Our War with Spain for Cuba's Freedom

by Trumbull White

HAVANA, THE METROPOLIS OF THE ISLAND.

Havana and Its Attractions for Tourists—How to Reach Cuba— Description of the Harbor of Havana—How the Proverbial Unhealthfulness of the City May Be Remedied—Characteristics of the Business Quarter—Residences and How the People Live—Parks and Boulevards—Other Features of Life in the City.

In spite of the little encouragement which American tourists have had for visiting the city of Havana, for many years it has been a popular place of resort for the few who have tried it or have been recommended to it by their friends. With the attractions it has had during Spanish administration, when an air of constraint and suspicion marked the intercourse with every American, it will not be surprising if under changed auspices and in an atmosphere of genuine freedom, Americans will find it one of the most delightful and easily accessible places possible for them to visit. It is not all pleasant, but the unpleasant things are sometimes quite as interesting as the pleasant ones. If the traveler forms his judgments according to the actual comforts he may obtain, he will be pleased from beginning to end of his stay. If the measure of his good opinion is whether or not things are like those to which he is accustomed, he will be disappointed, because novelty reigns. But novelty does not necessarily mean discomfort.

Havana may be reached by a sea voyage of three or four days from New York, on any one of several excellent steamers under the American flag, and even in winter the latter portion of the voyage will be a pleasant feature of the journey. Or the path of the American invading squadron may be followed, and the traveler, after passing through Florida by rail, may journey from Tampa by the mail steamers, and touching at Key West for a few hours, reach Havana after a voyage of two nights and a day.

The Florida straits, between Cuba and the Florida keys, which were the scene of the first hostilities of the war, are but ninety miles wide, and the voyage is made from Key West in a few hours. The current of the gulf stream makes the channel a trifle reminiscent of the English channel, but once under the lee of the Cuban coast the water is still and the harbor of the old city offers shelter.

In the days before the war, Morro Castle had an added interest to the traveler from the fact that behind its frowning guns and under the rocks on which it was built, were the cells of scores of sad prisoners, some of them for years in the dungeons, whose walls could tell secrets like those of the inquisition in Spain if they could but speak. Between Morro Castle and its neighbor across the way, La Punta, the vessels steam into that bay, foul with four hundred years of Spanish misrule and filth, where three hundred years of the slave trade centered, and into which the sewers of a great city poured their filth. Once inside the harbor, Cabana Castle frowns from the hills behind Morro, and on the opposite shore rise the buildings of the city itself.

The harbor always has been a busy one, for the commerce of the island and of the city has been large. In times of peace, scores of vessels lie at anchor in the murky waters. The American anchorage for mail steamers for years has been in the extremest part of the bay from the city of Havana itself, in order to avoid the contagion which was threatened by a nearer anchorage. Until the Maine was guided to her ill-fated station by the harbor master, it had been long since any American vessel had stopped in that part of the harbor.

PERFECT SANITARY CONDITION EASILY CREATED.

The shallow harbor of Havana has its entrance from the ocean through a channel hardly more than three hundred yards wide, and nearly half a mile long, after which it broadens and ramifies until its area becomes several square miles. No fresh water stream, large or small, flows into it to purify the waters. The harbor entrance is so narrow, and the tides along that coast have so little rise and fall, that the level of water in the harbor hardly shows perceptible change day after day.

The result of this is that the constant inflow of sewage from the great city pouring into the harbor is never diluted, and through the summer is simply a festering mass of corruption, fronting the whole sea wall and throwing a stench into the air which must be breathed by everyone on shipboard. There is one part of the harbor known as "dead man's hole," from which it is said no ship has ever sailed after an anchorage of more than one day, without bearing the infection of yellow fever among its crew.