Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

CHAPTER XV

THE CAPTURED CITY

We lay at anchor all Sunday night off the foot of the street known as Calle Baja de la Marina, and early on Monday morning steamed up to the most spacious and convenient pier in the city, made fast our lines, and began to discharge cargo. The dock and warehouse facilities of Santiago are fairly good. They are not so extensive as those of an American seaport of equal importance, but so far as they go they leave little to be desired. The pier at which the State of Texas lay was spacious and well built; an iron tramway ran from it to the customs warehouse, and, with the help of one hundred stevedores, Mr. Warner, of Miss Barton's staff, found it possible to unload and store from three hundred and twenty-five to three hundred and fifty tons of foodstuffs per day. As soon as the steamer had made fast her lines a great crowd of forlorn-looking men and children, clothed in the loose, dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers and battered straw hats which make up the costume of the lower classes, assembled on the pier to stare at the newcomers and watch the unloading of the ship. They were of all ages and complexions, from coal-black, grizzle-headed old negroes leaning on canes to half-starved and half-naked Cuban children, whose tallowy faces and distended abdomens were unmistakable evidences of fever and famine. They were not, as a rule, emaciated, nor did they seem to be in the last stages of starvation; but the eagerness with which they crowded about the open ports of the steamer, and watched the bags of beans, rice, and corn-meal as they were brought out by the stevedores and placed on the little flat-cars of the tramway, showed that at least they were desperately hungry. Now and then a few beans, or a few grains of rice, would escape from one of the bags through a small rip or tear, and in an instant half a dozen little children would be scrambling for them, collecting them carefully one by one, and putting them into their hats or tying them up in their shirt-tails and the hems of their tattered frocks. In one instance half a bushel or more of corn-meal escaped from a torn bag and lay in a heap on the dirty pier. One of the prowling Cuban boys espied it, gathered up a hatful of it, and then looked around for something in which he could put the remainder. Failing to see anything that could be utilized as a receptacle, he seemed for a moment to be in despair; but presently a bright thought flashed into his mind, and was reflected in his thin, eager, street-Arab face. Taking out of his pocket two bits of dirty string, he tied his loose cotton trousers tightly around his ankles, and then, unbuttoning his waist-band, he began scooping up the corn-meal from the filthy planks and shoveling it into his baggy breeches. Five minutes later he waddled off the pier in triumph, looking, so far as his legs were concerned, like a big, badly stuffed sawdust doll, or a half-starved gamin suffering from elephantiasis.

As the day advanced, the number of men and children who crowded about the steamer watching for opportunities to pilfer or pick up food became so great that it was necessary to clear the pier and put a guard of soldiers there to exclude the public altogether. Then the hungry people formed in a dense mass in the street opposite the steamer, and stood there in the blazing sunshine for hours, watching the little flat-cars loaded with provisions as they were rolled past to the warehouse. From an English cable-operator, who came down to the pier, we learned that for weeks there had been nothing in the city to eat except rice, and that the supply even of that was limited. Hard-bread crackers had sold as high as one dollar apiece and canned meat at four dollars a can, and many well-to-do families had not tasted bread, meat, or milk in more than a month.

Although there was said to be little or no yellow fever in Santiago, the captain of the State of Texas decided to quarantine the steamer against the shore, and gave notice to all on board that if any person left the ship he could not return to it. This made going ashore a serious matter, because there was virtually nothing to eat in the city, and no place for a stranger to stay, and if one cut loose from the steamer he might find himself without shelter and without any means whatever of subsistence. We had on board, fortunately, a young American named Elwell, who had lived several years in Santiago, and was well acquainted not only with its resources, but with a large number of its citizens. He said that there was a club there known as the Anglo-American Club, organized and supported by the foreign merchants of the city and the English cable-operators. Of this club he was one of the organizers and charter members, and although it had been closed during the blockade and siege, it would probably be reopened at once, and with an introduction from him I could get a room in it. He doubted whether the steward could give me anything to eat, but I could take food enough with me to last for a day or two, and as soon as possible arrangements would be made to supply the club with provisions from the State of Texas. Encouraged by this statement of the possibilities, I decided on Tuesday morning to abandon the steamer and trust myself to the tender mercies of the city and the Anglo-American Club. Hastily packing up a couple of hand-bags, and hiring a ragged, dirty Cuban to carry them and act in the capacity of guide, I left the ship, elbowed my way through the crowd of people at the head of the pier, and entered one of the narrow, ill-paved, and incredibly dirty streets which lead upward from the water-front to the higher part of the city.

The first impression made by Santiago upon the newcomer in July, 1898, was one of dirt, disorder, and neglect. It always had the reputation of being the dirtiest city in Cuba, and at the time of the surrender it was at its worst. I hardly know how to give an adequate idea of it to one who is not familiar with Spanish-American cities and architecture, but I will try. In the first place, the site of the city is the slope of a hill which falls rather steeply to the water on the eastern side of the bay. The most important streets, such as Enramadas and Calle Baja de la Marina, extend up and down the slope at right angles to the water-front, and are crossed at fairly regular intervals by narrower streets or alleys running horizontally along the hillside, following its contour and dipping down here and there into the gullies or ravines which stretch from the crest of the hill to the shore of the bay. As a result of the natural configuration of the ground there is hardly a street in the city that is even approximately level except the wide boulevard which forms the water-front. The east and west streets climb a rather steep grade from this boulevard to the crest of the elevation, and the north and south streets run up and down over the ridges and into the gullies of the undulating slope, so that wherever one goes one finds one's self either ascending or descending a hill. The widest streets in the city—exclusive of the Cristina Boulevard—are hardly more than thirty feet from curb to curb, and the narrowest do not exceed fifteen. The pavements at the time of my visit were made of unbroken stones and rocks from the size of one's fist to the size of a bushel-basket; the sidewalks averaged from two to three and a half feet in width, and the gutters were open drains, broken here and there by holes and pockets filled with decaying garbage and dirty, foul-smelling water. Piles of mango-skins, ashes, old bones, filthy rags, dung, and kitchen refuse of all sorts lay here and there on the broken and neglected pavements, poisoning the air with foul exhalations and affording sustenance to hundreds of buzzards and myriads of flies; little rills of foul, discolored water trickled into the open gutters at intervals from the kitchens and cesspools of the adjoining houses; every hole and crevice in the uneven pavement was filled with rotting organic matter washed down from the higher levels by the frequent rains, and when the sea-breeze died away at night the whole atmosphere of the city seemed to be pervaded by a sickly, indescribable odor of corruption and decay. I had expected, as a matter of course, to find Santiago in bad sanitary condition, but I must confess that I felt a little sinking of the heart when I first breathed that polluted air and realized that for me there was no return to the ship and that I must henceforth eat, work, and sleep in that fever-breeding environment. In a long and tolerably varied experience in Russia, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and European Turkey, I have never seen streets so filthy as in some parts of this Cuban city, nor have I ever encountered such a variety of abominable stenches as I met with in the course of my short walk from the steamer to the Anglo-American Club.

The houses and shops which stood along these narrow, dirty streets were generally one story in height, with red-tiled roofs, high, blank walls of stuccoed or plastered brick covered with a calcimine wash of pale blue or dirty yellow, large, heavy plank doors, and equally large, unglazed windows protected by prison gratings of iron bars and closed with tight inner shutters. There were no trees in the streets,—at least, in the business part of the city,—no yards in front of the houses, no shop-windows for the display of goods, and no windows of glass even in the best private houses. I cannot remember to have seen a pane of window-glass in this part of Cuba. The windows of both shops and houses were mere rectangular openings in the wall, six feet by ten or twelve feet in size, filled with heavy iron gratings or protected by ornamental metal scrollwork embedded all around in the solid masonry. These barred windows, with the heavy plank doors, thick stuccoed walls, and complete absence of architectural ornament, made the narrow, muddy streets look almost as gloomy and forbidding as if they were shut in by long rows of Russian prisons. The natural gloominess of the city, due to the narrowness of the streets and the character of the architecture, was heightened at the time of the surrender by the absence of a large part of the population and the consequent shutting up of more than half the houses. Thousands of men, women, and children had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and the long rows of closed and empty houses in some of the streets suggested a city stricken by pestilence and abandoned. At the time when we landed there was not a shop or a store open in any part of Santiago. Here and there one might see a colored woman peering out through the grated window of a private house, or two or three naked children with tallowy complexions and swollen abdomens playing in the muddy gutter, but as a rule the houses were shut and barred and the streets deserted.

The first pleasant impression that I received in Santiago was made by the Anglo-American Club. It was situated on a narrow, dirty street behind the Spanish theater, in a very low, disreputable part of the city, and did not impress me, at first sight, as being likely to afford even the ordinary necessaries and comforts of life, much less the luxuries and conveniences suggested to the mind of a city man by the word "club." But external appearance in a Spanish-American city is often deceptive, and it was so in this case. Opposite the rear or stage entrance of the theater, where half a dozen soldiers of the Ninth Infantry were cooking breakfast in the street, my ragged Cuban guide turned into a dark vaulted passage which looked as if it might be one of the approaches to a jail. "It can't be possible," I said to myself, "that this damp, gloomy tunnel is the entrance to a club; the guide must have misunderstood the directions given him."

But the guide was right. At a distance of thirty-five or forty feet from the street the vaulted passage opened into a paved patio, or court,—a sort of large, square well,—in the center of which stood a green, thrifty, broad-leaved banana-tree, fifteen or twenty feet in height. From the corners of this court, on the side opposite the street entrance, two broad flights of steps led up to what seemed to be a hanging garden of greenery and flowers, shut in on all sides by piazzas and galleries. Climbing one of these flights of steps, I found myself in a second and higher patio, shaded by large mango-and mamonilla-trees, brightened by borders of flowering shrubs and plants, and filled with the fragrance of roses, geraniums, and pomegranate blossoms. The transition from the heat, filth, and sickening odors of the narrow street to the seclusion and shady coolness of this flower-scented patio was as delightful as it was sudden and unexpected. I could hardly have been more surprised if I had entered what I supposed to be a Siberian forwarding prison, and found myself in a conservatory of tropical plants and flowers. Around three sides of the patio were spacious piazzas in two tiers, and upon these piazzas opened the living-rooms of the club,—about twenty in number,—like the boxes or stalls in the galleries of a European theater. On the southern side of the patio was a large dining-room, and beyond this, occupying the whole width of the building and overlooking the street from a projecting balcony, was the reading-room. This was a high, cool, spacious apartment comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, pictures, maps, hanging book-cases, a big library table covered with periodicals, and an American piano. The periodicals were not of very recent date, and the piano was somewhat out of tune, but I was so delighted with the shady, flower-bordered courtyard and the comfort and apparent cleanliness of the club as a whole that I felt no disposition to be hypercritical. To find such a haven of refuge at all in a city like Santiago was unexpected good fortune.

To one who is unfamiliar with the distinctive peculiarities of Spanish-American architecture, nothing, at first, is more surprising than the contrast between the gloomy and unpromising exterior of a Cuban residence and the luxury and architectural beauty which one often finds hidden behind its grated windows and thick stuccoed walls. It is more surprising and striking in Santiago, perhaps, than in most Spanish-American cities, on account of the narrowness and filthiness of the streets on which the houses even of the wealthiest citizens stand. In the course of the first week that I spent in the city I had occasion to enter a number of Spanish houses of the better class, and I never failed to experience a little shock of surprise when I went from what looked like a dirty and neglected back alley into what seemed to be a jail, and found myself suddenly in a beautiful Moorish court, paved with marble, shaded by graceful, feathery palms, cooled by a fountain set in an oasis of greenery and flowers, and surrounded by rows of slender stone columns, and piazzas twenty-five feet in width. The wealthy Spaniard or Cuban wastes no money in beautifying the outside of his house, because, standing as it does on a narrow, dirty street, it cannot be made attractive or imposing by any possible method of architectural treatment; but upon the ornamentation and embellishment of the patio, or interior court, he lavishes all his taste and skill. The patio of the Anglo-American Club was not nearly as large and attractive as the courtyards of private residences on Heredia Street, to which I gained access later, but as it was the first house of the kind that I had seen in Cuba, it made a very pleasant impression upon me.