REFLECTIONS VIA RAILROAD

Although the distance to Havana, as the bird flies, is only sixty miles, the railroad, winding into the interior, to draw out the sugar freights, makes a line of nearly one hundred miles. This adds to the length of our journey, but also greatly to its interest.

In the cars are two Americans, who have also been visiting plantations. They give me the following statistics of a sugar plantation, which they think may be relied upon. Lands, machinery, 320 slaves, and 20 coolies, worth $500,000. Produce this year, 4,000 boxes of sugar and 800 casks of molasses, worth $104,000. Expenses, $35,000. Net, $69,000, or about 14 per cent. This is not a large interest on an investment so much of which is perishable and subject to deterioration.

The day, as has been every day of mine in Cuba, is fair and beautiful. The heat is great, perhaps even dangerous to a Northerner, should he be exposed to it in active exercise, at noon but, with the shade and motion of the cars, not disagreeable, for the air is pure and elastic, and it is only the direct heat of the sun that is oppressive. I think one notices the results of this pure air, in the throats and nasal organs of the people. One seldom meets a person that seems to have a cold in the head or the throat; and pocket handkerchiefs are used chiefly for ornament.

I cannot weary of gazing upon these new and strange scenes; the stations, with the groups of peasants and Negroes and fruit-sellers that gather about them, and the stores of sugar and molasses collected there; the ingenios, glimmering in the heat of the sun, with their tall furnace chimneys; the cane-fields, acres upon acres; the slow ox-carts carrying the cane to the mill; then the intervals of unused country, the jungles, adorned with little wild flowers, the groves of the weeping, drooping, sad, homesick cocoa; the royal palm, which is to trees what the camel or dromedary is among animals seeming to have strayed from Nubia or Mesopotamia; the stiff, close orange tree, with its golden balls of fruit; and then the remains of a cafetal, the coffee plant growing untrimmed and wild under the reprieved groves of plantain and banana.

It is certainly true that there is such a thing as industry in the tropics. The labor of the tropics goes on. Notwithstanding all we hear and know of the enervating influence of the climate, the white man, if not laborious himself, is the cause that labor is in others. With all its social and political discouragements, with the disadvantages of a duty of about twenty-five per cent on its sugars laid in the United States, and a duty of full one hundred per cent on all flour imported from the United States, and after paying heavier taxes than any people on earth pay at this moment, and yielding a revenue, which nets, after every deduction and discount, not less than sixteen millions a year against all these disadvantages, this island is still very productive and very rich. There is, to be sure, little variety in its industry. In the country, it is nothing but the raising and making of sugar; and in the towns, it is the selling and exporting of sugar. With the addition of a little coffee and copper, more tobacco, and some fresh fruit and preserves, and the commerce which they stimulate, and the mechanic and trading necessities of the towns, we have the sum of its industry and resources. Science, arts, letters, arms, manufactures, and the learning and discussions of politics, of theology, and of the great problems and opinions that move the minds of the thinking world in these, the people of Cuba have no part. These move by them, as the great Gulf Stream drifts by their shores. Nor is there, nor has there been in Cuba, in the memory of the young and middle-aged, debate, or vote, or juries, or one of the least and most rudimental processes of self-government. The African and Chinese do the manual labor, the Cubans hold the land and the capital, and direct the agricultural industry; the commerce is shared between the Cubans, and foreigners of all nations; and the government, civil and military, is exercised by the citizens of Old Spain. No Cuban votes, or attends a lawful political meeting, or sits on a jury, or sees a law-making assembly, except as a curiosity abroad, even in a municipality; nor has he ever helped to make, or interpret, or administer laws, or borne arms, except by special license of government granted to such as are friends of government. In religion, he has no choice, except between the Roman Catholic and none. The laws that govern him are made abroad, and administered by a central power, a foreign Captain-General, through the agency of foreign civil and military officers. The Cuban has no public career. If he removes to Old Spain, and is known as a supporter of Spanish royal power, his Creole birth is probably no impediment to him. But at home, as a Cuban, he may be a planter, a merchant, a physician, but he cannot expect to be a civil magistrate, or to hold a commission in the army, or an office in the police; and though he may be a lawyer, and read, sitting, a written argument to a court of judges, he cannot expect to be himself a judge. He may publish a book, but the government must be the responsible author. He may edit a journal, but the government must be the editor-in-chief.

At the chief stations on the road, there are fruit-sellers in abundance, with fruit fresh from the trees: oranges, bananas, sapotes, and coconuts. The coconut is eaten at an earlier stage than that in which we see it at the North, for it is gathered for exportation after it has become hard. It is eaten here when no harder than a melon, and is cut through with a knife, and the soft white pulp, mixed with the milk, is eaten with a spoon. It is luscious and wholesome, much more so than when the rind has hardened into the shell, and the soft pulp into a hard meat.

A little later in the afternoon, the character of the views begins to change. The ingenios and cane-fields become less frequent, then cease altogether, and the houses have more the appearance of pleasure retreats than of working estates. The roads show lines of mules and horses, loaded with panniers of fruits, or sweeping the ground with the long stalks of fresh fodder laid across their backs, all moving towards a common center. Pleasure carriages appear. Next comes the distant view of the Castle of Atares, and the Principe, and then the harbor and the sea, the belt of masts, the high ridge of fortifications, the blue and white and yellow houses, with brown tops; and now we are in the streets of Havana.

Here are the familiar signs Por mayor y menor, Posada y Cantina, Tienda, Panadería, Relojería, and the fanciful names of the shops, the high-pitched falsetto cries of the streets, the long files of mules and horses, with panniers of fruit, or hidden, all but their noses and tails, under stacks of fresh fodder, the volantes, and the motley multitude of whites, blacks, and Chinese, soldiers and civilians, and occasionally priests Negro women, lottery-ticket vendors, and the girl musicians with their begging tambourines.

The same idlers are at the door of Le Grand’s; a rehearsal, as usual, is going on at the head of the first flight; and the parrot is blinking at the hot, white walls of the court-yard, and screaming bits of Spanish. My New York friends have got back from the country a day before me. I am installed in a better room than before, on the house-top, where the sun is hot, but where there is air and a view of the ocean.