Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Beyond come more miles of the lightly wooded wilderness, everywhere spotted with cattle, here and there a large banana plantation, and frequent half-clearings in the denser forest, heaped with huge logs of red mahogany and other valuable woods. The railroad itself does not hesitate to make ties and trestle beams of the precious caoba, the aristocracy of which is much less apparent in its own setting than after the expense of distant transportation has been added to its cost. Then again, like a constant reiteration of the main Cuban motif, come the endless seas of cane, sometimes full-grown and drowning all else except the majestic palms, sometimes just started in a flood of the bluer young plants that cannot yet conceal the burned stumps and charred logs of regions recently deforested. For a while cultivation disappears entirely, and the dense virgin forest, just as nature meant it to be, impassable, hung with climbing lianas, draped with “Spanish moss,” its huger trees bristling with flowerless orchids of green or reddish tint, its countless species of larger vegetation choked by impenetrable undergrowth, shuts in the track for many an uninhabited mile.

But hungry mankind does not long endure this unproductive slovenliness of nature. Gangs of men as varied in color as the vegetation in species are laying waste new areas of wilderness, and preparing to complete with fire the work of their axes and machetes in taming the unbroken soil for human purposes. Half-naked families of incredible fecundity swarm to the doors of thatch cabins, to gaze after the fleeing train like wild animals catching their first glimpse of the outside world. It would be easy to imagine that the clearing away of the forest has uncovered these primitive dwellings and their denizens, as it has brought to light the ant-nests in the crotches of the trees. They seem as little a part of the modern world as the shelter of some prehistoric Robinson Crusoe.

At Cacocúm, the junction for Holguín, up in the hills to the north, the primitive and the latest advances of civilization mingle together. Gaping guajiros watch the unloading of apples and grapes, the chief delicacies of Cuban desserts, that were grown in the northwesternmost corner of the United States. The tougher breeds of automobiles wait to whiz immaculate travelers from distant cities away into the apparently trackless wilderness; inhabitants of those same Robinson Crusoe huts come down to exchange roasted slabs of the half-savage hogs which roam the forests for silver coins and crumpled paper bearing the effigy of American Presidents.

Farther on, we were still more forcibly snatched back to the present and the modern. The train burst suddenly upon an immense expanse of cane, beyond which a low range of mountains, black-blue with a tropical shower, stretched away with ever-increasing height to the southward. Almost at the same moment we drew up at the station of Alto Cedro, junction of the line from Nipe Bay, into which a ship direct from New York had steamed that morning. It had brought one of the first flocks of migratory human birds that annually flee before the Northern winters, made doubly rigorous now by a nationwide drought. The Cuban passengers of the first-class coach were as suddenly and completely swamped under the aggressive flood of touring Americans as were the native chests and bundles in the baggage-car beneath a mountain of trunks which flaunted the self-importance of their owners. The tales of sad mistakes in picking lottery numbers and debate on the probable arrobas of the cane zafra, in the softened Spanish of Cuba, turned to chatter of the latest Broadway success and to gurgles of joy at escaping from a coalless winter, in a tongue that sounded as curiously anachronistic in this tropical setting as the heavy overcoats with which the new-comers were laden looked out of place.

The moon was full that evening, and its weird effect was enhanced by a slight accident that left the car without lights. Royal palms, silhouetted against the half-lighted sky, stood out even more strikingly than by day. The moonlight fell with a silvery sheen on the white-clad negroes who lined the way wherever the train halted, casting dense-black shadows behind them. Below San Luís junction, where automobiles offered to carry passengers down to Santiago in less time than the train, the vegetation grew unusually dense, the most genuinely tropical we had ever seen in Cuba. Immense basins filled with magnificent clusters of bamboo, royal palms in irregular, but soldierly, formations along the succeeding crests, masses of perennial foliage heaped up in the spaces between—all shimmered in the moonlight as if the earth had donned her richest ball-dress for some gala occasion. We sped continually downward, snaking swiftly in and out through the hills despite the frequent anxious grinding of the brakes. Here we sank into the trough of one of the few deep railway cuts in Cuba, there we rumbled across viaducts that lifted us up among the fronds of the royal palms. A white roadway darted in and out in a vain attempt to keep pace with us. Now we plunged into tunnels of vegetation, to burst forth a moment later upon a vast rolling plain washed by the intense tropical moonlight, which seemed to fall on the humble thatched roofs scattered about it with a curiously gentle, caressing touch. Our descent grew gradually less swift, the hills diminished and shrank away into the distance, and at length the lights of Santiago, which had flashed at us several times during the last half-hour, spread about us like a surrounding army.

The short stretch between San Luís and Santiago is one of the prettiest in Cuba. Travelers covering it twice would do well to make one trip in automobile. It was our own good fortune to pass four times over it under as many varying conditions. The two-engine climb in the full blaze of day shows the scene in a far different mood than under the flooding moonlight; the ascent at sunset has still another temperament; yet it would be hard to say which of the three journeys more fully emphasizes the beauty of a marvelous bit of landscape. Possibly the trip by road has the greatest appeal, thanks chiefly to an embracing view of Santiago and all its wooded-mountain environment from the crest of a precipitous headland. In the early days of American occupation a splendid highway was built, perhaps in the hope that the Cubans would some day be moved to carry it on across the island to Havana, perhaps that they might have a sample of real roadway to contrast with their own sad trails. But the natives do not seem to have taken the lesson to heart. They call the road “Wood’s Folly,” and though it still retains some of its former perfection, the condition into which it has already been permitted to lapse does not promise well for the future. To the Cubans, content, apparently, to jounce over all but impassable caminos, the building of good highways will probably be long considered a “folly.”

Though comparisons are odious, Santiago is the most picturesque city of Cuba, so far as we saw it in two months of rambling to and fro over most of the island. This is due largely to the fact that it is built on and among hills. Seen from the bay, or from several other of the many points of vantage about it, the city lies heaped up like a rock pile, the old cathedral, which some unhappy thought has subjected to a “reforming,” crowning the heap, which spreads out at the base as if it had lain too long without being shoveled together again. Several other church-spires protrude above the mass, but none of them is particularly striking. Taken separately, perhaps its houses are little different from prevailing Cuban architecture elsewhere; built as they are on the natural terraces of the hills, they are lifted into plainer view, each standing forth from the throng like the features of persons of varying height in a human crowd. Huge walls from ten to twenty feet high prove to be merely the foundations of the dwellings above, which look out head and shoulders over their next-door neighbors below, to be in turn overshadowed by their companions higher up. Santiago confesses to more than four centuries of age, and proves the assertion by her appearance. The medieval architecture which the conquistadores brought with them direct from Spain has persisted, and has been reproduced in newer structures more consistently than in Havana. The red-tiled roofs curve outwardly far over the street with a curiously Japanese effect. Balconies high above the pedestrian’s natural line of vision prove on nearer approach to jut out from the ground floor. Sometimes the steep streets tire with their climbing and break up frankly into broad stairways. In other places they fall away so swiftly that they offer a complete vista of multicolored house-walls, plunging at the end into the dense blue of the landlocked harbor.

Santiago is picturesque because of its quaint old customs, its amusing contrasts, the fantastic colors of its buildings, and the tumbled world that lies about it. All Cuban cities offer a motley of tints, but Santiago outdoes them all in the chaotic jumble of pigments. In a single block we found house walls of lavender, sap green, robin’s-egg blue, maize yellow, sky gray, Prussian blue, salmon, tan, vermilion, and purple. This jumble of colors, with never two shades of the same degree, gives the city a kaleidoscopic brilliancy under the tropical sun that is equally entrancing and trying to the eye. Of quaint old customs there is that of setting the entrance-steps sidewise into the wall of the house, so that it must be a sharp-eyed resident who recognizes his own doorway. It is a less open town than others of Cuba, for the steepness of the streets has raised the windows above the level of the eye, and only here and there does the stroller catch that comprehensive glimpse of the interior which elsewhere gives him a sense of intruding upon the family circle. It has, however, those same wide-open, yet exclusive, clubs whose members love to lounge in full sight of their less-favored fellow-citizens. Of contrasts between the old and the new there are many. Pack-trains of mules and asses pass under the very lee of the balcony dining-room overlooking the central plaza, where migratory mortals sup in full-coursed, solemn state. On Saturdays all sorts and conditions of human misery crawl in and out among luxurious automobiles, begging their legitimate weekly pittance. There are few Fords in Santiago; the steepness of her streets make more powerful cars essential to certain progress. On the other hand, the medieval horse-drawn carriage rattles and shakes its palsied way though the narrow calles with a musical jangle of its warning bell.

Time was when Santiago was a sink of disease, if not of iniquity. It has largely recovered from that condition, and its hundred thousand inhabitants, tainted in the vast majority of cases with the blood of Africa, no longer live in constant fear of sudden death. The principal streets are well paved; its dwellings and places of public gathering are moderately clean, though in the dry winter season dust swirls high and penetratingly with every gust of wind. The third city of the island in commercial importance—Cienfuegos having outstripped it in this respect—it is the second in political significance. Some rate it first in the latter regard, for it is usually the pot in which is brewed the most serious causes of indigestion for the Central Government at Havana. Santiago has always been noted for an Irish temperament that makes it constitutionally “ag’in’ the gover’ment.”

Outside the center of town its streets are little more than mountain trails. The houses degenerate to thatched hovels of mud and plaster; full-blooded negroes loll in dingy doorways, which give glimpses of contentment with pathetically few of this world’s comforts. Not a few of these outskirts’ inhabitants are Jamaicans. One recognizes them by their ludicrous attempts at aloofness from the native black Cubans, by their greater circumspection of manner. Here and there a group of them, usually all women, struggle to make some native urchin understand the error of his ways and the reason for their incomprehensible displeasure, and patter off, at least loudly discussing his misbehavior in their heavy, academic English. In these sections the picturesqueness of Santiago is apt to express itself chiefly in the variety and pungency of its odors.