Vegetable growing has never been favored by the inhabitants of our strictly agricultural little West Indian possession. Like all Latin-Americans, they are content to do as their forefathers have done, and stick to the yams, yautías, and ñames, a coarse species of sweet potato, which grow almost wild, and will have nothing to do with Yankee innovations, though radishes mature in twelve days, and even Irish potatoes may be grown in the higher altitudes, and the market price of such vegetables is high. Bit by bit the jíbaros may be coaxed to improve their opportunities. Clusters of beehives are already common sights in the island, which can be said of no other section of tropical America. The Federal Agricultural Experimental Station at Mayagüez is to be thanked for this improvement. The old legend that bees lose their custom of laying up honey after a few seasons in a winterless land was found to be a fallacy, though they mix with the wild black bees of the island and the queens have to be killed and replaced periodically to keep the swarms from following the example of tropical man and refusing duty. Dyewoods, cabinet woods, and timber for building are wholly lacking in Porto Rico. Imported lumber costs $100 a thousand square feet. No wonder huts are made of yagua, thatch, and odds and ends. Indeed, the Federal institution mentioned above finds it can get better lumber out of packing-boxes than it can buy on the island. Porto Rico’s peculiar condition, a tropical country in which practically all that the people produce is shipped out of the country, and nearly all they consume shipped in, makes eventual improvement of these conditions imperative. It strikes the casual observer as extraordinary, for instance, that there are no large manufacturing industries on the island, with its excellent sources of water-power and its unlimited supply of cheap labor.
I drifted out along the road from Aguadilla southward one day. The first man to arouse my interest was a little peon caminero clearing the highway edge of weeds, who was so pretty he would have made a charming bride in proper garments. His wages were $27.60 a month. He rented a “house” at $1.50 monthly, so large a house because he kept his wife’s mother and two sisters, “for they have no other shelter.” He said it casually, as one speaks of the weather, without the faintest hint of the boasting an American of his class could scarcely divorce from such a statement. A bit farther on a diseased old beggar sat on the edge of the road, the bottom of the dirty old straw hat on the ground before him sprinkled with copper cents—“chavos,” they call them in Porto Rico, though the beggars soften their appeal by using the diminutive “chavito.” There is a suggestion of India in the island’s prevalence of alms-seekers,—blind men led by a boy or a dog, distressing old women publicly displaying their ailments, cripples and monstrosities wailing for sympathy from the passer-by. Scarcity of land and employment, abetted by the bad Latin-American custom of giving alms indiscriminately even to children, has brought a plague of professional beggars. One such fellow in Mayagüez has pleaded himself into possession of a twenty-acre finca—and is still begging. A mendicant of San Germán complains that the time-table is so badly arranged that he has to run to meet two trains. An American medical missionary offered to remove the cataracts from his eyes free of charge, but he declined to have his means of livelihood cut off. One of our Porto Rican hosts was responding to the appeal of an old woman for a “chavito” when a boy rushed up and cried, “Don’t give her anything, señor, she has a cow!” The crone dashed after the urchin with an astonishing burst of speed, and returned out of breath to wail, “It is true, caballero, I admit it is true. But I have no pasture, and I must beg now to support the cow.”
A long row of men were hoeing new sugarcane for the “Central Coloso,” the tall stack of which broke the almost flat horizon behind them. They watched my approach, plainly suspicious that any man wearing shoes might be a company spy, and worked with redoubled energy. They were paid $1.50 for a nine-hour day, except two who were “sick” and a boy of seventeen, at two thirds that amount, and the capataz, who differed from the others only by the lack of a hoe, at $1.80. As I turned away, the latter asked in a soft voice if I could tell him the time. Then he drew from his pocket an Ingersoll watch and, apologizing for his atrevemiento (“daring”), requested me to show him how to set it, the men under him at the same time protesting that “he should not make so bold with gentlemen.” A stout, pure-white peon patching the road farther on, snatched off his hat as I spoke to him. His wages had gone up during the past year—from seventy-three to eighty cents a day! But he could earn little more than half that in the coffee estates at home, so he had been glad to come down to the coast to work. I drifted upon and strolled for a while along the railroad. The section hands were getting a dollar a day, which sets Porto Rico thirty years back in that regard, for I remember that like wages were paid then on the branch line that passed my birthplace. Perhaps the island’s laborers earn no more than they receive; a gang of ten men were loading a cane-cart in a neighboring field a single cane at a time. The two old women who were picking up rubbish beyond them had never been married, but they had three and four children respectively. They had always been paid forty cents a day, but now they had been promised a dollar. Whether or not they would get it only pay-day could tell. They accepted with alacrity the cigarettes I offered. At noon I stepped into a shop-dwelling to ask for food. The lunch that was finally prepared would not have over-fed a field laborer, yet the cost was eighty cents. The family was moderately clean, and energetic above the average. The four children all went to school. On the wall of the poor little hovel, surrounded on all sides by cane-fields, the oldest boy had chalked in English, “We have no sugar because we have sent it all to the poor people of Europe.”
Along the soft-dirt private road to the central I met an intelligent looking man of thirty or so, capable in appearance as any American mechanic, Caucasian of race, his hair already turning gray. He begged for a peseta. I opened my mouth to ask why a big, strong fellow in the prime of life should be asking for alms, when my eyes fell upon his left-leg. It was swollen to the knee with elephantiasis, both the trouser-leg and the skin having burst with the expansion. A year ago, he said, he had been out on a Sunday excursion in the country, and had stopped to wash his feet in a creek. They smarted a bit on the way home, but he thought nothing of it until, some time later, his left foot began to swell. He was a cigar-maker by trade, and the Sanidad had refused to let him work in such a condition, yet the government would not take care of him. So he wandered about the country, where the people were more kindly than in the towns. The leg did not exactly hurt any more, but it seemed to drag all his left side down with its weight. He would gladly go and have it cut off, if he could find a place to have it done, though people said even that would not do much good. Tears were near the brim of his eyes, but they did not well over. Hopeless cases of this kind seem much more pitiful when one can talk to the sufferer and find him a rational human being, of some education, than when they are merely the dog-like wretches of India, who seem scarcely capable of thought.
One morning I stepped off the night train to Ponce and struck out across the island by the Utuado road. It was an hour before I had emerged from the populous suburbs of the town. Automobiles snorted past without once offering a “lift.” Not that I wanted one, but one gets an impression of selfishness in a community that passes a foot-traveler without a suggestion of help. It was not universal here, however. Before I had climbed a mile into the foot-hills a man in a rattletrap buggy pulled his packages together in the seat and invited me to jump in. It was hard to explain my refusal. There were many little wayside “restaurants” where one would least expect any demand for such accommodations. But people must win a livelihood somehow, as one of the keepers explained. Then came a string of “villas,” of Porto Ricans, Americans, and a few Englishmen, modest little summer homes set where they could look down the valley upon the blue Caribbean. Here and there were the creeper-grown ruins of old Spanish country houses. Finally—a joke? I hardly think so, for the Latin-American countryman has as little sarcasm as sense of humor—a miserable little tin hut, in the yard of which the owner and his boy were forking manure, was elaborately announced in large letters as “Villa Providencia.”
At the first miriametro-post the coffee began, bananas and guayaba-trees shading it. There passed much freight in tarpaulin-covered wagons, the big brakes badly worn. A crowded guagua rumbled by, the chauffeur and most of the passengers staring at me with an air that said plainly, “Look at that stingy americano saving money by walking!” Staring is universal in Porto Rico, at least outside the larger cities. Even the “schoolmarms,” always well-dressed in spotless but cheap materials, pause in their lessons to gaze at the sight that has drawn the pupils’ attention.
Three hours up I had an extended view of the Caribbean, still seeming barely a rifle-shot way. A boy of eight, living a few yards from a school, had never attended it, “because he had to take care of a sick mare at home.” In the hovel-store where I had lunch three little girls read English to me from their textbooks. I could understand them, but only by giving their curious pronunciation the closest attention. Of the information in their Spanish textbooks they had a moderate knowledge for their years. The houses were constant; one was never out of human sight or sound. The scarcity of dogs was in contrast to other Latin-American countries; during an outbreak of bubonic plague some years ago seven thousand were killed in Ponce alone. In a spot where the roadside grew precipitous a sad-eyed peon stood looking at the little garden before his house, which had fallen into the highway, more than fifty feet below, during the night’s rain. Higher still the road reached its point of greatest altitude and descended, more or less abruptly, through artistic tree-ferns and clumps of bamboo to Adjuntas. All I remember of the flat little town are the oranges heaped up at the roadside, the drying coffee laid out on burlap sacks before the sleepy little shops, and that “Ponce de Leon Brothers” kept one of the clothing stores.
Many big auto-trucks were carrying bags of coffee in the direction of Ponce, as others like them carry tobacco from the region of tropical glaciers. The road forded a river, but so many stepping-stones had been laid across it that I needed to take off only one shoe. A new highway to Lares chewed its way upward into the almost chalky hills to the left. We certainly build good roads in Porto Rico; the Spanish influence seems to have survived the change of sovereignty. The highway under my feet followed a rock-tumbled river all the rest of the day. Census-tags decorated every hut. The enumerators did not skip their political opponents, as in Cuba, and though the date had passed after which the tags might be removed, not one of them had been touched. Most of the people could not read the printed permission to do so; besides, they would not dream of meddling in a government matter. Sunset came early between the mountain walls piled high above me on either side. Then fell the quick darkness of the tropics, and there began a constant creaking that suggested young frogs. For an hour I plodded on into the warm night, the road barely visible under a crescent moon, in the faint rays of which the feathery bamboos that lined the highway for a mile or more before reaching Utuado, looked weirdly like faintly moving gigantic fans.
Utuado is a large town for its situation, and piled up the first slopes of the hills about it in a stage-setting effect. Dense masses of fog—strange sight in the West Indies, where the fog-horn never breaks the slumber of sea passengers—lay in its very streets until the tropical sun wiped them away toward nine. Great precipices of limestone on either side, a boiling river below, mountains of bold broken outline ahead, marked the journey onward. The road climbed frequently, even though it followed the growing river. Patches of tobacco, as well as coffee, covered the steep hillsides; vegetation and mankind were everywhere. Here and there the highway clung by its finger-nails and eyebrows, as sailors say, along the face of the cliff. Then it regained solid footing and broke out into a broad, flat coastland, hot, dusty, and uninteresting, with cane and smoke-belching sugar-mills, and hurried across it to Atlantic-washed Arecibo.