The new-comer’s impressions of Havana will depend largely upon his previous travels. If this is his first contact with the Iberian or the Latin-American civilization, he will find the Cuban capital of great interest. If he is familiar with the cities of old Spain, particularly if he has already seen her farthest-flung descendants, such as Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz, he will probably call Havana “tame.” The most incorrigible traveler will certainly not consider a visit to this most accessible of foreign capitals time wasted. But his chief amusement will be, in all likelihood, that of tracing the curious dovetailing of Spanish and American influences which makes up its present-day aspect.
Both by situation and history the capital of Cuba is a natural place for this intermingling of two essentially different civilizations, but the mixture is more like that of oil and water than of two related elements. The ways of Spain and of America—by which, of course, I mean the United States—are recognizable in every block of Havana, yet there has been but slight blending together, however close the contact. Immigrants from old Spain tramp the streets all day under their strings of garlic, or jingle the cymbals that mean sweetmeats for sale to all Spanish-speaking children. Venders of lottery-tickets sing their numbers in every public gathering-place. On Saturdays a long procession of beggars of both sexes file through the stores and offices demanding almost as a right the cent each which ancient Iberian custom allots them. The places where men gather are wide-open cafés without front walls, rather than the hidden dens of the North. Havana’s cooking, her modes of greeting and parting, her patience with individual nuisance, her very table manners are Spanish. Like all Spanish-America, her sons and daughters are highly proficient in the use of the toothpick; like them they are exceedingly courteous in the forms of social intercourse, irrespective of class. As in Spain, life increases in its intensity with sunset: babies have no fixed hour of retirement; midnight is everywhere the “shank of the evening”; lovers are sternly separated by iron bars, or their soft nothings strictly censored by ever vigilant duennas.
Vendors of lottery tickets in rural Cuba
The winning numbers of the lottery
Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects
Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abaja district. The large building is a tobacco barn, the small ones are residences of the planters