Orellana, who held office at the time of my visit, was a former lieutenant of Cabrera’s. He had occupied the seat beside Cabrera when the bomb blew up coachman and horses. There were rumors afloat that Cabrera’s brain still directed the government, but they received little credence. Another story, purely humorous, was that on the night when Orellana overthrew Herrera, the ex-Dictator started to pile all his furniture against the door of his room.
“But, sir,” protested a servant, “these are your own friends coming back into power.”
“That’s why I’m doing this,” said Cabrera. “I know those fellows!”
Cabrera’s house was a fortress-like structure of unassuming exterior. An old man now, he was still following his life-long policy of retirement from the public gaze, and a guard of soldiers was present to see that he remained in retirement. The family came and went freely, but the ex-Dictator never showed his face. If he had done so, some one might have taken a shot at it. He probably welcomed the guard for its protection.
Orellana, despite his former connection with Cabrera, was proving a more lenient president. Clubs were now thriving, and the people might congregate where they pleased. Poison had been abolished as a function of government. And men might discuss politics without being shot. Few, however, publicly suggested a change of president. With all its comparative liberality, the new régime was ruling with an iron hand characteristic of Guatemalan governments. Shortly before my visit, Orellana had chased home a party of Mexican bolshevik agitators attempting to spread their propaganda among the Indians of his republic. A few years earlier, when his railway employees threatened a strike unless permitted to select their own officials and to discharge all foreigners from the service, the American superintendent had told them to go to Hades, and Orellana had sent them back to work by threatening to draft them all into the army.
These countries always thrive best under a stern dictator. Even under the tyrannical Cabrera, Guatemala enjoyed more prosperity than it would have enjoyed under a rapidly-changing series of get-rich-quick presidents. For a land of illiterate peons, a dictatorship, if exercised with justice, is always the most satisfactory form of government, except to politicians out of office.
IX
The two principal products of Central America are coffee and bananas. The Central-American remains in the cool highlands of the Pacific coast, and raises the coffee. To the invading foreigner he cedes the lowlands of the Caribbean for the culture of the bananas.
In Guatemala, it was a day’s railway journey from coffee country to banana country—first through a stretch of magnificent scenery, of forested mountains, and of rugged gorges spanned by several of the world’s highest railway bridges—then through a tedious expanse of desert, where the woodland gave way to scraggly cactus, and the mountains (although still majestic and piled one atop another until they reached the clouds) were swept by a fitful wind that blew gustily, transferring the sand from the landscape to the eye—and finally down among the swampy, jungle-grown lowlands of the coastal plains, into the empire of the United Fruit Company.
The stucco dwellings of moorish design gradually gave way to wooden shanties, and Guatemalan natives to West Indian blacks. Years ago, before sanitary engineering made the tropics liveable, the inhabitants of this region had retired to the cooler highlands, where snakes and fever were less abundant. To-day the greater part of the East Coast, all the way from Guatemala to Panama, is in the hands of the United Fruit Company or its several minor competitors. Except in Guatemala or Costa Rica, which have rail connection from ocean to ocean, banana-land is closer to New Orleans than to the capital of its own country. It is peopled with a few American or English bosses, and a host of imported negroes. Its prevailing language is English. And it bears more resemblance to Africa than to the Central America of which it is a part.