But after all one does not visit so beautiful and fascinating a country as Porto Rico to chatter of its problems, but to meet its curious people and to marvel at its glorious scenery. More mountainous than even Haiti and Santo Domingo, the island is such an unbroken labyrinth of hills, ranges, and high peaks, of deep valleys, perpendicular slopes, and precipitous canyons, that its rugged beauty seems never-ending. That beauty, too, is enhanced by the great amount of cultivation, by the character it gains over the often uninhabited island to the westward in being everywhere peopled, by the great variety of colors that decorate it especially in this tropical spring-time of February. Even along the rolling coastal belt the highways are lined with the green- and red-leaved almendras, or false almond-trees, which here and there carpet the roads with Turkish rugs of fallen leaves. Higher up comes the roble, or flowering laurel, with its masses of delicate pink blossoms, then the bucaré-trees, used as coffee shade, daub the precipitous hillsides with splotches of burnt-orange hue; still farther aloft come beautiful tree ferns, symbolical of high tropical altitudes, and everywhere stand the majestic royal palms and the dense, massive mango-trees, in sorrel-colored blossom at this season, to crown the heavy green vegetation that everywhere clothes the island. For although almost every acre of it was denuded of its native forest growth by the tree-hating Spaniards, nature and the necessities of man have replaced its unbroken verdure.
It would be hard to say which of the several splendid roads across the island offers the best glimpse of this scenic fairyland. Some swear by the Ponce-Arecibo route, through the magnificent Utuado valley; others find nothing to compare with the stretch between Comerio and Cayey, the heart of the tobacco district; the most traveled certainly is the great military highway of the Spaniards, from San Juan to Ponce, the first half of it rivalled now by an American-built branch through Barranquitas. Perhaps the most beautiful bit of all is the journey from Guayama up to Cayey, that, too, by a route that antedates our possession. One unconsciously compares these achievements of the old Spanish engineers with our more recent efforts, and the comparison is not always favorable to the Americans. The Spaniard built in that leisurely fashion of European highways, which prefers wide detours to over-steep grades; his successor here and there betrays the impatience of his race by a too abrupt turn or a sharper slope. Yet the works of both are splendidly engineered, with never a really dangerous spot to a sane driver, for all the hairpin curves, the precipitous mountain walls above and below, the lofty bridges over profound canyons at the bottom of which insignificant brooks meander or roaring torrents tear seaward as if fleeing from the wrath of the towering peaks above, according to the season. There are reminders of Europe at every turn,—crenelated bridge-parapets, kilometer-posts and white fractions of them at every hundred meters, squatting men wielding their hammers on roadside stone-piles, caminero huts every few miles. It is the latter, in particular, that explain the unfailing near-perfection of Porto Rican highways. Brick or stone dwellings for the capataces, or road foremen, who must proceed at once to any broken roadbed, rain or shine, are interspersed with the too miserable huts of the peones camineros, who toil unceasingly day after day in the up-keep of the highways, like scattered railroad section-gangs. This system, a direct legacy from Spain, would be the answer to our own road troubles, were it possible to find men in our country willing to spend their lives at low wages in such an occupation.
Travel is unceasing along these splendid island roads. Automobiles, creaking ox-carts and massive tarpaulin-covered freight wagons drawn by several teams of big Missouri mules, mail-busses and crowded guaguas, horse carriages and now and then a string of pack-animals to contrast with the flying motors, make endless procession along the way, while countless barefoot pedestrians flank the blurred roadsides. Only the horsemen so frequent elsewhere in Latin-America are conspicuous by their scarcity. In contrast to carefully tended highways are the constant successions of miserable huts, built of anything that will hold together, some of them so close to the precipitous edge of the road that the front yard sometimes comes tumbling down into it in the rainy season. Others are pitched up the mountain sides to the clouds above, many of the slopes so sheer that the little garden patches stand almost on end. A case once actually came to court of a man who sued his neighbor for pushing his cow off his farm, entailing great labor to hoist her up again. Little American-style schoolhouses, the Stars and Stripes always flying above them, the whole interior from teacher to pupils visible through the wide-open doors, flash past. Lounging men are frequent, women everywhere making lace or drawn-work squat like toads in the doorways of their patched hovels, no one of which is insignificant or inaccessible enough not to have the census-enumerator’s tag tacked in plain sight on its bare front wall.
From Guayama almost at sea-level the old Spanish carretera climbs quickly into the cooler air, in snaky fashion, the town and the cane-green valley below diminishing to a picture framed by the white beach-line and the fuzzy mountain-slopes, then mounts by tortuous curves and serpentine loops around the brinks of dizzy precipices to a height of three thousand feet. For a time it clings along the cliff of a magnificent little valley, giving an endless succession of vistas, panoramas of mountains, ravines, and forested slopes, enhanced by frequent glimpses of the deep-blue Caribbean. No one of these highways is twice alike; morning or evening, under the blazing tropical sun or veiled with mountain showers, there is always a different aspect. Then suddenly it bursts out high above the valley of Cayey, the roof-flecked red of the town surrounded and packed as far as the eye can see with cloth-covered tobacco-fields, the crowning beauty of Porto Rican scenery. As we drop downward by more hairpin curves and climb again into the hills beyond, the steep mountainsides are everywhere covered in enormous patches with what look like the snowfields and glaciers of Switzerland, transported to the tropics. All through the region the big unpainted wooden barns of the American Tobacco Company bulk above the shade-grown immensities, as if half buried by drifted snow, until the entranced beholder finds it hard to remember that he is in a land of perpetual summer, despite the royal palms that here and there spring aloft from the white landscape. Elsewhere the unclothed fields are planted in endless rows of tobacco, on, up, and over hill after mountain, some of them so steep as to make cultivation seem impossible, and all looking as if their velvety green fur had been put in order by a gigantic comb.
Here one meets wagon-loads of tobacco plants and men carrying them in baskets on their heads, tiny plants in the transplanting season, great clusters of the full-grown leaves in cutting-time. He is a simple fellow, the stubby-footed toiler of these regions, so naïve that he often tucks away for years the checks with which the company pays for his produce, instead of cashing them. They are always “good,” he argues, and easily concealed, and he seems never to have heard of the word interest.
“Where does all this stuff go?” demanded an American tourist who had been motoring for hours through these tropical glaciers, “I have never seen much Porto Rican tobacco in the States.”
“Ah, but when it reaches New York it becomes Habana,” explained the tobacco agent. “You see, we mix it with the Cuban.”
“About one leaf of Habana to a bale of this,” suggested the tourist.
“Well, something like that,” admitted the tobacco-man.