Perhaps the most remarkable of the many remarkable things about a Chinaman is his adaptability. Any one seeing him ironing shirts in the States might suppose that he was exercising an inherited talent. But he never saw an iron before coming to America and took to the calling because there was an evident unfilled demand for the work. He is not a laundryman in Cuba, because when he arrived the field was already occupied by the negroes. On the other hand, there was a distinctly felt want of market gardeners, and John jumped into the opening without hesitation. He would have acted with the same prompt decision had the need been for burglars or balloonists. He takes up one line of work as readily as another and whatever he attempts he does well. It matters not whether the hole be round or square, his plastic personality will fit in it snugly. When he went to Calcutta, he found that there was no one to make shoes and paint portraits in manner satisfactory to the Englishman. He calmly and confidently undertook to do both. It is quite unnecessary to state that he succeeded. But when you consider the essential differences between European and Chinese art, both in conception and execution, as well as the fact that the Chinese emigrant is not usually deeply versed in either, the result was simply miraculous.
Three favorite occupations of John Chinaman in Cuba are cooking, peddling sweetmeats, and keeping a fruit-stand. In each of these fields he has had to meet native competition, and in his quiet, forceful way he soon overcame it, although in the second he had serious difficulties to master. In short time he had learned to make better dulces than the Cubans had been accustomed to, but when it came to advertising his wares, he found himself hopelessly handicapped by a naturally weak voice when pitted against the Cuban hawker, who has no superior in the world as a street crier. However, with the Chinaman, the next thing to being confronted with an obstacle is to overcome it. John mounted a long red box upon his head and on this drummed continuously with a hardwood stick. In the course of time the Cuban women and children forsook the man who bawled frantically for the silent man who beat a box.
The acclimated, it would be altogether incorrect to say the naturalized, Chinaman in Cuba has been shorn of his pigtail, wears the same free shirt, and pantaloons as the native, and is called José, or Miguel, but if you should go into the back room of his store, you would find a vase of joss sticks burning before the shrine of his repulsive looking deity.
There are very few Chinese women in the country and John is usually a celibate, but occasionally he marries a negress or mulatto. The children are generally bright, and often good-looking. The Chinaman is an excellent husband and father in such cases.
Probably all these sallow-skinned taciturn Celestials yearn for their mother-country while they patiently plod through life in an uncongenial environment. At least they have the satisfaction of knowing that when they die their bones will be shipped back to be buried in the land of their fathers. Meanwhile their numbers are increasing in Cuba and it is easily conceivable that the country may have a Chinese problem to grapple with some day.
Numerically the Americans are not an important element in the foreign population but they represent more wealth and greater business than any other. There are about seven thousand white citizens of the United States, more or less permanently resident on the Island. A large proportion of the sugar and tobacco estates, as well as extensive railroad and mining properties, are in American hands. A few Americans are engaged in wholesale business and a considerable number in fruit culture. I shall have more to say about these in a later portion of the volume.
The first American occupation was the signal for a number of swindlers, loafers, and topers from the United States to take up residence in Habana. They caused endless trouble to the American officials and created a bad impression among the natives. By degrees this class has been almost entirely eradicated and the Cubans long since learned that they were in no sense representative of their countrymen. The American in Cuba to-day is either a responsible business man, or an industrious farmer, whom the people of the country look upon with respect, and with whom they are generally upon the most friendly footing.
CHAPTER VII
THE CONDITION OF CUBA
Here is a country, small in extent, it is true, but as rich proportionally in natural resources as any in the world. It exports over $100,000,000 worth of the products of its soil annually. Yet less than half of its productive area is turned to account, and of its cultivated tracts only a small proportion is subjected to intensive treatment. Bad government and ill-judged commercial policy have retarded the development of the country which, under favorable conditions, might to-day be producing five times its output and supporting a population five times as great as that which it has. It is importing large quantities of foodstuff that ought to be raised upon its lands and paying substantial sums for foreign labor that should be supplied by its own people.
The economic condition of Cuba is as unfavorable as possible to the welfare of its population. Foreigners own practically everything in the country. The Island is exploited for the benefit of everyone but the natives.