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XXIII
Cuba – The Tobacco Lands of Guanajay – The Town and Bay of Mariel
Guanajay, Cuba,December 28th.
It was dark. Through the wide-open window of my chamber crept the soft morning air of the tropics. Some one was shaking my door and crying, “Hay las seis, Hay las seis.” It was six o’clock. I was to leave on the seven o’clock train for Guanajay, and the fertile tobacco plantations of Pinar del Rio. In the spacious, airy dining room, I was the first guest at desayuno.
The railways of Cuba and the railway coaches are yet of the antiquated sort. Our car must have been made fifty years ago, with its small seats of hard plank and windows without glass. The clerk who sold tickets spoke no English. I just kept putting down Spanish dollars until he said “bastante” (enough). Later, I found that, presuming on my ignorance and the throng pushing behind me, he had gathered in two dollars too much, to his personal profit. The railway is owned by Englishmen, although run by Cubans. We rolled slowly out of the city toward the west. We looked upon high stone walls, now and then catching a glimpse of a garden through an open gateway, and then ran between perfectly tilled market gardens with rich black soil, many Chinamen working in them.
Beyond the gardens, we passed stately buildings and the beautiful park surrounding the Spanish Captain General’s summer palace, where are ponds and fountains, palms and blooming shrubs. All these are now owned by the Republic of Cuba, and are some day to be converted into a pleasure ground for the people, just as are in France the ancient royal palaces and gardens of Versailles and Fontainebleau. As our train rolled west, it gradually approached a range of hills, where are now many pineapple farms, yielding pineapples which put the tiny Florida plant to the blush – big, luscious and juicy. A young man from Boston sat next me. He was looking for pineapple land. He meant to quit the snow and ice of New England. He would buy a plantation and settle and live in Cuba, where, thank God, the ice blight never comes, where man has only to plant and nature abundantly does the rest. We passed many orange groves, and lemon and lime and mango trees which the Spaniards had failed to destroy. Their branches were heavy with yellow, golden, ripe fruit. Here, where is no terror of frosts, many a frozen-out Floridian is now arrived or is on the way. The orange of Cuba is sweet, juicy and luscious, and some day Americans will here raise them and sell them in New York, and in this way win back the money they have lost in Florida. As we passed along, we traversed many sugar plantations, once cultivated, now abandoned. The black and ruined chimneys and dilapidated walls of their factories were eloquent witness of devastation and war. But the smaller farmsteads looked prosperous. Beside each dwelling was usually a grove of plantains and bananas. The latter, commonly thin skinned and fragrant, are as small as two of your fingers and most delicious. A young couple plant a banana grove when they set up housekeeping, and thereafter have bananas at hand all their lives.
At many of the houses we saw the Cuban flag floating from the staff top. “Cuba Libre” is in the hearts of all these rural people. I told a Cuban fellow-passenger, that I, too, had raised that flag, the first to do so in my State, and he thereafter treated me like a brother. I had touched his heart. We passed a deep, wide stream, flowing with a clear full tide. It is the overflow from the wonderful spring which supplies to Havana its water. It bursts from the ground a full-grown river. Havana has dammed it, bridled it, and through huge pipes, carries its abundant and pellucid flood into her streets and houses, furnishing fresh, sweet, pure water for the multitude. A few miles further on, we saw another river plunge suddenly into the bowels of the earth. Full and brimming it flows along, and then all at once disappears forever into a mysterious hole. The Spaniards have here raised a chapel and set up a big cross, for must not this engulfing cavern be one of the gates to hell? And what more certain than a house of God to frighten off the devil!
We are now in the midst of some of the finest tobacco lands of the world. This part of Cuba is founded on a coral reef. The lime of the coral has here permeated the ground. Red and chocolate and brown-black, the soil contains just those chemical ingredients which tobacco needs. No other land has anywhere yet been found just like it, and no other tobacco grows with quite the same fragrant quality of leaf. All the world wants this Cuban tobacco. Therefrom the French government makes and sells cigars and cigarettes and reaps great revenues. The Germans also want the Cuban tobacco lands, and the enterprising American intends sooner or later to have his share of them. How would you feel, my smoking brother, to be able to enjoy a delicious Havana cigar, to roll it between your lips and inhale the perfume of its smoke, all for the price of three cents or perhaps a nickel? The Americans are quietly acquiring as great an acreage as possible of the tobacco lands of Cuba. These lands are mainly held in small farms of four and five acres, each worked by a single family, who devote all their attention to the planting of the seed, the raising of the crop, the drying of the leaf, and even the final making of the finished cigar. They sell the cigars at their door, or take them to the town and sell them to the dealers, who buy and then put on their own labels and place them in the market. Nowhere in the United States will nature permit a tobacco leaf to stay on the plant until it is fully ripe; there is too much fear of frost. But in Cuba the leaf hangs to the stalk in the sunshine until it has reached that degree of ripeness which insures the most perfect tone and flavor. Thus it is, there can be no other tobacco just like Cuba’s, for nowhere on earth ’t is said, do soil and climate and human skill so aptly and completely combine to make the product perfect. There are three islands of the sea where the soil is rich and fertile beyond all other lands; the island of Java, owned by the Dutch; the island of Luzon, chief of the Philippines, and the island of Cuba. And in this one product, it is claimed that Cuba surpasses them all.
We left the train at Guanajay – once a tobacco town of importance, then blasted and wasted by war, burned and ravaged, and now regaining its life and vigor. Here we took an open carriage and drove toward Mariel, upon a noble highway quite sixty feet wide, and all macadamized and ditched – a Spanish military road, once lined and shaded with gigantic and umbrageous trees; now bare of this magnificent bordery by reason of the war. The Spanish soldiery cut them down, lest here and there an insurgent might lie concealed. The road wound over a line of low hills, and then descended to the sea. Along the ridge, at intervals, were yet to be seen the “blockhouses” of the western Spanish Trocha. My friend, Captain Reno, beside me, had been an officer of the insurgent army. An American volunteer, with blood full of red corpuscles, he served all through the revolutionary struggle, fighting the Spaniards just for the joy of war. He crossed this Trocha with Gomez in his famous raid. The Spanish soldiers hid within their houses and shot from their loopholes. But Gomez and Reno cut down the wire barriers, rode through and dared to enter the suburbs of Havana. The superb road gradually winds toward the bay of Mariel. On our way, we passed a new railroad being built by Americans, back to an asphalt lake; Mariel will be their port, the bay their harbor.
Near to us on the left lay another American colony, – a group of Western folk who have come to Cuba to stay. The bay of Mariel, next to that of Havana, is the finest harbor on the western coast. At its entrance, high on a reef, lies the Spanish warship, Alfonso XII, driven on the rocks by American naval guns. Along the shores of this beautiful bay, it is said, will grow up the Newport of Cuba. Nowhere are there so well protected waters, nowhere is there so picturesque a panorama. Here you see palms, royal, cocoanut, and date, and fields of sugar cane and groves of bananas, oranges and pomegranates, and then the foaming, restless sea far out beyond. On the corner of a shaded street, close by the blue waters of the bay, we stopped at a modest, unpainted house. Within it we met a clear-eyed, sweet-faced woman – a lady from North Carolina, a Miss Edwards, who came to Cuba, after the devilments of Weyler had wrought their sad havoc, and gathered up a little company of starving girls, and here has given them a home – forty or more of them. She asks no outside aid. She is spending her own small means. The people of the town, with their Spanish pitilessness of heart, do not understand why she should be doing so strange a thing as to pick up and care for the dirty progeny of dying and dead vagabonds. Better let such a litter die, they say. She told us that she was much alone, that even yet the good people of Mariel treated her with suspicion. If she were a government official, they could comprehend, but they cannot understand how or why anybody should take so great a care of waifs and strays, all for the sake of the humanity of our Lord.
We spent the night at Guanajay in an old Spanish inn, very tumbled down, partly as the result of time, largely as the result of war. We ate our evening meal in a spacious, lofty chamber, sitting at a long table. The company was chiefly made up of tobacco planters, and one or two Cuban drummers, while right in front of us sat a Spanish marquis and his wife with their English governess for the children. They were visiting Cuba to inspect the ancestral sugar estates, and arrived only the week previous from Spain. They treated the company with haughty indifference, and ignored the poor English girl as though she were socially altogether out of their sphere. They helped themselves and talked to the children, while the governess foraged for herself or went without. It reminded me of those mediæval times one reads about, when the clergyman resident in the castle of the lord sat at a table in the servant’s hall. We took pains to see that the English girl received every attention, the Marquis glowering savagely upon us when we passed a dish to the governess rather than to his wife. When the meal was over the pair stalked loftily from the dining hall, leaving the governess to smile upon us in return for our pronounced civilities, momentarily made happy, for the first time perhaps in many months.
In the evening we visited the large Reform School for boys, which has been established by the military authorities of our government for the care of waifs whom the cruel reconcentrado policy of Weyler deprived of kith and kin. The children looked well-fed and content, and the courteous Governor, a major in the army, assured us that they throve and learned, gave little trouble, and bade fair to become good men and citizens. It is in this sort of thing, the Home for the little boys near Matanzas, the charity of Miss Edwards at Mariel in caring for the motherless little girls, the charity of our government in providing so generously for these boys, that is seen the difference in spirit of American civilization from the hard and callous pitilessness of Spain. The Spaniard and the Cuban care for their own with tenderness, but they look with indifference upon the suffering of others, nor do they comprehend why they should lift a finger to help anyone beyond the narrow circle of their own family or social set.
We have also called upon a big, gaunt, sunnyfaced man who is devoting his life to these people as a missionary of the Congregational Church. He is from Massachusetts, a man of education who preaches fluently in Spanish, and whose labors have met extraordinary success among the Cuban population of Key West. He has now been transferred to Guanajay, and already is creating a profound impression in a community which has never before known aught but an indifferent Roman priest.
The religious conditions of Cuba are peculiar, I am told. The Bishops and Priesthood of the Roman Church have been supplied by old Spain from time immemorial. The black sheep of the Church have found asylum here. Drawing their salaries, fretting in exile, these ne’er-do-wells of the motherland have cared little, and done less, for the spiritual welfare of their flocks. Guanajay is reputed to be a community among the most spiritually darkened of all Cuba. Hence, it is with no little wonderment that the active, enlightening methods of Mr. Frazier are viewed by those among whom he now ministers. The women come to him for solace and advice, the children flock to his singing school, and the Sunday-school in the afternoon is filled with old folks and young, who come to him after the hours of Mass. Even the local padre himself finds this strange heretic so pleasant a companion that he frequently drops in to share a cigar and gossip of the times. If Americans are to make impression spiritually upon this Latin-Catholic population of Cuba, they will do it only through such intelligent personal and sympathetic methods as are here employed. Mere perfunctory Protestant ecclesiasticism makes no impression upon these Latin-Catholic peoples.
Sunday morning we arose while the stars yet blazed, found a cup of coffee for our desayuno at a little restaurant across the street, and at five o’clock were in the cars again traveling toward Havana.
The country we have been looking on is quite as beautiful as the more flat-lying, but not more fertile region about Matanzas, and I have felt that the many Americans we have met everywhere, all looking for land to buy and to abide upon, are in happy quest. They are entering into one of the veritable garden places of the earth and many more of my fellow-countrymen will surely follow them.
XXIV
Steamer Mascot
Steamer Olivette, between Havana and Key West,December 31st.
One learns to rise early in these tropical lands. The midday siesta here affords the rest which we are wont to claim for the early morning hours. I have readily acquired the habit. To lie abed is become a burden. I stir abroad betimes as do all others. And I am sleepy also toward midday, and quite inclined to take a nap when the heat is most intense. I recall that two years ago when coming home from France, the only stateroom I could obtain upon the Wilhelm der Grosse, was already partly taken by a gentleman from Mexico. I doubted whether it would be pleasant to chum with a stranger, but I had no choice, so made the best of it. He had the upper berth, I slept below. But although we were a week upon the sea, I never saw him, and I do not to-day know who he was. I was asleep before he turned in. I was still asleep when, at break of dawn, he passed out to pace the decks. He took his midday siesta when I was enjoying the midday sun, or resting upon my sea-chair. I then wondered at the persistent habit which drove him from a comfortable bed almost before the night was spent. Now I comprehend his ways, and if I were to voyage seaward to-morrow, I should be rising with the dawn. Yesterday morning I had risen at four o’clock, and had taken my desayuno at an hour when those at home are sunk in sleep.
Overnight a great storm has arisen. I tried to find out at the hotel about the weather, but in Havana weather reports are unknown. The Spanish clerk at the hotel smiled at me most condescendingly for asking so silly a question as, “Is a storm likely to be coming from the North or the South, or anywhere; and what sort of a day are we likely to have to-morrow?” Bowing politely, he spoke in sneering undertone to his Spanish companion, and then in broken English said to me, “I never hear even an American ask a question like that, Señor. How we know what the weather is to be? God makes the weather Señor, not you or I.” And they both smiled upon me with supercilious contempt. They took me for a fool. Only a fool would pretend to ask what Providence might have in store. So much for the Weather Bureau and the yet mediæval Spaniard!
When we left the harbor a few hours later, a great sea was tossing gigantic breakers above the ramparts of El Moro. We plunged into the fury of a Norther, which turned out to be one of the wildest gales of the midwinter. I might have put off departure a day or two if I had known of it, but Spanish ignorance sent me out in a small and laboring boat to make the dangerous ninety miles across the straits in the face of such a storm.
After my breakfast, a Spanish hall-boy of the hotel had struggled down the successive stairways with my valise. Ordinarily, we would have taken the new electric elevator, but the American company which recently installed it had recalled their experts, and the Spaniard supposed to run it in their place had promptly put the machine out of order. The cage now hung fast about half-way up the shaft awaiting American skill to set it moving.
One of the many cochas drawn up before the loggia of the hotel was soon carrying me to the Caballerio Pier, there to have my trunks and bags stamped with the certificates of the health officers of the port, and checked through for the journey to Tampa. And then I went up to a little bird shop on Calle Obispo, and took charge of a clever parrot, for which I had arranged the day previous, – a bird brought from the Isle of Pines, with green body, white head, pink throat. She is named Marie, and yesterday she talked to me long and loud in Spanish. Along with her I purchased also a pair of pretty love birds. Perhaps I may tell you that the Marie with which we reached Florida could talk no Spanish, and the pair of pretty parakeets, instead of being loving mates, turned out to be two fighting males. But all of this I only learned when many leagues distant from the soft-eyed señora who sold them to me in the little shop on the Calle Obispo.
Our boat was named the Mascot, and well was it so christened, for the fierce billows tried her seaworthiness to the limit. The Norther which broke its fury upon the coasts of Yucatan did not arouse so angry a sea as that which fought the currents of the Florida Strait.
The greater number of our passengers were Cubans going across to work in the tobacco factories at Key West. It was apparently their first experience of the sea. They filled the forward decks, and gay and lively was their company as they waved their adios to their shouting friends ashore. The tempestuous waters caught us before we even left the bay. We were steaming out dead in the teeth of the gale, and the little boat pitched until she almost stood on end, and rolled as though her gunwales would be every time awash. Our Cubans soon lost their speech and then their breakfasts, and were at last filled with fear alone. They were scarcely recovered when we made fast to the long pier at Key West, and did not regain their cheerfulness until their legs were firmly set upon the land.
Key West boasts a larger Cuban-Latin population than native American, and sonorous Spanish speech falls more frequently upon my ear than th-i-th-ing- s-i-s-sing- English; yet I behold the Stars and Stripes floating above me and know myself at home.
My journey through Mexico and Cuba is at an end, and I am returned to the United States. I now experience again the same shock of transition which so moved me when a few weeks ago I crossed the Rio Grande and entered Mexico. For many days have I beheld and felt the puissant tenacity of a civilization older than my own; a civilization once world-dominant and still haughty and assertive, which begat arrogant war-lord and subservient slave, which exalted the few and crushed the many, and which to-day while it applauds and assumes the outward habiliments of democracy, yet underneath retains the flesh and blood of despotic individualism; a civilization, nevertheless, marked by the highest appreciation of all that appeals to the finer senses in splendor of religious ritual, in sensuousness in art, and in the graceful and the ornate in architecture; in music and in belles-lettres.
For the masterful rule of Diaz I had come prepared, but of the numerous well-ordered and well-built Mexican cities I had no thought. The discovery that here had been successfully applied the principles of municipal ownership of public utilities centuries before Chicago, San Francisco, and New York had debated their problems, came to me as a revelation, and when I beheld the noble cities of Mexico, of Toluca, of Morelia, of San Louis Potosí, of Monterey, and many others, giving for three hundred years free water and free illumination to their people, and throughout these centuries adorned with well-kept parks where flowers bloomed, artistic fountains flowed, and music played, for the free enjoyment of the poorest peon as well as the millionaire grandee, I was fain to bethink me whether the practical, money-getting American might not after all take lessons from his Latin brother of the South.
The romance of Mexico’s early history, the travail and triumph of Montezuma and Malinche, of Pagan teocali and Christian cross, stirred my imagination and aroused my interest to highest pitch, while the present progressiveness of Mexico’s people, the enlightenment of her leaders, the noble efforts she has made, and is now making to keep step with the procession of human progress, excited my sympathy.
Nor have I ceased to marvel at the extraordinary geographic and climatic gifts which nature has so lavishly bestowed upon this favored land; a country where every climate from the heats of Yucatan to the cool airs of Quebec are brought together within the compass of a journey of a single day; where teeming tropics and fertile highlands alike pour out their fruitfulness for the use of man; where alone upon the North American Continent has beneficent nature presented conditions which made it possible for mankind to develop an indigenous civilization of advancing type; – upon these plateaus existed well-built stone-and-mortar cities centuries before Cortez and the Spaniard set foot upon her shores; here successful agriculture has prevailed in uninterrupted continuity for a thousand years; here precious metals have been dug and worked by man for unnumbered centuries; and upon these salubrious highlands more than a mile above the sea, beneath the shadows of her snow-capped Sierras, man has developed, and may yet develop, the highest energy of the temperate zones.
I confess that despite a general knowledge, I yet entered Mexico ignorant, sadly ignorant, of one of the most splendid portions of the earth’s domain, and while my glimpses of this great country have necessarily been limited and partial, yet I have seen enough of her mineral and agricultural wealth, the solidity and comfort of her cities, the vigor and intelligence of her people, to assure me that the Republic of Mexico is destined to be no puny factor in promoting the advancement of the world, as well as the further increase in riches and power of the sister Republic wherein I dwell.
Nor has my transitory glimpse of Cuba, “Pearl of the Antilles,” as she is, caused me the less to marvel at the abounding fertility which constitutes her a veritable garden, and the charm of her climate, free of all frosts, yet temperate enough, amidst the cooling breezes of the all-surrounding seas, to make her the home of white races which hold fast to their primitive energies although within the tropics. While in imagination I behold her, at no distant date, taking her proud place among the galaxy of States of the great Republic of the North and vying with the most splendid of them in opulence and power.
