Santa Isabel (Santa Clara), with a population of five thousand, does a good business in sugar and cattle. Cienfuegos is its seaport and is connected with it by a railroad twenty-five miles long.
Tunas de Zaza (Santa Clara), with fifteen hundred population, is in such a poor country agriculturally and aquatically, that the railway has a monopoly in carrying vegetables and water supply to the people. The town is hot and healthful. It has shipped as much as half a million dollars’ worth of sugar, mahogany, cedar, honey, beeswax, etc., to the United States in one year.
Nuevitas (Puerto Principe), population seven thousand, is a town of promise and no public improvements. Water, in the dry season, commands nearly as high a price as whiskey. It is the seaport of Puerto Principe, Cuba’s largest inland town, and is connected with it by forty-five miles of railroad. It has a fine harbour and a good location for drainage. It was at or near Nuevitas that Columbus first saw Cuba. Its annual exports to the United States have, in a good year, exceeded one million dollars.
Banes (Santiago de Cuba) is noted for its fruit business, as many as 4,651,000 bunches of bananas having been exported since 1890. Thirty-two thousand pineapples were shipped in 1894, but the insurrection ruined the business in 1896.
Baracoa (Santiago de Cuba) is the most eastern port of importance on the north coast. It is the oldest town in Cuba and formerly was the capital. It was founded in 1512 by Velasquez, whose house is still shown to the traveller. Baracoa is far behind the times, but it has all the potentialities for future greatness. The country along the coast is not healthful, but the interior is not only fine scenically but also excellent as to its health standard. There are no good roads and no railways of any kind. Baracoa imports about nineteen thousand pints of beer per annum from the United States, and Milwaukee sells at twenty-five cents a bottle. Copper, cocoanuts and oil, bananas, and cocoa constitute the exports. General Maceo and his followers inaugurated the last Cuban revolution in Baracoa, on the 20th of February, 1895, and within a year had marched through the Island to Mantua in the west of Pinar del Rio.
Bayamo (Santiago de Cuba), with a population of about 4000 and an age of about 350 years, is a Spanish relic city, being very like the earlier cities of the mother country. It has eleven churches. It has none of the modern conveniences and no railways, and its waggon roads are impassable in the wet season. Bayamo never had a boom. It was the cradle of the Ten Years’ War.
Cobre (Santiago de Cuba), founded in 1558, is famous for its copper mines. It has a magnificent sanctuary, in which is the little statue known as the Virgin of Charity, which is claimed to have effected miraculous cures of all kinds.
Gibara (Santiago de Cuba), also spelled with a “J,” is the seaport for Holguin, with which it is connected by a railroad seventeen miles long and by a very bad waggon road. It has a population of about five thousand. It is greatly in need of improvement.
Guantanamo (Santiago de Cuba) has a population of nine thousand, and is the centre of the coffee district. Other agricultural products and minerals abound. It was founded in 1843, and still is not a modern town in the matter of conveniences. It is unhealthful because it has no sanitary provisions. It has a fine harbour and is of much commercial importance. It came into prominence during the late war.