Considerably more than four hundred years ago, when the redskin north of the Rio Grande had yet to scalp his initial pale face, there was founded in the fertile valley of the Yaque the first of the many Santiagos that to-day dot the map of more than half the western hemisphere. Thirty Spanish gentlemen, as the word was understood in those roistering days, hidalgos who had followed on the heels of Columbus, were the original settlers, and because of their noble birth they were permitted by royal decree to call their new home by the name it still officially bears,—Santiago de los Caballeros. Although the present inhabitants of the aristocratic old town by no means all boast themselves “gentlemen” either in the conquistador or the modern sense of the term, some of the leading families can trace their ancestry in unbroken line from those old Spanish hidalgos. Many of these descendants of fifteenth century grandees still retain the armor, swords, and other quaint warlike gear of their ancestors. A few have even kept their Caucasian blood pure through all the generations and frequent disasters of that long four hundred years, but the vast majority of them give greater or less evidence of African graftings on the family tree. The Cibao, as the northern half of Santo Domingo is called, is the region in which the Spaniards first found in any quantity the gold they came a-seeking, and gentlemanly Santiago has ever been its principal city. Twice destroyed by earthquakes, like so many cities of the West Indies, sacked by pirates and invaders more times than it cares to remember, it has persisted through all its mishaps.
But in spite of its flying start Santiago has by no means kept pace with many a parvenu in the New World. Barely can it muster twenty thousand inhabitants, and in progress and industry it has drifted but slowly down the stream of time. Revolutions have been its chief setback, for the innumerable civil wars that have decimated the population of the republic ever since it asserted its freedom from the Spanish crown have almost invariably centered about the city of caballeros. A hundred Spanish-American towns can duplicate its every feature. About the invariable central plaza, with its shaded benches, diagonal walks, and evening promenaders, stand the bulking, weather-peeled cathedral with its constantly thumping, tin-voiced bells, the casa consistorial where the municipal council dawdles through its weekly meetings, the wide open yet exclusive clubs, and the residences of the most ancient families, their lower stories occupied by shops and cafés. In contrast to this proudly kept square the wide, right-angled streets that radiate from it are either congenitally innocent of paving or littered with the remnants of what may long ago have been cobbled driveways. As in all Spanish-America the lack of civic team-work is shown in the sidewalks; which are high, low, ludicrously narrow, or lacking entirely, according to the personal whim of each householder, and rather family porches than public rights of way. Its houses, mostly of one story, never higher than two, are something more than half of wood, the remainder being adobe or baked-mud structures that some time in the remote past had their façades daubed with whitewash or scantily painted in various bright colors. The cathedral, the municipal building, many a private residence, our very hotel room were speckled with bullet-holes more or less diligently patched, corroborating the verbal evidence of Santiago’s revolutionary activities. There is a faint reminder of the Moors in the tendency for each trade to monopolize one street to the exclusion of the others. A dozen barbershops may be found in a single block, cafés cluster together, drygoods shops with their languid male clerks shoulder one another with a certain degree of leisurely, unindividualistic aggressiveness. Farther out, the unkempt streets dwindle away between lop-shouldered little huts that seem to need the supporting mutual assistance shared by their neighbors nearer the center of town.
There is not a street car in all the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti, as you choose to call it. Dingy, wretched old carriages, their horses only a trifle less gaunt and ungroomed than those of Port au Prince, loiter about a corner of the plaza, behind the cathedral, shrieking their pleas at every possible fare who passes within their field of vision. Automobiles are not unknown, but they have not yet invaded Santiago in force. The inevitable venders of lottery tickets, which in Santo Domingo are of municipal rather than national issue and resemble the handbills of some itinerant family of barn-stormers, pester the passer-by every few yards with spurious promises of sudden fortune. In the cathedral the visitor finds himself face to face at every step with admonitions that women must have their heads covered and that worshipers shall not spit on the floor. The first command is universally recognized, if only by the spreading of a handkerchief over the frizzled tresses, but the latter is by no means so faithfully obeyed. If there is anything whatever individualistic about St. James of the Gentlemen that distinguishes it from its countless cousins below the Rio Grande, it is the stars and stripes that wave above the ancient fortress overlooking the placid River Yaque, and the groups of American marines who come now and then striding down its untended streets.
The average santiagueño reaches the dignity of clothes somewhat late in life. Naked black or brown babies adorn every block, the sight of a plump boy of five taking his constitutional dressed in a pair of sandals, a bright red hat, and a magnificent expression of unconcern attracts the attention of no one except strangers. Girls show the prudery of their sex somewhat earlier in life, but many a boy learns to smoke cigarettes, and even long black cigars, before he submits to the inconvenience of his first garment. It may be this sartorial freedom of his earlier life that makes the Santiago male prone to sport a costume that belies his years. Youths of sixteen, eighteen, and some one might easily suspect of being twenty, display an expanse of brown legs between their tight knee-breeches and short socks that makes their precocious tendency to frequent cafés, consume fiery drinks and man-size cigars, and enamorar las muchachas doubly striking. They are intelligent youths, on the whole, compared with their Haitian neighbors, with a quick wit to catch a political argument or the mysteries of a mechanical contrivance, though they have the tendency of all their mixed race to slow down in their mental processes soon after reaching what with us would be early manhood. La juventud of Santo Domingo is beginning to look with slightly less scorn upon the use of the hands as a means of livelihood, an improvement which may be largely credited to American occupation, not so much through precept and example as by the reduction in political sinecures and the institution of genuine examinations for candidates to government office.
In character, as in physical aspect, Santiago is true to type. The outward forms of politeness are diligently cultivated; actual, physical consideration for the comfort or convenience of others is conspicuous by its scarcity. The same man who raises his hat to and shakes hands with his neighbor ten times a day shows no hesitancy in maintaining any species of nuisance, from a bevy of fighting cocks to a braying jackass, against the peace and happiness of that same neighbor, nor in hugging a house-wall when it is his place to take to the gutter. A haughtiness of demeanor, an over-developed personal pride that it would be difficult to find real reason for, burden all except the most poverty-stricken class. Amid the medley of tints that make up the population the casual observer might conclude that the existence of a color-line would be out of the question in Santiago. As he dips beneath the surface, however, he finds a very decided one, nay, several, dividing the population not into two, but into three or four social strata, though the lines of demarkation are neither as distinct nor as adamant as with us. Thus one of the tile-floored clubs on the central plaza, the chair-forested parlor of which stands ostensibly wide open, admits no member whose ancestry has not been unbrokenly Caucasian, while another across the square welcomes neither pure whites nor full-blooded Africans. An amusing feature of this club exclusiveness is that the first society, after what is said to have been violent debate, declined to admit American members, as a protest against “the unwarranted interference by superior force in our national affairs.” In retaliation, or rather, in supreme indifference to this attitude, the forces of occupation have acquired the premises next door and take no back seat to the Dominicans in the matter of exclusiveness. It may be the merest coincidence that whenever a dance is given in the American clubrooms a still more blatant orchestra, seated close up against the thin partition between the two social rendezvous, furnishes the inspiration for a similar recreation.
The principal business of Santiago, if one may judge by the frequent warehouse doors from which issues the acrid smell of sweating tobacco, is the buying and selling of the narcotic weed. It comes in great bales, wrapped in yagua, or the thick, leathern leaf-stem of the royal palm, of which each tree sheds one a month and which is turned to such a variety of uses throughout the West Indies. Women and boys are constantly picking these bales apart and strewing their contents about in various heaps, to just what purpose is not apparent to the layman, for they always end by bundling them up again in the self-same yagua, in which dusky draymen carry them off once more to parts unknown. A considerable amount of the stuff is consumed locally, however, for Santiago boasts one large cigar factory and a number of small ones, ranging down to one-room hovels in which the daily output could probably be contained within two boxes—were it not the custom in Santo Domingo simply to tie them in bundles.
The smoker must conduct himself with circumspection in American-governed Santo Domingo. Each and every cigar is wrapped round not only with the usual banded trademark, but also with a revenue stamp. Now beware that you do not indulge that all but universal American habit of removing the band before lighting the cigar. In Santo Domingo it is unlawful to withdraw this proof of legal origin until the weed has been “partially consumed,” and the official expert ruling on that phrase is that the clipping off of the consumer’s end does not constitute even partial consumption, which only the burning of a certain portion of the customarily, opposite extremity, accomplishes. Furthermore, when at last you do venture to remove the decoration, do not on any account fail to mutilate it beyond all semblance to its original state. If you are detected in the perpetration of either of the unlawful acts above specified, no power can save you from falling into the hands of “Mac,” who sits in the same office with “Big George”—whenever one or both of them are not pursuing similar malefactors in another corner of the Cibao—facing the charge of unlawfully, wilfully, and maliciously violating Article 12 of the Internal Revenue Law of the sovereign República Dominicana, and there is no more certain road to the prisoner’s dock.
But I am getting ahead of my story. “Mac” will make his official entry all in due season. What I started to explain was why one may frequently behold an elephantine Dominican market woman, often with a brood of piccaninnies half concealed in the folds of her ample skirt, parading down the street with the air of a New York clubman in spite of the bushel or two of yams or plantains on her head, puffing haughtily at a cigar the band of which falsely suggests that she has recently squandered a dollar bill with her tobacconist. Indeed, many an over-cautious Dominican avoids all possibility of falling into the net by smoking serenely on through band, stamp, and all, which, to tell the truth, does not particularly depreciate the aroma of the average native cigar.
There is sound basis for Article 12. In the good old days when there were no battalions of marines to interfere with the national sport of Santo Domingo the stamp tax was already in force, and the consumption of cigars was almost what it is to-day; yet for some occult reason it scarcely produced a tenth of its present revenue. First of all there were the “chivo” cigars,—chivo meaning not merely goat but something corresponding to our word “graft” in the Spanish West Indies—which never made any pretense of bearing a stamp. Some of them were made secretly; a veritable pillar of the social structure of Santo Domingo was discovered to be operating a clandestine cigar-factory long after the Americans took up this particular bit of the white man’s burden. Others were privately placed on the market by legitimate manufacturers, who supplied a certain percentage of legal stock also. A third scheme was to fill the pockets of the native inspector with a choice brand and advise him to forget the matter; still another alternative was to buy the stamps at a bargain from some revenue official who was hard pressed for ready cash. But the favorite means of avoiding contributions to the wily politicians in the capital was simplicity itself. A cigar-maker purchased a hundred revenue stamps and wrapped them about his first hundred cigars. His retailer, who might be himself, his wife, his cousin, or at least his compadre, greeted the purchaser with a smiling countenance. “Cigars? Why certainly. Try these. Cómo va la señora hoy? Y los niños? Curious exhibition that fourth pair of cocks gave on Sunday, verdad?” Bargains are not struck hastily in Santo Domingo. By the time the transaction was completed the retailer had ample opportunity idly to slip the bands off the cigars and drop them into his counter drawer. The purchaser made no protest, even if he noticed the manipulation, for he was buying cigars, not revenue stamps. It is vouched for that the same band saw continual service in the old days for a year or two. But it is a careless smoker to-day who ventures to thrust a cigar into his pocket without making sure that its proof of legality is intact.