Cane requires some eighteen months to mature in the virgin lands of Cuba, and will produce from twelve to twenty yearly crops without replanting. So prolific is the plant in these newer sections that when a lane several meters wide is left between the rows it is often almost impenetrable a year later. Cane high above the head of a man on horseback is by no means rare in these favored regions. By the beginning of our northern autumn the whole island is inlaid with immense lakes of maturing cane, the same monotonous panorama everywhere stretching to the horizon; the uniformly light green landscape, often spreading for mile after mile without a fold or a knoll, without any other note of color than the darker green of the rare palm-trees that have escaped destruction, grows fatiguing to the sight. Cane-fields without limit on each hand, flashing in the blazing sunshine, have a beauty of their own, though it is not equal to that of a ripening wheat-field with the wind rippling across it. There is less movement, less character; it has a greater likeness to an expressionless human face. Yet toward cutting-time sunrise or sunset across these endless pale green surfaces presents swiftly changing vistas which are worth traveling far to see.
The “dead season,” corresponding to the Northern summer, is a time of comparative leisure on the sugar estates. It is then that the higher employees, Americans in the great majority of cases, take their vacations in the North; it is then that the Spanish laborers who come out for each yearly zafra return to enjoy their earnings in their own land. Then there is time for fiestas among the native workmen and their families and those from the near-by islands, who frequently remain the year round, time for “parties” and dances among the English-speaking residents of the batey. The batey is the headquarters of the entire central, as the sugar estate is called in Cuba. It clusters about the ingenio, or mammoth sugar-mill, which stands smokeless and silent through all the “dead season,” its towering chimneys looming forth against the cane-green background for miles in every direction. Here the manager has his sumptuous dwelling, his heads of departments their commodious residences, the host of lesser American employees their comfortable screened houses shading away in size and location in the exact gradations of the local social scale. Usually there are company schools, tennis-courts, clubs, stores, hospital, company gardeners to beautify the surrounding landscape. Outside this American town, often with a park or a flower-blooming plaza in its center, are scores of smaller houses, little more than huts as one nears the outskirts, in which live the rank and file of employees of a dozen nationalities. In the olden days, when many slaves were of necessity kept the year round, the batey was a scene of activity at all seasons. But the patriarchal plantation life, the enchantment of the old family sugar-mill where each planter ground his own cane, has almost wholly disappeared before these giants of modern industry which swallow in a day the cane that the old-fashioned mill spent a season in reducing to sugar.
Cuban travelers
A Cuban milkman
A street of Santiago de Cuba
Not all Chinamen succeed in Cuba