For three hundred years or more house drainage has been discharged into cesspools, varying in size from three to ten feet in diameter, and from four to eight feet deep, closed at the top with a stone. While rules for taking proper care of these cesspools are plenty, enforcement of them is so neglected that some of them have not been cleaned in five years. They are not cemented inside and they drain off into the soil and rock, infecting everything in reach.
The paved streets (surface) are cleaned by contract, by methods prevailing in this country twenty-five years ago, and the work is fairly well done. The cleanings are carried eight miles from the city, where they are dumped and left on the ground, and the condition there is fearful. During the blockade the authorities ordered the cleanings to be dumped into the marsh near the Christina Street station, and here in the wet soil they remain, a dangerous menace to health. The thousands of reconcentrados and soldiers in the city used the unpaved streets as open privies, and when the Americans went into the city they found these streets utterly noxious and foul, and set to work at once to clean them, the street-cleaning contractor being permitted to continue his work on the paved streets.
There is but one slaughter-house in the city and it is owned by the municipality. It is mortgaged, like other city properties, to the Spanish Bank. From three hundred to four hundred cattle are killed daily, and the offal, which might easily be saved, and is, in American slaughter-houses, is dumped into Chavez Creek, where it is left to rot in the sun. The construction of a new building in a different locality has been long discussed, but opposition has been made to it, and nothing has been done. In the meantime the dumping continues in Chavez Creek.
The military hospitals have not yet been examined. Of the nine city hospitals, asylums, and homes examined by Surgeon Davis, three were in fairly good condition, two in bad condition, and four are most deplorable. Some of the houses are overcrowded and the inmates half starved. These hospitals can be put in good condition very soon.
The two principal markets, the Colon and the Tacon, are owned by the city and mortgaged to the Spanish Bank. Their sanitary condition is bad as it can be, but it can be remedied easily and quickly.
An elaborate code of Health Regulations, a volume of fifty pages, exists, but it is seldom or never referred to or its provisions carried out. Dairies prevail in many parts of the city, where twenty to thirty cows are kept in stalls in the same house where human beings live; livery stables are located in the most thickly settled parts of the city; dead dogs, cats, and other animals are left in the open streets for weeks; slops, filth, and night soil are thrown out of the windows and doors on the streets in the poorer localities and no kind of regard is paid to health regulations of any kind.
The condition of the harbour is gone into at length, one new fact being noted, to wit: that the water is so foul that the bottom cannot be seen two feet below the surface, while at Marianao, eight miles away, the bottom at twenty feet is plainly visible.
Both General Greene and Surgeon Davis are of the opinion that the harbour is not such a menace to health as are the cesspools, slaughter-house, and general filth of the city, and that it should come last in the cleaning process.
In recapitulation, General Greene says:
“From the foregoing it is apparent that the first steps toward sanitation are the improvement of the slaughter-house, the cleaning of cesspools, the inauguration of a proper system of street cleaning, and the devising and rigid enforcement of health regulations. I have therefore advised that immediately on taking possession of the city government a board be appointed, consisting of three army surgeons and two civilians—one from New York and one from Chicago—of long experience on the Health Boards in those cities; that this board study the sanitary conditions of the city and draw up a new code of sanitary regulations, including the management of the hospitals; and that this code be rigidly enforced by the new city police, assisted by such number of sanitary inspectors as may prove to be necessary. In this manner I believe that the sanitary conditions can be improved and the death-rate enormously reduced before the next rainy season sets in. The death-rate in October last was at the rate of 133 per 1000 per annum; in December it had been reduced to 106, and with only two deaths per week from yellow fever.