Cigar-making came to Key West as the most obvious meeting-place of material, maker, and consumer thirty-five years ago. To-day its factories are almost too numerous for counting. The largest of them are broad, low, modern structures facing the sea and ventilated by its constant breezes; the smallest are single shanty rooms. The raw material still comes chiefly from Cuba, but that from our own country, as far away as Connecticut, has its place in even the best establishments. Though women predominate in several of the processes, the actual making is almost entirely in the hands of men—and their tongues, I might add, for they do not hesitate to lend the assistance of those to the glue with which the consumer’s end is bound together. The average workman rolls some two hundred cigars a day. Men, too, sort the damp and bloated cigars into their respective shades of colors and arrange them in boxes, which are placed under a press. From these they are removed by women and girls, a dozen labels hanging fan-wise from their lower lips, and each cigar is banded and returned to the box in the exact order in which they were taken from it. Stamped with the government revenue label precisely as one affixes the postage to a letter, the boxes are placed in an aging and drying room—theoretically at least, though the present insistency of demand often sends them on their way to the freight-cars the very day of their completion.
The wrapper is of course the most delicate and costly of the materials used, being now commonly grown under cheese-cloth even in sun-drenched Cuba. The by-products from the maker’s bench are shipped northward to cigarette factories. Imperfect cigars are culled out before the boxing process and consumed locally, being given out to the “general help” to the extent, in the larger factories, of five or six thousand a month. The workman, however—and here we find the present day tyranny of labor maintained even in this far-flung island of our southern coast—is paid for every cigar he makes, though he may find himself invited to seek employment elsewhere if his average of “culls” is too persistently high. It is said that the makers of candy never taste the stuff they supply a sweet-tooth world; the same may almost be said of the cigarreros of Key West. If they smoke at all in the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the factories, they are far more apt to be addicted to the cigarette than to the product of their own handicraft. The smoker, by the way, who visits Key West is doomed to disappointment; cigars are no cheaper there than in the most northwestern corner of our land. Nor should he bring with him the hope of sampling for once the brands beyond his means. The factories treat their swarms of visitors with every courtesy—except that of tucking a cigar, either of the five-cent or the dollar variety, into a receptive vest pocket.
The cigar-makers of Key West have one drain upon their income which is not common to other professions. Each one contributes a small sum weekly to the support of a “reader.” A superannuated member of the craft sits on a platform overlooking the long roomful of eagle-taloned manipulators of the weed and reads aloud to them as they work. The custom has all the earmarks of being a direct descendant of the doleful dirge with which negro and Indian laborers, in the Old as well as the New World, are still in some regions urged on to greater exertion. But the reader’s calling has lost its romantic tinge of earlier days. Those we heard were not droning the poetry or the colorful tales of the Castilian classics, but read from a morning newspaper printed in Spanish, with special emphasis on the successful struggles of the “working class” against “capitalists” the world over.
The hurricane that vented its chief fury on the Florida keys early in September was still the chief topic of conversation in Key West. For two days the inhabitants had been without electricity, gas, or transportation; in most houses even the bread gave out. The damage was wide-spread, sparing neither the pipe-organs of churches nor the mattresses of family bedrooms. Many a house was reduced to a mere heap of broken boards. Sea-walls of stone were strewn in scattered bits of rock along the water-fronts; the roofs of some of the stanchest buildings bore gaping holes that carried the memory back to Flanders and eastern France.
Two other routes to the Caribbean converge on this one through Key West, those by way of New Orleans and Tampa. The ferry, for it is little more than that, which connects the southernmost of our cities with Havana is the chief drawback of the overland journey. In the first place its rates testify to its freedom from competition, fifteen dollars and tax for a bare ninety miles of travel. It is as if our ocean-liners demanded $500 for the journey to Liverpool, without furnishing food or baths on the way. Then, as though the continued exactions of passport formalities long after any suitable reason for them had passed were not sufficiently troublesome to the harassed passenger, his comfort is everywhere second to that of the steamer personnel, while the outstretched palm invites special contribution for even the most shadowy species of service. But once the door of his breathless stateroom is closed behind him, a brief night’s sleep, if the inexplicable uproar with which the crew seems to pass its time during the journey permits it, brings him to the metropolis of the West Indies. A glimpse through the port-hole at an unseasonable hour shows the horizon dotted at regular intervals by the arc-lights of Havana’s Malecón, and by the time he has reached the deck, these have faded away in the swift tropical dawn, and the steamer is nosing its way through the bottle-mouth of the harbor under the brow of age-and-sea-browned Morro Castle. There ensues the inevitable wait of an hour or two until the haughty port doctor rises and dresses with meticulous care and leisurely sips his morning coffee. When at last he appears, his professional duty does not delay the long file of passengers, for the simple reason that his attention is confined to the incessant smoking of cigarettes behind his morning newspaper. Passports, so sternly required of the departing American, are not even worthy of a glance by the Cuban officials; the custom examination is brief and unexacting. Once he has escaped the aggressive maelstrom of multicolored humanity which welcomes each new-comer with hopeful shrieks of delight, the traveler quickly merges into the heterogeneous multitude that is as characteristic as its Spanish style of architecture of the cosmopolitan capital of Cuba libre.
THE AMERICAN WEST INDIES
CHAPTER II
RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA
A constant procession of Fords, their mufflers wide open, were hiccoughing out the Carlos III Boulevard toward the Havana ball-park. The entrance-gate, at which they brought up with a snort and a sudden, bronco-like halt that all but jerked their passengers to their feet, was a seething hubbub. Ticket-speculators, renters of cushions, venders of everything that can be consumed on a summer afternoon, were bellowing their wares into the ears of the fanáticos who scrimmaged about the ticket-window. Men a trifle seedy in appearance wandered back and forth holding up half a dozen tiny envelopes, arranged in fan-shape, which they were evidently trying to sell or rent. The pink entradas I finally succeeded in snatching were not, of course, the only tickets needed. That would have been too simple a system for Spanish-America. They carried us as far as the grand stand, where another maelstrom was surging about the chicken-wire wicket behind which a hen-minded youth was dispensing permissions to sit down. He would have been more successful in the undertaking if he had not needed to thumb over a hundred or more seat-coupons reserved for special friends of the management or of himself every time he sought to serve a mere spectator.
We certainly could not complain, however, of the front-row places we obtained except that, in the free-for-all Spanish fashion, all the riffraff of venders crowded the foot-rests that were supposedly reserved for front-row occupants. Nine nimble Cubans were scattered about the flat expanse of Almendares Park, backed by Príncipe Hill, with its crown of university buildings. Royal palms waved their plumes languidly in the ocean breeze; a huge Cuban flag undulated beyond the outfielders; a score of vultures circled lazily overhead, as if awaiting a chance to pounce upon the “dead ones” which the wrathful “fans” announced every time a player failed to live up to their hopes. On a bench in the shade sat all but one of the invading team, our own “Pirates” from the Smoky City. The missing one was swinging his club alertly at the home plate, his eyes glued on the Cuban zurdo, or “south-paw,” who had just begun his contortions in the middle of the diamond. The scene itself was familiar enough, yet it seemed strangely out of place in this tropical setting. It was like coming upon a picture one had known since childhood, to find it inclosed in a brand new frame.