XXII Cuba — Her Fertile Sugar Lands — Matanzas by the Sea
Havana, Cuba,
December 27th.
A cup of chocolate, a roll, a pat of guava paste, such was my desayuno, my breakfast. Señor G——, Superintendent of Civic Training in the Schools of Cuba, had also had his morning coffee, and was awaiting me at the broad portal of the hotel. We call a cocha, bade the cochero drive us to the ferry on the bay, and were soon rattling through Havana’s narrow, rough-paved streets. It was early, not yet six o’clock. But the people of the tropics rise betimes and the busy life of the day was well begun. We could look right into the courtyards, and even into the living rooms of the houses, so close did our cocha wheel to the open doorways and to the wide-lifted curtains of the glassless windows. A young mother looked curiously through the iron bars of a window front at the Americanos. She held her laughing baby daughter in her arms. A pair of slippered feet, a coral necklace, a friendly smile, and it was clothed for the day. A family sat at a long table, each sipping the clear black coffee. The mother was smoking a huge black cigar, the father a cigar of more moderate size, the children were all smoking cigarettes. Scantily clad peddlers were crying their goods, one his back piled high with tinware. Women were carrying on their heads big baskets of fruit. An ancient jet-black African woman trudged along with a squealing shoat, tied by the four legs and slung to her shoulder. A drove of she-donkeys were standing before an open doorway; their owner was milking one of them, the buyer was standing near so as to be sure that the morning’s milk should be the real thing. The shops, however, were not yet open. It was too early for buyers. But the awnings were being spread over the streets, so as to be ready for the sun when it should wax hot.
As we approached the neighborhood of the bay, the press of footfarers in the streets increased. The narrow sidewalks and even the street itself were filled with men and women moving toward the ferry. Our cochero cracked his whip and hallooed at the crowd, and they fled out of the way, quite good-naturedly. I was trying to light my cigar, but the motion of the vehicle blew out the match. I had just struck a third. A woman on the sidewalk saw my fix. She called to the cochero and pointed to me. He stopped his horse upon its haunches. He waited until my cigar was alight, then he drove on. Such is the custom in a city where every man and woman smokes and El Segaro is the King.
At the long, low-roofed ferry house there was a great crowd, an uncommon press. We paid our cochero a peseta (twenty cents), dismissed him and strode among the thick of the throng.
In its midst were a group of gentlemen in white panama hats and white linen clothes. One of them was short and stout with gray mustachios, pointed goatee and flowing gray hair. It was General Masso, the candidate of the Massoista Party for President. I had met him the night when he made his great speech to his cheering followers in front of the Hotel Pasaje, and told them all to refrain from voting when the day for elections should arrive, “for were not all the Palmaistas scoundrels and thieves and would-be usurpers of power, backed, too, by Yankee bayonets! What use was it to vote or try to vote against such combinations for wrong and ill? No! let the Massoistas remain at home, and by the smallness of the vote cast let the world see that the real strength of the Cuban people was not with Palma, the puppet of American power, but with the real people of Cuba, whose day would in the future surely come!” And had not the assembled multitude filled the air with shouts of “Bravo! Viva Masso!” With him was Señor Hernandez, candidate for the Vice-presidency of the Massoista Party, who had also stood on a pile of boxes and stirred the excited multitude with eloquence even more intemperate. And there was also Señor Gualberto Gomez, the greatest orator of Cuba, short, stout, gray-haired, with gold spectacles—a Spanish mulatto, the real leader of the great, turbulent, Afro-Spanish race; the powerful backer of the Massoistas, who it is said, had welded the third of Cuba’s Negro-Spanish population into a solid political machine, bounden together with the secret ties of occult brotherhood. His impetuous eloquence it was which swept the Constitutional Convention, and carried the plank for universal suffrage triumphantly to victory against predetermined plans of the Conservative leaders. He would now have his following hold the balance of power in Cuba, and so rule the Island as does his race in Hayti and San Domingo! For the present, he would use the Massoistas and their pro-Spanish propaganda, later he would throw aside the Spanish following and himself rule Cuba through the power of his organized blacks. Young Garcia was there, too, the son of the great leader, discontented with the minor rôle Palma and the Americans have permitted him to play, and anxious for a Cuba wholly free from the interference of the American as well as the Spaniard. Yes, these leaders were all there, and the great square before the ferry house was packed with a cheering multitude to bid them good-bye, and Masso “God speed” on his journey to his plantation home. When I met these gentlemen before, I enjoyed free and frank talk with them, and they had made no scruple in voicing to me their policies and demands:—their determination to rule or ruin; their policy to refrain from voting and then later rise in armed revolt. This morning they were all gathered here to take a last farewell of their really loved chief, Masso, a fine old patriot with a famous war record, whom many now think that men more cunning than himself are using for their own selfish ends.
The ferryboat was ancient in make and slow in movement. We were to cross the bay to the little suburb where we were to take the train which was to carry us through the rolling country and level plains of middle Cuba into the rich and fertile sugar-producing province of Matanzas.
Our track over the now clear waters of the bay led us close alongside the crushed and bended wreckage of the United States Steamship Maine, while not far beyond lay at easy anchor three modern warboats of the navy, the Kearsarge, the Kentucky and the Massachusetts, a proud trio for Spanish and Cuban eyes to look upon. The wreck still lies there, its lonely foremast a mournful monument to the tragedy it marks.
The railroad runs almost due east, from the low-lying suburbs, and passes close by the village of Guanabacoa, where were gathered so many of the reconcentrados, where Spanish cruelty developed its most wanton crimes, and where yellow fever played most deadly havoc with Spaniard and with Cuban alike. We sped between rolling grass-covered hills, passing great groves of that most graceful and stately of tropic trees, the royal palm, large plantings of luxuriant bananas, and many cocoanut palms as well. The country was more flat than toward the west, and soon we were moving through wide reaches of the feathery sugar cane. There were miles of it, leagues of it, and all taller and more robust than the cane I saw while traversing the sugar lands of Louisiana.
In the black, deep and wonderfully fertile soil, the cane grows without care or heed. Here the cane once planted need not be reset for full twenty years, and the stock may be cut at six months’ intervals through all that time. No wonder the sugar-growers of Louisiana cry aloud, for they must reset their roots every third year, and can only count on two sugar crops from that; while their cane does not yield nearly so much sugar to the ton as the crops from these Cuban lands. Nor can the sugar grower of the Florida Everglades compete with the fertility of Cuba. Seven years, at most, to a single root is there the limit, five years is more often the rule, and the stalk is but little sweeter than that of Louisiana growth. The American sugar men are now scouting the land in Cuba. I met them from Louisiana and from Texas and from Florida. They are bound to come in numbers greater yet.
For many miles we traversed these waving cane fields, passing many villages and smoking sugar mills at work, teams of fat oxen hauling in the cane, miniature railroads dragging in long train loads of cane to the factories, and thousands of men and many women working in the fields, these lifting their faces from toil to gaze momentarily at our train as it hurried by.
At one station a bridal company entered the train; the groom was clad in black broadcloth, the bride was gowned in soft white fabric, a graceful white mantilla of priceless lace falling over her thick black braids. Their friends were all there to see them off, and cheered with many vivas, showering them with rice as they entered the car, followed by the burly bulk of the cassock-clad padre who had made them one.
Matanzas, which claims to be the most healthful city of all Cuba, is situated some fifty miles almost due east of Havana facing a beautiful bay, and spans the mouths of two small rivers, whose verdant valleys stretch behind the town. The city is ancient, and is spread for the most part along a high, long, sloping hill, or several hills, stretching back and up from the arm of the sea on which it lies. Here has been wrought under the skillful supervision of General Wilson, the most successful of the sanitary regenerations of any Cuban town. The city has been sewered in modernwise and macadamized with care, and is supplied with abundance of purest water.
We alighted at the commodious railway station, a larger and better structure for its purpose than any I have yet seen in Cuba. We entrusted ourselves to the care of a tawney-hued cochero, who galloped us away toward the heart of the town. We followed a long, level, wide street, crossed a substantial iron bridge over the river San Juan, made a sharp turn, climbed a steep pitch of hill and stopped before the chief hotel. Here is a little courtyard, at the farther end of which hangs a life-size portrait of Jose Marte, the martyred patriot. We sat in the patio, where palms waved over us, and coffee and delicious fish were brought to us along with a basket of oranges such as even Florida cannot well surpass. Lighting our cigars, we now sauntered into the fine, old-fashioned, Spanish gardens of the Plaza, laid out with precise symmetry and guarded by low iron fences set on bases of carved stone, the flowering shrubs and many blooming plants being half hid by the iron and the rock.
We viewed the cathedral, a small square-towered edifice in ill repair, and then visited the elaborate and commodious building for the public school, now in vacation emptiness, and then we strolled to the market where fruits and fish were in especial abundance; and we noted everywhere the multitude of Cubans tan and black, for many negroes live in salubrious Matanzas.
Then we climbed the long hill, until, high behind the town, we came to a hedge of cactus, an open gate, an old and half-dismantled house. Voices of children rang out as we approached the wide piazza. A blue-eyed man with firm and kindly face, a little pinched and pale, but alight with high purpose, greeted us at the door. He had made here a home for motherless waifs, the riffraff and refuse of the reconcentrado camps, whom Spanish heartlessness and hunger had not utterly destroyed. The man came from Illinois, and with his own small means had gathered these few score children, all little boys here, a separate home for the little girls yonder across the hill; had drawn to him a company of kindly Cubans, and here set up and now successfully maintains, asking no outside aid or alms, these homes and schools for the saving of the little bodies and their souls. The youngsters are the picture of good health. Their fare is the simplest; their instruction kindly, their play hours long. They grow and thrive, and some day will be men and women who will help Cuba’s destiny for weal and not for woe. I grouped the little lads together and took them with my kodak, and cherish the picture, in sad contrast with the party of little Mexican boys who left our ship at Progresso, all unconscious of the brutal slavery and death awaiting them.
We also visited the beautiful and simple shrine and chapel of Monserrat, erected by the descendants of those who came to Cuba from the Balearic Isles. This shrine crowns the summit of a hill overlooking the city. We here tarried long, viewing the wide reach of landscape stretching as far as the eye could see in undulating plains toward the south, with everywhere vistas of ripening cane, while northward wound the fertile valley of Ymurri toward the famous caves of Bellmar.
“Veni aci, Charley Blue-eyes,” they called after us as we passed along the narrow streets. Some of the voices possessed the cadent melody of the Spanish maiden, but we did not deign to turn, for who would be so bold as to call us “Charley Blue-eyes,” we should like to know! Many children were playing along the curb, and few of them wore even a coral band around the neck. Quite as God made them they were, their tan and swart skins, showing soft as satin under the influence of sunlight and fresh air. We were loath to bid adieu to the delightful city, and I shall never forget the charm of its picturesque location, the perfection of its smooth macadam streets, the cleanliness of its white and blue and yellow houses. Yellow was the hue most used and loved by the Spaniards, blue is the color for the patriotic Cuban. Since Spanish oppression has left the shores of Cuba, the towns and cities have been going through a steady metamorphosis from the yellow to the blue.
We lingered upon the fine iron bridge spanning the river San Juan, watching the abundant traffic of the waters beneath us, composed chiefly of fishing and fruit boats, although some were laden with more bulky commerce. At a little shop just across the bridge, we tarried to fill our pockets with delicious cigars, cheaper than even our stogies at home; and we let the boy behind the counter take up a huge cocoanut in its green husk and with his big knife hack it open and pour out the liquor within. “Milk,” they call it, but more like nectar it is, and he filled two deep glasses whose contents we quaffed with great content.
The stars were out when we returned to the city of Havana. The American squadron was ablaze with electric lights, and only the gloomy mast of the Maine, thrusting above the placid waters, hinted at the final provocation to war which so short a time ago brought to Cuba peace with liberty.