Officially the city is “Santiago de Cuba,” so called by its sixteenth-century founders to distinguish it from its namesake, Santiago de Compostella in Spain. Foreigners and even the Cubans of the Western provinces address it familiarly by the first name; the natives of the Oriente dub it “Cuba.” Walled on all sides by what to the Cubans are high mountains, it offers a striking panorama from any high point in the city. In places the ranges of big hills, culminating in Pico Turquino, are as brown, bare, and nakedly majestic as the Andes; in others they are half wooded with green scrub forests, above which commonly float patched and irregular cloud canvases on which the tropical sunsets paint their masterpieces with lavish and swift hand.
The city cemetery across the harbor is somehow less gruesome than most Cuban burial-places. For one thing, it is unusually gifted with grass and trees and the aery forms of tropical vegetation, instead of being the bare field of most campos santos in Spanish America. Its graves, however, are family affairs, built of cement and six or eight “stories” deep, so that the coffins are set one above the other, as their time comes, in perfect chronological order. Over the top, commonly a bare three or four feet above the grass, is laid a huge stone slab, preferably of marble, with immense brass or nickeled rings at each corner by which to lift it, and space on its top for a poetic epitaph to each succeeding occupant. As in all Spanish countries, the tombs of all but the wealthiest inmates are rented for a term of years, at the end of which time, if the descendants fail to renew the contract, the bodies are tossed into a common graveyard, to make room for those of greener memory.
Martí, the Cuban “Father of Liberty,” is buried here, and Estrada Palma, promoted from humble pedagogue in one of our own schools to first President of Cuba. But neither holds the chief place in the heart of the Cuban masses. That is reserved for Macéo, the negro general killed just before the dawn of independence during a foolhardy scouting expedition in the woods of Cacahual, in company with a bare half-dozen soldiers. The gardeners seemed unusually industrious in the cemetery the day of our visit; it was only next morning that we discovered they were preparing for the Cuban “Memorial day,” which is observed throughout the island, with much spouting of poetry and laying on of flowers, on December 7, the anniversary of Macéo’s death at the hands of the Spaniards.
San Juan Hill is a mere knoll in comparison with the ranges that surround it on all sides. A street-car sets one down within a few hundred yards of it, or one may stroll out to it within an hour along a very passable highway. The “peace tree,” an immense ceiba under which the contending generals came to terms, is peaceful indeed now, with only the twittering of birds to break the whisper of its languid leaves, except when a flock of tourists swirl down upon it in one of Santiago’s hired machines and bellow for “Old Jeff” to come and tell them, in the inimical dialect of our Southern “darky,” the story of his last battle. From the ugly brick tower which marks the summit of the only Cuban hill known to the average American, El Caney lies embowered in its thick-wooded mountain-slope a few miles away, the same dawdling, sleepy village it was when the Americans stormed it more than twenty years ago.
Morro Castle, unlike its prototype in Havana, is not visible from the city; nor is the Caribbean itself. As one chugs-chugs down the landlocked bay, “Cuba” shrinks away, and finally disappears entirely in a fold of the fuzzy hills, before the ancient fortress, framed in the bluest of blue seas, comes into sight. Beyond the point where the Merrimac failed in its perilous mission a sheltered cove, with a rusted cannon here and there among the bushes, gives landing-place, and leaves the visitor to scramble upward along an ancient cobbled roadway completely arched over in place with the rampant vegetation. Nature is similarly toiling to conceal the old fortress from modern eyes, and bids fair in time to succeed. The dismal dungeons, the gruesome death-chamber, are still there, but the decay that has let the sunshine filter into them here and there has robbed them of their terror, and left only an imperfect setting for the anecdotes of a bygone age. Lizards and others of their sort are the only inhabitants of El Morro now, and through the huge holes in the outer walls made by American cannon one may gaze out along the Caribbean to the hazy, mountainous shore where still lie some of the skeletons of Cervera’s fleet.
Whatever else he misses in Santiago, the traveler should not fail to spend a Sunday evening in the central plaza. It is a small block square, completely paved in asphalt, and furnished with an equal profusion of comfortable benches and tropical vegetation. Any evening, except in the rainy season when the afternoon shower is delayed, will find it a study in human types; but toward sunset on Sunday it becomes the meeting-place par excellence of Santiago’s élite. They gather in almost exact order of social rank, the smaller fry first, then the more pompous citizens, until, by seven in this “winter” season, the families that the foreign visitor never sees at any other time of the week stalk past in the continual procession. The men, formed three or four or even six abreast, march on the inside, clock-wise; the women saunter in similar formation around the outer arc of the circle in the opposite direction. A pace of about a mile an hour is a sign of proper social breeding. Negroes are by no means lacking in any Santiago gathering, but they are in the minority at this weekly promenade. The color line is not sharply drawn, but it is approximate, in that each rank or group has its own gradations of tints. The women seldom wear hats; the younger girls tie with a single ribbon the hair that hangs down their backs. Rice powder is in plentiful evidence on every feminine face, very few of which, candor obliges the critical observer to admit, can be called attractive. The men, never robust, more often slender to the point of effeminacy, one and all wear stiff straw hats, tipped back at exactly the angle approved by the Latin-American version of Parisian fashion. A felt hat is prima-facie evidence of a foreigner; a Panama, all but universal in the country towns, is almost never seen. Swarms of children of all sizes and colors, the offshoots of the wealthier families, ludicrously overdressed, scamper in and out with an abandon in inverse ratio to the social strata to which they belong. Saucy, rather insolent boys of from twelve to fourteen, dressed like their elders down to the last trousers’ crease, swing their diminutive canes and strut along among the men, who treat them with that curious oblivion to their immaturity that is prevalent in all Latin America. Young as they are, they are old enough to ogle the little girls of similar age in the approved fashion, half admiringly, half suggestively, with a cynical shadow of a smile that seems to belie the patent evidence of their age. Nor are the over-dressed little maids behindhand in the game of mutual admiration their elders are playing, and they pass the same quick signs of recognition to their small boy friends as do their older sisters to their own forward admirers.
If the municipal band plays the retreta, this inevitable Sunday evening is enlivened, but Santiago comes for its weekly promenade whether there is music or not. By the height of the evening every plaza bench, the entire quadrangle of stone balustrade backed by the low grille inclosing the square, are compactly occupied with admiring citizens or with older promenaders catching their breath after their undue exertions. Seven-passenger cars filled with elaborately upholstered matrons deathly pale with rice powder, with a few elderly, over-slender males tucked in between them, snort round and round the square; the electric lights among the palm-trees disclose a slowly pulsating sea of humanity, chiefly clad in white; the murmur of a thousand low voices resembles the sound of a broken waterfall; the musical tinkle of the steel triangles of sweetmeat-sellers blends harmoniously into the suppressed uproar. “Every one worth knowing” knows every one else in the throng. The straw hats are frequently doffed with elaborate courtesy; gentle little bows pass incessantly between the two opposing columns; the language of fans is constantly in evidence. The requirements of dress are exacting at this general weekly airing. Ladies of Santiago’s upper circle must indeed find it a problem not to be detected here too often in the same gown; the men of the town may be seen hurrying homeward every Sunday afternoon from their café lollings or their cock-fights to don their spotless best; negroes of both sexes, starched and ironed to the minute, walk with the circumspection of automatons just removed from excelsior-packed boxes. From our Northern point of view, there is much ill-mannered staring, an ogling of the younger women which, though accepted as complimentary in Cuba, would be nothing short of insulting with us. But with that exception, and a tendency of columns a half-dozen abreast not to give way when courtesy would seem to demand it, there is a general politeness, an evidence of good-breeding in the slight social amenities of daily life, that it would be hard to duplicate in our own brusk-mannered land.
The plaza promenade is a more general gathering-place, a more thorough clearing-house of common acquaintance, than any included in Anglo-Saxon institutions. Nowhere do the inhabitants of our own cities so thoroughly mingle together irrespective of class. At the weekly meeting business men make many of their coming engagements—or explain the breaking of one arranged the week before. Here old friends who find no other chance to get together spend an hour talking over old times; here youth forms new acquaintances, here kindred spirits who might otherwise never have met make enduring friendships. The exclusiveness of family life wherever Spanish civilization has set its stamp is offset by the intercourse fostered by these Sunday evenings in the public plazas. There the first tender glances pass between youth and maid, to be followed, with due propriety of delay, by soft words whispered through the reja of her prison-like home, and finally by his admittance, under parental supervision, to the chair-forested parlor, whence there is seldom any other escape than past the altar. There, too, looser characters sometimes form their attachments, but always with due outward propriety. The best-behaved city of our own land cannot be freer from visible evidence of human perversity than the island of Cuba.
Toward eight the plaza throng begins to thin out. The more haughty ladies of the vida social and their cavaliers stroll away up the laboriously mounting streets toward the better residential districts. The second social stratum follows their lead in all but direction, descending instead the calles that pitch downward toward the harbor. All but the rattletrap automobiles that ply for hire have snorted away. The average tint of the promenaders grows steadily darker. Within a half hour the plaza has become plebeian again both in manner and garb; in place of the compact throng their remain only a few scattered groups. In contrast, the luxurious clubs, facing the square, have taken on new life. The municipal council meets in its wide-open chamber across the way, a rabble peering in upon it through the heavy iron bars of the rejas. Inside, beneath an elaborate painting of Santiago’s first alcade—who was none other than the conqueror of Mexico—taking his first oath of office, politician-faced men of varying degrees of African ancestry slouch down into their seats with the super-bored attitude of legislators the world over. On a rostrum backed not by likenesses of Cuba’s native heroes, but by a portrait of Roosevelt as a young-man and another of our own President, a kinky-haired orator begins a peroration that rouses shrill roars of delight from the reja-hugging mob far into the moonlighted tropical night.
Cuba’s patron saint, though she has never received official papal sanction, is the Virgin of Cobre. The tale of her miraculous appearance is monotonously similar to that with which most Spanish-speaking peoples explain their dedication to some particular enshrined doll. Some three hundred years ago, the legend runs, two men and a negro slave boy from the village of Cobre, not far from Santiago, went to Nipe Bay to gather salt. There they found, floating on the water, an image of the Virgin, bearing the Child on one arm and holding aloft a gold cross. After various vicissitudes which the mere heretic may pass over in silence the image was set up in a shrine on the top of Cobre hill, in a church that had been specially erected for it.