The priest in charge of Porto Rico’s place of pilgrimage
One reason why cane-cutters cannot all be paid the same wages
A procession of strikers in honor of representatives of the A. F. L.
“How many of you are on strike?” asked Senator Iglesias
The peons of the region, silent-footed, listless, are often pure Caucasian in type; indeed their pasty-white complexions frequently contrast with the tanned faces of northern visitors. Now and again one wanders by looking startlingly like a three-day corpse. They are victims of the hookworm. There is more hookworm in Porto Rico, those who should know tell us, than in any other country on the globe, with the possible exception of India and Ceylon. The disease was brought by African slaves—along with most of the troubles of the West Indies—and while it does little harm to negroes, it is often fatal to the whites. The population in the rural areas makes no sanitary provisions, and soil pollution is wide-spread; they invariably go barefooted, with the result to be expected. Ninety per cent. of the laboring class was infected with hookworm when we took over the island. An active campaign was waged at once and had good results, but with partial autonomy the populace has fallen back almost into its first pitiable condition. The Rockefeller Foundation has recently offered three fourths of the preliminary expense of a new attack on the disease, if the insular government will bear the rest. For the cure is simple; it only requires persistence. Drafted soldiers were treated for it, and one may easily detect the superiority in energy of the camineros and laborers who are still to be seen in remnants of their old uniforms. In a way it is Porto Rico’s most serious problem. Even a light infection causes serious mental retardation, and much money that is spent on schools is lost because of this defective mentality.
The hookworm is troublesome chiefly in the rural districts. The poor of the cities, who are bread eaters, have sprue instead. Of late only certified yeast from the United States has been permitted on the island; moreover, sprue may be cured by vaccination. A more serious thing is the prevalence of “t. b.”—which missionaries on the island dub “tin box.” Since the Americans came, there has been a constant increase in zinc roofs and sheet-iron houses over the old open-as-wool thatch hovels, and as the countryman persists in closing by night even the single tiny window, like that in the end of a box-car, up under the eaves of his shacks, weak lungs are increasing.
Fruit is abundant along the roads of Porto Rico. Mere bananas are so plentiful that they are often abandoned to the goats and pigs; in Lares a man with a wheelbarrow full of them was selling the largest and best at seven cents a dozen. Wild oranges, sweet, and juicy, for all their seeds, line the highways in what seems quantity sufficient to supply the entire demands of the “Mainland.” Most of them never reach the market. Here and there one runs across a crude packing-house among the hills, but the fact that a box containing an average of one hundred and fifty oranges, picked, sorted, crated, and hauled to the coast, sells for fifty cents answers the natural query. In the trade these are known as “east-side oranges,” and are generally sold by pushcart men in the tenement districts of our large cities—at how many hundred per cent. increase in price purchasers may figure out for themselves.