There are express trains in Cuba, those that make the long journey between the two principal cities sometimes so heavy with their half dozen third, their one or two first-class, their Pullman, baggage, express, and mail-cars, that it is small wonder the single engine can keep abreast of the time-table even when washouts or slippery, grass-brown rails do not add to its troubles. Section-gangs are conspicuous by their scarcity, and those who contract to keep the tracks clear of vegetation by a monthly sprinkling of chemicals do not always accomplish their task. But there is nothing more comfortable than loafing along in the wicker chairs to be found in one uncrowded end of the first-class coach, without extra charge, with the immense car-windows wide open, far enough back to miss the inevitable cinders, through the perpetual, palm-tree-studded summer of the tropics. Even the expresses are, perhaps unintentionally, sight-seeing trains, though they are frequently more or less exasperating to the hurried business man. But, then, one has no right to be a hurried business man in the West Indies.
The slower majority of trains dally at each station, according to its size, just about long enough to “give the town the once over”; or, if it is large enough to be worth a longer visit, one is almost certain to catch the next train if he sets out for the station as soon as it arrives. The scene at a Cuban railway station is always interesting. Except in the largest towns, most of the population comes down to see the train go through, so that the platform is crowded half an hour before it is due, which usually means an hour or two before it actually arrives. The new-comer is apt to conclude that he has little chance of getting a seat, but he soon learns by experience that few of these platform loungers are actual travelers. The average station crowd is distinctly African in complexion, though perhaps a majority show a greater or less percentage of European ancestry. Pompous black dames in gaudy dresses, newly ironed and starched, with big brass earrings and huge combs in their frizzled tresses, their fingers heavy with a dozen cheap rings, stand coyly smoking their long black cigars. A man with his best rooster under one arm and his best girl on the other stalks haughtily to and fro among his rivals and admirers. An excited negro with a gamecock in one hand waves it wildly in the air as he argues, or tucks it under an armpit while he wrestles with his baggage. A colored girl in robin’s-egg blue madly powders her nose in a corner, using a pocket mirror of the size of a cabinet photograph. Guajiros in chamarretas with stiffly starched white bosoms which give them a resemblance to dress shirts that have not been tucked into the trousers, a big knife in a sheath half showing below them, the trousers themselves white, or faintly pink, or cream-colored, even of gay plaids in the more African cases, their heads covered with immense straw hats and their feet with noiseless alpargatas, gaze about them with the wondering air of peasants the world over. Rural guards of the “O. P.” strut hither and yon, making a great show of force both in numbers and weapons. Children of all ages add their falsetto to the constant hubbub of chatter. Here and there a worn-out old Chinaman wanders about offering dulces for sale. A negro crone engaged in that unsavory occupation technically known as “shooting snipes” picks up an abandoned cigar or cigarette butt here and there, lighting it from the remnant of another and dropping that into a pocket. The first-class waiting-room is crowded, but the departure of the train will prove that most of the occupants have come merely to show off their finery or examine that of their neighbors. A white-haired old negro man wheels back and forth in the bit of space left to him a white baby resplendent with pink ribbons. When the train creaks in at last, would-be baggage carriers swarm into the coaches or about departing travelers like aggressive mosquitoes. The racial disorderliness of Latin-Americans, and their abhorrence of carrying their own bags, make this latter nuisance universal throughout the length and breadth of the island. It is of no use for the American traveler to assert his own ability to bear his burdens; no one believes him, and they are sure to be snatched out of his hands by some officious ragamuffin before he can escape from the maelstrom. In some stations a massive, self-assertive negro woman “contracts” to see all hand baggage on or off the trains, keeping all the rabble of ragged men and boys, some of them pure white, in her employ and collecting the gratuities herself in a final promenade through the cars.
Sometimes the train stops for a station meal, the mere buffet service on board being uncertain and insufficient. Then it is every one for himself and hunger catch the hindmost, for one has small chance of attracting the attention of the overworked concessionary if the heaping platters with which the common table is crowded are empty before he can lay hand upon them. Then he must trust to the old Chinamen who patiently stand all day along the edge of the platform, or even well into the night, slinking off into the darkness with their lantern-lighted boxes of sweets and biscuits only when the last train has rumbled away to the east or west.
We were invited to spend a Sunday at a big tobacco finca in the heart of the far-famed Vuelta Abajo district in Cuba’s westernmost province. With the exception of Guanajay the few towns between Havana and Pinar del Rio, capital of the province of the same name, have little importance. The passing impression is of rich red mud, a glaring sunshine, and a wide difference between the rather foppish, over-dressed Havanese and the uncouth countrymen in their bohíos, huts of palm-leaves and thatch which probably still bear a close resemblance to those in which Columbus found the aborigines living. Then there are of course the royal palms, which grow everywhere in Cuba in even greater profusion than in Brazil. The roads are bordered with them, the fields are striped with their silvery white trunks, their majestic fronds give the finishing touch to every landscape.
Pinar del Rio itself has the same baking-hot, glaring, dusty aspect of almost all towns of the interior in the dry season, the same curious contrasts of snorting automobiles and guajiros peddling their milk on horseback, the cans in burlap or leaf-woven saddlebags beneath their crossed or dangling legs. Beyond, the mixto wanders along at a jog trot, now and then stopping for a drink or to urge a belligerent bull off the track. Here a peasant picks his way carefully down the car steps, carrying by a string looped over one calloused finger two lordly peacocks craning their plumed heads from the tight palm-leaf wrappings in which their bodies are concealed; there a family climbs aboard with a black nursegirl of ten, whose saucer eyes as she points and exclaims at what no doubt seems to her the swiftly fleeing landscape show that she has never before been on a train. Tobacco is grown in scattered sections all over Cuba, but it is most at home in the gently rolling heart of this western province. Being Sunday, there was little work going on in the fields, but when we passed this way two days later we found them everywhere being plowed with oxen, birds following close on the heels of the plowmen to pick up the bugs and worms, women and children as well as men transplanting the bed-grown seedlings of the size of radish tops. Time was when the narcotic weed had all this region to itself, but the lordly sugar-cane is steadily encroaching upon it now, daring to grow in the very shadow of the old, brown, leaf-built tobacco barns.
Don Jacinto himself did not meet us at the train, but his giant of a son greeted us with an elaborate Castilian courtesy which seemed curiously out of keeping with his fluent English, interlarded with American college slang. How he managed to cramp himself into the driving seat of the bespattered Ford was as much of a mystery as the apparent ease with which it skimmed along the bottomless Cuban country road or swam the bridgeless river. I noted that it bore no license tag and, perhaps unwisely, expressed my surprise aloud, for Don Jacinto’s son smiled quizzically and for some time made no other answer. Then he explained, “Those of us who are old residents and large property holders in our communities do not bother to take out licenses; besides, they are only five dollars here in the country, so it is hardly worth the trouble.”
Our host, a lordly-mannered old Spaniard who had come to Cuba in his early youth, received us on the broad, breeze-swept veranda of his dwelling. It was a typical Spanish country house of the tropics, low and of a single story, yet capacious, rambling back through a large, wide-open parlor, a dining-room almost as extensive, and a cobbled patio to a smoke-blackened kitchen and the quarters of the dozen black domestics who were tending the pots or responding with alacrity to the slightest hint of a summons from Don Jacinto or his equally imperious son. The living rooms flanked the two larger chambers, and were as tightly closed as the latter were wide open. The guest room opening directly off the parlor contained all the conveniences that American influence has brought to Cuba, without losing a bit of its Castilian architecture. There were of course neither carpets nor rugs in the house, bare wooden floors being not only cooler, but less inviting to the inevitable insects of the tropics. A score of cane rocking-chairs, the same round rattan which formed the rockers curving upward and backward to give the chair its arms, and a bare table, constituted the entire furniture of the parlor. On the unpapered wooden walls hung two framed portraits and a large calendar. Boxes of cigars lay invitingly open in all the three rooms we entered and another decorated the table on the cement-paved veranda.
This last was the principal rendezvous of the household. There a peon dumped a small cartload of mail, made up largely of technical periodicals; there the servants and the overseers came to receive orders. The demeanor of the inferiors before their masters was in perfect keeping with the patriarchal atmosphere of the entire finca. Thus, one easily imagined, plantation owners commanded and servants unquestionably obeyed in the days of slavery. There was a certain comradeship, one might almost say democracy, between the two, or the several, social grades, but it was not one which carried with it the slightest suggestion of familiarity on either side.
Luncheon was a ceremonious affair. Rachel, being the only lady present, was given the head of the table, with Don Jacinto on her right. In theory the ladies of the household were indisposed, but it was probably only the presence of strangers, particularly a male stranger, which kept them from appearing, if only in bata and curlpapers. Below our host and myself, on opposite sides, the company was ranged down the table in careful gradations of social standing, empty chairs separating those who were too widely different in rank to touch elbows. Thus there was a vacant chair between the son of the house and the head overseer and, farther down, two of them separated the company chemist from a sort of field boss. Conversation was similarly graded. The chief overseer did not hesitate to put in a word or even tell an anecdote whenever guests, father or son were not speaking; the chemist now and then ventured a remark of his own, but the field boss ate in utter silence except when some question from the top of the table brought from him a respectful monosyllabic reply. Of the food served on one mammoth platter after another I will say nothing beyond remarking that two thirds of it was meat, all of it well cooked, and the quantity so great that the whole assembled company scarcely made a noticeable impression upon it. Over the table hung an immense cloth fan like the punkahs of India, operated in the same manner by a boy incessantly pulling at a rope over a pulley in the far end of the room. Its purpose, however, was different, as was indicated by its name, espanto-moscas (scare-flies), for Cuba’s unfailing breeze would have sufficed to keep the air cool; but when the wallah suddenly abandoned his task with the appearance of the coffee the flies quickly settled down upon us in a veritable cloud. It may be that the tobacco fields attract them, for they are ordinarily far less troublesome in the West Indies than during our own summers.