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.