The History of Cuba, vol. 2

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

"No Spaniard was allowed to sail for America without permission of the king, a permission granted only for well-defined business reasons, and for a period limited to two years. The agreement to settle there was even more difficult to obtain. A special permission was needed even to pass from the province first chosen to another. Priests and nuns were subject to the same rule."

These restrictions were enforced even at the beginning of the nineteenth century. M. Masse continues to say that travelers were detained on board several days before they were allowed to land in Havana. They had to present a passport, a certificate of birth and baptism and a certificate of respectable life and good conduct, all signed by a consul of Spain.

In individual cases these severe requirements may have been evaded—M. Masse mentions the fact that minor functionaries were ready to do the foreigners any favor—for a consideration. But upon the whole it must be admitted that their observance tended to keep up a certain moral standard in the colonies, which may not have been without some good influence in moulding the character of the people. While other powers of Europe allowed—and even encouraged—their colonies to become dumping-grounds for human refuse, to populate them with their derelicts and those of other nations, until America was spoken of by the Germans as the big reformatory, Spain made an attempt at what some centuries later, in our scientific age, might have been called "race culture."

CHAPTER XIV

The conditions which we have described did not, however, prevent the colony, when prosperity came to her, from succumbing to the evils which invariably follow in the wake of new wealth. The historian Blanchet reports that there existed in Cuba towards the end of the century a strange mixture of immorality and piety. Religious enthusiasm rose to an unusual degree of fervor in Villa Clara in the year 1790. Two Capuchin missionaries had been there a month, and the church was crowded from early morning until late at night with men and women spellbound by their words. After the orisons there was a sermon, and at times, immediately after the sermon, the women left, the building was closed and darkened and the men remained inside. Prayers alternated with flagellations, until some individuals were exhausted with pain and the loss of blood. In the penitential procession, which took place on some evenings, the two missionaries and the priests of the town were followed by a multitude in which both sexes were represented. The members of the Ayuntamiento took part, bare-legged and bare-foot; some marched with the head and face concealed by a white cowl, the body uncovered to the waist, and from the waist down wrapped in sack-cloth. Some staggered under the weight of a heavy cross; others walked straight and attempted to inflict wounds upon themselves with the point of a sword. It seems, however, that this religious exaltation was at times carried too far, for flagellation assumed such proportions at burials that it had to be forbidden.

In contrast to this religious revival was the wave of frivolity and immorality that seemed simultaneously to sweep over the island. The streets of the towns resounded with ribald speech and lascivious songs. The Bishop was scandalized to see Cuban women discard their veils when they went on the street. When they wore décolleté gowns, they did not even close the blinds, but openly showed themselves at the windows. There is little doubt that increase of overseas traffic in the ports of the island contributed to the growing laxity of morals. M. Masse considered the navy yard a special source of the corruption which wealth had brought. "For the money needed by that enterprise circulated in the city at the same time as the vices and the passions of its employees and sailors." With a remarkable psychological insight he gives a most plausible explanation how the change in the life of the island affected the women of Cuba, and especially of Havana.

For these women had so far been brought up in strict conformity to the conventions of their female ancestors in Spain. They had been sent to a girls' school, always escorted, and had never until they were married even talked alone with a man. In the narrow confines of their home, either before or after marriage, their beauty was taken for granted and passed uncommented. For the Cuban women were always unusually handsome, having the same regular features and rich coloring as the Spanish, the same large black eyes and bluish black hair, perhaps even accentuated by their placid immobility of expression. A strange type, bound to attract attention anywhere, they struck the strangers landing in this tropical city like rare exotic flowers, and they suddenly found themselves the objects of an admiration which manifested itself in ways that were new and irresistible. The Cuban husband was known not to be as loyal as his wife was expected to be; why should they not accept the homage offered them? To this host of admirers, ever changing, ever ready to shower them with favors, M. Masse, the keen psychologist, attributes the change in the attitude of the women and the gradual change in the tone of Cuban, especially Havanese, society. As more and more of these industrious foreigners, who might have been as good Spaniards as their own ancestors, settled on the island, the difference between them and the native Cubans manifested itself, not always to the latter's advantage. Women began to prefer them as husbands, and there was one more cause for antagonism between these scions of a common stock, whom different environment and conditions of existence had caused to drift apart, and become irreconcilably estranged.

Of Havana that subtle student of life has this to say:

"The need of forgetting the many privations of a prolonged sea voyage, with gold always in abundance for those who do not know how to manage their affairs and to whom each voyage seems a new adventure, the influence of a climate which makes for voluptuousness, all this combines to make Havana a new Cythera placed at the port of long journeys even as the ancient cradle of pleasure was at that end of the long voyage of that time."

Thus Havana, like other capitals of the world, became gradually not only the cradle of Cuban culture, but also of that corruption of the simpler and purer instincts of human nature which seems to be inseparable from a certain degree of material comfort. The man of Havana had in centuries of repression and restriction lost the power of initiative; the end of the century which gave the colonists of North America their independence made them free to think and act, and work for themselves, and above everything else, to govern themselves, found him still under a rigorous paternal supervision by representatives of a king whom he perhaps never saw. Centuries of such guardianship had robbed him of all incentive and made him drift along the line of least resistance.