Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

With the expiration of slavery the patrician style of sugar raising died out. It became necessary, largely for lack of labor, partly for convenience sake, to separate the agricultural from the other phases of the sugar industry. The more customary method to-day is to divide the estate into a score or more of “colonies,” each in charge of, or rented to, a colono, who operates almost independently, at least until the cutting season arrives. A few companies are run entirely on the administrative system, directing every operation from planting to grinding from a central office; some own little land themselves, but buy their cane of the independent planters in the surrounding region. But the colono system gives promise of surviving longest. For one thing, in case of drought or other disaster, the loss falls in whole or part on the planter instead of being entirely sustained by the company. Even when the land from which they draw their cane is not their own property, the companies keep a force of inspectors who ride day after day through the cane-fields, offering advice to the colonos here, ordering them to change their methods there, if they are to remain in the good graces of the central management. The latter keeps in its offices large maps of all the region from which its mill is fed, noting on each plot the condition of the soil, the age of the cane, particularly whether or not it has been burned over, that it may be assigned its proper turn for cutting when the grinding season begins.

Fires are the chief bugaboo of the sugar growers. All the fields are cut up into sections by frequent guardarayas, open lanes some fifty yards wide which serve not only as highways, but as a means of confining a conflagration to the plot in which it starts. In many cases there are little watch towers set up on stilts from which to give warning in case of fire, while special employees sometimes patrol the fields during the drier months. Rural guards of the “O. P.” corps have orders to be constantly on the lookout for incendiaries; when a fire starts they immediately surround the field, and woe betide the luckless mortal who is caught in it, for all Cuba is banded together to punish the man who wantonly or carelessly brings destruction upon their principal product.

A cane fire is an exciting event, not to say a magnificent sight. Starting in a tiny puff of vapor where some careless smoker has tossed a match, from a passing locomotive, or by intention, it quickly gives warning by the black-brown column of smoke which rises high into the clear tropical heavens. Whistles, bells, anything capable of making a noise, join in the din which summons planters, employees, and neighboring villagers to stem the threatened catastrophe. By the time the bright red flames begin to curl above the cane-tops men and boys of every degree, color, and nationality are racing pell-mell from every direction toward them, colonos, overseers, rural guards, Americans, Chinamen, Spaniards, West Indian negroes, Cubans ranging from the village alcade to bootblacks. Many of these bring with them machetes, others catch up clubs, handsful of brush, the tops of banana plants, and fall to threshing the flames, which by this time are crackling like the tearing up of thousands of parchments. Men on horseback race up and down the open lanes, directing the fighters, ordering the cutting of a new guardaraya there, commanding the lighting of a back-fire yonder. The air is full of black bits of cane leaves, the sun is obscured by the grayish-brown smoke which envelops all the struggling, shouting multitude and covers the field with an immense pall. A gust of wind sends the flames jumping to another plot, whirlwinds caused by the heat catch up the sparks and scatter them at random. New-comers join in the turmoil, indifferent alike to their garments and their skins. Half-asphyxiated men stumble out to the open air, gasp a few lungsful of it, and dash back into the fray; the now immense column of smoke can be seen over half the province. The pungent scent of crude sugar ladens all the air. Bit by bit the leaping flames decrease under the chastisement of hundreds of weapons, or confess their inability to leap across a wider guardaraya. The crackling loses its ominous sound, the voices of men are heard more clearly above it, gradually it succumbs to the noise of threshing bushes, the last red glare dies out, and the struggle is over. The motley throng of fighters, smeared, smudged, and torn, emerge into the open lanes, toss away their improvised weapons, and straggle homeward in long streams, while sunset paints the now distant smoke-cloud with brilliant colors, flecked by the little black particles which still float in the air. The burning of a cane-field does not mean the complete loss of its crop. Only the leaves are consumed; the parched canes are still standing. But these must be cut and ground quickly if their juice is to be turned into sugar; the ringing of the heavy cane-knives resounds all through the following day, and by night the field stands forlorn and ugly in its nudity.

One by one during the month of October the mills of the island begin their grinding. The cutting has started two days before, and incessantly through the weeks that follow the massive two-wheeled carts, drawn by four, six, ten, even twelve oxen, drag the canes to the mill, now straddling the charred stumps and logs which litter new fields for years after the first planting, now wallowing in the sloughs into which they have churned the lanes and highways. Or, if the fields are too far away, the ox-carts halt at railway sidings, where immense hooks catch up their entire load and deposit them in cane-cars, long trains of which creak away in the direction of the ingenio. The planters are paid on a percentage basis, from five to seven arrobas of sugar, or its equivalent in cash at that day’s market quotation, for a hundred arrobas of cane, a system which gives the colono his share in any increase in price. The workmen, more than half of whom are foreigners, are paid by the “task,” their earnings depending on their strength and diligence. The natives have a reputation for doing less than their competitors. There are Cubans who work in both the tobacco and sugar zafras, but most of them are content to spend from four to six months in the cane-fields earning their five to eight dollars a day, and to loaf and buy lottery tickets the rest of the year. The result is that the entire island has a toilsome, preoccupied air during our winter months and a holiday manner throughout the summer.

Grinding time is the antithesis of the “dead season.” Then the dull sullen grumble of the mill never ceases, fiestas and “parties” are forgotten, all but the higher employees and the field-men alternate in their twelve-hour shifts between night and day, with little time or inclination left for recreation. The chimneys of the ingenios belch forth constant columns of smoke, by night their blaze of electric lights makes them visible far off across the country. Once dumped in the chutes the canes have no escape until they have reached the market, or at least the warehouse, in the form of sugar. Rivers of juice run from beneath the rollers to the boiling vats; the centrifugals, most often tended by Chinamen, whirl the thick molasses into grains, great bags of which are stood end up on the necks of burly negroes and trotted away to the almacen. The porters must be burly, for Cuba still retains the bag used in slave days, holding thirteen arrobas, or two hundred and seventy-five pounds, and the negroes insist they must run with them to keep from falling down. It has more than once been proposed to reduce the size of the bags, but this would require a change all the way back to India, where jute and bags originate.

From the days of the primitive trapiche, when two logs turned by an ox or a donkey constituted a Cuban sugar-mill, through the period of individual growing and grinding, when an army of slaves worked under the whip for the benefit of an ignorant and often lazy and licentious owner who considered that work his right, down to the immense ingenio and extensive batey of modern times, Cuba has been more or less exploited for the benefit of other lands and peoples. Even to-day, when fabulous wages are paid to the men who do the actual toiling under the tropical sun, much of the profit from her soil brings up eventually in the pockets of others. Few are the centrals which do not win back a considerable portion of the wages they are forced to pay by maintaining company stores in which the prices are exorbitant, or in selling the right to maintain them. Many an American manager frankly admits the injustice of this, yet all assert themselves unable to remedy it. Of the sums carried off by workmen from other lands the Cubans have no complaint, admitting that they earn their hire. But there is a growing tendency to grumble that the island is being more thoroughly exploited now than in the days of slavery, for it comes to the same thing, they contend, whether the larger portion of their national riches go to Spanish masters or to stock-holders who have never set foot on Cuban soil. Notwithstanding that the island claims more wealth per capita than any other land on earth, the inhabitants are not satisfied, either with themselves or with circumstances, as a brief extract from the native novel already several times quoted will indicate:

They [foreign stock-holders] are the owners of everything, soil and industry. We abandon it to them with good grace so long as they leave to us the politics and public careers, that is, the road of fraud and life with little work. On the other hand they, the producers, profoundly despise us. It is the case of all Latin-America. While we gnaw the bone the true exploiter, who is no Cuban, eats the meat. And if we growl, showing our teeth, all they have to do is to complain to the diplomats. Then they hand us a kick, one on each side, and the matter is settled.

In contrast to the United States, Cuba grows wilder, more pioneer-like, from west to east. The traveler is aware of this increase of wilderness about the time he passes Ciego de Avila and the line of the old trocha across the island at the slenderest part of its waist, where are still seen remnants of the long row of forts from sea to sea with which the Spaniards vainly hoped to keep the rebels in the eastern end of the island and save at least the advanced and more populous western half from open rebellion. There are, to be sure, aged towns and pueblos on the sunrise side of the trocha. Camagüey, for instance, could scarcely be called a parvenu; and Baracoa, on the extreme eastern beach of the island, is Cuba’s first settlement. But the fact remains that the traveler feels more and more in touch with primeval nature as he advances to the eastward.

Small as it looks on the map, it is hard to realize that for vast distances the island of Cuba is still the unbroken wilderness of the days of Columbus. Though it is frequently broken by long stretches of civilization, the virgin forest is always near at hand on this eastward journey. There are frequent sugar estates, immense stretches of pale-green cane from horizon to horizon, but they are of the rough, wasteful, unfinished type of all pioneering. Cattle dot the great savannas, sleek, contented-looking cattle of a prevailing reddish tinge, and scarcely bearing out the assertion that the Cuban climate tends to dwarf their size. These unpeopled savannas are often of a velvety brown, now gently rolling, more commonly as flat as the sea itself, and stretching away farther than the eye can follow with the same suggestion of endlessness. Gazing out across them, one likes to let the imagination play on the simpler pre-Columbian days when only the Siboney Indians trekked across them in pursuit of the one four-foot game with which nature stocked the island, the diminutive jutía.

Of a score of striking trees with which these more open regions are punctuated, the broad-spreading, open-work, lace-like algarrobo, thorny and of slight value, is the most conspicuous, almost rivaling the ceiba and the royal palm in the ability to etch the sky-line with its artistic tracery. Stations are far apart and primitive in character in this region. Now and again one of special interest brings the long Habana-Santiago train to a laborious and often lengthy halt. There is Omaja, for example, said to have been settled by immigrants from Nebraska, and laboring under the Cubanization of the name they brought with them. It is the same sun-washed collection of simple dwellings and wide-open pioneer stores as everywhere greets the eye of the Cuban traveler. Yet the American’s influence is seen in the immense width of its one street and the more sturdy aspect of its wooden houses, crude, yet not without the simpler comforts. The Americans of Omaja, like several other groups that have settled in Cuba, came to plant fruit, with the accent on the toronja, or grape-fruit, so popular on Northern breakfast-tables, yet so scorned by the rural Cuban. But it was their bad luck to strike one of those curious dry spots frequent even in the wettest American tropics, and most of the score who remain have turned their attention to lumber. There are long rows of sturdy fruit-trees, however, as heavy with grape-fruit as a Syrian peddler with his pack, and hundreds of the saffron-yellow spheres lie rotting under the trees. Lack of transportation answers for many incongruities. Some of the orchards have been planted with cane, and only the deep-green crests of the trees gaze out above the pale-verdant immensity. Yet prosperity seems to have come to some of the settlers despite droughts and scarcity of rolling-stock, for in the neighborhood of Omaja are several big farm-houses of the bungalow family which can scarcely be the products of Cuban taste.