On the Mexican Highlands, with a Passing Glimpse of Cuba

by William Seymour Edwards

ALONG THE MILITARY ROAD, A CEIBA TREE

We left the train at Guanajay—once a tobacco town of importance, then blasted and wasted by war, burned and ravaged, and now regaining its life and vigor. Here we took an open carriage and drove toward Mariel, upon a noble highway quite sixty feet wide, and all macadamized and ditched—a Spanish military road, once lined and shaded with gigantic and umbrageous trees; now bare of this magnificent bordery by reason of the war. The Spanish soldiery cut them down, lest here and there an insurgent might lie concealed. The road wound over a line of low hills, and then descended to the sea. Along the ridge, at intervals, were yet to be seen the “blockhouses” of the western Spanish Trocha. My friend, Captain Reno, beside me, had been an officer of the insurgent army. An American volunteer, with blood full of red corpuscles, he served all through the revolutionary struggle, fighting the Spaniards just for the joy of war. He crossed this Trocha with Gomez in his famous raid. The Spanish soldiers hid within their houses and shot from their loopholes. But Gomez and Reno cut down the wire barriers, rode through and dared to enter the suburbs of Havana. The superb road gradually winds toward the bay of Mariel. On our way, we passed a new railroad being built by Americans, back to an asphalt lake; Mariel will be their port, the bay their harbor.

Near to us on the left lay another American colony,—a group of Western folk who have come to Cuba to stay. The bay of Mariel, next to that of Havana, is the finest harbor on the western coast. At its entrance, high on a reef, lies the Spanish warship, Alfonso XII, driven on the rocks by American naval guns. Along the shores of this beautiful bay, it is said, will grow up the Newport of Cuba. Nowhere are there so well protected waters, nowhere is there so picturesque a panorama. Here you see palms, royal, cocoanut, and date, and fields of sugar cane and groves of bananas, oranges and pomegranates, and then the foaming, restless sea far out beyond. On the corner of a shaded street, close by the blue waters of the bay, we stopped at a modest, unpainted house. Within it we met a clear-eyed, sweet-faced woman—a lady from North Carolina, a Miss Edwards, who came to Cuba, after the devilments of Weyler had wrought their sad havoc, and gathered up a little company of starving girls, and here has given them a home—forty or more of them. She asks no outside aid. She is spending her own small means. The people of the town, with their Spanish pitilessness of heart, do not understand why she should be doing so strange a thing as to pick up and care for the dirty progeny of dying and dead vagabonds. Better let such a litter die, they say. She told us that she was much alone, that even yet the good people of Mariel treated her with suspicion. If she were a government official, they could comprehend, but they cannot understand how or why anybody should take so great a care of waifs and strays, all for the sake of the humanity of our Lord.

We spent the night at Guanajay in an old Spanish inn, very tumbled down, partly as the result of time, largely as the result of war. We ate our evening meal in a spacious, lofty chamber, sitting at a long table. The company was chiefly made up of tobacco planters, and one or two Cuban drummers, while right in front of us sat a Spanish marquis and his wife with their English governess for the children. They were visiting Cuba to inspect the ancestral sugar estates, and arrived only the week previous from Spain. They treated the company with haughty indifference, and ignored the poor English girl as though she were socially altogether out of their sphere. They helped themselves and talked to the children, while the governess foraged for herself or went without. It reminded me of those mediæval times one reads about, when the clergyman resident in the castle of the lord sat at a table in the servant’s hall. We took pains to see that the English girl received every attention, the Marquis glowering savagely upon us when we passed a dish to the governess rather than to his wife. When the meal was over the pair stalked loftily from the dining hall, leaving the governess to smile upon us in return for our pronounced civilities, momentarily made happy, for the first time perhaps in many months.

THE BAY OF MARIEL

In the evening we visited the large Reform School for boys, which has been established by the military authorities of our government for the care of waifs whom the cruel reconcentrado policy of Weyler deprived of kith and kin. The children looked well-fed and content, and the courteous Governor, a major in the army, assured us that they throve and learned, gave little trouble, and bade fair to become good men and citizens. It is in this sort of thing, the Home for the little boys near Matanzas, the charity of Miss Edwards at Mariel in caring for the motherless little girls, the charity of our government in providing so generously for these boys, that is seen the difference in spirit of American civilization from the hard and callous pitilessness of Spain. The Spaniard and the Cuban care for their own with tenderness, but they look with indifference upon the suffering of others, nor do they comprehend why they should lift a finger to help anyone beyond the narrow circle of their own family or social set.

We have also called upon a big, gaunt, sunnyfaced man who is devoting his life to these people as a missionary of the Congregational Church. He is from Massachusetts, a man of education who preaches fluently in Spanish, and whose labors have met extraordinary success among the Cuban population of Key West. He has now been transferred to Guanajay, and already is creating a profound impression in a community which has never before known aught but an indifferent Roman priest.

The religious conditions of Cuba are peculiar, I am told. The Bishops and Priesthood of the Roman Church have been supplied by old Spain from time immemorial. The black sheep of the Church have found asylum here. Drawing their salaries, fretting in exile, these ne’er-do-wells of the motherland have cared little, and done less, for the spiritual welfare of their flocks. Guanajay is reputed to be a community among the most spiritually darkened of all Cuba. Hence, it is with no little wonderment that the active, enlightening methods of Mr. Frazier are viewed by those among whom he now ministers. The women come to him for solace and advice, the children flock to his singing school, and the Sunday-school in the afternoon is filled with old folks and young, who come to him after the hours of Mass. Even the local padre himself finds this strange heretic so pleasant a companion that he frequently drops in to share a cigar and gossip of the times. If Americans are to make impression spiritually upon this Latin-Catholic population of Cuba, they will do it only through such intelligent personal and sympathetic methods as are here employed. Mere perfunctory Protestant ecclesiasticism makes no impression upon these Latin-Catholic peoples.