Truly, as you stand on the quay and watch the ferry boats, modeled on those of the Hudson River, go screaming across the harbor, you feel there is some justification for the saying that San Juan is a miniature New York.
One thing, however, it lacks, and that is an adequate number of "shoe-shine parlors." Like the Bedouins who have a monopoly of the visitors to the Sphinx, so a tribe exists in San Juan who hold the blacking brush to the world. When an imperial race arrives there is great competition among the natives as to who shall clean their boots. The tribe especially swarms around the town square which, banked with flora and shaded with luxuriant palms, might otherwise be a pleasant place of rest. Even at night, after supper, when the town band is playing to a flocking crowd under a dreaming moon, you are treated to a sort of jazz interposition of "Shine! Shine! Shine!"
The voices of the street urchins and news venders have the same quality of voice as those of Cadiz. Boy babies come forth from their mothers' wombs howling "Demokratia." The stones of the high houses repeat their cries. But there are no parrots shouting on the streets of San Juan. There used to be, for Spanish sailors brought them. But in some streets of Cadiz one might have thought there was a riot, what with the news venders below and the parrots in the upper storys. Coming direct from Cadiz one noticed many divergencies in the detail of life. For instance, Cadiz had no cinemas; San Juan had five or six, showing all the Californian stars. In Cadiz there were several theaters with dancing and singing. In San Juan there was only one with a visiting Spanish artist. In Cadiz no one rocks or swings on a veranda. In San Juan, on the other hand, there are no bullfights. Most of what bound the island to Spain has been now cut. Only a few educated people know who is King of Spain.
Out in the country, however, life is more definitely Spanish and American influence is less felt. The Negro life is greater there and seems to relate neither to Spain nor to America. It hardly seems to relate to Africa either.
The Negroes live in saffron- and marine-colored boxes little bigger than bathrooms, and what they crowd into these cabins makes them like Noah's arks with all the toy furniture and animals inside. You'll see them stuck right in the midst of a swamp with thousands of land crabs crawling on the tips of their claws and feeling in the air with their portentous extra talons.
The mangoes hang their fruits like tassels. The palm trees rise up like vast, lissom, feminine forms swathed to the waist and then bright naked to their matted heads, where cluster their giant nuts. The banana palms bask in solar radiance and hot mist; and last year's shabby sugar plantation stretches for a mile of bashed canes and sprawling withered leaves. And naked children improvise a throb of music with a tin can band while others dance to it a natural shimmy shake.
Living among the colored folk are poor white Spanish Porto Ricans on quite an equal basis, and their pale babies run about in the sun, too, only they are not musical and do not dance. The grown girls, white and black, are beautiful creatures, dazzling with their bright dresses, their vitality, and their unthwarted curves. The Negro men are finer than the Spanish ones, however, and naturally a long way simpler. I never saw Negro men so happy and untroubled as here—the Negro without a complex, without the blues.
Nearby goes the military high road, hard and straight, and along it hoot America's cars. The little island is traversed by a whole series of magnificent roads of great value from the point of view of war, but now a happy means of touring the country. The automobile parade from Packard to Ford goes past before your eyes, and beside private cars fly strings of little motor buses, all packed with people. Each bus has a name, and that adds greatly to the amusement of the road. Thus we have "Coney Island," "Cristobal Colon," "Excuse my Dust," "Maria Luisa," and a hundred more. These are worked by the Spanish-speaking people for Spanish-speaking people. You will seldom meet an American in one. I found afterwards in Colon and Mexico City, in Santo Domingo and Port au Prince, and other places, these converted Ford trucks swarm, and are a great if risky means of locomotion. The Porto Rican wagonettes are if anything quieter in their demeanor than the Mexican ones. So they scour the ways from ports and tobacco-towns, over the low ranges of tree-covered sugar-loaf mountains, to other towns and ports and villas and resorts. When far away on the verdure-covered hills they show where the roads are by their turbulent dust.
You see almost the whole range of class life in Porto Rico from the bottom to the broad top, from yellow wooden cabin to the latest type of American home. For whites an American standard of life has been set. Rich as the island is, and simple and remote, the artificial prices of New York, nevertheless, range. Your room at the hotel, with bath and telephone, will cost you from three to five dollars a day. You will sit down to the characteristic breakfast of grapefruit, ham and eggs, corn cakes, and coffee. Ice and water continually tinkles in glasses. Yonder is the ice-cream soda bar. The suit pressers are all busy keeping proper creases in the breeches of the islanders. American men, wearing their white suits and linen collars, look smarter than the Porto Ricans, and the women, if quieter in looks, at least keep to the fashions.
Business of course is king. You feel that, at every turn, by the look of the advertisements and the trend of the talk. Porto Rico hums as it has never hummed before. It goes. It is a real live place. The dominant spirit of the Anglo-Saxon has overcome the gentle, sluggish conservatism of old Spain. Rich Porto Ricans, and there are many of them, live in luxury, in beautiful villas with every possible means of material happiness—books, baths, electric light, fans, tiled floors, perfect mosquito nets, and the whitest sheets and the softest of pillows. And the water is pure and the drains are good—thanks in great part to a quarter of a century of ownership and exploitation by the U. S. A.