Letter XLVII.Scenery of Cuba.—Coffee Plantations.Matanzas,April16, 1849.My expectations of the scenery of the island of Cuba and of the magnificence of its vegetation, have not been quite fulfilled. This place is but sixty miles to the east of Havana, but the railway which brings you hither, takes you over a sweep of a hundred and thirty miles, through one of the most fertile districts in the interior of the island. I made an excursion from Havana to San Antonio de los Baños, a pleasant little town at nine leagues distance, in a southeast direction from the capital, in what is called the Vuelta Abajo. I have also just returned from a visit to some fine sugar estates to the southeast of Matanzas, so that I may claim to have seen something of the face of the country of which I speak.At this season the hills about Havana, and the pastures everywhere, have an arid look, a russet hue, like sandy fields with us, when scorched by a long drought, on like our meadows in winter. This, however, is the dry season; and when I was told that but two showers of rain have fallen since October, I could only wonder that so much vegetation was left, and that the verbenas and other herbage which clothed the ground, should yet retain, as I perceived they did, when I saw them nearer, an unextinguished life. I have, therefore, the disadvantage of seeing Cuba not only in the dry season, but near the close of an uncommonly dry season. Next month the rainy season commences, when the whole island, I am told, even the barrenest parts, flushes into a deep verdure, creeping plants climb over all the rocks and ascend the trees, and the mighty palms put out their new foliage.Shade, however, is the great luxury of a warm climate, and why the people of Cuba do not surround their habitations in the country, in the villages, and in the environs of the large towns, with a dense umbrage of trees, I confess I do not exactly understand. In their rich soil, and in their perpetually genial climate, trees grow with great rapidity, and they have many noble ones both for size and foliage. The royal palm, with its tall straight columnar trunk of a whitish hue, only uplifts a Corinthian capital of leaves, and casts but a narrow shadow; but it mingles finely with other trees, and planted in avenues, forms a colonnade nobler than any of the porticoes to the ancient Egyptian temples. There is no thicker foliage or fresher green than that of the mango, which daily drops its abundant fruit for several months in the year, and the mamey and the sapote, fruit-trees also, are in leaf during the whole of the dry season; even the Indian fig, which clasps and kills the largest trees of the forest, and at last takes their place, a stately tree with a stout trunk of its own, has its unfading leaf of vivid green.It is impossible to avoid an expression of impatience that these trees have not been formed into groups, embowering the dwellings, and into groves, through which the beams of the sun, here so fierce at noonday, could not reach the ground beneath. There is in fact nothing of ornamental cultivation in Cuba, except of the most formal kind. Some private gardens there are, carefully kept, but all of the stiffest pattern; there is nothing which brings out the larger vegetation of the region in that grandeur and magnificence which might belong to it. In the Quinta del Obispo, or Bishop's Garden, which is open to the public, you find shade which you find nowhere else, but the trees are planted in straight alleys, and the water-roses, a species of water-lily of immense size, fragrant and pink-colored, grow in a square tank, fed by a straight canal, with sides of hewn stone.Let me say, however, that when I asked for trees, I was referred to the hurricanes which have recently ravaged the island. One of these swept over Cuba in 1844, uprooting the palms and the orange groves, and laying prostrate the avenues of trees on the coffee plantations. The Paseo Isabel, a public promenade, between the walls of Havana and the streets of the new town, was formerly over-canopied with lofty and spreading trees, which this tempest leveled to the ground; it has now been planted with rows of young trees, which yield a meagre shade. In 1846 came another hurricane, still more terrific, destroying much of the beauty which the first had spared.Of late years, also, such of the orange-trees as were not uprooted, or have recently been planted, have been attacked by the insect which a few years since was so destructive to the same tree in Florida. The effect upon the tree resembles that of a blight, the leaves grow sere, and the branches die. You may imagine, therefore, that I was somewhat disappointed not to find the air, as it is at this season in the south of Italy, fragrant with the odor of orange and lemon blossoms. Oranges are scarce, and not so fine, at this moment, in Havana and Matanzas, as in the fruit-shops of New York. I hear, however, that there are portions of the island which were spared by these hurricanes, and that there are others where the ravages of the insect in the orange groves have nearly ceased, as I have been told is also the case in Florida.I have mentioned my excursion to San Antonio. I went thither by railway, in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked by an American engineer. For some distance we passed through fields of the sweet-potato, which here never requires a second planting, and propagates itself perpetually in the soil, patches of maize, low groves of bananas with their dark stems, and of plantains with their green ones, and large tracts producing the pineapple growing in rows like carrots. Then came plantations of the sugar-cane, with its sedge-like blades of pale-green, then extensive tracts of pasturage with scattered shrubs and tall dead weeds, the growth of the last summer, and a thin herbage bitten close to the soil. Here and there was an abandoned coffee-plantation, where cattle were browzing among the half-perished shrubs and broken rows of trees; and the neglected hedges of the wild pine,piña raton, as the Cubans call it, were interrupted with broad gaps.Sometimes we passed the cottages of themonteros, or peasants, built often of palm-leaves, the walls formed of the broad sheath of the leaf, fastened to posts of bamboo, and the roof thatched with the long plume-like leaf itself. The door was sometimes hung with a kind of curtain to exclude the sun, which the dusky complexioned women and children put aside to gaze at us as we passed. These dwellings were often picturesque in their appearance, with a grove of plantains behind, a thicket of bamboo by its side, waving its willow-like sprays in the wind; a pair of mango-trees near, hung with fruit just ripening and reddish blossoms just opening, and a cocoa-tree or two lifting high above the rest its immense feathery leaves and its clusters of green nuts.We now and then met themonterosthemselves scudding along on their little horses, in that pace which we call a rack. Their dress was a Panama hat, a shirt worn over a pair of pantaloons, a pair of rough cowskin shoes, one of which was armed with a spur, and a sword lashed to the left side by a belt of cotton cloth. They are men of manly bearing, of thin make, but often of a good figure, with well-spread shoulders, which, however, have a stoop in them, contracted, I suppose, by riding always with a short stirrup.Forests, too, we passed. You, doubtless, suppose that a forest in a soil and climate like this, must be a dense growth of trees with colossal stems and leafy summits. A forest in Cuba—all that I have seen are such—is a thicket of shrubs and creeping plants, through which, one would suppose that even the wild cats of the country would find it impossible to make their way. Above this impassable jungle rises here and there the palm, or the gigantic ceyba or cotton-tree, but more often trees of far less beauty, thinly scattered and with few branches, disposed without symmetry, and at this season often leafless.We reached San Antonio at nine o'clock in the morning, and went to the inn of La Punta, where we breakfasted on rice and fresh eggs, and a dish of meat so highly flavored with garlic, that it was impossible to distinguish to what animal it belonged. Adjoining the inn was a cockpit, with cells for the birds surrounding the inclosure, in which they were crowing lustily. Two or three persons seemed to have nothing to do but to tend them; and one, in particular, with a gray beard, a grave aspect, and a solid gait, went about the work with a deliberation and solemnity which to me, who had lately seen the hurried burials at the Campo Santo, in Havana, was highly edifying. A man was training a game-cock in the pit; he was giving it lessons in the virtue of perseverance. He held another cock before it, which he was teaching it to pursue, and striking it occasionally over the head to provoke it, with the wing of the bird in his hand, he made it run after him about the area for half an hour together.I had heard much of the beauty of the coffee estates of Cuba, and in the neighborhood of San Antonio are some which have been reputed very fine ones. A young man, in a checked blue and white shirt, worn like a frock over checked pantaloons, with a spur on one heel, offered to procure us avolante, and we engaged him. He brought us one with two horses, a negro postillion sitting on one, and the shafts of the vehicle borne by the other. We set off, passing through fields guarded by stiff-leaved hedges of the ratoon-pine, over ways so bad that if the motion of the volante were not the easiest in the world, we should have taken an unpleasant jolting. The lands of Cuba fit for cultivation, are divided into red and black; we were in the midst of the red lands, consisting of a fine earth of a deep brick color, resting on a bed of soft, porous, chalky limestone. In the dry season the surface is easily dispersed into dust, and stains your clothes of a dull red.A drive of four miles, through a country full of palm and cocoanut trees, brought us to the gate of a coffee plantation, which our friend in the checked shirt, by whom we were accompanied, opened for us. We passed up to the house through what had been an avenue of palms, but was now two rows of trees at very unequal distances, with here and there a sickly orange-tree. On each side grew the coffee shrubs, hung with flowers of snowy white, but unpruned and full of dry and leafless twigs. In every direction were ranks of trees, prized for ornament or for their fruit, and shrubs, among which were magnificent oleanders loaded with flowers, planted in such a manner as to break the force of the wind, and partially to shelter the plants from the too fierce rays of the sun. The coffee estate is, in fact, a kind of forest, with the trees and shrubs arranged in straight lines. Themayoral, or steward of the estate, a handsome Cuban, with white teeth, a pleasant smile, and a distinct utterance of his native language, received us with great courtesy, and offered uscigarillos, though he never used tobacco; and spirit of cane, though he never drank. He wore a sword, and carried a large flexible whip, doubled for convenience in the hand. He showed us the coffee plants, the broad platforms with smooth surfaces of cement and raised borders, where the berries were dried in the sun, and the mills where the negroes were at work separating the kernel from the pulp in which it is inclosed."These coffee estates," said he, "are already ruined, and the planters are abandoning them as fast as they can; in four years more there will not be a single coffee plantation on the island. They can not afford to raise coffee for the price they get in the market."I inquired the reason. "It is," replied he, "the extreme dryness of the season when the plant is in flower. If we have rain at this time of the year, we are sure of a good crop; if it does not rain, the harvest is small; and the failure of rain is so common a circumstance that we must leave the cultivation of coffee to the people of St. Domingo and Brazil."I asked if the plantation could not be converted into a sugar estate."Not this," he answered; "it has been cultivated too long. The land was originally rich, but it is exhausted"—tired out, was the expression he used—"we may cultivate maize or rice, for the dry culture of rice succeeds well here, or we may abandon it to grazing. At present we keep a few negroes here, just to gather the berries which ripen, without taking any trouble to preserve the plants, or replace those which die."I could easily believe from what I saw on this estate, that there must be a great deal of beauty of vegetation in a well-kept coffee plantation, but the formal pattern in which it is disposed, the straight alleys and rows of trees, the squares and parallelograms, showed me that there was no beauty of arrangement. We fell in, before we returned to our inn, with the proprietor, a delicate-looking person, with thin white hands, who had been educated at Boston, and spoke English as if he had never lived anywhere else. His manners, compared with those of his steward, were exceedingly frosty and forbidding, and when we told him of the civility which had been shown us, his looks seemed to say he wished it had been otherwise.Returning to our inn, we dined, and as the sun grew low, we strolled out to look at the town. It is situated on a clear little stream, over which several bathing-houses are built, their posts standing in the midst of the current. Above the town, it flows between rocky banks, bordered with shrubs, many of them in flower. Below the town, after winding a little way, it enters a cavern yawning in the limestone rock, immediately over which a huge ceyba rises, and stretches its leafy arms in mid-heaven. Down this opening the river throws itself, and is never seen again. This is not a singular instance in Cuba. The island is full of caverns and openings in the rocks, and I am told that many of the streams find subterranean passages to the sea. There is a well at the inn of La Punta, in which a roaring of water is constantly heard. It is the sound of a subterranean stream rushing along a passage in the rocks, and the well is an opening into its roof.In passing through the town, I was struck with the neat attire of those who inhabited the humblest dwellings. At the door of one of the cottages, I saw a group of children, of different ages, all quite pretty, with oval faces and glittering black eyes, in clean fresh dresses, which, one would think, could scarcely have been kept a moment without being soiled, in that dwelling, with its mud floor. The people of Cuba are sparing in their ablutions; the men do not wash their faces and hands till nearly mid-day, for fear of spasms; and of the women, I am told that many do not wash at all, contenting themselves with rubbing their cheeks and necks with a little aguardiente; but the passion for clean linen, and, among the men, for clean white pantaloons, is universal. Themonterohimself, on a holiday or any public occasion, will sport a shirt of the finest linen, smoothly ironed, and stiffly starched throughout, from the collar downward.The next day, at half-past eleven, we left our inn, which was also what we call in the United States a country store, where the clerks who had just performed their ablutions and combed their hair, were making segars behind the counter from the tobacco of the Vuelta Abajo, and returned by the railway to Havana. We procured travelling licenses at the cost of four dollars and a half each, for it is the pleasure of the government to levy this tax on strangers who travel, and early the following morning took the train for Matanzas.
My expectations of the scenery of the island of Cuba and of the magnificence of its vegetation, have not been quite fulfilled. This place is but sixty miles to the east of Havana, but the railway which brings you hither, takes you over a sweep of a hundred and thirty miles, through one of the most fertile districts in the interior of the island. I made an excursion from Havana to San Antonio de los Baños, a pleasant little town at nine leagues distance, in a southeast direction from the capital, in what is called the Vuelta Abajo. I have also just returned from a visit to some fine sugar estates to the southeast of Matanzas, so that I may claim to have seen something of the face of the country of which I speak.
At this season the hills about Havana, and the pastures everywhere, have an arid look, a russet hue, like sandy fields with us, when scorched by a long drought, on like our meadows in winter. This, however, is the dry season; and when I was told that but two showers of rain have fallen since October, I could only wonder that so much vegetation was left, and that the verbenas and other herbage which clothed the ground, should yet retain, as I perceived they did, when I saw them nearer, an unextinguished life. I have, therefore, the disadvantage of seeing Cuba not only in the dry season, but near the close of an uncommonly dry season. Next month the rainy season commences, when the whole island, I am told, even the barrenest parts, flushes into a deep verdure, creeping plants climb over all the rocks and ascend the trees, and the mighty palms put out their new foliage.
Shade, however, is the great luxury of a warm climate, and why the people of Cuba do not surround their habitations in the country, in the villages, and in the environs of the large towns, with a dense umbrage of trees, I confess I do not exactly understand. In their rich soil, and in their perpetually genial climate, trees grow with great rapidity, and they have many noble ones both for size and foliage. The royal palm, with its tall straight columnar trunk of a whitish hue, only uplifts a Corinthian capital of leaves, and casts but a narrow shadow; but it mingles finely with other trees, and planted in avenues, forms a colonnade nobler than any of the porticoes to the ancient Egyptian temples. There is no thicker foliage or fresher green than that of the mango, which daily drops its abundant fruit for several months in the year, and the mamey and the sapote, fruit-trees also, are in leaf during the whole of the dry season; even the Indian fig, which clasps and kills the largest trees of the forest, and at last takes their place, a stately tree with a stout trunk of its own, has its unfading leaf of vivid green.
It is impossible to avoid an expression of impatience that these trees have not been formed into groups, embowering the dwellings, and into groves, through which the beams of the sun, here so fierce at noonday, could not reach the ground beneath. There is in fact nothing of ornamental cultivation in Cuba, except of the most formal kind. Some private gardens there are, carefully kept, but all of the stiffest pattern; there is nothing which brings out the larger vegetation of the region in that grandeur and magnificence which might belong to it. In the Quinta del Obispo, or Bishop's Garden, which is open to the public, you find shade which you find nowhere else, but the trees are planted in straight alleys, and the water-roses, a species of water-lily of immense size, fragrant and pink-colored, grow in a square tank, fed by a straight canal, with sides of hewn stone.
Let me say, however, that when I asked for trees, I was referred to the hurricanes which have recently ravaged the island. One of these swept over Cuba in 1844, uprooting the palms and the orange groves, and laying prostrate the avenues of trees on the coffee plantations. The Paseo Isabel, a public promenade, between the walls of Havana and the streets of the new town, was formerly over-canopied with lofty and spreading trees, which this tempest leveled to the ground; it has now been planted with rows of young trees, which yield a meagre shade. In 1846 came another hurricane, still more terrific, destroying much of the beauty which the first had spared.
Of late years, also, such of the orange-trees as were not uprooted, or have recently been planted, have been attacked by the insect which a few years since was so destructive to the same tree in Florida. The effect upon the tree resembles that of a blight, the leaves grow sere, and the branches die. You may imagine, therefore, that I was somewhat disappointed not to find the air, as it is at this season in the south of Italy, fragrant with the odor of orange and lemon blossoms. Oranges are scarce, and not so fine, at this moment, in Havana and Matanzas, as in the fruit-shops of New York. I hear, however, that there are portions of the island which were spared by these hurricanes, and that there are others where the ravages of the insect in the orange groves have nearly ceased, as I have been told is also the case in Florida.
I have mentioned my excursion to San Antonio. I went thither by railway, in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked by an American engineer. For some distance we passed through fields of the sweet-potato, which here never requires a second planting, and propagates itself perpetually in the soil, patches of maize, low groves of bananas with their dark stems, and of plantains with their green ones, and large tracts producing the pineapple growing in rows like carrots. Then came plantations of the sugar-cane, with its sedge-like blades of pale-green, then extensive tracts of pasturage with scattered shrubs and tall dead weeds, the growth of the last summer, and a thin herbage bitten close to the soil. Here and there was an abandoned coffee-plantation, where cattle were browzing among the half-perished shrubs and broken rows of trees; and the neglected hedges of the wild pine,piña raton, as the Cubans call it, were interrupted with broad gaps.
Sometimes we passed the cottages of themonteros, or peasants, built often of palm-leaves, the walls formed of the broad sheath of the leaf, fastened to posts of bamboo, and the roof thatched with the long plume-like leaf itself. The door was sometimes hung with a kind of curtain to exclude the sun, which the dusky complexioned women and children put aside to gaze at us as we passed. These dwellings were often picturesque in their appearance, with a grove of plantains behind, a thicket of bamboo by its side, waving its willow-like sprays in the wind; a pair of mango-trees near, hung with fruit just ripening and reddish blossoms just opening, and a cocoa-tree or two lifting high above the rest its immense feathery leaves and its clusters of green nuts.
We now and then met themonterosthemselves scudding along on their little horses, in that pace which we call a rack. Their dress was a Panama hat, a shirt worn over a pair of pantaloons, a pair of rough cowskin shoes, one of which was armed with a spur, and a sword lashed to the left side by a belt of cotton cloth. They are men of manly bearing, of thin make, but often of a good figure, with well-spread shoulders, which, however, have a stoop in them, contracted, I suppose, by riding always with a short stirrup.
Forests, too, we passed. You, doubtless, suppose that a forest in a soil and climate like this, must be a dense growth of trees with colossal stems and leafy summits. A forest in Cuba—all that I have seen are such—is a thicket of shrubs and creeping plants, through which, one would suppose that even the wild cats of the country would find it impossible to make their way. Above this impassable jungle rises here and there the palm, or the gigantic ceyba or cotton-tree, but more often trees of far less beauty, thinly scattered and with few branches, disposed without symmetry, and at this season often leafless.
We reached San Antonio at nine o'clock in the morning, and went to the inn of La Punta, where we breakfasted on rice and fresh eggs, and a dish of meat so highly flavored with garlic, that it was impossible to distinguish to what animal it belonged. Adjoining the inn was a cockpit, with cells for the birds surrounding the inclosure, in which they were crowing lustily. Two or three persons seemed to have nothing to do but to tend them; and one, in particular, with a gray beard, a grave aspect, and a solid gait, went about the work with a deliberation and solemnity which to me, who had lately seen the hurried burials at the Campo Santo, in Havana, was highly edifying. A man was training a game-cock in the pit; he was giving it lessons in the virtue of perseverance. He held another cock before it, which he was teaching it to pursue, and striking it occasionally over the head to provoke it, with the wing of the bird in his hand, he made it run after him about the area for half an hour together.
I had heard much of the beauty of the coffee estates of Cuba, and in the neighborhood of San Antonio are some which have been reputed very fine ones. A young man, in a checked blue and white shirt, worn like a frock over checked pantaloons, with a spur on one heel, offered to procure us avolante, and we engaged him. He brought us one with two horses, a negro postillion sitting on one, and the shafts of the vehicle borne by the other. We set off, passing through fields guarded by stiff-leaved hedges of the ratoon-pine, over ways so bad that if the motion of the volante were not the easiest in the world, we should have taken an unpleasant jolting. The lands of Cuba fit for cultivation, are divided into red and black; we were in the midst of the red lands, consisting of a fine earth of a deep brick color, resting on a bed of soft, porous, chalky limestone. In the dry season the surface is easily dispersed into dust, and stains your clothes of a dull red.
A drive of four miles, through a country full of palm and cocoanut trees, brought us to the gate of a coffee plantation, which our friend in the checked shirt, by whom we were accompanied, opened for us. We passed up to the house through what had been an avenue of palms, but was now two rows of trees at very unequal distances, with here and there a sickly orange-tree. On each side grew the coffee shrubs, hung with flowers of snowy white, but unpruned and full of dry and leafless twigs. In every direction were ranks of trees, prized for ornament or for their fruit, and shrubs, among which were magnificent oleanders loaded with flowers, planted in such a manner as to break the force of the wind, and partially to shelter the plants from the too fierce rays of the sun. The coffee estate is, in fact, a kind of forest, with the trees and shrubs arranged in straight lines. Themayoral, or steward of the estate, a handsome Cuban, with white teeth, a pleasant smile, and a distinct utterance of his native language, received us with great courtesy, and offered uscigarillos, though he never used tobacco; and spirit of cane, though he never drank. He wore a sword, and carried a large flexible whip, doubled for convenience in the hand. He showed us the coffee plants, the broad platforms with smooth surfaces of cement and raised borders, where the berries were dried in the sun, and the mills where the negroes were at work separating the kernel from the pulp in which it is inclosed.
"These coffee estates," said he, "are already ruined, and the planters are abandoning them as fast as they can; in four years more there will not be a single coffee plantation on the island. They can not afford to raise coffee for the price they get in the market."
I inquired the reason. "It is," replied he, "the extreme dryness of the season when the plant is in flower. If we have rain at this time of the year, we are sure of a good crop; if it does not rain, the harvest is small; and the failure of rain is so common a circumstance that we must leave the cultivation of coffee to the people of St. Domingo and Brazil."
I asked if the plantation could not be converted into a sugar estate.
"Not this," he answered; "it has been cultivated too long. The land was originally rich, but it is exhausted"—tired out, was the expression he used—"we may cultivate maize or rice, for the dry culture of rice succeeds well here, or we may abandon it to grazing. At present we keep a few negroes here, just to gather the berries which ripen, without taking any trouble to preserve the plants, or replace those which die."
I could easily believe from what I saw on this estate, that there must be a great deal of beauty of vegetation in a well-kept coffee plantation, but the formal pattern in which it is disposed, the straight alleys and rows of trees, the squares and parallelograms, showed me that there was no beauty of arrangement. We fell in, before we returned to our inn, with the proprietor, a delicate-looking person, with thin white hands, who had been educated at Boston, and spoke English as if he had never lived anywhere else. His manners, compared with those of his steward, were exceedingly frosty and forbidding, and when we told him of the civility which had been shown us, his looks seemed to say he wished it had been otherwise.
Returning to our inn, we dined, and as the sun grew low, we strolled out to look at the town. It is situated on a clear little stream, over which several bathing-houses are built, their posts standing in the midst of the current. Above the town, it flows between rocky banks, bordered with shrubs, many of them in flower. Below the town, after winding a little way, it enters a cavern yawning in the limestone rock, immediately over which a huge ceyba rises, and stretches its leafy arms in mid-heaven. Down this opening the river throws itself, and is never seen again. This is not a singular instance in Cuba. The island is full of caverns and openings in the rocks, and I am told that many of the streams find subterranean passages to the sea. There is a well at the inn of La Punta, in which a roaring of water is constantly heard. It is the sound of a subterranean stream rushing along a passage in the rocks, and the well is an opening into its roof.
In passing through the town, I was struck with the neat attire of those who inhabited the humblest dwellings. At the door of one of the cottages, I saw a group of children, of different ages, all quite pretty, with oval faces and glittering black eyes, in clean fresh dresses, which, one would think, could scarcely have been kept a moment without being soiled, in that dwelling, with its mud floor. The people of Cuba are sparing in their ablutions; the men do not wash their faces and hands till nearly mid-day, for fear of spasms; and of the women, I am told that many do not wash at all, contenting themselves with rubbing their cheeks and necks with a little aguardiente; but the passion for clean linen, and, among the men, for clean white pantaloons, is universal. Themonterohimself, on a holiday or any public occasion, will sport a shirt of the finest linen, smoothly ironed, and stiffly starched throughout, from the collar downward.
The next day, at half-past eleven, we left our inn, which was also what we call in the United States a country store, where the clerks who had just performed their ablutions and combed their hair, were making segars behind the counter from the tobacco of the Vuelta Abajo, and returned by the railway to Havana. We procured travelling licenses at the cost of four dollars and a half each, for it is the pleasure of the government to levy this tax on strangers who travel, and early the following morning took the train for Matanzas.