The figure is of wood, about fifteen inches high, and gaudily decorated with the silks and jewels given by the pious believers. If one may accept the testimony of the Cubans of the less-educated class, particularly the fishermen, the Virgen de Cobre has performed many astounding miracles. At any rate, her priestly attendants have been richly showered with worldly gifts, and her shrine is surrounded with costly votive offerings—or was, at least, until some one ran away with most of them about the time Spanish rule in Cuba was abolished. Pilgrims still flock to Cobre, especially during the first days of September, and if they do not leave gifts of value, at least they decorate the church with crude and amusing drawings depicting the miracles that have been performed for them, or with wax likenesses of the varying portions of their bodies that have been cured by her intercession. A guagua crowded with women of the masses jolts out to Cobre from Santiago even during the off season. Now and then one runs across Cuban women of similar antecedents wearing copper-colored ornaments and even entire costumes of that shade, as signs of having dedicated themselves, in gratitude for her favors, to the Virgin of Cobre. Many a Cuban church displays a replica of the famous image, with a miniature boat, carved from wood and bearing the three salt-gatherers, beneath it.
But the world changes, and the time came when the Virgin entered, in all innocence, into conflict with practical modern forces beyond her control. Copper was discovered in the hill beneath her. An English company contracted to make good any damage their mining operations might cause to the venerated shrine. During their tenure the church suffered no injury. The mine was worked to what was considered the limit of its real productiveness under old methods and was then abandoned. When world conflict suddenly made copper worth increased exertion, Cobre was taken over by an American syndicate. The mine had meanwhile filled with water. When the new company began pumping this out, the old supporting timbers gave way and the church of the Virgin on the hilltop above began to sink. In time it fell completely out of sight. A new shrine, monotonously like the spire-less and uninspiring country churches to be found throughout all Cuba, was erected for the Virgin and her pilgrims farther down the valley. The Archbishop of Santiago—for the old Eastern city still remains the religious capital of the island despite Havana’s greatness—entered suit against the new company on the strength of the old English agreement. In his innocence of things worldly and geological the ecclesiastic feared that the tricky Yankees were forestalling him by washing out the ore in liquid form. An injunction ordered them to stop pumping, and the mine rapidly filled again with water. At length the prince of the church won his suit, with damages in excess of the value of the mine. The Americans abandoned what had become a more than useless concession, and to-day a mineful of water, colored with copper sulphates and lapping undetermined streaks of ore, remains the property of the Virgin of Cobre.
Daiquirí is not, as Rachel was justified in supposing, a cocktail factory, but an eminently respectable iron mine belonging now to a great American syndicate. It lies a score of miles eastward along the coast from Santiago, and may be reached—when the company chooses it shall be—by a little narrow-gage railroad older than Cuban independence. From a dusty suburb of the eastern metropolis we traveled thither by cigüena, as Cubans call a Ford with railroad feet. The half-breed conveyance roared down a dry and rocky cavern to the coast, bursting out upon the incredibly blue Caribbean beside a forgotten Spanish fortress all but hidden under the rampant vegetation. For a time the line spins along on the very edge of the sea, which lashes constantly at the supporting boulders, and affords the seeker after scenic beauties an entrancing vista of mountain headlands protruding one after another into the hazy distance. This coastal region has little in common with the fertile and richly garbed flatlands of the interior. Jagged coral rock, known as dientas de perro (dog’s teeth) to the Cubans, spreads away on the left and here and there rises in forbidding cliffs on the right. Vegetation is prolific, as always in the tropics, wherever a suggestion of foothold offers, but it is a dry and thorny growth, a menacing wilderness that invites few inhabitants. Only one abode of man breaks the journey, a cluster of sun-faded huts known as Siboney, on a rock before which stands a monument to the American forces that landed here for the march on Santiago.
Farther on, where the sea hides its beauty behind a widening strip of rocks and bristling vegetation, are a few fertile patches densely covered with cocoanut and banana groves. A cocoanut plantation is the lazy man’s ideal investment. Once it is planted, he has only to wait until the nuts drop to have a steady income, taking the trouble to husk them if he cares to save something on transportation, but needing to exert himself no further unless thirst forces him to walk up a tree and cut down one of the green nuts filled with its pint of cool and satisfying beverage. The mountains rose to ever more impressive heights as the tireless Ford screamed onward, their culminating peak exceeded only by the Pico Turquino, peering into the sky from a neighboring range. Half bare, brown of tint, wrinkled as the Andes, they rise majestically into the sky, and if they are not high mountains, as mountains go the world over, they are at least lofty enough to be cloud-capped in the early mornings and now and then during the day. Mining villages, of which there are several besides the “mother mine” of Daiquirí, began to appear, perched on projecting knobs and knolls, long before we drew up at the port where hundreds of tons of ore are dropped every week directly into the ships—when ships can be had.
The mines themselves are laid out in full sight between heaven and earth. For they are open-work mines, each “bench” like the step of a giant stairway, reminding one of the Inca terraces of Peru. Steam-shovels gnaw at the two horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters, frequent explosions rouse the languid mountains to the exertion of sending back a long series of echoes, and the gravity-manipulated ore-buckets spin constantly away across the void to the crushers below. Here, too, the workmen are Spaniards who remain in Cuba only long enough to carry a villager’s fortune back to their native land, and their labor in the open air gives them a tint far different from the human moles of most mining communities. Their houses are pitched high on a conical hill far above the mine, the married men living on the topmost summit, the “single village” farther down the slope, no doubt in order to convince the benedicts that they have risen to higher things. A locomotive dragged us up to the bit of a town, whence we rode on horseback to the crest of another foothill, on which stood in splendid isolation the residence of the bachelor manager. Of the veritable botanical and zoölogical gardens with which he had surrounded himself, of the beauty of the scene as the sun sank into the Caribbean far below, the rustling of the cocoanut palms in the steady breeze, and the distant sounds of the mining community settling down for the night I need say nothing except that we regretted we had not a hundred days instead of one to spend there.
The manager had lived through several revolutions, the latest less than three years before, and had grown accustomed to have some brakeman or miner in his employ march into his office at the head of a dozen ragamuffins and announce that he had been made a colonel overnight. Luckily our host was quite plainly liked by all classes of the community, so that such visits were usually mere social calls, and he had only to congratulate the new military genius, give him a drink and smoke a cigarette with him as a sign of equality to have him offer the mine his protection even unto death and stalk merrily away at the head of his “troops.” On the mountain-sides across a mighty gully and high above us were still the remnants of old French coffee plantations, with native squatters in the old houses. By daylight the steep slopes stood forth like aged tapestries, golden brown in tinge except where they were dotted with immense mango-trees which looked at this distance like tiny green bushes. There one may find dogs, cats, cattle, guinea-fowls, pigs, and coffee all gone equally wild since the days when the plantation owners fled.
Wedded as it is to its sugar industry, Cuba is nevertheless capable of producing many other things. Of four-footed game there is little, as in all the West Indies. The aborigines must have been mainly vegetarians, for the only animal on the island at the time of the discovery was the jutía, which looks like a combination of rat, opossum, and woodchuck, lives in mangroves and hilly places, feeds on the bark of trees, and is so tame and stupid it may be killed with a club. It is still eaten, “its flesh being much esteemed by those who like it,” as one description has it, though to the unaccustomed it is oily and insipid. During the last century deer were introduced, which are fairly plentiful in some parts of the island and would be more so if there were game laws and any feasible means of enforcing them. Jutías and boniatos frequently constituted the entire commissary of the insurgents against the Spaniards. The latter is a tuber so prolific that an acre, free from insects, has been known to produce fifty thousand pounds of it in eighteen months. Its chief rival in the peasant’s garden and on most Cuban tables is the malanga, the taro of the South Seas, easily distinguishable by its large heart-shaped leaves. Of the feathered species there is a larger representation than of quadrupeds. Wild turkeys, called guanajos, abound, the flocks of guineas are sometimes so large as to do serious damage to the crops. The indigenous birds are distinguished more by their color than by their ability to sing. The best of them in the latter respect is the sinsonte, which not only imitates the songs of other birds, but has been known to learn short pieces of music. Snakes are rare and never venomous, the largest being a species of boa constrictor with a tan-colored skin, so sleepy and harmless that small boys climb the trees in which it sleeps and knock it to the ground with sticks. Cuban oysters are much smaller than ours, though the natives claim they are more succulent and nutritious. There are lobsters also, but the finest of all Cuban sea foods is the congrejo moro, a huge crab with a beautiful red and black shell. Little corn is grown, and still less rice, though the latter invariably makes its appearance at the two daily meals. Vegetables, except for the malanga and boniato, are rare, as in all tropical America; fruit, on the other hand, almost unlimited. There are twenty varieties of bananas, seedy oranges may be had anywhere, the mango, pineapple, mamey, guayaba, mamoncillo, guanábana, chirimoya, sapote or níspero, the papaya, a tree-grown melon superior to our best cantaloupes and with a taste of honeysuckle, and the grape-fruit are among the many island delicacies, but only the pineapple and grape-fruit are cultivated with any attention. Even with all these fruits to choose from the most familiar Cuban dessert is the apple, imported from our Northwestern States and retailing at from twenty to thirty cents each. Unfortunately, though most American fruits arrive in Cuba in perfect condition, few of those grown in Cuba can endure the journey to the United States. Lastly, for the ever-present palma real could not be left out of any mention of Cuban products, this most beautiful of the island’s trees is as useful as it is incomparable as a landscape decoration. The royal palm has no bark and the trunk is hollow, so that with a very little labor it can be fashioned into waterpipes or split into a rough and ready lumber. The fronds make splendid roofing, light, yet impermeable. The yagua, or leaf base, has a score of uses. Pigs prefer the oily little nuts which hang in clusters beneath the leaves to any other food. The branches to which these seeds are attached make good brooms; salt can be had from the roots; the “cabbage” from which the leaves gradually form makes an excellent salad, raw or cooked, and lastly, the lofty tree is peerless as a lightning-rod.
Daiquirí and Cobre by no means exhaust the places of interest in the mammoth eastern province of Cuba. There are branch railroad lines, for instance, to the western, northern, and southern coasts of the province, each several hours from Santiago. On the way to Manzanillo one passes the village in which the “Grito de Yara” began the revolt against Spanish rule, and in the neighborhood of which some of the old revolutionary leaders still live. Antilla, in the north, faces one of the most magnificent bays in the New World; beyond the town of Guantánamo, noteworthy for its unbroken chorus of roosters, two little railways flank the opposite shores of the gulf of the same name, one of them passing through an entrancing little valley. The other wanders across a flat, thorny, and rather arid land to Caimanera, noted for its salt beds and as the nearest place free from the American drought which reigns perpetually over the station of our marines and sailors holding our naval base of Guantánamo Bay.