A policeman of Havana
Cuba’s new presidential palace
The mainland ends at Jewfish, a cluster of three or four yellow wooden cabins, and for more than a hundred miles the traveler experiences the uncouth sensation of making an ocean voyage by rail. Strangely enough, however, there is more dry land for a considerable distance after the continent has been left behind than during the last twenty miles of mainland. The swamps disappear, and the gray coral rock of the chain of islands along which the train speeds steadily onward sustains a more generous vegetation than that of the watery wastes behind. Gradually, however, the grayish shallows on either hand turn to the ultramarine blue of the Caribbean, and the score of island stepping-stones along which the railroad skips grow smaller and more widely separated, with long miles of sea-washed trestles between them. Within an hour these have become so narrow that they are invisible from the car windows, and the train seems to be racing along the surface of the sea itself, out-distancing ocean-liners bound in the same direction. Brazil-like villages of sun-browned shacks surrounded by waving cocoanut palms cluster in the center of the larger keys, as the Anglo-Saxon form of the Spanish cayo designates these scattered islets of the Caribbean. The names of the almost unpeopled stations grow more and more Castilian—Key Largo, Islamorada, Matacumbe, Bahia Honda, Boca Chica. In places the water underneath is shallow enough for wading, and shades away from light brown through several tones of pink to the deepest blue. The building of a railroad by boat must have been a task to try at times the stoutest hearts, and the cost thereof suggests that the undertaking was rather a labor of love than a hope of adequate financial return.
The Cuban tinge of the passengers had steadily increased from Jacksonville southward; now the “White” car showed many a complexion that was suspiciously like those in the coach ahead. As with the Mexican passengers of our southwest, however, the “Jim Crow” rules are not too rigorously applied to travelers from the lands beyond. Indeed, the color-line all but fades away during the long run through Florida, partly, perhaps, because of the increasing scarcity of negroes. By the time the traveler has passed Miami, African features become almost conspicuous by their rarity.
Toward the end of the three-hour railway journey by sea, land grows so scarce that platforms are built out upon trestles to sustain the stations. The wreckage of a foundered ship lies strewn here and there along the edge of sandy spits across which we rumble from sea to sea. The pirates of olden days would scarcely believe their eyes could they awake and behold this modern means of trespassing on their retreats. Hundreds of palm-trees uprooted by the hurricane of the month before marked the last stages of the journey, the islands became larger and more closely fitted together, and as the sun was quenching his tropical thirst in the incredibly blue sea to the westward, the long line of a city appeared in the offing and the railroad confessed its inability to compete longer with its rivals in ocean transportation.
Key West, fifteen hundred miles south of New York, is a quaint mixture of American and Latin-American civilization, with about equal parts of each. Its wooden houses of two or three stories, with wide verandas supported by pillars, lend tropical features to our familiar architecture. The Spanish tongue, increasingly prevalent in the streets from St. Augustine southward, is heard here as often as English. The frank staring that characterizes the Americas below the United States, the placid indifference to convenience typified in the failure of its trolley-cars to come anywhere near the railroad station, the tendency to consider loafing before a fruit-store or a hole-in-the-wall grocery a fitting occupation for grown men, mark it as deeply imbued with the Spanish influence. Small as the island is, the town swarms with automobiles, and the chief ambition of its youths seems to be to drowse all day in the front seat of a car and trust to luck and a few passengers at train- or boat-time to give them a livelihood. Doctors and dentists announcing “special lady attendant” show that the Latin-American insistence on chaperonage holds full sway. The names of candidates for municipal offices, from mayor to “sexton of the cemetery,” are nearly all Spanish. As in the towns along our Mexican border, the official tongue is bilingual, and Americans from the North are frankly considered foreigners by the Cubanized rank and file of voters. Freight-cars marked “No sirve para azucar” (“Do not use for sugar”) fill the railroad yards; the very motormen greet their passengers in Spanish.
The resident of the “Island City” does not look forward with dread to his winter coal-bill. Not a house in town boasts a chimney. But this advantage is offset by his year-long contest with mosquitos and the absence of fresh water. The railroad brings long trains of the latter in gigantic casks; the majority of the smaller householders depend upon the rains and their eave-troughs. As in all tropical America, the scarcity of vegetables restricts the local diet. Fish, sponges, and mammoth turtles are the chief native products, with the exception, of course, of an industry that has carried the name of Key West to every village of our land.
Of the two principal cigar factories we visited one was managed by a Cuban and the other by an American. The employees are some seventy per cent. natives of the greatest of the West Indies, and Spanish is the prevailing tongue in the workshops. There, as in the city itself, the color-line shows no evidence of existence. Each long table presents the whole gamut of gradations in human complexions. Piece work is the all but invariable rule, and the notion of striking for shorter hours would find no adherents. The cigar-maker begins his daily task at the hour he chooses and leaves when he has wearied of the uninspiring toil. This does not mean that the tables are often unoccupied during the daylight hours, for the citizen of Key West, like those in every other corner of this maltreated and war-weary world, finds the ratio between his earnings, whatever his diligence, and the demands made upon them, constantly balancing in the wrong direction, despite a long series of forced wage increases within the last few years. Not only the pianist-fingered men who perform the most obvious operation of cigar-making, that of rolling the weeds together in their final form, but those who separate the leaves into their various grades and colors by spreading them around the cloth-bound edge of a half-barrel, the women who deftly strip them of their central stem, even those who box and label the finished product, all have the fatness of their pay envelope depend on the amount they accomplish.