There must be twenty thousand mendicant venders of lottery tickets in Cuba, from ragged urchins to reputable graybeards wearing straw hats and carefully creased trousers. These friars of chance know no shame, and are more persistent than bluebottles, coming to you five or six times after having been sent off. They shout the number of their series and whisk the red sheets in your face, knowing that you have no redress against them—for they are in a way Government servants, or at least Government commission agents. Every lottery ticket they sell helps the national exchequer of the Republic of Cuba. People buy—they have not the wills to stand out against such persistence. They vaguely hope to draw a lucky number—though they may have deep doubts of the honesty of the Administration.
But the quickest way to get rid of a lottery vender is to cry in a loud voice: "These are no good; these draw no prizes." That scares them. It is easy to buy a ticket for a lottery that has already been drawn. Besides that, there are forgeries and "unlucky numbers."
If there are twenty thousand ticket venders there must be fifty thousand bootblacks on the island. Such a passion for blacking your boots! And then as many beggars. There are beggars of all ages, and as plentiful as in Moscow, and more active than the Russians. From the moment I arrived in Cuba, away in the east at Santiago, I was besieged with people wanting money. It was astonishing. I was sailing to a dream island, to "the little lazy isle where the trumpet orchids blow," to a new world, to El Dorado, the golden one, to a verdant tropic land where God and the sun and the benevolent, ever-freshening trade wind made work almost unnecessary and poverty impossible—Cuba, called the Pearl of the Antilles. And instead, I found a land made ugly and a people destitute and desperate.
At the dock in Santiago de Cuba, torn to this side and to that by the clamorous ragamuffins who wanted to carry my knapsack, and hung on to by beggars and lottery venders at the same time, I plunged through dusty and filthy streets to the Plaza of this breathless commercialized city of which Cortes was first Mayor. Here stand two grandiose hotels, one of them called the Hotel Venus, surely an amusing name for would-be respectability. Both hotels are expensive. No provincialism of price holds here—dinner costs you five dollars.
Cuba has a southern coast reminding one of the southern coast of England where Santiago would be Southampton. Santiago is of great strategic importance to the island, and its capitulation on July 17, 1898, ended the war with Spain. This southern coast faces Jamaica, from which it is distant less than two hundred miles. Habana on the northern coast is over five hundred miles distant and is reached by a tenuous, rickety, narrow-gauge railway. It may be said that this railway keeps to the worst of the island all the way—but that is because the railroad is naturally the artery of cane transport. Camaguey, about two hundred miles north-west of Santiago is the center of an immense sugar-planting area, of which the ox teams drawing cane trucks on caterpillar wheels through deep soft earth are most characteristic. The sinister-looking progress of war "tanks" along the alleys of the sugar plantations has a strange effect. Camaguey itself is such that no educated person would live there except for a short while, to make money. When you continue your journey to Santa Clara there is a good deal of improvement and more of the Spanish dignity of living. Habana, of course, is a well-shod city of pleasure of remarkable brilliance. Habana does not feel to be Cuba. It is the Coney Island of Key West, Florida.
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Of course it is possible to see Cuba in a more pleasant light. There is much glamour over Cuba if you half close your eyes. It is an ideal place for a wicked elopement. The hero of the Hergesheimer novel thither resorts. It is certainly the place for a good cigar. Cuba has become a sportsman's island, the place par excellence where an American can get a drink. The characteristic sound of the towns is the rattle of ice in the inverted metal tumblers where the cocktail is coming to birth. The cocktail and the cigar are the first emblems of Habana. Then comes the Cuban girl sans peur, and then the gamblers' dice. Horse racing and boxing and cockfighting and betting and gambling are tremendous human interests—stronger in the Cuban than in the visiting American. Even the ice-cream venders carry dice boxes on their barrows and will "shake you for one" as soon as sell you straight.
You can go back and forth to Florida, not like Ponce de Leon, but by airplane in an hour or so. You read in the Habana News how over at Tampa the Floridians are trying to enforce even the blue law which makes the blues compulsory on Sundays, and you realize what a contrast the Cuban sporting resort affords.
Among many places of pleasure one stands out in my experience as both novel and fascinating, and that is the Galatea Lawn Tennis Club, on the Prado. Here is played all the evening and until late into the night a game of human roulette.
Gay lights adorn a pleasantly painted wooden structure which possesses a doorway but no windows, and a rapturous thundering Cuban band clamors from the interior; men stroll in and out all the time as if it were a drinking saloon, but there is nothing outside to indicate the nature of the entertainment. "Probably a cabaret with screened rooms and suppers and dancing girls," you surmise. But once inside you are aware that it is nothing of the kind.