Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Of the several towns which the traveler in Cuba is more or less sure to visit the first is usually Matanzas, both because it is the first place of any importance on the way eastward and because it boasts two natural phenomena that have been widely reported. The town itself, wrapped around the head of a deeply indented bay, has nothing that may not be found in a dozen other provincial towns,—unpaved streets reeking with mud or dust, according to the weather, a cement-floored central plaza gay with tropical vegetation and flanked by portales, or massive arcades, and constant vistas of the more formal hours of family life through the street-toeing window grilles. The pursuit of tourists is among its favorite sports, and not only are the prices and accommodations of hotels infinitely more attractive in the mouths of their runners at the station than at their desks, but the entire town seems to be banded together in a conspiracy to force foreign visitors to hire automobiles. At least we were forced to learn by experience rather than by inquiry that the street-cars carry one two thirds of the way to either of the “sights” for which the place is noted, or that one can stroll the entire distance from the central plaza in half an hour.

The Yumurí valley is, to be sure, well worth seeing. From the hermitage of Montserrat, erected by the Catalans of the island on a slope above the town, the basin-shaped vale has a serene beauty, particularly at sunrise or toward sunset, which draws at least a murmur of pleasure from the beholder. Royal palms, singly and in clumps, dot the whole expanse of plain with their green plumes and silvery trunks and climb the slopes of the encircling hills, which lie like careless grass-grown heaps of cracked stone along the horizon. Even by day the silence is broken only by the distant shouts of a peasant or two struggling with their oxen and plows; the occasional lowing of cattle floats past on the stronger breeze of evening. The Cubans rank this as their most entrancing landscape, but I have seen as pretty views from the abandoned farms of Connecticut. For one thing the colors are not variegated enough in this seasonless land to give such scenes the beauty lent by changing leaves, though much else is made up for by the majesty of the royal palms.

A gentler climb at the other end of town, between broad fields of rope-producing cactus, brings one to a cheap wooden house which might pass unnoticed but for the incongruous rumble of an electric dynamo within it. In sight of the commonplace landscape it is easy to believe the story that the caves of Bellamar remained for centuries unknown until a Chinese coolie extracting limestone for a near-by kiln discovered them by losing his crowbar through a hole he had poked in the earth. To-day they are exploited by the rope-making company which owns the surrounding fields. The main portion of the huge limestone cavern has been fitted with electric lights, which of themselves destroy half the romance of the subterranean chambers; the temperature is that of a Turkish bath, and the stereotyped chatter of the guide grows worse than tiresome. But it would be a pity to let these minor drawbacks repel the traveler from visiting Cuba’s weirdest scene. The cave contains more than thirty chambers or halls, the chief of which is the “Gothic Temple,” two hundred and fifty by eighty feet in extent, its lofty roof upheld by massive white columns. There are immense natural bath-tubs, forming waterfalls, fantastic grottoes and nature-sculptured figures of all shapes and sizes along the undulating central passageway that stretches far away into the unlighted earth. Mounds that look like snow-banks, towering walls that seem shimmering curtains, white glistening slopes down which one might easily fancy oneself tobogganing, so closely do they resemble our Northern hillsides in mid-winter, resound with the cackling voice of the irrepressible guide. Of stalagmites and stalactites of every possible size there is no end, some of them slowly joining together to form others of those mighty columns which seem to bear aloft the outer earth. The caves are admirably fitted, except in temperature, to serve as setting for the more fantastic of Wagner operas.

If the train is not yet due, it is worth while to visit the rope factory near the station. As they reach full size the lower leaves of the henequen plants are cut off one by one and carried to the crushing-house on a knoll behind the main establishment. Here they are passed between grooved rollers, the green sap and pulp falling away and leaving bunches of greenish fibers like coarser corn-silk, which shoot down across a little valley on cables to the drying-field. Looped over long rows of poles, they remain here for several days, until the sun has dried and bleached them to the color of new rope. Massive machines tended by women and men weave the fibers together in cords of hundreds of yards long and of the diameter of binding-twine; similar machines twist three of these into the resemblance of clothes-lines, which in their turn are woven together three by three, the process being repeated until great coils of ship’s hawsers far larger than the hand can encircle emerge at the far end of the room ready for shipment.

A principal street of Santa Clara

The Central Plaza of Santa Clara

A dairyman, Santa Clara district