Harry Alverson Franck

“ All through the region the big unpainted wooden barns of the American Tobacco Company bulk above the shade-grown immensities, as if half buried by drifted snow, until the entranced beholder finds it hard to remember that he is in a land of perpetual summer, despite the royal palms that here and there spring aloft from the white landscape. Elsewhere the unclothed fields are planted in endless rows of tobacco, on, up, and over hill after mountain, some of them so steep as to make cultivation seem impossible, and all looking as if their velvety green fur had been put in order by a gigantic comb. ”

“ They are busy roads, dotted with automobiles, of which there are more than one hundred on the island, many donkeys, heavy two-wheeled carts hauled by neck-yoked oxen, a kind of jaunting car of the conservative gentry, and innumerable black pedestrians. The island is everywhere punctuated with picturesque old stone windmill towers that once ground cane, their flailing arms long since departed, and gray old chimneys of abandoned sugar-mills break the sky-line on every hand. ”

“ Sunday in Fort de France is not the deadly dull Sabbath of the British West Indies. The market and many of the shops are open in the morning; the cooler hours of the afternoon find the town enlivened with strollers, from the ramparts of grim old Fort St. Louis to the banks of the Rivière Madame, lined by vari-colored boats drawn up out of the water, with whole jungles of nets hung out to dry, with carelessly constructed little houses, in the shadows of which squat chattering, boisterously laughing negroes. The evening is one of the three during the week on which the movies function. ”

“ The passing impression is of rich red mud, a glaring sunshine, and a wide difference between the rather foppish, over-dressed Havanese and the uncouth countrymen in their bohíos, huts of palm-leaves and thatch which probably still bear a close resemblance to those in which Columbus found the aborigines living. Then there are of course the royal palms, which grow everywhere in Cuba in even greater profusion than in Brazil. The roads are bordered with them, the fields are striped with their silvery white trunks, their majestic fronds give the finishing touch to every landscape. ”

“ From the hermitage of Montserrat, erected by the Catalans of the island on a slope above the town, the basin-shaped vale has a serene beauty, particularly at sunrise or toward sunset, which draws at least a murmur of pleasure from the beholder. Royal palms, singly and in clumps, dot the whole expanse of plain with their green plumes and silvery trunks and climb the slopes of the encircling hills, which lie like careless grass-grown heaps of cracked stone along the horizon. Even by day the silence is broken only by the distant shouts of a peasant or two struggling with their oxen and plows ”

“ Old Colón market is as dark and unsanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day’s purchases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. One may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial Havana never tasted. ”

“ Seven-passenger cars filled with elaborately upholstered matrons deathly pale with rice powder, with a few elderly, over-slender males tucked in between them, snort round and round the square; the electric lights among the palm-trees disclose a slowly pulsating sea of humanity, chiefly clad in white; the murmur of a thousand low voices resembles the sound of a broken waterfall; the musical tinkle of the steel triangles of sweetmeat-sellers blends harmoniously into the suppressed uproar. “Every one worth knowing” knows every one else in the throng. ”

“ Travel is unceasing along these splendid island roads. Automobiles, creaking ox-carts and massive tarpaulin-covered freight wagons drawn by several teams of big Missouri mules, mail-busses and crowded guaguas, horse carriages and now and then a string of pack-animals to contrast with the flying motors, make endless procession along the way, while countless barefoot pedestrians flank the blurred roadsides. Only the horsemen so frequent elsewhere in Latin-America are conspicuous by their scarcity. ”

“ The capital of a province without so much as the pretense of a hotel is a rarity even in backward Santo Domingo. Nothing but the most miserable of thatched huts, with three human nests on legs in one tiny room, and a back-yard reed kitchen attended by a ragged old negro crone, offers accommodation to unbefriended strangers in Seibo. It is perhaps the most out-of-the-way, astonished-at-strangers, unacquainted-with-the-world town of any size that can be found in the West Indies. ”

“ A dozen American windmills clustered together in a little hollow irrigate space enough to grow the alfalfa and other green stuff needed for their nourishment. Yet even this strange industry looks out of place in so arid a land, and as one scurries over the tolerable roads which cover the island, past occasional makeshift shanties, jolting mule-carts, and an endless vista of bare, parched ground scattered with repulsive forms of thorny vegetation, the wonder comes again that this desert-faced coral reef should have succeeded in attracting human inhabitants. ”

“ There is not a street car in all the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti, as you choose to call it. Dingy, wretched old carriages, their horses only a trifle less gaunt and ungroomed than those of Port au Prince, loiter about a corner of the plaza, behind the cathedral, shrieking their pleas at every possible fare who passes within their field of vision. Automobiles are not unknown, but they have not yet invaded Santiago in force. ”

“ While one negro held a sugar-cane, another rolled the sapling back and forth along it, the juice running down the groove into a gourd or pot. Wherever the breeze reached us the weather was agreeable; in the breathless pockets of the hills the humid heat hung about us like a hot wet blanket.
The marine-gendarme commander of Jacmel met us with an automobile farther out along the trail than one had ever been driven before, and the astounded natives fled shrieking before it as if the malignant spirits they fancied they could hear groaning under its hood were visibly pursuing them. ”

“ Cane high above the head of a man on horseback is by no means rare in these favored regions. By the beginning of our northern autumn the whole island is inlaid with immense lakes of maturing cane, the same monotonous panorama everywhere stretching to the horizon; the uniformly light green landscape, often spreading for mile after mile without a fold or a knoll, without any other note of color than the darker green of the rare palm-trees that have escaped destruction, grows fatiguing to the sight. ”

“ In a constant stream the soot-draped women jog up the gang-plank, balancing the eighty-pound basket of coal on their heads, often without touching it, thrust out a begrimed hand for the three cents a trip which a local labor leader has won them in place of the original one, drop the coins into a dust-laden pocket, dump their load into the steamer’s chute, and trot down again. Sometimes the ship is a man-of-war that unfairly speeds up the pace of coalers by having its band play rousing music on the upper deck. Here and there a man may be made out in the endless chain of black humanity. ”

“ Then when the sun has lost its youthful ardor one may climb again to the village and catch the afternoon train over the mountains to the north coast. The region about Highgate almost rivals the beauty of Porto Rico. Cacao, cocoanuts, clumps of bamboo, the spreading breadfruit-trees, whole valleys full of bananas, some of which climb far up the surrounding slopes, decorate the rugged landscape. One looks almost in vain, however, as in all Jamaica, for the queen of tropical vegetation, the royal—or, as the English unimaginatively call it, the cabbage-palm. ”

“ But Port au Prince is by no means unshaded. The better residential part up beyond the glaring parade-ground makes full use of the gorgeous tropical vegetation. Here almost every house is hidden away in its grove of palms, mangos, breadfruit, and a score of other perennial trees, and flowering bushes, ranging all the way from our northern roses to the pale-yellow of blooming cotton-trees and enormous masses of the lavender-purple bougainvillea, crowd their way in between the tree-trunks. Oranges, bananas, and the pear-shaped grape-fruit of Haiti hang almost within reach from one’s window ”

“ When cursing, filthy market women pile their baskets and unwashed produce in upon them and crowd their own women out of their places, they bear it all with humble resignation, as if they were the last survivors of the civilized race wholly disheartened by an invasion of barbarian tribes. The visitor who flees all this and retires is lucky to catch half an hour of unbroken sleep amid the endless uproar of shouting negroes, the barking of innumerable dogs, and the crowing of more cocks than even a Latin-American city can muster. ”

“ Rusted iron pillars, hanging awry or completely fallen, help the brush to choke up the interior; a pathetic old iron saint, without head, arms, or feet, leans against the outer wall as if he were still dazed by the fall from his niche above. Gaunt black pigs roam everywhere through the ruins, the silence of which is seldom broken except by the wind whispering through the leaves and the murmur of the running water with which the ghost of a city is still abundantly supplied. ”

“ Immense basins filled with magnificent clusters of bamboo, royal palms in irregular, but soldierly, formations along the succeeding crests, masses of perennial foliage heaped up in the spaces between—all shimmered in the moonlight as if the earth had donned her richest ball-dress for some gala occasion. We sped continually downward, snaking swiftly in and out through the hills despite the frequent anxious grinding of the brakes. Here we sank into the trough of one of the few deep railway cuts in Cuba, there we rumbled across viaducts that lifted us up among the fronds of the royal palms. ”

“ But hungry mankind does not long endure this unproductive slovenliness of nature. Gangs of men as varied in color as the vegetation in species are laying waste new areas of wilderness, and preparing to complete with fire the work of their axes and machetes in taming the unbroken soil for human purposes. Half-naked families of incredible fecundity swarm to the doors of thatch cabins, to gaze after the fleeing train like wild animals catching their first glimpse of the outside world. ”

“ Several Americans defied the tropical sun to direct the labors of another band of blacks engaged in planting a diminutive pine-tree with a few scattered twigs at its top, and to hide its nudity beneath another tree of tropical luxuriance, out on the glaringly bare Champs de Mars before the grand stand from which the élite of Port au Prince watches its president decorate its national heroes after a successful revolution. The rotarians of color could not, of course, be expected to appear at such a place in the heat of the day. ”

“ The insolence of nearly all the British West Indies reaches its zenith in Kingston. Even in the main street clamoring black urchins and no small number of adults trail the white visitor, heaping upon him 405foul-mouthed taunts, all but snatching his possessions out of his hands in broad daylight; diseased beggars plod beside him in bare feet that seem never to have known the luxury of a scrubbing, scattering their germs in a fine gray limestone dust that swirls in blinding clouds which envelop everything in a yellowish veil whenever a breath of wind stirs or a street-car sweeps past. ”

“ Toward sunset, especially on the days when a military band plays the retreta in the kiosk facing Morro Castle and the harbor entrance, an endless procession of seven-passenger motors files up and down the wide Prado and along the sea-washed Malecón, two, or at most three, haughty beings, not infrequently with kinky hair, lolling in every capacious tonneau. Liveried chauffeurs are the almost universal rule. The caballero who drives his own car would arouse the wonder, possibly the scorn, of his fellow-citizens; once and once only did we see a woman at the wheel. ”

“ Here and there washing parties of women were beating their rags on stones at the edge of the stream and spreading them out in the sun to bleach, their almost nude black bodies glistening in the sunshine and their tongues cackling incessantly until a glimpse of us reduced them to sudden silence. Several times we passed voodoo signs—a chicken with its entrails removed hanging by one leg from a pole, the white skull of a horse decorated with bits of red rag set on the top of a cactus-bush. Now and then we came across the most primitive form of cane-crusher except the human teeth. ”

“ The élite of the town sit in their houses, piled steeply up the pyramidal hills, and let the music float up to them on the harbor breeze. Our new fellow-countrymen are ostentatiously patriotic in all that concerns mere formalities. Every morning at eight all St. Thomas becomes static when the marine band plays our national anthem. The market-women on the wharf halt as if suddenly turned to stone, holding whatever posture they happen to be caught in until the last note has died away; the very boatmen in the bay sit with their poised oars motionless. ”

“ From the beach to the sheer green mountain wall behind, a dark-gray lava dust everywhere covers the natural soil, and from this fertile humus a veritable jungle has sprung up. Former parlors are filled with growing tobacco; banana plants wave their huge leaves from out what were once secluded family residences; one can get lost in the hills of lava, so overgrown are they with forests of brush, of manioc, hedgewood, and thorny brambles. The remnants of stone walls ready to fall down at the least tremor of the earth force the cautious visitor to make many a detour. ”

“ Beyond Maunabo the highway climbs through huts and rocks that look strangely alike as they lie tossed far up the spur of the central range, then past enormous granite boulders that suggest reclining elephants, and out upon an incredible expanse of cane, with pretty Yabucoa planted in its center and Porto Rico’s dependent islands of Vieques and Culebra breaking the endless vista of sea to the southward. ”