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WEST INDIES
A deaf person would probably enjoy Havana far more than those of acute hearing. I have often wondered why nature did not provide us with earlids as well as eyelids. A mere oversight, no doubt, that would not have been made had the Cuban capital existed when the first models of the human being were submitted. Havana may not hold the noise championship of the world, but at least little old New York is silent by comparison. Unmuffled automobiles beyond computation, tramcars that seem far more interested in producing clamor than speed, bellowing venders of everything vendible, are but the background of an unbroken uproar that permeates to every nook and cranny of the city. Honest hotel-keepers tell you frankly that they can offer every comfort except quiet. Even in church you hear little but the tumult outside, broken only at rare intervals by the droning voice of the preacher. It is not simply the day-time uproar of business hours; it increases steadily from nightfall until dawn. In olden days the sereno, with his dark lantern, his pike, pistol, bunch of keys, whistle, and rope, wandered through the streets calling out the time and the state of the weather every half-hour. His efforts would be wasted nowadays. The long-seasoned inhabitants seem to have grown callous to the constant turbulence; I have yet to meet a newcomer who confesses to an unbroken hour of sleep. If you move out to one of the pensions of Vedado, the household itself will keep you constantly reminded that you are still in Havana. The Cubans themselves seem to thrive on noise. If they are so unfortunate as to be denied their beloved din, they lose no time in producing another from their own throats. After a week in Havana we took a ferry across the harbor and strolled along the plain behind Cabaña Fortress. For some time we were aware of an indefinable sensation of strangeness amounting almost to discomfort. We had covered a mile or so more before we suddenly discovered that it was due to the unaccustomed silence.
CHAPTER III
CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST
Steamers to Havana land the traveler within a block or two of the central railway station, so that, if the capital has no fascination for him, there lies at hand more than four thousand kilometers of track to put him in touch with almost any point of the island. The most feasible way of visiting the interior of Cuba is by rail, unless one has the time and inclination to do it on foot. Automobiles are all very well in the vicinity of Havana, but the Cuban, like most Latin-Americans, is distinctly not a road builder, and there are long stretches of the island where only the single-footing native horses can unquestionably make their way. There is occasional steamer service along the coasts, and with few exceptions the important towns are on the sea, but even to visit all these is scarcely seeing Cuba.
The railroads are several in number and as well equipped as our second-class lines. One ventures as far west as Guane; there is a rather thorough network in the region nearest the capital; or the traveler may enter his sleeping-car at Havana and, if nothing happens, land at Santiago in the distant “Oriente” some thirty-six hours later. Unfortunately something usually happens. The ferry from Key West brings not only passengers, but whole freight trains, and among the curious sights of Cuba are box-cars from as far off as the State of Washington basking in the tropical sunshine or the shade of royal palms hundreds of miles east of Havana. First-class fares are higher than those of our own land, but some eighty per cent. of the traveling public content themselves with the hard wooden benches of what, in spite of the absence of an intervening second, are quite properly called third-class. Freight rates are said to average five times those in the United States. Women of the better class are almost as rarely seen on the trains as on the streets of Havana, with the result that the few first-class coaches are sometimes exclusively filled with men, and all cars are smoking-cars.
There are sights and incidents of interests even in the more commonplace first-class coaches. In the November season, when the mills of the island begin their grinding, they carry many Americans on their way back to the sugar estates, most of them of the highly skilled labor class in speech and point of view. Now and again a well-dressed native shares his seat with his fighting-cock, dropping about the bird’s feet the sack in which the rules of the company require it to be carried and occasionally giving it a drink at the passengers’ water-tank. At frequent intervals the gamester shrilly challenges the world at large; travelers by Pullman have been known to spend sleepless nights because of a crowing rooster in the next berth. Train-guards in the uniform of American soldiers, an “O. P.” on their collars—this being the abbreviation of the Spanish words for “Public Order”—armed with rifle, revolver, and a long sword with an eagle’s-head hilt in the beak of which is held the retaining strap, strut back and forth through the train, usually in pairs. Most of them are well-behaved youths, though the wide-spread corps on which the government largely depends to overawe its revolutionarily inclined political opponents is not wholly free from rowdies. The trainboy and the brakemen have the same gift of incomprehensible language as our own, and only a difference in uniform serves in most cases to distinguish the name of the next station from that of some native fruit offered for sale. The wares of the Cuban train vender are more varied than in our own circumspect land. Not only can he furnish the bottles that cheer, in any quantity and degree of strength, but also lottery tickets, cooked food, and oranges deftly pared like an apple, in the native fashion. There is probably no fruit on earth which varies so much in its form of consumption in different countries as the orange.
But it is in third-class that one may find a veritable riot of color. Types and complexions of every degree known to the human race crowd the less comfortable coaches. There are leather-faced Spaniards returning for the zafra, fresh, boyish faces of similar origin and destination, Basques in their boinas and corduroy clothes, untamed-looking Haitians sputtering their uncouth tongue, more merry negroes from the British West Indies, Chinamen and half-Chinamen, Cuban countrymen in a combination shirt and blouse called a chamarreta, men carrying roosters under their arms, men with hunting dogs, negro girls in purple and other screaming colors, including furs dyed in tints unknown to the animal world, and a scattering of Oriental and purely Caucasian features from the opposite ends of the earth. Perhaps one third of the throng would come under the classification of “niggers” in our “Jim Crow” States; Southerners would be, and sometimes are, horrified to see the blackest and the whitest race sharing the same seat and even engaged, perhaps, in animated conversation. In a corner sits, more likely than not, an enormous negro woman with a big black cigar protruding from her massive lips at an aggressive angle and a brood of piccaninnies peering out from beneath her voluminous skirts like chicks sheltered from rain by the mother hen. All the gamut of sophistication is there, from the guajiro, or Cuban peasant, of forty who is taking his first train-ride and is waiting in secret terror for the first station, that he may drop off and walk home, to others as blasé as the entirely respectable, cosmopolitan, uninteresting travelers in the chair-car and Pullmans behind.