The holy place of Porto Rico—for it would be a strange Latin-American country without one—is the old church of Hormigueros, a yellow church high on a hill, conspicuous afar off and with the inevitable cane of the coast lands stretching away from it as far as the pilgrim can see. The pious still climb its great stone stairway on their hands and knees, though rarely now except during the big fiesta in September. The story is that, some time back in the days of legend, a bull attacked a man in the field below. The man prayed to the Virgin, promising to do something in her honor if she would save him, and at the very instant his life was about to be gored out the bull dropped dead at his feet. There is a colored picture of that miracle in the church on the hill, which was built by the grateful man, who also entailed the estate he owned below to support it in perpetuity. To-day the lands are producing sugar cane for the Guánica Central, which pays rent to the church—and which also hastens to contribute when the parish priest suggests that money is needed for a fiesta or for some other purpose. For if the company does not respond, the priest calls a holiday, digging up some old saint out of the church calendar, and the fields round about go begging for laborers.
There is at least one other “sight” which the visitor to Porto Rico should not miss, for it throws a striking side-light on Latin-American character. In the hilly little town of Barranquitas is the birthplace of Luís Muñoz Rivera, often called the “George Washington of Porto Rico.” A cheap, thin, little clapboarded building, uninviting by our standards, though almost palatial to the simple country people, it has been turned into a museum to the dead insular hero, such a museum as cannot often be seen elsewhere. At the back of the house a lean-to garage has been built to accommodate the expensive touring-car in which his remains were carried to the cemetery. Not that Rivera owned an automobile; he was too honest a servant of his country to have reached that degree of affluence. It was loaned for the funeral by one of the dead man’s admirers, a senator and the owner of a large sugar central. When the mourners returned, it was decided to make a Porto Rican “Mount Vernon” of the humble residence of the departed statesman, to which end the rich senator not only contributed generously in money, but added the improvised funeral-car. There it stands to this day, its brand new tires lifted off the garage floor by wooden horses, the license of four years ago still on its blunt nose, the plank framework that was built out the back of it to hold the coffin still intact. Inside the house is the narrow spring cot on which the hero died, covered with those poetically lettered purple ribbons of which the Latin-American mourner is so fond, and a score of other belongings, similarly decorated. These include a tin bath-tub on wheels, a leather valise, the high-hat box indispensable to diplomats, several photographs of the deceased, death-masks of his face and of his hands, his last umbrella—one almost expects to find his last toothbrush, with a purple bow on the handle—all of them more or less covered with cobwebs. On his writing-table lies a specially bound volume of his book of poems, called “Tropicales,” and, most striking tribute of all, an elaborate bit of embroidery done in the various shaded hair of his female admirers.
Rivera differed from most politicians in being strictly honest. Not only did he live within his government salary; he gave a large share of it to the poor. Bit by bit hatchet-and-cherry-tree stories are already growing up about his memory. As the leader of the Unionist party he was violently anti-American, went to the United States to fight for the independence of the island—and came back ardently pro-American. His admirers assert that “he would have been the salvation of Porto Rico had he lived,” though exactly what they mean by the statement they probably have little notion themselves.
There are two drawbacks to walking in Porto Rico, though the ardent pedestrian will not let them deter him from his favorite sport. For one thing an American attracts attention, and loses the incognito that makes walking in Europe, for instance, so pleasant. Then the roads are too good. The hard macadam surfaces which are the joy of the motorist are not soft underfoot, and the rushing automobiles have small respect for the mere foot-traveler. There are, of course, many unpaved trails in and over the mountains, but they were scarcely passable at the time of our visit, for Porto Rico seems to have no definitely fixed wet and dry season.
I rambled about several sections of the island on foot. There was the trip to and about Lares, for instance, in the heart of the coffee district. The men of the over-developed big toes are less in touch with the outside world than either the cane or tobacco planters. The coffee industry is the only one that suffered by the island’s change of sovereignty. Though it was not introduced into Porto Rico until more than two centuries after the sugar-cane, the Arabian berry was the king of the island when General Miles landed the first American troops at Guánica. The loss of their free markets in Spain and Cuba, however, caused the coffee men to succumb under a discouragement from which they have not wholly recovered to this day. It is this, no doubt, which accounts for the careless methods of the cafetales, where jungle, weeds, and parasites often choke the bushes, while the berries are dried on half-cured cowhides laid in the open streets or on hut floors, with chickens, dogs, goats, and naked children, to say nothing of pigs, wandering over them at will. Such conditions will of course improve when the United States, the greatest coffee-drinking nation on the globe, finally learns that a berry equal to any in the world can be produced on American soil.
In Lares region the crop is taken a bit more seriously. There are brick coffee-floors in many a yard, and the bushes cover even the crests of the mountains, though the stranger might not suspect it, hidden as they are by the sheltering trees. They are pretty in their white blossoms in the February season, and the bucaré trees flame forth everywhere on the steep slopes. The Spaniards, who own many of the estates, pay fifty cents “flat” a day to their peons. The more generous Porto Rican growers, if their own assertions may be taken at par, pay sixty cents, with the right to eat the oranges and guineos, or small bananas, that fall from the trees, the rent-free possession of an acre of ground on which to build a hut and graze a cow, a pig, or a few chickens, and plant a garden, and such free firewood as may be picked up on the estate. Formerly they paid thirty cents and gave two meals a day, but the cost of food has caused them to “advance” wages instead. The women and girls of the region spend most of their time making lace or drawn-work, as elsewhere, unless they are attracted to the cafetales in picking season by the higher inducement of forty cents a day.
I paused to talk with a youth who kept a roadside “shop.” It consisted of a few plantain leaves and pieces of boxes laid together into a kind of shelter and counter. He rarely made a half-dollar daily profit, he admitted, but that was all he could earn in the coffee fields, and there he wore out his shoes, which cost much money. He was an ardent friend of Americans, like many of the country people. Asked to explain his friendship, he based it chiefly on the fact that they required the police to speak politely to everyone, did not allow beating, and punished their own people as well as Porto Ricans, whereas the Spaniards always used to be let off free. Then the Americans gave free schools. He had gone to one himself, “but he was not given to learn.” It is a familiar refrain all over Porto Rico, even from persons who have every outward evidence of being bright as our average. Doctors say there is a special reason for this backwardness.
