THE immediate environs of Havana are disappointing, although some of the neighbouring villages are pretty enough. Every visitor to Havana is sure to be taken to three places—Puentes Grandes, Marianao, and Carmelo. A little railway carries you, as slowly as steam can do it, in about an hour, out to Marianao. If it were not for the groups of palm trees and the huge plantain leaves, generally very dusty and tattered, hanging over the garden walls, you might easily mistake the country for certain districts in Northern France. It undulates, just as it does in Normandy, up and down over low-lying hills, and the straight roads, bordered with coca palm trees, reminded me forcibly of the poplar avenues round Rouen. Before very long, however, you are made aware that you are under the Southern Cross, for, just before you reach your destination, you form your first acquaintance with the banyan tree, of which there is a celebrated group, considered one of the finest in the West Indies, standing in the middle of a field. The central tree, which must be of great age, is of vast size. From its upper branches it has cast down numerous feelers, which, in their turn, have become big trees, and so the one growth contrives to cover some four or five acres of ground. After you have amused yourself by walking in and out of the innumerable arches and avenues formed by this grand specimen of perhaps the most extraordinary species of tree in existence, you follow a narrow path, and walk on to Marianao, a Cuban village boasting an odd-looking church painted a vivid blue, and some very nice country houses, embedded in orange and banana orchards. There are a number of restaurants in the place, and on Sundays the foreign residents, especially the Germans, come out here to eat supper and drink lager-beer. What pleased me most about Marianao were the country lanes, which are bordered by hedgerows covered with delightful creepers, the coral,—with its clusters of pink and white flowers,—the morning glory, with its wealth of azure blossoms,—the scarlet passion flower,—the blue sweet pea,—and a species of wild stephanotis, with an overpowering scent.
Puentes Grandes lies half-way between Marianao and Havana. It possesses the only nail factory in the country, worked by several hundred coolies. Carmello is a village of restaurants and cabarets, situated at the head of a little sandy bay glorified by a tradition that it was once visited by Columbus. Hither people drive out of an evening from Havana, to eat oysters, lobsters, and other crustacea, and, above all, to enjoy the cool sea breeze. Here I first beheld the most astonishing of all flowers—the aristolochia pelicana. It is a variety of the aristolochia sìpho, which has been recently brought over to England from America and acclimatised, and which is popularly known as the "Dutchman's pipe," on account of the peculiar shape of the flower, which is exactly like a little tobacco-pipe. The Cuban variety is a sturdy creeper, with enormous, heart-shaped leaves. This flower must be seen to be appreciated. When open, it presents the appearance of a huge porous plaster about a foot in diameter. The edge is perfectly white and waxy, the centre a dark brown, with a slit in the middle, opening into a pod-shaped cup, and furnished with sharp bristles, usually garnished with drops of syrup, to allure the flies and other insects, which, when once they enter that little "parlour," find themselves in a veritable ogre's castle, whence no escape is possible, for the hungry flower soon absorbs and devours them. When the pouch is full,—and it will contain several hundred insects,—the enormous flower closes, and assumes the exact shape of a beautiful white duck. Severed from its stem, and placed in the centre of a bouquet of flowers, or on a sheet of looking-glass in the centre of a dining-table, this weird flower produces a very startling effect. It is the custom in Havana to place one of these strange freaks of nature in the centre of a bouquet, which is always offered to a successful prima-donna on her first appearance at the National Theatre.
One fine morning towards the middle of Lent I left Havana with a friend, to make a tour of the other cities of the island, beginning with Matanzas.
A Cuban railway is unlike any other railway in the world. The carriages are built on the American plan, with a promenade from end to end, but there are no glass windows, and when one considers the heat, one is thankful that there are no cushions, to harbour dust and insects. The conductor stands in front, and is perpetually ringing a bell, which does not seem to help on the speed of the train in the very least degree.
Havana has no far-stretching suburbs, like most European cities, and you very soon find yourself quite in the open country. It chanced that, on this particular morning, a thick, low fog hung like a misty veil over the fields, and the lofty palm trees shot up into the clear atmosphere above in the most fantastic manner. However, by-and-bye, as the sun grew stronger, the mist lifted entirely, and towards midday we found ourselves passing through an extremely pretty country, traversed in every direction by interminable lines of coca palm trees, which wound through the sugar-cane fields, otherwise not particularly picturesque. We stopped for luncheon at a village called, I think, Rincon, where there is a regular Cuban buffet. The principal dish, I remember, was roast sucking-pig, cold but succulent. Coolies and negroes came round with baskets of fruit—bananas, pineapples, oranges, mangoes, and zapadillos. After this station, we travelled between rocky cliffs, in the fissures of which grew the most exquisite ferns I have ever seen out of a hot-house, the hardy, glossy, oak-leaf fern, so sought after in Covent Garden Market being especially plentiful. At last, after a pleasant, but deadly slow journey, we arrived safely at Matanzas, which, after the capital and Santiago, is by far the most flourishing city in the island. Its real name is San Carlos, though it is popularly known as Matanzas, or the "Butcheries." Most of the encyclopædias inform you that it is so called after a frightful massacre of Caribbees, which took place early in the 16th century. This is an error. There was no city here till 1649, when the town was founded on the site of an old slaughter-house, owned by the Havana butchers.
We drove straight from the station to the "Leon de Oro," reputed the best hotel in the island. Cuban hotels, even those in the capital, are none of them of superlative excellence, and although in all that concerns the elegances of life the "Inglaterra", the "Louvre" and the "Pasage" at Havana are infinitely superior to the old "Leon de Oro," they are distinctly its inferiors in point of cleanliness, and, above all, in the matter of cooking.
Very brilliantly painted in fresco are the walls of the "Golden Lion" of Matanzas. Venus rises from the sea in your bedroom, or rather in that portion of an enormous dormitory which is allotted to you. Paris offers the golden apple to the three goddesses in the dining-room, and the whole court of Olympus, more or less successfully limned by an Italian artist, occupies the lofty walls of the general sitting-room on the first and only floor. The waiters are nearly all Coolies, and very clean and tidy they are. The landlady, in the days of my youth, was a French, coloured dame of enormous size, but also of almost preternatural activity. "Madame" was everywhere, upstairs and downstairs, and never seemed to go to sleep. It mattered little at what hour of the day or night you happened to come in, you were sure to find the old lady, with a huge turban on her head, ready to bid you welcome, with the very broadest of smiles. As my friend and myself had brought her a letter, which, by-the-way, she could not read, of introduction from one of her Havanese patrons, she made a prodigious fuss in our honour. She felt sure, she said, that, being Englishmen, we should like to have a bedroom all to ourselves, to which reasonable proposition we very naturally assented. Presently she took us upstairs to a very long and very lofty dormitory, furnished with about a dozen brass bedsteads, arranged against the walls in a double line, each duly protected by mosquito curtains, and supplemented by a table, a chair, an iron tripod, bearing a basin and jug, and a flat candlestick. Having paraded us once or twice up and down this apartment, she suddenly stopped in front of two neat little bedsteads standing side by side, and, pointing to them, informed us in Creole French (she came from Martinique) that she destined them for our accommodation. But what about the proffered privacy? Were we to dress and undress in the presence of the strange occupants of the other dozen beds, and were we to be soothed, or otherwise, throughout the dreary watches of the night, by their combined snores. We resolved, between ourselves, to make no comment, to leave fate and Madame to work out our destiny. We descended to our dinner without venturing the least observation. When we went upstairs again to unpack our travelling trunks, we were heartily amused to find that the worthy old soul had fenced us off from our future companions, with four long sheets, fastened by old-fashioned washing-pegs, to a rope stretched tightly across the room.
I remember we had an excellent dinner, the best we had yet eaten in Cuba. There was a very good broth—sopa de pan—followed by a fair preparation of fresh fish—pescado frito. Then came a great national dish—sheeps' brains fried in butter, with tomato sauce, succeeded by a reasonably fat and tender chicken, a la Creola, that is to say, with a delicious sauce made with various vegetables; and a dish of ternero asado (roast veal) ended what might be termed the serious portion of the meal. Then came guava jelly, eaten with little cakes, and a splendid dessert of fresh bananas,—the small, stumpy, fat one, plantano de Guinea, is the only one which is eaten as a fruit in Cuba. The large ones, of the sort sent to England, are considered as vegetables, and either fried as a separate dish, like potatoes, or cut up in slices and used in salads. The Cuban oranges are magnificent, very large, pale in colour, and innocent of seeds. The pine-apples are, of course, splendid, and are cooked as sweet dishes, in a variety of ways. There is one necessary of life which you are obliged to dispense with, and that is butter, which is only likely to appear in the houses of the very rich, or at one or two of the best hotels in Havana. There is an appalling decoction called mantiquella, which is kept in a bottle, and poured out for the benefit of American and English visitors, who are asked to believe it is butter! God save the mark, it's exactly like train-oil. Everything is fried in olive oil, but of excellent quality, so you soon learn to do without butter to your bread, and, indeed, with as little bread as may be, for nowhere is it very good. Otherwise, Cuban cooking is not bad when once the traveller knows the ropes, and what to order. It is certainly much better than the Spanish cuisine. There is a Cuban cookery book in the British Museum, printed and published in Havana in the year 1879, the perusal of which I commend to those of my readers who are interested in such matters. They will learn how to make some excellent and very succulent dishes. Cuban cooks are not strong on sweetmeats, and they rarely, if ever, attempt pastry. On the other hand, their fruit cheeses, especially the famous guava jelly, are worthy of their world-wide renown. Ice was only introduced into the island about forty years ago, and is even now considered a great luxury; but a cocoa-nut gathered before dawn, and kept as much in the shade as possible until wanted, is the most refreshing of drinks. The milk which it contains is icy cold, and with a few spoonfuls of rum or brandy, and a little sugar thrown in, is really excellent. Then, too, wherever you go, you are sure to be offered narangiata, or orangeade, which all Cubans make to perfection. Excellent Spanish and French wines and lager beer are to be had in almost all the inns.
The lower part of every Cuban hotel is used as a café and restaurant, and stands open to the four winds of heaven. It begins to fill immediately after sunset, and in warm weather is never empty until four o'clock in the morning. In the middle of the café is the kitchen, and in the centre of the kitchen will be found an indispensable retreat which does not add to the sanitary advantages of the establishment. Otherwise, a Cuban kitchen affords much interest and amusement to those in search of the picturesque. Round it are arranged little open charcoal stoves, above which are suspended an endless number of copper saucepans. Sometimes, up in a corner, is an image of our Lady of Guadaloupe, blessing, apparently, from the interior of her glass case, the motley gathering of cooks of all ages and colours, who are intently busy doing nothing. Here on the floor sits a little darkie shelling peas, and near him another small sable urchin howls because his ears have just been boxed for licking his fingers. Yonder is a group of chattering mulatresses whipping a cream, and there "Madame" herself roars at the top of her voice at the chief cook, standing frying chicken livers, strung on a skewer, over one of the innumerable charcoal fires, whose fumes would suffocate the whole noisy party, if this weird kitchen were not, but for its ceiling, quite an open air arrangement, for there are no glass windows anywhere in the house, the only protection against a storm being the green venetian blinds.
Our first night at the "Leon de Oro" was a memorable one. The hotel was packed, and, notwithstanding the seclusion of our canvas walls, it was impossible to get a wink of sleep,—in the first place, on account of the mosquitoes, and in the second on that of the chorus of snores which resounded on all sides after two o'clock in the morning, when our neighbours, after chattering among themselves like so many magpies, and even singing in chorus, finally succumbed to the claims of nature, and tumbled to sleep. The next day Madame found us two small rooms at the top of the house, where we were quite comfortable for the rest of our visit.