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

A peace that was not peace endured for over twenty years. In the meantime
oppression grew, and misgovernment multiplied its evil effects. Taxes were
enormously high, and the proceeds of them went into the pockets of the Spanish
officials chiefly. Once, as in 1877, the amount raised in taxes amounted to the
extraordinary sum of 12,ooo,ooo ($60,ooo,ooo), and this in a country where
production was hampered by lack of commercial freedom because of Spain's
insistence that Cuba must buy what she needed from Spain The population
at that time, too, only amounted to 1,509,ooo persons.
A yearly contribution of $6,000,000 was made to the Spanish Treasury, Spain's
Colonial system being based upon the principle that the colonies must assist the
mother country.
From Professor Robert Hill's "Cuba and Porto Rico" I take the following
statement of how the revenue raised in 1884 was expended. It amounted to
$34,269,410. "Of this sum, $12,574,485 was paid for old military debts incurred
by Spain in suppressing Cuban outbreaks and otherwise riveting the shackles of
tyranny upon the Cuban people; $5,904,084 for the Ministry of War; $14,595,096
or nearly one-half the revenue, for supporting Spaniards, as follows : pensions of
Spanish officers, $468,000; pay of retired Spanish officers, $918,500; salary of
Captain-General, $50,000; salaries of colonial officials (all Spaniards), $10,115,420;
church and clergy (all Spaniards), $379,757; military decorations (to Spaniards
only), $5,000; pay of gendarmerie (all Spaniards), $2,537,119; expenses of Spain's
diplomatic representatives to all American countries except the United States,
$121,300. This left I,195,745 for the ordinary administration of the island, such
as education, public works, sanitation, the judiciary, &c."
By one budget we may judge the rest. The island was governed by military
men; every Governor-General had to hold the rank of Lieutenant-General in the
Spanish Army; the governors of the six provinces of Cuba were all generals, and
there were thirty-four subordinate administrative positions called captaincies, and
these also were held by officers of the Army. The position of Spain in her colony
was, in fact, that of a conqueror; yet the Cubans were mainly people of Spanish
descent. With a very few exceptions, however, to be born in Cuba was to be
counted as a Cuban, and to be counted as a Cuban was to be treated with injustice
and suspicion. Such a situation could not possibly last. The signal of revolt was
given in 1867 by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a wealthy planter and lawyer of
Santiago, who headed the first rising. Thus began the terrible Ten Years
Revolution. In 1868 a declaration of independence was formerly proclaimed,
and in 1869 a constitution was adopted by the revolutionists.
The constitution decreed the abolition of slavery. This was a wise provision.
It helped to win the sympathy of the negro for the cause of freedom, and struck
a blow at the policy maintained by the Government of pitting white against black.
The one thing to the credit of Spain in Cuba was her legislation affecting the slaves.
Slavery was not only definitely abolished in 1884, but the number of slaves then

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA.

"l'u~

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS

set free was merely 25,000. Long before this, repeated enactments had ameliorated
the condition of the slaves : they had the right of marriage, they could insist upon
being transferred from one master to another if they so desired, they could
purchase their freedom by paying the purchase money in instalments, and their
value was fixed by a disinterested tribunal. Then, about the same time as the
beginning of the Ten Years Revolution, a law was passed giving freedom to every
child who should be born of a slave, and to every slave of sixty years of age. Free
negroes, too, were allowed to bear arms as volunteers, a privilege denied to white
Cubans. The followers of Cespedes therefore acted with wisdom when, by their
constitution adopted at Guaimaro, they proclaimed the abolition of slavery under
the "Cuban Republic."
But the revolution was ill-fated. Year after year the struggle dragged wearily
on, but the Cubans were not recognized as belligerents, and so arms and ammuni-
tion could only be brought into the island by filibusters, and food and money could
only be obtained by the revolutionists levying contributions on the planters. The
revolution came to an end in 1878. Its energy had perhaps been already exhausted,
and this may have been the reason why its leaders so readily listened to the
overtures of General Campos, whose policy, on his arrival in Cuba, he had
proclaimed to be one of conciliation. Promises of reform were made by the
Spanish Government, which afterwards proved illusory. And the total result of
the struggle was an exhausted and almost ruined country and an appalling loss
of life.
Spain is said to have lost between eighty and one hundred thousand men
in the Ten Years Revolution, while the cost of the war amounted to 4o,ooo,ooo.
This was charged to the Cuban Treasury, and, in consequence, taxes were increased.
So the gulf that separated the Spaniards from the Cubans widened and deepened;
and many of the natives who had fled from the island during the revolution
refused to return. Some settled in Jamaica, others in different parts of Spanish-
America; but the vast majority made the United States their temporary home,
and there they organised the movement that was finally to lead to the over-
throw of the Spanish power in Cuba.
Juntas, or revolutionary committees, were formed in Cuba, in the United
States, in Jamaica, in Costa Rica, in Santo Domingo, and elsewhere. The head-
quarters were in New York. Funds were raised, arms secretly purchased, and
then on February 24, 1895, as had been arranged by Jos6 Marti, "the Apostle
of Freedom," the standard of revolution was hoisted in Cuba.
This time the majority of the soldiers were negroes, and two of the leaders
of the movement were the Maceos, mulattoes both. The Ten Years War
had been mainly a war of white men; now all classes and colours were united
in the struggle for freedom. One of the first acts of the revolutionists was to
form a Provisional Government, and Marti having been killed at the begin-
ning of the war, a Camagueyan gentleman of noble descent, the Marquis

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

Salvador Cisneros y Betancourt, was elected president of the republic. He
was a white man. So was Maximo Gomez, the Commander-in-Chief of the
Army. But his second in command was Antonio Maceo, and throughout the
war negroes and white men fought side by side for the common cause.
And the black man was the common soldier, on him fell the brunt of the
fighting. Slavery had not bred in him a savage hate of his master; and so
when the white man appealed to him he did not appeal in vain.
The revolution lasted three years. The war was carried on with singular
fierceness on both sides. At first General Campos was sent from Spain to deal
with the rebels, and he again endeavoured to try the effects of a policy
of conciliation. But this time the insurgent leaders would not listen to him,
and all his attempts to confine their forces to one part of the island, and
then to force them to a decisive engagement, failed completely. They eluded
his troops, they broke through his lines, they fell upon small bands of
Spanish soldiers and destroyed them, and they laid waste the country as they
moved. The plan of the rebels was to make Cuba an unprofitable place for
Spain to hold, even at the cost of the devastation of the country. Every
town or village that did not show active sympathy with the cause of Cuba Libre
was destroyed, so that it was better to join the rebels than to remain neutral.
The horror of the situation for the peaceful peasant may be imagined;
for if he was left alone by the rebels, he fell under the suspicion of the
Government. Campos having failed, the terrible Nicola Weyler was sent
to take his place. He was known as "the butcher," and he promptly pro-
ceeded to show how well he deserved the name. So that the insurgents
should find as little aid as possible, and with a view of striking terror to
the hearts of the Cubans, he gathered the people of the country districts into
concentration camps, military zones where they could be watched by soldiers,
and where they were ordered to grow food as best they could. I have
walked in one of these old concentration camps in Havana. To-day it is a
park filled with palm-trees and flowering shrubs and plashing fountains. A
little more than ten years ago it was filled with emaciated men and starving
women and children. The filth and wretchedness of these camps was in-
describable: many thousands of persons perished in them. In the meantime
plantations and ranches were being given to the torch and the sword by
Spaniard and Cuban alike, and the civilised world wondered when the carnage
would cease.
Several of the Cuban leaders, including Jos6 Maceo, were slain. Gomez and
Garcia still continued the struggle. The insurgents endeavoured to secure
recognition as belligerents from the United States, but could not succeed. Spain,
however, had received a clear warning from America in 1896 when President
Cleveland said in his message to Congress that the time might come when
considerations of humanity might constrain the Government of the United States

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS

to take such action as would "preserve to Cuba and its inhabitants an opportunity
to enjoy the blessings of peace." The warning was not without effect, for, towards
the close of 1907, Weyler was superceded by General Blanco, and the new
Governor came with orders to establish an insular parliament, to break up the
concentration camps, and to take steps to relieve the suffering of the starving
non-belligerents.
Was Spain sincere ? We can never know. What we do know is that with
Blanco's arrival hostilities practically ceased, more, perhaps, because of the
exhaustion of the rebels than because of their confidence in the new reforms.
But whether Spain was sincere or not, she was given no opportunity of proving
her good faith. For in February, 1898, the Maine was blown up in Havana
Harbour, and in April of the same year war was declared between Spain and the
United States. That the Americans had been preparing for intervention before the
destruction of the Maine is made evident by the message which President
McKinley sent to Congress in December, 1897. He refused to recognize Cuban
belligerency, but he said that "If it shall hereafter appear to be a duty imposed
upon us by our obligations to ourselves, to civilisation and humanity, to intervene
with force, it shall be without fault on our part and only because the necessity
for such action will be so clear as to command the support and approval of the
civilised world."
The Cubans have never forgiven America her refusal to grant them belligerent
rights. "We could have beaten Spain," said more than one Cuban to me in
the island, "if we had been allowed to raise money and import arms openly."
Men who speak like this believe that American intervention took place for the
sake of America and not for the sake of Cuba. And so, but a few years after the
close of a most terrible revolution which, with its battles and its concentration
camps, cost Cuba fully two hundred thousand men, we find the name of William
Taft received in silence in a popular Havana theatre, while that of Alfonso XIII.
is applauded to the skies.

A country devastated by civil war, accustomed to despotic government, with
no training in politics and still infected with the virus of revolution-this was the
Cuba which the Americans undertook to make a free and independent" republic
of. There was some doubt at first as to whether the United States would really
hand over the administration of Cuban affairs to Cubans. A few able Americans
argued that, as economic freedom was the chief desideratum of Cuba, that country
would be satisfied if, for some time at any rate, the United States authorities continued
to govern her, while removing the vexatious hindrances to trade and commerce
with which Spain had handicapped the development of the island. Annexation
was advocated by some, and these were supported by the views of conservative
Cubans who doubted the capacity of their countrymen for self-government. It

68 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

was confidently assumed that "the more the Cubans know of the United States
and of our institutions, the better they will like us." But the majority of the Cuban
politicians and soldiers showed plainly that they expected Cuba to become a
republic; accordingly, in 1902, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba was
adopted, its first article setting forth that "The people of Cuba are hereby
constituted a sovereign and independent State, and adopt a republican form of
government." The other articles which follow are all drawn up on the most
approved republican pattern. All Cubans have equal rights before the law;
every person arrested shall be set at liberty or placed at the disposal of a competent
judge or court within twenty-four hours immediately following arrest; in no case
shall the penalty of confiscation of property be imposed; the profession of all
religious beliefs, as well as the practice of all forms of worship, are free; primary
education is compulsory and gratuitous ; and so on to the end of the chapter.
But at the end of the chapter there is an appendix known as the Platt Amendment,
and Article III. of that Amendment reads, "That the Government of Cuba con-
sents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation
of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a Government adequate for the
protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the
obligations with respect of Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United
States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the Government of Cuba." This
amendment proposed by Senator Platt and forced upon the Cuban people (who
could not possibly have refused to accept it), is really the most important part
of the Cuban Constitution. More will be heard of it one of these days.
The Government of Cuba was transferred to its people on the 2oth of May, 1902.
Dr. Estrada Palma, who had been head of the chief Cuban revolutionary junta
in America, and who represented the Conservative Party, was elected President.
I was told by an American in Cuba that the election was managed entirely by
the Americans in the island, and that many people voted for Palma under the
impression that he was some one else This may have been so; but in any case
it is certain that Estrada Palma had worked well for the cause of Cuban inde-
pendence, and possessed a reputation for integrity and single-mindedness which
was second to none in Cuba.
Problems presented themselves from the first to the new Cuban Administration.
The Americans had cleaned Havana and had improved some of the other cities.
They had begun roads and had established a system of common-school education.
But they had spent millions of dollars on the work, and the Palma Government
found the Treasury depleted when it came into power; yet it had had to promise to
continue the sanitation of the island, this being one of the provisions imposed upon
it by the United States. It had also been agreed (it is part of the Platt Amend-
ment) that Cuba should contract no debts the repayment of which could not
be covered by the ordinary resources of the annual budget. Nevertheless, no
sooner was the new Government installed than the soldiers of the revolution began

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS 69

to clamour for their pay. These were difficulties enough, but they were met;
revenue came in rapidly, such is the wonderful power of recuperation possessed by
the island. With the consent of the United States, a loan was raised and the
soldiers paid off (most of the money going into the hands of American speculators
who had bought the debt from the soldiers in advance, while assuring them that
they were not likely to be paid). To some outsiders it seemed at first that Cuba
would really set an example of peaceful progress to the rest of Latin-America,
but such a belief left the character of the average Latin-American politician
entirely out of consideration. For one thing, the Liberals were not satisfied with
the Government.
In 1905 the Liberals of Cuba held a congress and drew up a political
programme. One of the chief principles of that programme pledged the
Liberal Party to work for the abolition of the Platt Amendment. This was
significant of the growing feeling against the Americans, who were believed
to be on the side of the Cuban Conservatives.
The second presidential election came off early in 1906, and Dr. Palma was
again elected President. That fraud had been used at the polls was unquestion-
able. The President himself was an old man, and had never been counted
ambitious; yet he had undoubtably allowed himself to be persuaded that the
safety of Cuba depended upon his retaining office. He had become the tool
of self-seeking politicians, and no one was really surprised when, in August,
1906, a revolution broke out. The mass of the people were with the Liberals.
The Conservatives in Cuba will tell you to-day that this was because the Liberal
leaders basely pandered to the lowest tastes of the mob by promising them
bull-fights and cock-fights and lotteries, and perhaps there is something
in this. But whatever the cause, the fact remains that Pino Guerra easily
gathered an army of malcontents and began to move on Havana. Then Palma
did a deed for which he is cursed by some Cubans and blamed by others,
those who praise him being few indeed. He said he could not set Cuban to
fight against Cuban, brother against brother. But he did not surrender office to the
Liberal insurgents. It was to America that he turned in that hour of difficulty,
and already the Americans had prepared to intervene. In September Palma
resigned office as President of Cuba, and on the i7th of that month Mr. Taft
was proclaimed as Provisional Governor.
President Palma's enemies say that he betrayed his country. "Because he
and his party could not retain what they had won by fraud, he was willing
to sacrifice the independence of Cuba." I cannot undertake to discuss the
motives of a man who sacrificed much for his country when he could not
have hoped to be its President; yet the public admission that Cuba could not
govern herself in peace, coming from one of his reputation and position, was
without doubt a more formidable indictment against her than any that could
be drawn up by the people of the United States.

70 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

The second period of American intervention lasted a little over two years.
In January, 1909, General Miguel Gomez, who had been elected President by
an overwhelming majority of votes, assumed charge of the affairs of State.
The American troops evacuated Cuba, and were allowed to leave without a
single mark of appreciation or even cordiality. On the other hand, a Spanish
training-ship, the Nautilus, going to Havana almost by accident last year, was
welcomed with every manifestation of joy. Enough could not be done by the
Cubans to make the Spaniards stay in Havana one long fiesta. The streets
were decorated, rockets were fired, three whole days were devoted to public
rejoicing; and when the Nautilus left, the sea-wall of Havana was thronged with
thousands of cheering spectators. Why? I put the question to a Cuban. "After
all," he said, "we are of one blood, father and son." But the Spaniard was a
cruel parent, according to the Cubans themselves. And even to-day the
Spaniards who lived in Cuba before the independence most cordially despise
the natives. Yet it is America who is the enemy, in the mind of the average
Cuban-between American and Cuban no love exists. The reason is not far to
seek.
The existence of Cuba as "a sovereign and independent State" may be
formally stated in the constitution, but the sovereignty and independence of the
island is certainly not recognized by the American Government. It does not
appear that Washington interfered too sharply in the internal affairs of Cuba
during the Palma administration. But since the new Government assumed
office there has been repeated interference. As it was the Liberals who made
the last revolution, too, and as they welcomed an intervention which they
believed would lead to their becoming the dominant party in the State, it is
difficult for them now to murmur against the decrees of their powerful suzerain,
and the Opposition knows this well. So the Opposition papers twit the
Government with supinely carrying out the orders of its "senior partners," but
no one really imagines that the Cuban Government likes the tutelage to which
it is subject.
Three instances will suffice to show how Washington keeps the young
Republic in leading-strings, to the bitter annoyance of her people.
The Cuban Government wishing to purchase guns for the Army the other
day, entered into negotiations with a German firm of manufacturers for the
required supply of arms. The United States interposed its veto, and the guns
were not bought from Germany. The Cuban Government prepared its budget
for the year 1909-1o. The authorities at Washington thought it was an extravagant
budget, and quietly said that it must be reduced. And reduced it accordingly
has been, especially in the matter of salaries. The last instance : before Governor
Magoon left the island, he appointed Mr. James Page, an American, to be chief
engineer of the sanitary work now being done in Cienfuegos, which city is
being improved. But the Cuban Secretary of Public Works dismissed Mr.

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS

Page, one of the reasons being that all-important positions in Cuba must be
filled by Cubans. Mr. Page, however, did not go, for again the American
Government reminded the Cubans that there are some things which it is not
expedient to do, and the Cubans took the hint. Other instances of diplomatic
interference may be given, and all of them have occurred since January, i909-
ever since Cuba began to govern herself.
These constant reminders of American suzerainty have called forth bitter protests
from the Cuban Press. One paper, La Discussion, has uttered threats-" Our
powerful friends will do well not to carry their rigour to extremes, for the
desperation of a people, even of a small people, may give them much to do."
Others write more calmly, but yet with deep annoyance. Still, the United
States will continue to interfere, and the Cuban Government will continue to
obey.
Another reason why the American is not liked in Cuba is because some of
the Americans who visit the island do not show much consideration for the
feelings of the people. The resident American complains bitterly of this, and
I have been told that the American Minister has expressed the wish that he had
the power to expel all objectionable American visitors. For while most of the
tourists are estimable people, some take a delight in elbowing the Cubans
off their own side-walks, and in entering the churches while the service is going
on, for the purpose, if you please, of staring, or of even taking photographs.
These show by their manner that they think little of the Cubans. Even an
American guide-book is thoughtless enough to inform the stranger that "the average
native guide would rather tell an untruth for credit than to tell the truth for
cash," a statement which is not calculated to make the average Cuban think
highly of American manners. He does not distinguish between different types
of Americans; he judges all by those that are rude. He is not a "hustler"
either, and does not like to be hustled. Above all, he remembers that he is in
his own country, and he wants all the world to recognize that fact.
But over and above every other feeling is the fear that haunts the mind of
the Cuban that one day the American will return to Cuba, and this time for good.
He knows something of America's overwhelming strength. He knows that a
struggle against her would be short and inglorious. The Spaniard remained in
the cities and fought when the Cuban came within reach of him; the American
would go and search for the rebel, and would surely find him. I believe the
Cuban to be quite capable of rising against his American protector in an outburst
of uncontrollable anger, but in his calmer moments he feels that even such a
demonstration would not drive the American out of Cuba.
Not every Cuban, however, is opposed to the Americans. There is a party
(a minority it is true) which is in favour of annexation. Thus a coloured man
who has lived in the United States and Canada told me that the bulk of the
Cuban people do not really understand what annexation would mean. They do

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

not understand, he said, that Cuba, if admitted into the Union as a State, would
elect her own Governor, and have her own Legislature, and make her own
State laws, and be in every way better off, especially as she would have free
trade with the other States of the Union. Another Cuban, one of the biggest
men in Havana, rather bitterly remarked to me that the common people did not
know what they wanted and that the politicians were interested only in
themselves. I conclude that he, a Conservative, would much prefer to see a
Conservative than any other Government in Cuba; but failing that, he holds
annexation to be preferable to what he no doubt considers to be Liberal
misgovernment. And here perhaps is the rock on which the Cuban ship of
State may eventually split. It is the political jealousies and opposition amongst
the Cubans themselves that are more to be feared than the wishes of the foreigners
for American annexation, and the annexationist aspirations of the travelled
Cubans.
The Conservatives were so badly beaten at the last election that they
cannot depend upon their own strength to win them back political power
for many a year to come. But this will not prevent them from intriguing;
and the longer the Liberals remain in power, the more bitter the enmity
of their opponents will grow. Then the Liberals themselves have more than
once exhibited a tendency to split into factions; and that a fission will actually
occur some day is beyond all question. For in spite of party names and party
shibboleths, the really dominant force in Cuban politics is the personal element:
it is the man that counts, it is individual ambitions and not party principles
which cause most of those revolutions for which Spanish-America has become
so notorious. The Cuban, like his Latin-American brother on the continent
of South America, is a natural-born politician, and his leaders are all constitution-
makers and amenders. They believe devoutly in political theory; they thirst
for honour, distinction, and popularity; and every man wants to be his own
master and the master of some others. So though the present Cuban Government
has not yet been a year in existence, there have been many Cabinet resignations,
and more than one rumour of a "crisis." A part of the Liberals are the
personal followers of Senor Zayas, the Vice-President of the Republic, and
these are determined that he shall be the next President : the remaining Liberals
are the personal followers of General Gomez, and, as he has said that he will
not again be a candidate for the Presidency, his friends have already been
seeking to find some one whom they think will rule the country better than
Senor Zayas.
There are other disruptive forces at work, chiefly personal. In June last
the leader of the Negro Party in Havana, Senor Morura, ostentatiously resigned
the position of director of the National Lottery, to which he had been
appointed by the President. His reason was that the latter had refused to
allow him to name his own chief subordinate officer, a refusal which he

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS 73

seemed to consider an affront. And so that there should be no misunder-
standing of his influence in the country, his followers and admirers in Havana
organised a demonstration in his honour, which was to consist of a procession,
and public speeches, and the firing of rockets (for some inscrutable reason,
rockets are frequently fired off in the daytime in Havana). All this was
to take place on a Sunday afternoon; but the rain coming down in torrents,
the programme could not be carried out.
Then, just a little before this, there was a dispute between Pino Guerra
and the Government as to whom the former should be directly responsible
to in his capacity of Major-General of the Army. Pino Guerra thought he
ought to be under no one but the President himself. The Government
said he should be subordinate to the Minister of the Interior. The general
had to submit, but he is not satisfied. Perhaps he will again refer to the
matter. And the worst of it is that all these disputes find their way into
the Press and are discussed by the politicians in the cafes; and in a small
country, with a disproportionate and rather excitable city population, this
cannot make for a peaceful settlement of personal or political differences.
Meantime the Conservatives declare that, under any Liberal Administration
whatever, the country is certain to go to the dogs; and experience has
proved that a defeated Cuban party will prefer to turn to the United States
rather than allow its hated rivals to enjoy the sweets of place, position, and
power. By the time the next general election draws near, therefore, there
will be at least three parties in the field, and the watchful eye of the American
will be fixed upon them all. I fear too, that, if the election is not managed
by impartial outsiders, fraud will again be practised at the polls; and this is
almost certain to be followed by some sort of demonstration on the part
of those defeated. This is why the American can well afford to abide his
time. He is waiting until Cuba herself shall have given full and ample proof
to the world of her incapacity for peaceful self-government.
What will happen then? The Cuban fears the annexation of the island.
The foreign element in Cuba and some of the Cubans (as said before) desire
it. Some of the journals in the United States openly advocate it. Does the
American people, as a whole, want it ? Does its Government wish it ? I imagine
no. I think the American Government and people wish to keep Cuba in a
state of tutelage, wish to remain the island's perpetual suzerain; I believe
that the present system of control over the Government suits them entirely,
and that the forcible annexation of the island at this juncture would be under-
taken with some reluctance. After all, America already holds Cuba in the hollow
of her hand. The Cubans have been compelled to lease two naval stations to
the United States; they can enter into no treaty with a foreign Power that
may give the latter any control over the country or may lead to international
complications; and the reciprocity treaty between Cuba and America guarantees

74 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

to America almost all the trade of Cuba. By allowing Cuban produce to enter
her markets at a duty lower by 20 per cent. than the duty paid by other
countries, America secured cheaper sugar and tobacco for her own people.
Thus America benefited at least as much as Cuba. By arranging that American
goods shall be admitted into Cuba under a preferential clause, America secured
an important market for American foodstuffs and manufactures. The preference
granted by Cuba to America, too, is greater than that granted by America
to Cuba-for there are several articles sold by America to Cuba on which
the preference given is more than 20 per cent. With such a treaty, with two
naval stations in her hands, with the Platt Amendment in force, and with a
Minister in Havana to convey to the Cuban Government the views and sug-
gestions of Washington, there is no good reason why the American Republic
should want to undertake the actual governing of a country that will not
easily forgive annexation unless it comes about at the request of the people.
Annexation, moreover, will always be fiercely opposed by a large number
of the people and politicians of America herself. These want no colonies;
besides, they will think of what Europe will say if their country, having fought
to liberate the Cubans, brings that people under her own yoke. All these
considerations can never be absent from the minds of the rulers of America,
and in view of them they would probably prefer a continuance of the present
system of control over Cuban affairs. But this system is galling to the Cubans,
and they will endeavour to put an end to it; in addition, I fear it is impossible
to hope for political peace amongst the Cubans themselves. No wonder, then,
that, to some Cubans, "the future is dark."

What exists in Cuba at the present moment is practically an American
Protectorate, and undoubtedly it would be good for the country if a protectorate
could be openly established and accepted. This would obviate all pretence
about the existence of Cuba as a sovereign and independent State, would put
the right of America to give advice on matters of policy and finance beyond
the possibility of dispute, would leave the internal administration of Cuba in
the hands of her own people, and would ensure the presidential and other
elections being conducted without fraud and without violence. The American
Minister in Havana could be used, as he actually is now used, as the medium
of communication between the United States and the Cuban authorities, and
the broader aspects of Cuban financial policy could be settled by Washington.
There would, of course, be an "army of occupation," but the Americans could
easily follow the example of England in Egypt, and utilise the native troops
for the maintenance of peace and order in the country. These troops could
be trained by American officers and, if necessary, stiffened by a contingent
of American soldiers. Cubans could be appointed to very high positions in

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS

the Army, and good salaries and permanency of position should ensure their
loyalty and help to create amongst them an effective esprit de corps. Such a
protectorate would still leave Cuba a republic with real and large self-governing
powers, would leave to her the opportunity to learn in the school of experience
the lessons of self-control and practical efficiency that she still has need of.
Then, with order assured, and confidence restored in the stability and peaceful
progress of the country, capital would flow into the island, and its prosperity
would be another of the already remarkable achievements of American capital
and American energy.
A protectorate would solve the difficulty for both Cubans and Americans,
and the Americans would not object to it. They would welcome it in preference
to annexation, and even, no doubt, in preference to the present system of
undefined control which is but winning for them the hatred of most Cubans.
But would the Cubans care for a protectorate even? I think not. They will
not willingly accept any form of tutelage whatever. Yet, if they refuse a
protectorate and still are unable to govern themselves, the only alternative is
annexation. For America is determined to keep her hand upon the island, and
it is to her interest that there should be peace in Cuba.
The wish of America to acquire possession of Cuba is not a thing of yesterday.
It goes far back into the nineteenth century, to the time when Jefferson and
Madison gave expression to the feeling of all thoughtful Americans by saying
that the United States could not view with satisfaction the falling of the island
of Cuba under any European government "which might make a fulcrum of
that position against the commerce and security of the United States." Some
time after this, John Quincy Adams wrote of Cuba and Porto Rico as "the
natural appendages of the North American continent"; and again: "Looking
forward," he said, "for half a century it is scarcely possible to resist the conviction
that the annexation of Cuba to our republic will be indispensable to the
continuance and integrity of the Union itself." Jefferson, too, advised his
countrymen "to be in readiness to receive that interesting incorporation when
solicited by herself, for certainly her addition to our confederacy is exactly
what is wanted to round our power as a nation to the point of its utmost
interest !" All these prophetic sentiments were expressed before the close of
the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Spain was still mistress of Cuba,
but the revolt of the Spanish colonies in South and Central America, the obvious
weakness of Spain, and the indications that she would one day lose her remaining
possessions in the Western World, all caused the attention of American statesmen
to be turned to the question of Cuba's future; and that future, the ablest of
them declared, could not ultimately be with any other country except the
United States.
An attempt to purchase the island from Spain was actually made in 1848
by President Polk. Through the American Minister at Madrid, he offered the

IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

Spanish Government $Ioo,ooo,ooo for Cuba: "The country would prefer to see
it sunk in the ocean," was the proud characteristic reply of Spain. But her Govern-
ment did not rest content with this reply. Very shortly after, it endeavoured to
induce the United States, France, and Great Britain to enter into an agreement that
none of them would acquire Cuba; but the United States peremptorily refused
to be a party to any such compact. This alone was significant of American
hopes and designs; significant also was the Ostend Manifesto, drawn up by
the American Ministers at Paris, London, and Madrid, and setting forth that
Cuba ought to belong to America, and that it would be to the advantage of
Spain to sell the island to that Power. The Ministers were not supported
by their Government, yet they could hardly have acted as they did had they
not known that they were not likely to be severely blamed for publishing a
manifesto that might easily have led to a war between the two countries.
Other instances of the desire of America to obtain possession of the island
might be given, even though her statesmen did inform the Spanish Government
in 1874 that they did not "meditate or desire the annexation of Cuba to the
United States, but its elevation into an independent republic of freemen in
harmony with ourselves and with the other republics of America." As a matter
of fact the geographical position of Cuba rendered it inevitable that the United
States should be anxious to control the island, and any further pretence that
the Spanish-American War was merely a war of humanity would be the sheerest
hypocrisy. No doubt many Americans still honestly think so, but their statesmen
do not. Cuba, as John Quincy Adams wrote, is "an object of transcendent
importance to the commercial and political interests" of the American Union,
and the recognition of that salient fact is a sufficient reason for the determination
of American statesmen to guide and control the destinies of the island of
Cuba.
With the opening of the Panama Canal, the strategical importance of the
island must largely increase. Holding Guantanamo and Bahia Hondo (both
situated at the eastern end of Cuba) at strongly fortified naval bases, the United
States commands the Windward Passage, which is the route mainly used by
vessels going from Europe to the Isthmus of Panama. Thus the approach
to the Canal from the Atlantic side is amply protected by Cuba, and all the
Caribbean Sea is made into a great American lake by this island, by the island
of Hayti (or Santo Domingo), where the United States Government had also
a naval station, and by Porto Rico which is now an American colony. From
her basis in the Province of Oriente the United States can sweep the Atlantic
Ocean from Florida to Trinidad with a West Indian squadron; while, from
the western part of the island of Cuba, she can protect her own eastern coast
up to Cape Hatteras. Then, again, the possession of Cuba makes the Gulf of
Mexico an American sea: America completely dominates that Gulf with Cuba
in her hands. These propositions may be proved by any one who simply

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS

takes the trouble to glance over a map of the New World; and if the possession
of Cuba secures to America the mastery of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of
Mexico, if it makes the protection of the Panama Canal a comparatively easy
matter, if it helps to bring the Central American Republics more completely
within the sphere of the influence of the United States, it follows surely that the
existence of Cuba as a peacefully-governed appendage of the United States is
an absolute necessity from the American point of view. In these circumstances
the "independence" of Cuba could not be anything but illusory. And given
all the elements of discord at present operating in Cuba, even the existing
appearance of independence in that island must give place to a more explicit
assertion of American control before long.
What will be the effect of this upon the Cuban people ? I have already said
that prosperity must inevitably follow domestic stability and peace; but I fear
that at first, after the change of government which all foresee has come about
in Cuba, there will be considerable unrest. Hatred of the Americans will be
expressed in frequent broils, in murders, in destruction of property; sometimes,
perhaps, in revolts. There will be a deliberate attempt to make the island an
unpleasant place for Americans to live in; and it will take some time to teach
the malcontents that guerilla warfare cannot succeed in Cuba now, and that order
will be maintained at any cost. But once that lesson is taught, I do not see
why there should be any further trouble. After all, the interest of the mass of
the people is not to be found in disturbances, and they will soon realise that fact.
The Americans are never going to emigrate in large numbers to Cuba: the
American never wishes to live outside of his own country, and certainly has no
liking for a tropical climate. The Cuban need never fear, therefore, that
Cuba will be overrun by active, energetic aliens bent upon driving him to the
wall by a determined and ruthless competition. The American tourist is not a
settler. And if he is sometimes rude, there is nothing to prevent his being rudely
treated in return. American capital, too, can be nothing but a benefit to a country
that is still so largely undeveloped, and the more developed Cuba becomes the
better the position of her people.
As for the politicians, who would naturally feel the effects of American control
more keenly than any other class, even they would not be so hard hit as they
may fear. Some part in the government of their country they must have, and
there are a number of positions which they would fill, and have filled even during
the periods when the Americans were administering the affairs of the island.
I admit that many of them would feel genuinely humiliated to see their country's
government in the hands of foreigners, but they would find some scope for their
ambition in agitating that, if Cuba is to be connected with the United States, it
must be as a State in the Union.
And that the island will become a State eventually is beyond all doubt.
Education will spread, population will grow, industry and wealth will increase.

78 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

Consequently, however much one may now dwell upon the gulf which separates
the Latin from the Anglo-Saxon, however much one may discuss the difference
in ideals, in religion, and in traditions between Cubans and Americans, the end
must be the incorporations of Cuba as a State in the Union. Religion has nothing
to do with the matter-there are millions of Catholics in the United States to-day.
Traditions will not affect the eventual solution of the Cuban problem either, for
if the hordes of Italians and Poles who have for so many years been pouring into
the United States can have become citizens of the American Union, I do not see
why the Cubans, who are mostly a white people of Spanish descent, and whose
increase by immigration will be chiefly from white sources, should be held to be
less amenable to American influences. I admit at once that the man who remains
in Cuba will be much less affected by such influences than the immigrant who
lives in the United States, and is forced by circumstances to conform to the habits
and customs of that country, to learn its language, and to obey its laws. It is plain
that in the latter case environment counts for a vast deal in moulding the man
according to the dominant American pattern. It is plain, also, that the character
of a man born and brought up in a tropical island, believing that his country has
been wronged, cut off largely from outside influences, and thinking in narrow,
insular grooves, will remain unmodified during almost the whole course of his
life. But I do not believe the intelligent Cuban will be cut off from outside
influences or will grow up a simple, ignorant man. The day of Cuban isolation
is past. The day is coming when English will vie with Spanish as the spoken
language of the country when it will be taught in every school of the island. And
if large numbers of Americans are not likely to crowd into a country already settled
by people of another race and civilisation, and where the land is already parcelled
out amongst the inhabitants, it is certain on the other hand that thousands of
Cubans will visit the United States, will go there to be educated, will follow its
politics with interest, and will thus gradually assimilate American modes of
thought.
This is what is already happening. Once it was to Paris chiefly that wealthy
Cubans went and sent their children to be educated. Now it is to Boston and
New York. And as the habit of travelling grows amongst the Cubans, as it is
growing amongst all West Indians, it is to the United States that they will turn
their faces. This will mean that nearly every one in the island belonging to
the classes which count politically will in time have become affected by the
American ethos, and these will demand State union and State rights, and their
demands will surely not be denied. "But what of the negro population?"
some one may ask. "Surely it will be a danger to admit any more negroes into
the Union?" Considering that less than one-third of the Cuban people is
coloured, and that less than one-half of the coloured element is black, I do not
see the reason for the slightest apprehension. Besides, as I have previously
pointed out, the coloured element is slowly but steadily disappearing, owing

THE AMERICANS AND THE CUBANS 79

to the number of white men emigrating to Cuba and seeking wives amongst
the people, and also to the predominance of the male over female population
of Cuba. Here is the number of foreigners that were in Cuba when the Census of
1907 was compiled-the proportion of the white to the black immigrants may
be seen at a glance :-

From Spain ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 185,393
,, China ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 11,217
,, Africa ... ... ... ... ... .. ... 7,948
,, The United States ... ... ... ... ... 6,713
SThe West Indies, not including Porto Rico ... 4,280
,, Porto Rico ... ... ... ... ... ... 2,918
S France ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 1,476
SSouth and Central America ... ... ... 1,442
SThe United Kingdom ... ... ... ... 1,252
,, M exico ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 1,187

And 80 per cent. of the white immigrants were men.
The colour problem of Cuba, then, will tend to grow less and less as time goes
on : indeed, I am not justified in saying that there is a colour problem in Cuba
at all. There is prejudice, there is class feeling. There may even be what Sir
Harry Johnston has told me he perceived in the island, a tendency to keep the
negro out of his due share of political power, and out of his due proportion of
public employment. This prejudice and this tendency towards discrimination
on account of race may increase with the growth of American influence in Cuba-
which would be a danger; and yet I am not sure that, at first at any rate,
American influence would not make against undue discrimination. For what-
ever practices may obtain in the Southern States in the way of preventing the
exercise of the Negro suffrage at the polls, would certainly not be allowed to
obtain in a Cuba governed as a colony, or over which a protectorate had been
established. The aim of the American Government would be to hold the balances
even between all classes and races in Cuba, until the island had acquired the
status of Statehood; and this would inevitably have a great educational effect.
Then, it is absolutely certain that, whether as a republic, a protected dependency,
or a state, the island will always be divided into two parties, and each party will
be quick to see the wisdom of not giving its rival the opportunity of making a
bid for the entire negro vote. The Spanish colonies and republics, we must
also remember, have always managed to handle their negro question very well;
nor is Porto Rico troubled by any race problem at the present day. A careful
study of the Cuban political situation, therefore, does not seem to warrant the
belief that the racial factor will ever be a seriously disturbing one in the future.
Difficulties may arise now and then; but these will not be like the difficulties

80 IN JAMAICA AND CUBA

which have perplexed the Southern States. Negro predominance is out of the
question in Cuba. And, if treated fairly, the negro, who occupies contentedly an
inferior social position in the island, will not want to form an aggressive, inde-
pendent party of his own.
I see Cuba, then, a future State in the American Union. I see her a prosperous
island, an example to the rest of the West Indies, a great winter resort for
Americans, a factor in the civilisation of the West Indian Archipelago. Spain
failed to make her anything like what she will become. She could not thrive
and prosper by herself. None of the European nations could give her that helping
hand that America will be glad to hold out to her. And a future generation of
Cubans, looking back upon the past of their country, will see that union with the
United States was inevitable, and that only by union with the United States could
the destiny of Cuba be fulfilled.

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