Beginning with Havana, the capital of the country and the largest city in it, the stories of its great filthiness can scarcely be believed by those who have seen the place upon the surface and moved about in beautiful parks, in brilliant cafés, on the lovely drives, and elsewhere, among pleasure-loving people, all clothed in their clean white suits and smoking their dainty cigarettes. Yet Havana is viler than words can express; and the vileness has slopped over until her harbour is a veritable cesspool, whose waters are deadly, and whose bottom is so covered with filth that ships will not drop their anchors in it, because it is necessary to clean and disinfect them before they can be taken on board. Havana has been in Spain’s possession for four hundred years, and that harbour is a typical result of Spain’s good government. In the city itself the poor people are huddled in ill-built houses—there are only about eighteen thousand houses in the entire place—more densely than in any city of the world, on narrow streets without sewerage, upon the surface of which garbage and all kinds of refuse are thrown. No attention is paid to ventilation. The houses are built so low that the floors rest upon the soft, damp—in many places swampy—ground; the material is a porous conglomerate which absorbs moisture as a sponge does. Sinks are totally inadequate or absent. Water is not sufficiently supplied, and there is scarcely any effort by the authorities to exercise that care and provision for the public well-being which is characteristic of every properly governed city in the world. As an indication of what might be expected from such a condition of affairs the following table, prepared for American officials by the Havana Department of Sanitation showing the number of deaths for the first eleven months of 1898, is cited:
| January | 1,081 |
| February | 1,518 |
| March | 1,500 |
| April | 1,411 |
| May | 1,298 |
| June | 1,129 |
| July | 1,381 |
| August | 1,975 |
| September | 2,390 |
| October | 2,249 |
| November | 1,828 |
| Total | 17,760 |
And this out of a population of about 200,000, in which there were only a few, if any, reconcentrados to starve to death. During this period there were only 2,224 births, showing a net loss of 14,336, or about seven per cent. of the population; a condition of health which would produce a panic in a northern city as soon as the figures were known. Speaking of these figures, Captain Davis, who has been inspecting hospitals, prisons, and public buildings under General Greene, says:
“Vienna, with its million and a half of population, has been called the pest-hole of Europe, because of its death-rate of more than twenty-five to the thousand; yet Havana, with less than one-sixth of its population, has more deaths in one month than Vienna in twelve. The deaths this year in Havana will outnumber those in Chicago by probably five thousand, and will exceed the totals of Boston, St. Louis, Baltimore, and San Francisco combined.”
New York City at this rate would have a death-roll of 270,000 a year and London 450,000, and the deaths in the United States, which are now about 1,000,000 a year, would be about 7,000,000. Of course the figures for 1898 are greatly in excess of other years, owing to the war and the generally disturbed condition of affairs, but even in the healthiest years the death-rate was two or three times greater than the average of other cities.
The leading diseases are consumption, a common disease in hot, wet countries; diarrhœa, dysentery, cholera infantum, and fevers, worst of which is the yellow fever, which is present in Havana every month of the year, although much worse at certain times than at others. It is said that portions of Havana are permanently infected by yellow-fever germs, but Surgeon-General Sternberg, Dr. Wyman, Supervising Surgeon-General of the Marine Hospital Service, and other authorities say that by proper sanitary regulations and careful quarantining, the city may be made free of the disease and kept so, as is the case in Jamaica, where the English have had control for years. The work of sanitation will be difficult and expensive, and years will be required to accomplish it, but it must be done before Havana’s future is assured. Sewers are few and far between, and those which exist are filled with refuse from the streets and are never cleaned, as the odours that rise from them constantly most disagreeably testify. They empty into the bay. Most of the drainage is surface, and as the city lies so low that a heavy wind across the waters of the bay will inundate many of the streets, it will be understood that the drainage is sluggish, and that what should be carried off by water is usually left to be rotted and dried by the sun—except in the rainy season, when it rots without drying. Much of the lower part of the city is built on swamp and “made-land,” and what this means for the health of those who live upon it needs no elucidation.
The following statement, made by José M. Yzquierdo, civil engineer, of Havana, under date of September 28, 1898, will throw some light upon street-sweeping contracts in Havana, show why the work cannot be properly done, and also indicate the part that the city authorities have always taken in the good cause:
“I now have the contract for cleaning the streets and have been connected with the city government a long time. The present system of cleaning the streets is a combination of old and new. When I took up the work about five years ago, I ascertained that the system was very deficient, so I went to New York and studied up the matter. To begin with, the pavements were very bad. The automatic street-sweepers cannot be used to advantage, though I have two sweeping-machines. At night time my people go out with the sweeping-machines and a sprinkler and clean the streets, and from there the dirt is taken to the railroad cars and from the station about nine miles from here, and there I do some business with it; that is, I make a kind of fertilizer. I employ 230 men. We have no furnace to burn up the garbage. I am now going to make a proposition to the city council to clean the cities for the same price and use crematories, doing it on the American plan. For cleaning the city I am to be paid $2350.50 weekly, but I do not get the money; they owe me $180,000. A year or two ago, by giving ten per cent. to the city mayors, etc., I collected $20,000 in one week. Immediately after I got the contract the aldermen called upon me and directed my attention to certain articles in it, so that I finally had to take these aldermen into partnership in order to collect the money.
“I have also had the slaughter-house privilege. I paid the city council $800,000 per year for the privilege of collecting the slaughter-house taxes, and one year I collected nearly $880,000, out of which, of course, I had to pay my men. This has fallen off a great deal. To slaughter cattle, you have to pay 4½ cents per kilo, $1 per head for the corral, $1.25 to kill and dress it, and then 50 cents to take it to the market. The present slaughter-house is a new one, and not very efficient at present, but it could be made into a good one. All the refuse from the slaughter-house now goes into the bay.”