YOUNG AMERICA ON PANAMA BEACH
READY TO CONTROL THE PACIFIC
Shopping in Panama is a decidedly cosmopolitan enterprise. The shopkeeper of whom I bought a Panama hat, made in Ecuador, did business under a Spanish name, was in fact a Genoese and when he found I could speak neither Spanish nor Italian coaxed me up to his price in French. Most of the retail prices are of so elastic a sort that when you have beaten them down two-thirds you retire with your package perfectly confident that they would have stood another cut. Nevertheless the Chinese merchants, who are the chief retail dealers in the tropics, compel respect. They live cleanly, are capable business men, show none of the sloth and indifference of the natives, and seem to prosper everywhere. The Chinese market gardens in the outskirts of Panama are a positive relief for the neatness of their trim rows of timely plants. The Panamanian eats yams and grumbles that the soil will grow nothing else; the Chinaman makes it produce practically all the vegetables that grow in our northern gardens.
Avenida Centrale ends its arterial course at the sea wall of the city, or at least at that part of the sea wall which is the best preserved and retains most of its old-time dignity. It is here something like the Battery at Charleston, S. C., though the houses fringing it are not of a like stateliness, and the aristocracy of the quarter is somewhat tempered by the fact that here, too, is the city prison. Into the courtyards of this calaboose you can gaze from sundry little sentry boxes, the little sentries in which seem ever ready to step out to let the tourist step in and afterward pose for his camera, with rifle, fixed bayonet and an even more fixed expression. The greater part of one of the prison yards is given over to flower beds, and though sunken some twenty feet or more below the crest of the wall, is thoughtfully provided with such half-way stations in the way of lean-to sheds, ladders and water butts that there seems to be no reason why any prisoner should stay in who wants to get out. But perhaps they don’t often yearn for liberty. A wire fence cuts off the woman’s section of the jail and the several native women I observed flirting assiduously with desperate male malefactors from whom they were separated only by this fence, seemed content with their lot, and evidently helped to cultivate like resignation in the breasts of their dark adorers. A white-clad guard, machete at side and heavy pistol at belt, walks among them jingling a heavy bunch of keys authoritatively but offering no interruption to their tender interludes.
On the other side of the row of frame quarters by which the prison yard is bisected you can see at the normal hours the prisoners taking their meals at a long table in the open air. Over the parapet of the sea wall above, an equally long row of tourists is generally leveling cameras, and sometimes exchanging lively badinage with some criminal who objects to figuring in this amateur rogues’ gallery. To the casual spectator it all savors of opera bouffe, but there are stories a-plenty that the Panama jail has had its share of brutal cruelty as have most places wherein men are locked away from sight and subject to the whims of others not so very much their superiors. Once the Chiriqui Prison was a fortress, the bank of quarters for the prisoners formed the barracks, and the deep archways under the sea wall were dungeons oft populated by political prisoners. Miasma, damp and the brutality of jailers have many a time brought to occupants of those dungeons their final discharge, and a patch of wall near by, with the bricks significantly chipped, is pointed out as the place where others have been from time to time stood up in front of a firing squad at too short a range for misses. The Latin-American lust for blood has had its manifestations in Panama, and the old prison has doubtless housed its share of martyrs.
THE FLOWERY CHIRIQUI PRISON
Where native women prisoners may flirt without interruption with male malefactors, separated only by a wire fence
But one thinks little of the grimmer history of the Chiriqui Prison, looking down upon the bright flower beds, and the gay quadroon girls flirting with some desperate character who is perhaps “in” for a too liberal indulgence in rum last pay day. Indeed the guard wards off more sanguinary reminiscences by telling you that they used to hold bull baitings—a milder form of bull-fight—in the yard that the captives in the dungeons might witness the sport, and perhaps envy the bull, quien sabe?
