Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

We visited tobacco estates in other parts of Cuba and saw all the process except the cutting and curing before we left the island. At Zaza del Medio, for instance, whole carloads of small plants are handled during November. They are very hardy, living for three or four days after being pulled up by the roots from the seed-beds. Strewn out on the station platform in little leaf-tied bundles, they were counted bunch by bunch and tossed into plaited straw saddlebags, to be transported by pack-animals to fields sometimes more than a day’s journey distant. Surrounded on all sides by horizonless seas of sugarcane, the Zaza del Medio region is conspicuous twenty miles off by its tobacco color, not of course of the plants, but of the rich brown of plowed fields and the aged thatch-built tobacco barns. We rode that way one day, our horses floundering through mammoth mud-holes, stepping gingerly through masses of thorny aroma, and fording saddle-deep the Zaza River. Here the small planter system, as distinctive from the big administrative estates of Vuelta Abajo, is in vogue. We found lazy oxen swinging along as if in time to a wedding march, dragging behind them crude wooden plows protected by an iron point. A boy followed each of them, dropping a withered small plant at regular intervals, a man, or sometimes a woman, setting them up behind him. Immense barns made of a pole framework covered entirely with brown and shaggy guinea-grass bulked forth against the palm-tree-punctuated horizon. The similarly constructed houses of the planters were minute by comparison. Here, they told us, tobacco grows only waist high, in contrast to the six feet it sometimes attains in Pinar del Rio province. In February or March the plants are cut off at the base and strung on the poles which lie heaped in immense piles, and hung for two months in the airy barns. Then they are wrapped in yagua and carried back to the railroad on pack-animals. Yagua, by the way, which is constantly intruding upon any description of the West Indies, where it is put to a great variety of uses, is the base of the leaf of the royal palm, the lower one of which drops off regularly about once a month. It is pliable and durable as leather, which it resembles in appearance, though it is several times thicker, and a single leaf supplies a strip a yard long and half as wide.

Rivals, especially Jamaica, assert that the famous tobacco vegas of Cuba are worn out and that Cuban tobacco is now living on its reputation. The statement is scarcely borne out by the aroma of the cigars sold by every shop-keeper on the island, though to tell the truth they do not equal the “Habana” as we know it in the North. This is possibly due to the humidity of the climate. The new-comer is surprised to find how cavalierly the Cuban treats his cigars, or tobacos, as he calls them. Even though he squanders dos reales each for them he thrusts a handful loosely into an outside coat pocket, as if they were so many strips of wood. For they are so damp and pliable in the humid Cuban atmosphere that they will endure an astonishing amount of mistreatment without coming to grief. Contrary to the assertions of Dame Rumor, Cubans do not smoke cigarettes only; perhaps the majority, of the countrymen at least, confine themselves to cigars.

There are cigar-makers in every town of Cuba, though Havana almost monopolizes the export trade. How long some of the famous factories have been in existence was suggested to us by a grindstone in the patio of the one opposite the new national palace. There the workmen come to whet their knives each morning, and they had worn their way completely through the enormous grindstone in several places around the edge. The methods in Havana cigar factories are of course similar to those of Cayo Hueso, as Cuba calls our southernmost city. In one of them we were shown cigars which “wholesale” at fifteen hundred dollars a thousand, though I got no opportunity of judging whether or not they were worth it, either in tobacco or ostentation. The stems of the tobacco leaves are shipped to New York and made into snuff. An average wage for the cigar makers was said to be five dollars a day. They each paid that many cents a week to the factory reader, who entertains the male workmen with the daily newspapers, and the women, by their own choice of course, with the most sentimental of novels. Girls will be girls the world over.

The dreadful habit of using tobacco has progressed since the day when Columbus discovered the aborigines of the great island of Cubanacan smoking, not Habana cigars, but by using a forked reed two ends of which they put in their nostrils and the other in a heap of burning tobacco leaves.

Neither space nor the reader’s patience would hold out if I attempted to do more than “hit the high spots” of our two months of journeying to and fro in Cuba. There is room for a year of constant sight-seeing and material for a fat volume in the largest of the West Indies, though to tell the truth there is a certain sameness of climate, landscape, town, and character which might make that long a stay monotonous despite the glories of at least the first two of these. While he lacks something of that open frankness of intercourse which we are wont to think reaches its height in our own free and easy land, and the exclusiveness of his family life puts him at a disadvantage as an entertainer of guests, the Cuban himself, particularly outside the larger cities, is not inhospitable. But his welcome of visitors from the North is overshadowed by the unbounded hospitality of the American residents of Cuba, whether on the great sugar estates, the fruit farms, in the scattered enterprises of varied nature in all corners of the island, or in the many cities that have become their homes. Merely to enumerate the unexpected welcomes we met with from our own people in all parts of the island would be to fill many pages.

The cities, on the whole, are the least pleasant of Cuba’s attractions. Their hotels, and those places with which the traveler is most likely to come in contact, are largely given over to the insular sport of tourist-baiting even before mid-winter brings its plethora of cold-fleeing, race-track-following, or prohibition-abhorring visitors from the North. Havana, I take it, would be the last place in the world for the lover of the simplicities of life, as for the man of modest income, in those winter months when its hotels turn away whole droves of would-be guests and its already exorbitant prices climb far out of sight from the topmost rung of the ladder of reason. Incidentally Cuba is in the throes of what might be called a “sugar vs. tourists” controversy. Its merchants would like to draw as many visitors as possible, but even its tourist bureau sees itself obliged to “soft pedal” its appeals. If still more visitors come, where is the island to house them? Time was when her more expensive hotels, especially of Havana, stood well nigh empty through the summer and welcomed the first refugees from Jack Frost with open arms, or at least doors. It is not so to-day. Sugar planters from the interior, who would once have grumbled at paying a dollar for a night’s lodging in a back street fonda, now demand the most luxurious suites facing the plaza and the Prado, nay, even house their families in them for months at a time, to the dismay of foreign visitors. Stevedores who were once overjoyed to earn two dollars a day sneer at the fabulous wages offered them now, knowing that a bit of speculation in sugar stocks will bring them many times the amount to be had by physical exertion. The advice most apropos to the modern visitor to Cuba whose tastes are simple and whose fortune is limited would be, perhaps, to come early and avoid the cities.

We found Pinar del Rio town, for instance, far less beguiling than a journey we made from it over the mountain to the Matahambre mines. A peon met us with native horses where the hired Ford confessed its inability to advance farther. Along the narrow trail the vegetation was dense and tropical. Royal palms waved high along the borders of the small streams; red-trunked macicos, yagrumas with their curious upturned leaves showing their white backs, broke the almost monotony of the greenery. Here and there we passed a brown grass hut which seemed to have grown up of itself, a little patch of malanga, boniato, or yuca, the chief native tubers, about it, a dark woman paddling her wash against the trunk of a palm-tree on the edge of a water-hole, several babies in single white garments or their own little black skins scurrying away into the underbrush as we rode down upon them. A few horsemen passed us, and a pack-train or two; but only one woman among the score or more we met was mounted. She was a jet-black lady in a bedraggled skirt and a man’s straw hat, who teetered perilously on her uncomfortable side-saddle, yet who gazed scornfully down her shaded nose at Rachel, riding far more easily astride. Finally, when the sun was high and the vegetation scrubby and shadeless, and we had climbed laboriously up several steep, bare hillsides only to slide down again into another hollow, a cleft in the hills gave us a sudden panorama of the sea, and almost sheer below us lay spread out the mining town. The setting was barren, as is that of most mines, though five years before it had been covered with a pine forest, until a cyclone came to sweep it wholly away and leave only here and there a dead, branchless trunk in a reddish soil that gave every outer indication of being sterile. A network of red trails linked together the offices, the shafts and the reduction plant, the red-roofed houses of the American employees, and the thatched huts of the mine workers.

Mining is not one of Cuba’s chief assets, but this particular spot is producing a high-grade copper. Ore was discovered here by a deer hunter wandering through the forest of pines, but before he could make use of his knowledge the region was “denounced” by another Cuban and still belongs to his family, though there is some bitter-worded doubt as to which branch of it. It goes without saying that the manager is an energetic young American. The laborers are chiefly Spaniards, for the Cubans are too superstitious to long endure working underground. The company builds its own roads, and has installed a telegraph and post-office without government aid, yet it pays full rates on its telegrams or letters. We went far down the shaft into the damp blackness of the eighth and tenth levels, hundreds of feet below the surface, following the galleries and “stopes” to where the workmen were piling the bluish rock into the little iron hand-cars, the dull echoing thud of the dynamiting on some other level sending a shudder through the mountain. All night long the mine worked tirelessly on, the suspended ore-cars swinging down their six-mile cables across the gorge to the loading bins on the edge of the sea.

We followed them in a Ford next morning, from the treeless uplands down through an oak-grown strip where half-wild hogs fatten themselves, unwisely, for the plumper of them are sure to grace native boards during the fiesta of Noche Buena, then along a strip of palms to the Atlantic. A launch scudded down the coast with us to Esperanza, a long range of mountains, rounded in form, gashed with red wounds here and there, looking lofty only because they were so near at hand, seeming to keep pace with us as if bent on shutting us out of the level country behind them. After luncheon in the “best hotel,” with a hen under my chair and a pig under Rachel’s, we Forded to Viñales, the road running for miles under the very lee of a sheer mountain wall, trees, especially of the palm variety, rising everywhere out of the crevices of the soft white rock and seeming to keep their foothold by clutching the wall above with their upper branches. Caves with elaborate stalactite and stalagmite formations gaped beneath them, until we rounded the spur and passed through a sort of mountain portal into the familiar, rolling, dense-grown interior again.

We returned to Pinar del Rio by guagua, a four-seated mail and passenger auto bus such as ply in many sections of rural Cuba. Its driver was as wild as his brethren of Havana, and the contrivance leaped along over the bad roads like a frolicsome goat. Fortunately the usual crowd had missed their ride that morning and we could stretch our legs at ease. Only a leathery old lady who dickered for a reduction in fare, two or three guajiros in their best starched chamarretas, a villager’s shoes which were to be resoled, and two turkeys in palm-leaf cornucopias made up the passenger list. The shrill whistle in place of a horn warned dawdling countrymen to beware, for our chauffeur had scant respect for his fellow-mortals.