Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Sugar was shipped from Porto Rico as early as 1533, but the Spaniards gave it less attention than they did coffee. For one thing their methods were antiquated. Two upright wooden rollers under a thatched roof, turned by a yoke or two of oxen, was the customary cane-crusher. Here and there one of these may be seen to this day. The big open iron kettles in which they boiled the syrup are still strewn around the coast, some of them occupied in the plebeian task of catching rain-water from hovel roofs, many more rusting away like abandoned artillery of a by-gone age. All the coastal belt is dotted with the ruins of old brick sugar-mills, their stocky square chimneys broken off at varying heights from the ground, like aged tombs of methods that have passed away. They do not constitute a direct loss, but rather unavoidable sacrifices to the exacting god of modern progress, for barely sixty per cent. of the sugar contents was extracted by the contrivances of those ox-gaited, each-planter-for-himself days.

It is natural that combinations of former estates, with immense central engenios, should have followed American possession. To-day four great companies control the sugar output of Porto Rico, from Guánica on the west to Fajardo in the east. Like the mammoth central of Cuba, they reckon their production in hundreds of thousands of bags and utilize all the aids of modern science in their processes. Their problem, however, is more complex than that in the almost virgin lands of Cuba and Santo Domingo. The acreage available for cane production is definitely limited; virtually all of it has been cultivated for centuries. Charred stumps and logs of recent deforestation are unknown in Porto Rican canefields. Instead there is the acrid scent of patent fertilizers and, particularly in the south, elaborate systems of irrigation. After each cutting the fields must be replanted; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic they reproduce for eight to twelve years. A few areas never before devoted to cane have recently been planted, but they are chiefly small interior valleys and the loftier foothills well back from the coast. For the Porto Rican sugar producer is forced to encroach upon the mountains in a way that his luckier fellows of the larger islands to the westward would scorn, and his fields of cane are sometimes as billowy as a turbulent Atlantic.

There are school accommodations for only half the children of our Porto Rico

The home of a lace-maker in Aquadillo

The Porto Rican method of making lace

Porto Rico was in the midst of a wide-spread strike among the sugar workers during our stay there. All through this busiest month of February there had been constant parades of strikers along the coast roads by day and thronged mitines in the towns each evening. The paraders were with few exceptions law-abiding and peaceful despite the scores of red flags that followed the huge Stars and Stripes at the head of each procession. When the authorities protested, the strike leaders explained that red had long stood as the symbol of the laboring class in Spanish countries. They were astounded to learn that to people beyond the blue sea that surrounds them, the color meant lawlessness and revolt by violence, and they lost no time in adopting instead a green banner. When this in turn was found to have a similar significance in another island somewhere far away, they chose a white flag. It was not a matter of one color or another, they said, but of sufficient food to feed their hungry families.

Negro spell-binders from the cities, evil-faced fellows for the most part, whose soft hands showed no evidence of ever having wielded a cane-knife, harangued the barefoot multitudes in moonlighted town streets. When the head of the movement was taken to task by neutral fellow-citizens for not choosing lieutenants more capable of arousing general public sympathy and confidence, he replied with a fervent, “I wish to God I could!” But the ranks of Porto Rican workmen do not easily yield men of even the modicum of education required to spread-eagle a public meeting. Held down for centuries to almost the level of serfs, they have little notion of how to use that modern double-edged weapon, the strike. They do not put their heads together, formulate their demands, and carry them to their employers. Inert by nature and training, they plod on until some outside agitator comes along and tells them they shall get higher wages if only they will follow his leadership, whisper to one another that it would be nice to have more money, and quit work, with no funds to support themselves in idleness or any other preparation. It is the old irresponsibility, the lack of foreplanning common to the tropics. Then, that they may not be the losers whichever side wins, they strive to keep on good terms with their employers by telling them that only the fear of violence from their fellows keeps them from coming to work, being so docile by nature that they would not hurt even the feelings of their superiors.