One other town and I am done with them, for though Sagua la Grande and Caibarien, Ciego de Avila and picturesque Trinidad, at least, are worthy a passing notice, there is something distinctive about Camagüey, though the difference is after all elusive and baffling. For one thing it is more than four hundred years old; for another it is the largest town in the interior of Cuba. Even it, however, did not shun the coast by choice, but ran away from the northern shore in its early youth to escape the pirates, and, to make doubly sure of concealment, changed its name from Puerto Principe to that of the Indian village in which it resettled. Its antiquity is apparent, appalling, in fact. Projecting wooden window grilles, heavy cornices, aged balconies, also of wood, and tiled roofs hanging well over the street, crumbling masonry, all help to prove the city a genuine antique. Few of its streets are straight, few parallel, few meet at right angles, the result being to give the visitor a curiously shut-in feeling. It is said that this civic helter-skelter is due to the fact that the refugees from the harassed coast staked their claims and built their houses at random in their haste to get under cover, though there is a bon mot to the effect that the streets were purposely made crooked to fool the pirates. The town is noted for its tinajónes, in the legitimate sense, that is, for in Spanish the word means not only an immense earthenware jar, but a person with a large capacity for liquid refreshment. Some of these jars would easily contain the largest human tinajón; the majority of them are more than a hundred years old; there are said to be none younger than sixty. They serve the same purpose as our cisterns. Several ancient churches lift their weather-dulled gray walls and towers above the mass of old houses. The majority of these are down at heel, their façades battered and cracked, though the patios or small gardens in their rear are gay with flowers and shrubbery. Most of its streets were once paved, but that, too, was long ago, and during the frequent rainy days one must pick one’s way across them by the scattered cobbles embedded in mud as over a stream on stepping-stones. The railroad once offered to pave at its own expense the slough bordering the station, but the local politicians would not permit it, for the same reason that Tammany prefers to let its own contracts. Even the social customs of Camagüey are ancient. If “any one who is any one” dies, for instance, as they do not infrequently, “everything” closes and all social functions are abandoned, often to the dismay of hostesses. The town is said to be famed for its beautiful women and its skilled horsemen; its color-line is reputed more strict and its negro population less numerous than in the rest of Cuba, at least three of these things being credited to the fact that the region was long given over to cattle rather than sugar-cane, requiring fewer slaves. The casual visitor, however, sees little to confirm these statements.
To-day even Camagüey province has succumbed to the cane invasion, like all Cuba, and the raising of cattle has become a secondary industry. Droves of the hardy, long-horned, brown breed may still be grazing the savanna lands, searching the valleys for tasty guinea-grass, standing knee-deep in the little rivers, but Cuba now imports meat, in contrast to the days when the exporting of cattle was one of her chief sources of revenue. The climate has had its share in bringing this change. Not only does it cause the milk to deteriorate in quantity and quality within a very few years, but the animals decrease steadily in size from generation to generation. Butter, unless of the imported variety, is as rare in Cuba as in all tropical America, and the invariable custom of boiling milk before using makes it by no means a favorite beverage. Besides, the constant drought in the United States does not extend to Cuba. But all these causes are but slight compared with the skyrocketing price of sugar, which is swamping all other industries in the island, nay, even its scenery, beneath endless seas of cane.
Our good hosts of Tuinucú varied their hospitality by bearing us off on a two-days’ horseback journey into the neighboring mountains. A hand-operated ferry and a road that was little more than a trail, except in width, brought us to the Old World town of Sancti Spiritus, founded in 1514 and rivaling in medieval architecture and atmosphere almost anything Spain has to offer. Here a práctico, which corresponds to, but is apt to mean much less than a guide, took the party in charge and trotted away toward the foothills. A group of priests in their somber, flowing gowns and shovel hats grinned offensively at the unwonted sight of ladies riding man-fashion, and the townsmen stared with the customary Latin-American impudence, but the countrymen greeted us with the dignified courtesy of old Castilian grandees. Pack-trains shuffled past in the deep dust now and then, the dozen or more undersized horses tied together from tails to halters. The fact that this left the animals no protection from the vicious flies meant no more to the compassionless guajiros than did the raw backs under the heavy, chafing packs. Cuba, like all Latin America, is a bad country in which to be a horse, or any other dumb animal for that matter. Much of the country was uncultivated, though royal palms and guinea-grass testified to its fertility. Big dark-red oxen or bulls were here and there plowing the gentler hillsides, more of them stood or lay at ease under the spreading ceiba trees. The region was once famed for its coffee, but even the few bushes that are left get no care nowadays and the time is already at hand when they are to give way before the militant sugarcane.
We turned into an old estate where a hundred slaves had once toiled. All but a corner of it was overgrown with bush; the massive old plantation house had lost all its former grandeur except the magnificent views from its verandas. A disheveled family of guajiros inhabited it now, its cobbled courtyard seldom resounded to the hoofs of horses bringing guests to its very parlor door, the broad, brick-paved coffee-floor was grass-grown between its joints, the old slave inclosure had been turned over to the pigs, feeding on palmiche, the berries of the royal palm. The slattern who thrust her head out of the ruined kitchen building had little claim to propriety of appearance, though she answered a joking question as to whether she, too, would ride astride with a fervent, “Not I, God protect me!”
Reminiscences of slave days brought forth the story of “Old Concha” as we rode onward. She had been a slave on Tuinucú estate as far back as any one could remember, still is, in fact, in her own estimation. No one knows how old she is, except that she was married and had several children when the mother of her present mistress was a child. Her own answer to the question is invariably “thirteen.” All day long she potters about the kitchen, though great effort has been made to get her to rest from her labors. She refuses to accept wages, only now and then “borrowing” a peseta, the total averaging perhaps five dollars a year, and being mainly spent for tobacco. Whenever any of the modern servants are remiss in their duties or show a suggestion of impudence she warns them that the “master’s” whip will soon be tingling their legs, then, recalling herself, sighs for the “good old days” that are gone. She is the chief authority on forgotten family affairs, though incapable of keeping the “in-laws” straight. In her early days Concha accompanied her mistress to the United States. Arrived at the dock in New York, she submitted to her first hat, on the warning that she would be conspicuous without it—and raised it to all white people with whom she spoke. A custom officer questioned her right to bring in the fifty large black cigars which she had first attempted to conceal about her person, doubting that they were for her own use. Concha lighted one forthwith and quickly convinced the skeptic of her ability to consume them. It is useless to try to throw anything away at Tuinucú; Concha is certain to retrieve it and stow it away in her little room, with her “freedom paper” and her souvenir hat.
By sunset we were surrounded by mountains, though perhaps those of central Cuba should rather be called ranges of high hills. The little village of Banao was thrown into a furor of excitement by the arrival of “caballeros,” and particularly by the announcement that we planned to camp out on the mountainside. Picnics are as unknown to the Cuban as to the rest of Latin America. Boys swarmed around us and scampered ahead in the swiftly falling darkness to show us a spot well up the slope where water and a bit of open ground were to be found. They told us many lugubrious tales of the dangers of sleeping in the open air and implored us to return instead to the hovels they shared with their pigs and chickens. When it became evident that we were not to be turned from our reasonless and perilous undertaking, they took to warning us at every step against the guao, quite fittingly pronounced “wow!” This is a species of glorified poison ivy, equally well named pica-pica. Drawbacks of this kind are rare in Cuba, however, where there are few poisonous plants, no venomous snakes, not even potato-bugs! The boys remained with us gladly until the last scraps of the camp-fire meal had disappeared, but fled with gasps of dismay at the suggestion that they spend the night there.
The traveler in the West Indies must learn to rise early if he is to catch the best nature has to offer. Noonday, even when less oppressively hot than our own midsummers, thanks to the unfailing trade-wind, is glaring in its flood of colors, insistent, without subtleties. But dawn and sunrise have a grandeur and at the same time a delicacy, as if the light were filtered through gauze upon the green-bespangled earth, which even the gorgeous sunsets and the evanescent twilight cannot equal. As we watched the new day steal in upon us through the dense foliage, it would have been easy to fancy that we had been transported to some fantastic fairyland in which the very birds were bent on adding to the subtle intoxication of the visitor’s senses.
We beat the sun to the grotto of cold, transparent water and by the time it began to express itself in terms of heat were scrambling through the jungle to the nearest summit. Fresh coffee was to be had on many a bush for the picking; and inviting the red berries looked, too, until a taste of them had destroyed the illusion. He who fancies Cuban mountains are not high is due to revise his notions by the time he has dragged himself up the face of one of them through jagged rocks half concealed beneath the matted brush, over veritable hedges of needle-pointed cactus, now and again clutching as the only escape from toppling over backward a treacherous handful of “wow.” Our garments were torn, our hands cut and stinging with pica-pica, our guide had degenerated from the fearless fellow of the night before to an abject creature who asked nothing better than to be left to die in peace by the time we reached the summit; and even then it was no real summit at all, but only the first of half a dozen knobs which formed a species of giant stairway to some unknown region lost in the clouds. In the light of the struggle it had cost us to cover this infinitesimal portion of the scene before us we seemed mere helpless atoms lost in the midst of a ferocious nature which clothed the pitched and tumbled world far beyond where the eye could see in any direction; or, to put it more succinctly in the words of our host, we looked like worn-out fleas caught in the folds of a thick and wrinkled carpet.
The ride homeward was by another road, boasting itself a camino real, but little more than a wide trail for all its claim to royalty. Black ranges studded with royal palms cut short the horizon. Guajiros slipped past us here and there on little native horses of rocking-chair gait; others rode more slowly by perched on top of their woven-leaf saddle-bags, bulging with produce, a chicken or two usually swinging by the legs from them; all bade us a diffident “Muy buenas.” Trees worthy of being reproduced in the stained-glass windows of cathedrals etched the sky-line. The stupid peon who posed as guide, flapping his wings with the gait of his horse like a disheveled crow, knew the names of only the most familiar growths, which would not so much have mattered had he not persisted in digging up false ones from the depths of his turbid imagination. Of the flowers, fruit, and strangely tame long-tailed birds he had as little real knowledge, though he had seen them all his life. Nor did he even know the road; I have never met a Latin-American “guide” who did. A negro boy on horseback singing his cows home from pasture; a peasant in the familiar high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat of braided palm-leaves hooking together tufts of grass with a crotched stick and cutting them off with a machete; children gathering the oily palmiche nuts which are the chief delicacy of the Cuban hog, were among the sights of the afternoon. Next to sugar certainly the most prolific crop in Cuba is babies. Black, brown, yellow, and all the varying shades between, they not only swarm in the towns, but cluster in flocks about the smallest country hut, innocent of clothing as of the laws of sanitation, with no other joy in life than to roll about on the ground inside or around their little homes and suck a joint of sugar-cane. The houses of the peasants, still called by the Indian name of bohío, owe nothing to the outside world, but are wholly built of materials found on the spot, their very furnishings being woven palm-leaf hammocks, hairy cowhide chairs, pots and dishes made from gourds picked from the trees. The gates to many fincas, mildly resembling the entrances to Japanese temples, drew the eyes to more commodious residences as we neared Sancti Spiritus once more, each casa vivienda of a single low story covered with a tile roof which projected far out over the earth-floored veranda surrounding it. Nor were these much different from the humbler bohíos except in size, and perhaps an occasional newspaper to keep their owners somewhat in touch with the outside world.