There were some fourteen thousand “regulars” in the Cuban Army before the European War, a number that was more than tripled under compulsory service after the island republic joined the Allies. To-day, despite posters idealizing the soldier’s life and assuring all Cubans that it is their duty to enlist, despite a scale of pay equalling our own, their land force numbers barely five thousand. Many of these are veterans of the great European war,—as fought in Pensacola, Florida. Some wear fifteen to eighteen years’ worth of service stripes diagonally across their lower sleeves; a few played their part in the guerilla warfare against the Spaniards before the days of independence, and have many a thrilling anecdote with which to overawe each new group of “rookies.” In short, they have nearly everything in common with our own permanent soldiers—except the color-line. I have yet to see a squad of white, or partly white, American soldiers march away to duty under a jet-black corporal, a sight so commonplace in Havana as not even to attract a passing attention.
Havana has just celebrated her four-hundredth birthday. She confesses herself the oldest city of European origin in the western hemisphere. Her name was familiar to ocean wayfarers before Cortés penetrated to the Vale of Anáhuac, before Pizarro had heard the first rumors of the mysterious land of the Incas. When the Pilgrim Fathers sighted Plymouth Rock, Havana had begun the second century of her existence. In view of all this, and of the harried career she led clear down to days within the memory of men who still consider themselves youthful, she is somewhat disappointing to the mere tourist for her lack of historical relics. This impression, however, gradually wears off. Her background is certainly not to be compared with that of Cuzco or of the City of Mexico, stretching away into the prehistoric days of legend; yet many reminders of the times that are gone peer through the mantle of modernity in which she has wrapped herself. From the age-worn stones of La Fuerza the bustle of the city of to-day seems a fantasy from dreamland. In the underground passages of old Morro, in the musty dungeons of massive Cabaña, the khaki-clad soldiers of Cuba’s new army look as out of place as motor-cars in a Roman arena. The stroller who catches a sudden unexpected glimpse of the cathedral façade is carried back in a twinkling to the days of the Inquisition; Spain herself can show no closer link with the Middle Ages than the venerable stone face of San Francisco de Paula. The ghosts of monks gone to their reward centuries ago hover about the post-office where the modern visitor files his telegram or stamps his picture postals. The British occupied it as a barracks when they captured Havana in the middle of the last century, whereby the ancient monastery was considered desecrated, and has served in turn various government purposes; yet the shades of the past still linger in its flowery patio and flit about the corners of its capacious, leisurely old stairways.
Old Havana may be likened in shape to the head of a bulldog, with the mark of the former city wall, which inclosed it like a muzzle, still visible. The part thus protected in olden days contains most of Havana’s antiquity. Beyond it the streets grow wider, the buildings more modern, as one advances to the newer residential suburbs. Amusing contrasts catch the eye at every turn within the muzzled portion. Calle Obispo, still the principal business street, is a scant eighteen feet wide, inclusive of its two pathetically narrow sidewalks. The Spanish builders did not foresee the day when it would be an impassable river of clamoring automobiles. They would be struck dumb with astonishment to see these strange devil-wagons housed in the tiled passageways behind the massive carved or brass-studded doors of the regal mansions of colonial days, as their fair ladies would be horrified to find the family chapels turned into bath-rooms by desecrating barbarians from the North. Office buildings that seem to have been bodily transported from New York shoulder age-crumbled Spanish churches and convents; crowds as business-bent as those of Wall Street hurry through narrow callejones that seem still to be thinking of Columbus and the buccaneers of the Spanish main. Long rows of massive pillars upholding projecting second stories and half concealing the den-like shops behind them have a picturesque appearance and afford a needed protection from the Cuban sun, but they are little short of a nuisance under modern traffic conditions. Old Colón market is as dark and unsanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day’s purchases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. One may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial Havana never tasted.
The city is as brilliantly lighted as any of our own, by dusky men who come at sunset, laboriously carrying long ladders, from the tops of which they touch off each gas jet as in the days of Tacón. Ferries as modern as those bridging the Hudson ply between the Muelle de Luz and the fortresses and towns across the harbor; but they still have as competitors the heavy old Havana rowboats, equipped, when the sun is high, with awnings at the rear, and manned by oarsmen as stout-armed and weather-tanned as the gondoliers of Venice. Automobiles of the latest model snort in continual procession around the Malecón on Sunday afternoons, yet here and there a quaint old family carriage, with its liveried footmen, jogs along between them. Many a street has changed its name since the days of independence, but still clings to its old Spanish title in popular parlance. A new system of house numbering, too, has been adopted, but this has not superseded the old; it has merely been superimposed upon it, until it is a wise door indeed that knows its own number. To make things worse for the puzzled stranger, the two sides of the street have nothing in common, so that it is nothing unusual to find house No. 7 opposite No. 114.
Havana is most beautiful at night. Its walls are light in color, yellow, orange, pink, pale-blue, and the like prevailing, and the witchery of moonlight, falling upon them, gives many a quaint corner or narrow street of the old city a resemblance to fairyland. But when one hurries back to catch them with a kodak in the morning, it is only to find that the chief charm has fled before the grueling light of day.
The architecture of the city is overwhelmingly Spanish, with only here and there a detail brought from the North. The change from the wooden houses of Key West, with their steep shingled roofs, to the plaster-faced edifices of Havana, covered by the flat azoteas of Arab-Iberian origin often the family sitting-room after sunset, is sharp and decided. Among them the visitor feels himself in a foreign land indeed, whatever suggestions of his own he may find in the life of the city. The tendency for low structures, the prevalence of sumptuous dwellings of a single story, the preference for the ground floor as a place of residence, show at a glance that this is no American city. Yet the single story is almost as lofty as two of our own; the Cuban insists on high ceilings, and the longest rooms of the average residence would be still longer if they were laid on their sides. To our Northern eyes it is a heavy architecture, but it is a natural development in the Cuban climate. Coolness is the first and prime requisite. Massive outer walls, half their surfaces taken up by immense doors and windows, protected by gratings in every manner of artistic scroll, defy the heat of perpetual summer, and at the same time give free play to the all but constant sea breezes. The openness of living which this style of dwelling brings with it would not appeal to the American sense of privacy in family life. Through the iron-barred rejas, flush with the sidewalk, the passer-by may look deep back into the tile-floored parlor, with its forest of chairs, and often into the living-rooms beyond. At midday they look particularly cool and inviting from the sun-drenched street; in the evening the stroller has a sense of sauntering unmolested through the very heart of a hundred family circles.
Old residents tell us that Havana is a far different city from the one from which the Spanish flag was banished twenty years ago. Its best streets, they say, were then mere lanes of mud, or their cobbled pavements so far down beneath the filth of generations that the uncovering of them resembled a mining operation. Along the sea, where a boulevard second only to the peerless Beira Mar of Rio runs to-day, the last century left a stenching city garbage-heap. The broad, laurel-shaded Prado leading from the beautiful central plaza to the headland facing Morro Castle was a labyrinthian cluster of unsavory hovels. All this, if one may be pardoned a suggestion of boasting, was accomplished by the first American governor. But the Cubans themselves have continued the good work. Once cleaned and paved, the streets have remained so. Buildings of which any city might be proud have been erected without foreign assistance. In their sudden spurt of ambition the Cubans have sometimes overreached themselves. A former administration began the erection of a presidential palace destined to rival the best of Europe. About the same time the provincial governor concluded to build himself a simple little marble cabin. Election day came, and the new president, after the spendthrift manner of Latin-American executives, repudiated the undertaking of his predecessor, which lies to-day the abandoned grave of several million pesos. The governor of the province was convinced by irrefutable arguments that this half-finished little cabin was out of proportion to his importance, and yielded it to his political superior. It is nearing completion now, a thing of beauty that should, for a time at least, satisfy the artistic longings even of great Cuba. For it has nothing of the inexpensive Jeffersonian simplicity of our own White House, fit only for such plebeian occupants as our Lincolns and Garfields, but is worthy a Cuban president—during the few months of the year when he is not occupying his suburban or his summer palace.
Havana has grown in breadth as well as character since it became the capital of a free country. While the population of the island has nearly doubled, that of the metropolis has trebled. Víbora, Cerro, and Jesús del Monte have changed from outlying country villages of thatched huts to thriving suburbs; Vedado, the abode of a few scattered farmers when the Treaty of Paris was signed, has become a great residential region where sugar-millionaires and successful politicians vie with one another in the erection of private palaces, not to mention the occasional perpetration of architectural monstrosities. Under the impulse of an ever-increasing and ever-wealthier population, abetted by energetic young Cubans who have copied American real-estate methods, Havana is already leaping like a prairie fire to the crests of new fields, which will soon be wholly embraced in the conflagration of prosperity.