Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

The day died out as we were jogging homeward along the dusty flatlands between endless vistas of sugar-cane. But as I have not the courage to try to describe a Cuban sunset I gladly yield the floor to the native novelist known to his fellow-countrymen as the “Zola of the Antilles,” who has no fear of so simple a task:

The sun agonized pompously between incendated clouds. Before it opaque mountains raised themselves, their borders dyed purple, orange, and violet. The astra itself was not visible, hidden behind its blood-streaked curtain, but one divined its disk in the great luminous blot which fought to tear asunder the throttling clouds; and on high, light, white cupolas, like immense plumages, were floating, reddened also, like the dispersed birds of a great flock that had been engaged in sanguinary combat. A vast silence had established itself, the solemnity of the evening which was rapidly expiring, with that brevity of the twilight of the tropics, which is similar to a scenic play arranged beforehand. On the blue-gray line of the sea the clouds had floundered in an immense stain of violet color, furrowed with obscure edges which opened themselves like the spokes of a gigantic wheel, in a dress of whitish blue, raising itself to the rest of the heavens. The disk of the sun was no longer evident; but, far off, some separate little clouds seemed to be touched by a lightly purple dyestuff. The picture changed with the celerity of an evening sunset on the stage, visibly obscuring itself, and by degrees, as if in that stage setting some one were shutting off, one after the other, the electric batteries, until the scene had been left in darkness. In a few minutes the great violet stain, formerly full of light, passed through all the tones of color, to convert itself into a great lake, without brilliance, in which swam lead colored flocks of birds dyed with black. The delicate dyestuff which embroidered for an instant the remote little clouds had suddenly rubbed themselves out. Only an enormous white plume, stretched above the place in which the sun had sepulchered itself, persisted in shining for a long time like a fantastic wreath suspended over the melancholy desolation of the crepuscule. Afterward that went out also.

CHAPTER IV
THE WORLD’S SUGAR BOWL

Cuba produces more sugar than any other country in the world. During the season which had just begun at the time of our visit she expected to furnish four million tons of it. Barely as large as England, being seven hundred and thirty miles long and varying in width from twenty-two to one hundred and twenty miles, the island is favored by the fact that the great majority of her surface is level or slightly rolling, though the Pico de Turquino rises 8320 feet above the sea. Her soil is largely of limestone formation, with very little hard rock. She has considerable deep red earth which, scientists say, is deteriorated limestone without a trace of lime left in it. Fresh limestone brought down from the hills and scattered upon this quickly restores its virgin fertility, and it responds readily to almost any other fertilizers. There are regions in Cuba where this reddish soil permeates all the surrounding landscape, including the faces, garments, and offspring of the inhabitants, giving its color even to their domestic animals. At least four fifths of the wealth and happiness of her population depends on her chief industry, and it is natural that everything else should take second place in the Cuban mind to the production of sugar.

French colonists running away from their infuriated slaves in Haiti brought with them the succulent cane, and at the same time a certain love of comfort and various agricultural hints which may still be traced on some of the older estates. But the industry has been modernized now to the point where science and large capital completely control its methods and its output. The saying is that wherever the royal palm grows sugar-cane will flourish, while the prevalence of guinea-grass is also considered a favorable sign. As these two growths are well-nigh universal throughout Cuba, it would seem that the island is due to become an even greater leader in sugar production that she is already.

The making of a Cuban sugar plantation is a primitive and, from our Northern point of view, a wasteful process consistent with virgin lands and tropical fecundity. Thus it seems in many parts of the island, particularly in the Oriente, the largest and most eastern of Cuba’s six provinces. Here vast stretches of virgin forest, often three to five thousand acres in extent, are turned into cane-fields in a few months’ time. The usual method is to let contracts for the entire process, and to pay fixed sums for completely replacing the forests by growing cane. Bands of laborers under native capataces begin by erecting in the edge of the doomed woods their baracones, crudely fashioned structures covered with palm-leaves, usually without walls. Here the woodsmen, more often Jamaican or Haitian negroes than Cubans, swing their hammocks side by side the entire length of the building, if the long roof supported by poles may be called that, a few of them indulging in the comfort of a mosquitero inclosing their swinging couch, all of them wrapping their worldly possessions in the hammock by day. Then with machetes and axes which to the Northerner would seem extremely crude—though nearly all of them come from our own State of Connecticut—they attack the immense and seemingly impenetrable wilderness.

The underbrush and saplings fall first under the slashing machetes. Next the big trees—and some of these are indeed giants of the forest—succumb before the heavy axes and, denuded of their larger branches, are left where they lie. Behind the black despoilers the dense green woodland turns to the golden brown which in the tropics means death rather than a mere change of season, and day by day this spreads on and on over plain and hillock into regions perhaps never before trodden by man. The easy-going planters of the olden days were apt to spare at least the royal palms and the more magnificent of the great spreading ceibas. But the practical modern world will have none of this compassion for beauty at the expense of utility. As an American sub-manager summed up the point of view of his class, “If you are going to grow cane, grow cane; don’t grow royal palms.” Everything falls before the world’s demand for sugar, translated by these energetic pioneers from the North to mean the unsparing destruction of all nature’s splendors which dare to trespass upon the domain of His Majesty, the sugar-cane. Mahogany and cedar—though occasionally the larger logs of these two most valuable of Cuban woods are carried to the railroad sidings—are as ruthlessly felled as the almost worthless growths which abound in tropical forests. Here and there the contractor leaves an immense caguarán standing, in the hope that he may not be compelled to break several axes on a wood far redder than mahogany and harder than any known to our Northern timberlands. But the inspector is almost sure to detect his little ruse and to require that the landscape be denuded even of these resisting growths. Logs of every possible size and of a hundred species cut up the trails over which the sure-footed Cuban horses pick their way when the first inspection parties ride out through the fallen woodland.

The clearing of a Cuban forest has in it little of the danger inherent in similar occupations in other tropical lands. Not only are there no venomous snakes to be feared, but there are few other menaces to the health of the workmen. Now and again a belligerent swarm of bees is encountered, along the coast streams the dreaded manzanillo sometimes demands the respect due so dangerous a growth. The sap of the manzanillo is said to be so poisonous that to swallow a drop causes certain death; hands and face sprayed with it by a careless blow of the ax swell up beyond all semblance to human form. When one of these rare species is found, the woodsmen carefully “bark” it and leave it for some time before undertaking the actual felling. But with few exceptions this is the only vegetation to be feared in a Cuban wilderness. Even the malarial fevers which follow not the cutting, but the burning, of the woodlands are less malignant than those of other equatorial regions.

The burning usually takes place during the first fortnight of March, at the end of the longest dry season. Indeed, extreme care is exercised that the firing shall not begin prematurely, for the consumption of the lighter growths before the larger ones are dry enough to burn would be little short of a catastrophe for the contractors. When at last the fires are set and sweep across the immense region with all the fury of the element, fuel sufficient to keep an entire Northern city warm during the whole winter is swept away in a single day. At first thought it seems the height of wastefulness not to save these uncounted cords of wood, these most valuable of timbers, but not only would the cost of transportation more than eat up their value before they could reach a market, without this plenitude of fallen forest the burning would not be successful and the fertility of the future plantation would suffer. The time is near, however, scientists tell us, when the Cubans must regulate this wholesale destruction of their forests or see the island suffer from one of those changes of climate which has been the partial ruination of their motherland, Spain.

When the first burning has ended, the larger logs remaining are heaped together and reburned. Some of them, the júcaro, for instance, continue to smolder for months, this tree having even been known to burn from top to bottom after catching fire thirty feet from the ground. Though it is usual in the open savannas, plowing is not necessary in these denuded woodlands. Here all that is necessary is to hoe away the grass and the bit of undergrowth that remains. The primitive method of planting in the slave days still survives. In some sections a man sets out along each of the proposed rows carrying in one hand a long sugar-cane and in the other a machete. He jabs the cane into the ground at intervals of about three feet, slashes off the buried end with his cutlass, and marches on, to repeat the process at every step. More often nowadays one man goes ahead to dig holes with a heavy hoe, while another following him drops into each of them a section of cane and covers it with a stamp of his bare heel. Two joints and sometimes three are planted in each hole, to insure the sprouting of at least one of them. There is a more scientific system of planting, in which a rope with knots given distances apart is used, but the first method is more prevalent in the feverish haste of the Oriente. The fact that charred logs and stumps still everywhere litter the ground rather helps than hampers the growth of the cane, for as these rot they add new fertilizer to the already rich soil.