Down in the plaza that night a score of ragged men lolled about a cement bench discussing wages and the cost of food. Beans cost a fortune now; sugar was sixteen cents; coffee, their indispensable coffee, thirty-two. They did not mention bread; the Porto Rican of the masses seldom indulges in that luxury. And with the sugarcentralsin the neighborhood paying scarcely a dollar a day, even when one could find work! “I tell you, we working-men are too tame,” concluded one of them; “we should fight, rob....” But he said it in a half-joking, harmless way that is characteristic of his class through all Porto Rico.
It is time, however, that we leave the towns and get out among thejíbaros, as the countrymen are called, from a Spanish word for a domesticated animal that has gone wild again.
The American Railroad of Porto Rico was originally French, as its manager is still. Though it is narrow-gauge, it has a comfort andaseounknown even in Cuba, a cleanliness combined with all the smaller American conveniences, ice water, sanitary paper cups, blotter-roll towels—prohibition has at least done away with the yelping trainboy and made it possible to drink nature’s beverage without exciting comment. Its fares are higher than in the United States,—three cents a kilometer in first and 2¼ in the plain little second-class coaches with their hard wooden benches that make up most of the train. The single first-class car is rarely more than half filled, for all its comfortableswivel chairs. Automobiles and the lay of the land, that makes Ponce less than half as far over the mountain as by rail, accounts for this; though by night the sleeping-car at the rear is fully occupied by men, usually men only, who have adopted the American custom of saving their days for business. The sleeping compartments are arranged in ship’s-cabin size and run diagonally across the car, to leave room for a passageway within the narrow coach. These two-bunk cabins are furnished with individual toilet facilities, thermos bottles of ice water, and electric lights, and many Porto Ricans have actually learned that an open window does not necessarily mean a slumberer turned to a corpse by morning. The trainmen are polite and obliging in an unostentatious way that make our own seem ogres by comparison. In short, it is a diligent, honest little railroad suiting the size of the country and with no other serious fault than a tendency to stop again at another station almost before it has gotten well under way.
For nearly an hour the train circles San Juan bay, the gleaming, heaped-up capital, or its long line of lights, according to the hour, remaining almost within rifle-shot until the crowded suburbs of Bayamón spring up on each side. Then come broadening expanses of cane, with throngs of men and women working in the fields, interspersed with short stretches of arid sand, or meadows bright with pink morning-glories and dotted with splendid reddish cattle. Beyond comes a fruit district. Under Spanish rule scarcely enough fruit was grown in Porto Rico to supply the local demand. The Americans, struck with the excellency of the wild fruit, particularly of the citrus variety, began to develop this almost unknown industry. But among the pathetic sights of the island is to see acre after acre of grape-fruit, unsurpassed in size and quality, rotting on the trees or on the ground beneath them. While Americans are paying fabulous prices for their favorite breakfast fruit, many a grower in Porto Rico is hiring men to haul away the locally despisedtoronjasand bury them. Lack of transportation is the chief answer—that and a bit of market manipulation. Not long ago the discovery that the bottled juice of grapefruit and pineapple made a splendid beverage led a company to undertake what should be a booming enterprise, with the thirsty mainland as chief consumers. But the promoters quickly struck an unexpected snag. The available supply of bottles, strange to relate, was quickly exhausted, and to-day the company manager gazes pensively from his windows across prolific, yet unproductive, orchards.
The pale-green of cane-fields becomes monotonous; then at lengththe blue sea breaks again on the horizon. Beyond Arecibo the railroad runs close along the shore, with almost continuous villages of shaggy huts half hidden among the endless cocoanut-grove that girdles Porto Rico, the waves lapping at the roots of the outmost trees. These without exception are encircled by broad bands of tin. During an epidemic of bubonic plague the mongoose was introduced into the island, as into nearly all the West Indies, to exterminate the rats. The rodents developed new habits and took to climbing the slanting cocoanut trees, which afforded both food and a place of refuge. The bands of tin have served their purpose. To-day both rats and snakes are scarce in Porto Rico, but the inhabitants discovered too late that the chicken-loving mongoose may be an even greater pest than those it has replaced. Cocoanuts brought more than one Porto Rican a quick fortune during the war. Now that the gas-mask has degenerated into a mural decoration, however, immense heaps of the fibrous husks lie shriveling away where the armistice overtook them, and even the favorable state of the copra market seems incapable of shaking the growers out of their racial apathy.
Several pretty towns on knolls against a background of sea attract the eye as the train bends southward along the west coast. Below Quebradillas the railroad swings in a great horseshoe curve down into a little sea-level valley, plunges through two tunnels, and crawls along the extreme edge of a bold precipitous coast, past mammoth tumbled rocks, and all but wetting its rails in the dashing surf. A few tobacco patches spring up here, where the mountains crowd the cane-fields out of existence, women and children patiently hoeing, and men plowing the pale-red soil behind brow-yoked oxen. Crippled Mayagüez drags slowly by, new seas of cane appear, then the splendid plain of San Germán, with its vista of grazing cattle and itspepinos gordos, reddish calabashes clinging to their climbing vines like huge sausages. Beyond, there is little to see, except canefields and the Caribbean, until we rumble into Ponce, spread away up its foothills like a city laid out in the sun to dry. On the southeastern horizon lies an island the natives call Caja de Muertos—“deadman’s box,” and it looks indeed like a coffin, with the lighthouse on its highest point resembling a candle set there by some pious mourner. Local tradition has it that this is the original of Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”
The train turns back from Ponce, but the railroad does not, and one may rumble on behind a smaller engine to Guayama. Some day the company hopes to get a franchise for the eastern end of the islandand encircle it entirely. A private railroad covers a third of the remaining distance as it is. But the traveler bent on circumnavigating all Porto Rico must trust toguaguas, an automobile, or his own exertions through this region, and swinging in a great curve around the Luquillo range, with the cloud-capped summit of the island purple and hazy above him, eventually fetches up once more in sea-lashed San Juan. By this time, I warrant, he will long for other landscapes than spreading canefields.
Sugar was shipped from Porto Rico as early as 1533, but the Spaniards gave it less attention than they did coffee. For one thing their methods were antiquated. Two upright wooden rollers under a thatched roof, turned by a yoke or two of oxen, was the customary cane-crusher. Here and there one of these may be seen to this day. The big open iron kettles in which they boiled the syrup are still strewn around the coast, some of them occupied in the plebeian task of catching rain-water from hovel roofs, many more rusting away like abandoned artillery of a by-gone age. All the coastal belt is dotted with the ruins of old brick sugar-mills, their stocky square chimneys broken off at varying heights from the ground, like aged tombs of methods that have passed away. They do not constitute a direct loss, but rather unavoidable sacrifices to the exacting god of modern progress, for barely sixty per cent. of the sugar contents was extracted by the contrivances of those ox-gaited, each-planter-for-himself days.
It is natural that combinations of former estates, with immense centralengenios, should have followed American possession. To-day four great companies control the sugar output of Porto Rico, from Guánica on the west to Fajardo in the east. Like the mammothcentralof Cuba, they reckon their production in hundreds of thousands of bags and utilize all the aids of modern science in their processes. Their problem, however, is more complex than that in the almost virgin lands of Cuba and Santo Domingo. The acreage available for cane production is definitely limited; virtually all of it has been cultivated for centuries. Charred stumps and logs of recent deforestation are unknown in Porto Rican canefields. Instead there is the acrid scent of patent fertilizers and, particularly in the south, elaborate systems of irrigation. After each cutting the fields must be replanted; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic they reproduce for eight to twelve years. A few areas never before devoted to cane have recently been planted, but they are chiefly small interior valleys and the loftier foothills well back from the coast. For the Porto Rican sugar producer is forced to encroach upon the mountains in a way that his luckier fellows of the larger islands to the westward would scorn, and his fields of cane are sometimes as billowy as a turbulent Atlantic.
There are school accommodations for only half the children of our Porto Rico
There are school accommodations for only half the children of our Porto Rico
There are school accommodations for only half the children of our Porto Rico
The home of a lace-maker in Aquadillo
The home of a lace-maker in Aquadillo
The home of a lace-maker in Aquadillo
The Porto Rican method of making lace
The Porto Rican method of making lace
The Porto Rican method of making lace
Porto Rico was in the midst of a wide-spread strike among the sugar workers during our stay there. All through this busiest month of February there had been constant parades of strikers along the coast roads by day and throngedmitinesin the towns each evening. The paraders were with few exceptions law-abiding and peaceful despite the scores of red flags that followed the huge Stars and Stripes at the head of each procession. When the authorities protested, the strike leaders explained that red had long stood as the symbol of the laboring class in Spanish countries. They were astounded to learn that to people beyond the blue sea that surrounds them, the color meant lawlessness and revolt by violence, and they lost no time in adopting instead a green banner. When this in turn was found to have a similar significance in another island somewhere far away, they chose a white flag. It was not a matter of one color or another, they said, but of sufficient food to feed their hungry families.
Negro spell-binders from the cities, evil-faced fellows for the most part, whose soft hands showed no evidence of ever having wielded a cane-knife, harangued the barefoot multitudes in moonlighted town streets. When the head of the movement was taken to task by neutral fellow-citizens for not choosing lieutenants more capable of arousing general public sympathy and confidence, he replied with a fervent, “I wish to God I could!” But the ranks of Porto Rican workmen do not easily yield men of even the modicum of education required to spread-eagle a public meeting. Held down for centuries to almost the level of serfs, they have little notion of how to use that modern double-edged weapon, the strike. They do not put their heads together, formulate their demands, and carry them to their employers. Inert by nature and training, they plod on until some outside agitator comes along and tells them they shall get higher wages if only they will follow his leadership, whisper to one another that it would be nice to have more money, and quit work, with no funds to support themselves in idleness or any other preparation. It is the old irresponsibility, the lack of foreplanning common to the tropics. Then, that they may not be the losers whichever side wins, they strive to keep on good terms with their employers by telling them that only the fear of violence from their fellows keeps them from coming to work,being so docile by nature that they would not hurt even the feelings of their superiors.
This time the strikers had been encouraged by what they mistook to be federal support. The American Federation of Labor had sent down as investigating delegates two men of forceful Irish wit who were naturally appalled to find their new fellow-citizens living under conditions unequalled even among their ancestral peat-bogs. What they did not recognize was that all over Latin-America, even where land is virtually unlimited and there are no corporations to “exploit” the populace, the masses live in much the same thatched-hut degradation. Their familiarity, with the Porto Rican environment was as negative as their knowledge of the Spanish language; they made the almost universal American mistake of thinking that what is true of the United States is equally so of all other countries, and their straight-forward national temperament made them, no match for the wily, intricate machinations of native politicians.
Porto Rico had not been so lively since the Americans ousted the Spaniards. I had an opportunity of hearing both sides of the case, for with the privilege of the mere observer I was equally welcome—whatever the degree may have been—in the touring car of the delegates and at the dinner-tables of the sugar managers.
“These simple fellows from the States,” said the latter, “think they can solve the problem of over-population by giving $2.50 a day to all laborers, good or bad, weak or strong. The result would be to drive the best workmen out of the country, and leave us, our stock-holders, and the consumers, victims of the poorest. Like the labor union movement everywhere, it would give the advantage to the weakling, the scamper, the time-killer. We have men in our fields who earn $3.50 a day, and who will tell you they do not know why on earth they are striking. Men who can cut six tons of cane a day on piece-work will not cut one ton at day wages. Then there are men so full of the hookworm that they haven’t the strength to earnonedollar a day. Wecentralsinsist on keeping theajustesystem that has always prevailed in Porto Rico—the letting of work by contract to self-appointed gang leaders; and we will not sign a minimum wage scale because there is no responsible person to see that the terms are carried out on the laborer’s side. We refuse to deal with the strikers’ committees because we cannot listen to a lot of bakers and barbers from the towns who do not know sugarcane from swamp reeds. There is nothing but politics back of it all any way. This is a presidential year; that explainsthe sudden interest of politicians in the poor down-trodden laboring class. Our men earn at least $1.75 a day—and they seldom work in the fields after two in the afternoon. Besides that we give every employee a twenty per cent. bonus, a house to live in if he chooses, free medical attention, half-time when they are sick, and the privilege of buying their supplies in our company stores at cost. Cuba pays higher wages, but the companies get most of it back through their stores. We run ours at a loss; I can prove it to you by our books; and we give much to charity. Hungry indeed! Do you know that our biggest sales to our laborers are costly perfumes? They may starve their children, but they can always feed fresh eggs to their fighting-cocks. There is hardly a man of them that is not keeping two or three women. If we paid our men twice what we do, the only result would be that they would lay off every other day. Let them strike! We can always get hillmen from the interior or men from Aguadilla who are only too glad to work for even less than we are paying now.”
I found Santiago Iglesias literally up to his ears in work at the headquarters of the Socialist-Labor party, a few doors from the governor’s palace. About him swarmed several of the foxy-faced individuals he had himself privately deplored as assistants. A powerful man in the prime of life, of pure Spanish blood, the radical Porto Rican senator was quite ready to recapitulate once more his view of the situation. If he was “playing politics”—and what elective government official is not every time he opens his mouth or turns over in bed?—he gave at least the impression of being genuinely distressed at the condition of Porto Rico’s poverty-bred masses. We had conversed for some time in Spanish before he surprised me by breaking forth into a vigorous English, amusing for its curious errors of pronunciation. The minimum wage demanded, for instance, which recurred in almost every sentence, always emerged from his lips with the second f transformed into an s. That is the chief trouble with Santiago, according to his opponents—his methods are “too fisty.”
“There has been a vast improvement in personal liberty in Porto Rico under American rule,” he began. “But the island has been surrendered to Wall Street, to the heartless corporations that always profit most by American expansion. Moreover, American rule has forced upon us American prices—it always does—without giving our people the corresponding income. Formerly all our wealth went to Spain. Now it goes to the States, but with this difference,—underSpanish rule wages were low but the employers were paternal; they thought occasionally about their peons. At least the workers got enough to eat. The corporations that have taken their place are utterly impersonal; the workmen who sweat in the sun for them are no more to the far away stock-holders than the canes that pass between the rollers of their sugar-mills. When they get these magnificent returns on their investment do the Americans who hold stocks and bonds in our greatcentralsever ask themselves how the men who are actually earning them are getting on? No, they sit tight in their comfortable church pews giving thanks to the Lord with a freer conscience than ever did the Spanish conquistadores, for they are too far away ever to see the sufferings oftheirpeons.
“The sugar companies can produce sugar at a hundred dollars a ton; they are getting two hundred and forty. The common stock of the four big ones, paid from fifty-six to seventy dollars last year on every hundred dollars invested, not to mention a lot of extra dividends, and their profits for thiszafrawill be far higher. The island is being pumped dry of its resources and nothing is being put back into it. In the States not twenty per cent. of the national income goes out of the country; the rest goes back into reproduction. In Porto Rico seventy per cent. goes to foreigners, and of the thirty left wealthy Porto Ricans spend a large amount abroad. We do not want our land all used to enrich non-resident stock-holders; we need it to feed our own people. There is not corn-meal and beans enough now to go round, because the big sugarcentralshold all the fertile soil. They have bought all the land about them, even the foot-hills, so that the people cannot plant anything, butmustwork for the companies. Stock-holders are entitled to a fair profit on the capital actually invested—actually, I say—and something for the risk taken—which certainly is not great. But the Porto Ricans, the men, and women, and the scrawny children who do the actual work in the broiling tropical sun should get the rest of it, in wages. We should tax non-resident sugar companies ten per cent. of their income for the improvement of Porto Rico; we should borrow several millions in the States and give our poor people land to cultivate, and pay the loan back out of that tax. But what can we do? The politicians, the high officials are all interested in sugar. They and the corporations form theinvisiblegovernment; they are the law, the police, the rulers, the patriots. Patriots! The instant the Porto Rican income-tax was set at half that in the States the corporations made Porto Rico their legal residence. When the federal governmentwould not stand for the trick and forced them to pay the balance they cried unto high Heaven. Porto Rican law forbids any company or individual to own more than five hundred acres. They get around the law by trickery, by dividing the holdings among the members of the same family, by making fake divisions of company stock. The Secretary of War and other federal officials come down here to ‘investigate.’ They motor across our beautiful mountains, have two or three banquets in the homes of the rich or thecentralmanagers, and the newspapers in the States shout ‘Great Prosperity in Porto Rico!’ I tell you it is the criminal lack of equity, the same old blindness of the landed classes the world over and in all ages that is driving Porto Rico into the camp of the violent radicals.
“You admire our fine roads. All visitors do. You do not realize that they were built because the corporations needed them. And did we pay for them by taxing the corporations? We did not. We paid for them by government bonds—that is, we charged them up to the children of the peons. You have probably found that we have inadequate school facilities. The corporations, the invisible government, do not want the masses educated, because then they would not have left any easily manipulated laboring class. Nor do I take much stock in this over-population idea. At least I should like to see the half million untilled acres turned over to the people before I will believe emigration is necessary. Sixty per cent. of Porto Rico is uncultivated, yet eighty per cent. of the population goes to bed hungry every night in the year. Then there is this cry of hookworm. Do not let the Rockefeller Foundation, a direct descendant of the capitalists, tell you lies about ‘anemia.’ The anemia of Porto Rico comes from no worm, but from the fact that the people are always hungry. It is the sordid miserliness of corporations, bent on keeping our peons reduced to the level of serfs, in order that they may always have a cheap supply of labor, that is the fundamental cause of the misery of Porto Rico, of the naked, barefoot, hungry, schoolless, homeless desolation of the working classes.”
The calm and neutral observer, neither underfed nor blessed with the task of clipping sugar-stock coupons, detects a certain amount of froth on the statements of both parties to the controversy in Porto Rico. But he cannot but wonder why the sweat-stained laborers in the corn-fields should be seen wearily tramping homeward to a one-room thatched hovel to share a few boiled roots with a slattern woman and a swarm of thin-shanked children while the Americans who direct them fromthe armchair comfort of fan-cooled offices stroll toward capacious bungalows, pausing on the way for a game of tennis in the company compound, and sit down to a faultless dinner amid all that appeals to the aesthetic senses. Least of all can he reconcile the vision of other Americans, whose only part in the production of sugar is the collecting of dividends, rolling about the island in luxurious touring cars, with the sight of the toil-worn, ragged workers whose uncouth appearance arouses the haughty travelers to snorts of scorn or falsetto shrieks of “how picturesque.”
The problem in Porto Rico, as the reader has long since suspected, is the antithesis of that in Santo Domingo. In the latter island the difficulty is to get laborers enough to develop the country; in the former it is to find labor enough to occupy the swarming population. Barely three-fourths of a million people are scattered through the broad insular wilderness to the westward; the census of 1920 shows little Porto Rico crowded with 1,263,474 inhabitants, that is nearly four hundred persons to the square mile. There are several reasons for this discrepancy; for one thing Santo Domingo has been fighting itself for generations, while Porto Rico has never had a revolution. The obvious solution of the problem has two serious drawbacks. The Dominicans do not welcome immigration; they wish to keep their country to themselves. The Porto Rican is inordinately fond of his birthplace. Send him to the most distant part of the world and he is sure sooner or later to come back to his beloved Borinquen. Emigration from the island can reach even moderate success only when entire families are sent. The letters of Porto Rican soldiers no nearer the front than Florida or Panama were filled with wails of homesickness that would have been pitiful had they not been tinged with what to the unemotional Anglo-Saxon was a suggestion of the ludicrous.
There is a Japanese effect in the density of population of our little West Indian colony. When the traveler has motored for hours without once getting out of sight of human habitations, when he has noted how the unpainted little shacks speckle the steepest hillside, even among the high mountains, when he has seen the endless clusters of hovels that surround every town, whether of the coast or the interior, he will come to realize the crowded condition. If he is a trifle observant, he will also see everywhere signs of the scarcity of work. Men lounging in the doors of their huts in the middle of the day, surrounded by pale women and children sucking a joint of sugar-cane, are not alwaysloafers; in many cases they have nowhere to go and work. While the women toil at making lace, drawn-work, or hats, the males turn their hands to anything that the incessant struggle for livelihood suggests. The man who spends two days in weaving a laundry basket and plods fifteen or twenty miles to sell it for sixty cents is only one of a thousand commonplace sights along the island highways.
A job is a prize in Porto Rico. If one is offered, applicants swarm; many a man “lays off” in order to lend his job to his brother, his cousin, or hiscompadre. Naturally, employers take advantage of this condition. The American labor delegates told the chief of police that he should be the first to lead his men on strike, for certainly he could not keep them honest at forty-five dollars a month.
“Oh, yes, I can,” retorted the chief, “for while we have barely eight hundred on the force, there are twelve thousand on the waiting-list, and every policeman knows that if he is fired, he will have to go back to punching bullocks at a third as much.”Mozosand chambermaids in the best hotels seldom get more than five dollars a month. Street-car men get from sixteen to twenty-five cents an hour, depending on the length of service. In a large clothing factory of Mayagüez, fitted with motor-run sewing-machines, only a few of the women get a dollar a day; the majority average fifty cents. The law, of course, requires that they be paid a minimum wage of a dollar; but what is a mere law among a teeming population which the Spaniards spent four centuries in training to bemansoand uncomplaining? The favorite trick is to pay the dollar, and then fine the women fifty cents for not having done sufficient work. Among the regrettable sights of the island are groups of callous emissaries frequenting the leading hotels who have been sent down as agents of certain American department stores to reap advantage from the local poverty. Thesecomisionistasmotor about the island, placing orders with the wretched native women, but by piece-work, you may be sure, to avoid the requirement of paying a dollar a day. American women who are paying several times what they once did for Porto Rican lace, blouses, and drawn-work, may fancy that some of this increase goes to the humblemujereswho do the work. Not at all. They are still toiling in their miserable little huts at the same ludicrous prices, while their products are being sold on the “bargain” counters in our large cities, at several hundred per cent. profit. So thoroughly have these touts combed the country that the individual can nowhere buy of the makers; their work has all been contracted far in advance.
CHAPTER XIIWANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN
The American who, noting the Stars and Stripes flying everywhere and post-offices selling the old familiar postage-stamps, fancies he is back in his native land again is due for a shock. Though it has been Americanized industrially, Porto Rico has changed but little in its every-day life. Step out of one of the three principal hotels of the capital and you are in a foreign land. Spanish is as necessary to the traveler in Porto Rico who intends to get out of the Condado-Vanderbilt-automobile belt as it is in Cuba, Mexico, or South America. Though it is not quite true that “base-ball and poker are the only signs of American influence,” the other evidences might be counted on the fingers. There is the use of personal checks in place of actual money, for instance; venders of chickens carry them in baskets instead of by the legs. Offenders are tried by a jury of their peers; the native regiment wears the uniform of our regular army; it would take deep reflection to think of many more instances. Only one daily newspaper in Porto Rico has an English edition. The first American theatrical company to visit the island since the United States took it over was due the week we left. There are barely ten thousand American residents; except in the capital and the heart of two or three other cities one attracts as much gaping attention as in the wilds of Bolivia. In a way this conservatism is one of the charms of the island. The mere traveler is agreeably disappointed to find that it has not been “Americanized” in the unpleasant sense of the word, that it has kept much of its picturesque, old-world atmosphere.
English is little spoken in Porto Rico. That is another of the surprises it has in store for us, at least for those of us old enough to remember what a splurge we made of swamping the island with American teachers soon after we took it over. It is indeed the “official” language, but the officials who speak it are rare, unless they come from the United States, in which case they are almost certain to be equally ignorant of Spanish. The governor never stirs abroad without an interpreter. The chief of police rarely ventures a few words ofCastilian, though there is scarcely a patrolman even in the heart of San Juan who can answer the simplest question in English. Can any one think up a valid reason why a fair command of the official tongue should not be required of natives seeking government employment? Spanish is a delightful language; its own children are no more fond of it than I am. But after all, Porto Rico differs from the rest of Spanish-America, in that it is a part of the United States. She aspires some day to statehood. That day should not come until she knows English; it is not a question of one language in place of another, but of mutual understanding.
To be sure, English is compulsory in all the schools of the island, but few pupils learn it thoroughly enough to retain it through life. Most of them can read it in a parrot-like manner; if they speak it at all, it is to shout some half-intelligible phrase after a passing American. “Aw right” is about the only expression that has been thoroughly Portoricanized. That is not exactly the fault of the pupils. The ear shudders at the “English” spoken even by those teachers who are supposed to be specialists in it; the rest are little short of incomprehensible. Passed on from one such instructor to another, the English that finally comes down to the pupils resembles the original about as much as an oft-repeated bit of gossip resembles the original facts. It might almost be said that there has been no progress made in teaching Porto Rico English in the twenty years of American rule, or at least in the last fifteen of them.
On the whole the state of education in Porto Rico is a disappointment. It is a surprise to the visitor who has thought this essential matter was settled long ago to find sixty per cent. of the population illiterate, few countrymen over thirty who can read, and scarcely a third of the children of school age in school. We had, of course, much to make up. In 1898, after four centuries of ostensibly civilized government, there was but one building on the island specially erected for educational purposes. The total enrollment in the schools, with a population of nearly a million, was 26,000. Three-fourths of the males of voting age were wholly illiterate. Pupils were “farmed out,” teachers drew salaries without ever going near a schoolhouse, all the old Spanish tricks were in full swing. But that was twenty years ago. Yet the department of education asks for twenty years more to bring things up to a “reasonable standard.” Why? Moreover, at the rate things have been moving it will not nearly do that. The thousand and more school-buildings that have been erected, tropical Spanish in architecture,well lighted and ventilated, of concrete in the towns and wood in the country, their names in English over the entrances, are all very well, but they are far from sufficient. The census taken just before our arrival showed almost a half million children of school age, with 181,716 enrolled, and 146,561 in average attendance. Of the 2984 teachers only 148 were Americans. The only inducement Porto Rico offers to instructors from “the States” is an appeal to the love of adventure. Those who wish to make a trip to the tropics may be sure of a position—at a lower salary than they receive at home, and with the privilege of paying their own passages down and back to profiteering steamship companies. No wonder the “English” of Porto Rico is going to seed.
In the graded school system of the towns all instruction is given in that maltreated tongue except the class in Spanish. In the rural schools all the work is given in Spanish except a class in so-called English as a special subject in all grades above the first. The University of Porto Rico, seventeen years old, has fewer than a thousand students. The Agricultural College in Mayagüez has some two hundred. Private institutions like the Polytechnic Institute of San Germán are doing yeoman service, but why should the education of Porto Rico depend on private enterprise? The natives claim that the trouble is that nearly all the commissioners of education sent down from the United States have been political appointees; the latter lay the blame to the fact that salaries and disbursements are set by the native legislature. Somewhere between the two the education of Porto Rico is suffering.
For all their misfortunes, or perhaps because of them, the Porto Ricans, especially outside the large cities, are hospitable and soft-mannered, characterized by a constant courtesy and a solicitude to please those with whom they come in contact, with little of that bruskness of intercourse for which “the Mainland” is notorious. The island has a less grasping, less materialistic atmosphere than Cuba, it is less sinister, less cynical, more naïve, its people are more primitive and simple, though industrial oppression and American influence are slowly changing them in this regard. Their naïveté is often delightful. It is reported that a company of youthfuljíbarosdrafted into the Federal service during the war waited on their captain one day and asked for their “time,” as they did not care for a job in which they had to wear shoes! The children are rarely boisterous, rather well-bred, even where little chance for breeding exists. As a race they have keptmany of the peculiarities of their Spanish ancestry. They are still Latin Americans in their over-developed personal pride and their lack of a sense of humor. Moorish seclusion of women still raises its head among the “best families.” The horror in the slightest suggestion of manual labor, of a lowering of caste, still oppresses the “upper” class. Few of them would dream of carrying their own suitcase or a package from a store, even though they must abandon them for lack of a peon. Though they are far more polite than our own club-swingers in superficial matters, it has required persistent training to get the insular police to forget their high standing and help across the street women or children of the socially inferior class. Finally, Porto Ricans are little to be depended upon in the matter of time;mañanais still their watchword despite twenty years of Anglo-Saxon bustle. But, for that matter, Americans get hopelessly irresponsible on this same subject after a few years in the tropics.
The unprepared visitor will find Porto Ricans astonishingly white, especially in the interior. There are few full negroes on the island; sixty per cent. of the population have straight hair. Yet there is a motley mixture of races, without rhyme or reason from our point of view. Mulatto estate owners may have pure white peons working for them; a native octoroon is frequently seen ordering about a Gallego servant from Spain. There is still considerable evidence of Indian blood in the Porto Rican physiognomy, for the aborigines, taking refuge in the high mountains, were wiped out only by assimilation. Then there are Japanese or Chinese features peering forth from many a hybrid face. The Spaniards brought in coolies to work on the military roads, and they mixed freely with all the lower ranks of the population. Yet pure-blooded Orientals are conspicuous by their absence; so overcrowded a community does not appeal even to the ubiquitous Chinese laundryman. For the same reason Jews, Syrians, and Armenians have not invaded the island in any great numbers, though one now and then meets an olive-skinned peddler tramping from village to town with a great flat basket filled with bolts of calico and the like on his cylindrical head.
Small commerce is almost entirely in the hands of Spaniards, thanks to whom the mixture of races that made Latin-America a hybrid is still going on—to say nothing of an exploiting of the simplejíbarosthat would have been scorned by the old straight-forward, sword-brandishing conquistadores. The modern Spaniard, especially theCanary Islanders, come over as clerks, live like dogs until they have acquired an interest in their master’s business, and eventually set up a little store for themselves. Sharp, thrifty, heartless, utterly devoid of any ideal than the amassing of a fortune, they resort to every species of trickery to increase their already exorbitant profits. The favorite scheme is to get the naïve countrymen into a gambling game,manigua, the native card-game, for instance, and to urge them on after their scanty funds are exhausted with a sweet-voiced “Don’t let that worry you,Chico, I’ll lend you all you want. Go ahead and play,” until they have a mortgage on “Chico’s” little farm or have forced him to sign a contract to sell them all his coffee at half the market price. Then when his fortune is made, the wily Iberian leaves each of his concubines and her half-breed flock of children a little hut, goes back to Spain, marries, and bequeaths his wealth to his legitimate offspring. Many a little plantation is still encumbered with these “manigua mortgages.”
To the casual observer there seems to be no color-line in Porto Rico; but in home life and social matters there is comparatively little mingling of whites and blacks above the peon class. In the Agricultural College at Mayagüez, for instance, this question is left entirely to the pupils. The students draw their own color-line. Clubs are formed that take in only white members, though a few of these might not pass muster among Americans. The colored boys do not form clubs because they cannot afford to do so. In the early days the teachers gave a dance to which all students were invited without distinction. But the darker youths brought up all sorts of female companions from theplayahovels, and the experiment was never repeated. Yet it is no unusual sight to see a white and a mulatto youth sharing a textbook in the shade of a campus mango-tree.
There remain few strictly insular customs to distinguish Porto Rico from the rest of Latin-America. The native musical instrument is a calabash, or gourd, with a roughened surface over which a steel wire is rubbed, producing a half-mournful, rasping sound almost without cadence. Thanks perhaps to American influence, the church bells are musical and are rung only by day, in grateful contrast to the incessant, broken-boiler din of other Spanish-settled countries. TheRosario, a kind of native wake, consists of all-night singing by the friends and relatives of the recent dead. Possibly the most universal local custom is that of using barbed-wire fences as clothes-lines, to the misfortune even of the linen of trustful visitors. The panacea for all rural ills seems to be the tying of a white cloth about the head. Doctors seldomgo into the country, but let the sick be brought in to them, whatever the stage of their illness. More than ten thousand, chiefly of the hut-dwelling class, died of “flu” during the winter of 1918–19, largely because of this inertia of physicians.
One must not lose sight of their history in judging the present condition of the Porto Rican masses. It is only fifty years since slaves over sixty and under three were liberated, and later still that slavery was entirely abolished. No wonder the owners were glad to be rid of what fast breeding had made a burden, especially with free labor at twenty cents a day. Yet they were indemnified with eight million dollars from the insular revenues. Nor was servitude confined to Africans. Spain long used Porto Rico as a penal colony, and when public works no longer required them, the convicts were turned loose to shift for themselves. Most of them took to the mountains where the “poor white” population is numerous to this day. Yet the later generations are no more criminal than the Australians; if there is much petty thieving, it is natural in a hungry, overcrowded community.
The insular police established by the Americans have an efficiency rare in tropical countries. Their detective force rounds up a larger percentage of law-breakers than almost any other such body in the world. The insular character of their beat is to their advantage, of course; few Porto Ricans can swim. The island has long since been “cleaned up,” and the unarmed stranger is safer in its remotest corners than on Broadway. In olden days the Porto Rican was as fond of making himself a walking arsenal as the Dominican; ten thousand revolvers were seized in nine years, and miscellaneous weapons too numerous to count have been confiscated and destroyed. To-day, except in the rare cases when a desperado like “Chuchu” breaks loose, or strikers grow troublesome, the spotlessly uniformed insular force has little to do but to enforce the unpopular laws that have come with American rule.
Porto Rico voted herself dry in 1917. Three varying reasons are given for this unnatural action, according to the point of view of the speaker. Missionaries assert that, thanks largely to their work with the populace, the hungry rank and file determined thattheirchildren should not grow up under the alcoholic burden that had blasted their own success in life. Scoffers claim the people were misled by psychological suggestion. The majority make the more likely assertion that the result was largely due to a mistake on the part of the ignorant peons. The “dries” chose as their party emblem the green cocoanut,a favorite rural beverage. Their opponents decorated the head of their ballot with a bottle. Now, the bottle suggests to thejíbarosof the hills the Spaniards who keep the liquor shops, and they hate the Spaniards as fiercely as they are capable of hating anything. Whatever the workings of their obscure minds, the unshaven countrymen came down out of the mountains to the polls, and next morning Porto Rico woke up to find herself, to her unbounded surprise, “bone-dry.” The mere fact that the politicians and the “influential citizens” almost in a body, and even the American governor, who saw insular revenues cut down when they sadly needed building up, were against the change had nothing to do with the case. Since then the insular police have confiscated hundreds of home-made stills and thousands of gallons of illicit liquor. It is rumored that they would like to indict the Standard Oil Company as an accessory before the fact, for virtually all the stills that languish in the police museum in San Juan are made of the world-wide five-gallon oil can, some of them ingenious in the extreme.
Cockfighting was forbidden by American edict soon after we took over the island—and in retaliation the Porto Rican Legislature forbade prize-fighting, even “practice bouts.” But there is no law against keeping fighting-cocks, and where there are game-cocks there is bound to be fighting, at least in Latin-America. The police are on the constant lookout for clandestineriñas de gallos. One point in favor of the sleuths is that, though they cannot arrest people for harboring prize roosters, they can bring them up on the charge of cruelty to animals if they pick and trim the birds as proper preparation for battle requires. Americans who have lived long in Porto Rico assert that cock-fighting and the lottery are so indigenous to the island that there is little hope of really stamping them out. Indeed, even the police are in sympathy with the sport, though they may not let that sympathy interfere with doing their duty. High American officials sometimes ask what there is wrong in running a lottery, so long as other forms of gambling are permitted, especially as the old government lottery kept up many benevolences. Why, they ask, should not the poor man be allowed to “take a chance” as well as speculators on the stock exchange? Roosters andbilletesare two things that are sure to come back if Porto Rico wins her autonomy during the life of the present inhabitants. Possibly the next generation will be like-minded; one of the absorbing tasks of the insular police is to keep street urchins from gambling on the numbers of passing automobiles.
It is not surprising that Porto Rico has more than her share ofjuvenile offenders. Sexual morality is on a low plane in the island. Though there is less public vice than with us, the custom of even the “best citizens” to establish “outside families” is wide-spread. Even the “Washington of Porto Rico,” who is pointed out as the model man of the island, always kept two or threequeridas, and lost none of his high standing with the natives for that reason. Estate owners are well-nigh as free with the pretty wives of their peons as were old feudal lords. Women of this class are often more proud to have a son by the “señor” than by their own husbands. The latter are easy-going to a degree unknown among us; they may be cajoled by presents or threatened with discharge—and where else shall they find a spot to live on?—or at worst they can seek consolation in the arms of their ownqueridas. The men usually acknowledge their illegal children without hypocrisy, but they frequently abandon them to their own devices. Homeless children are one of the problems of all Porto Rican cities; in San Germán a gang of little ruffians roost in trees by night. The cook of an American missionary family openly gave all her wages, except what went for the rent of her hovel, to her “man,” who was married to another. It was not that he demanded it; there is little of the “white slave” attitude in Porto Rico, but she was proud to do so and it iscostumbre del país. Much as they deplored such an employee, the missionaries endured her, knowing only too well by experience that they might look farther and fare worse. Few Porto Ricans of the better class permit their women to go to confession, however strictly they keep up the other forms of religion. Out of church the priests are frankly men like other men, and seldom have any hesitancy in admitting it. One famous for his pulpit eloquence brazenly boasts himself “the most successful lover in Porto Rico.”
It is natural that there should be a certain political unrest in Porto Rico. The island does not know, for instance—nor does any one else, apparently—whether it is a colony or a possession of the United States, or whether it is an integral part of it. A bit of history is required to explain the situation. The island was under the jurisdiction of Santo Domingo from its settling to the end of the sixteenth century, when a royal decree made it an independent colony. For a long time it was not self-supporting—thanks, no doubt, largely to the dishonesty of its governors. Its government became such a burden that Spain assigned a certain proportion of the treasure it was drawing from Mexico to support it. Incidentally this came near making Porto RicoBritish, for ships bringing funds from Mexico were repeatedly made the objects of attack, and the commander of one of these fleets once attempted to occupy the island, but disease among his soldiers forced him to abandon the enterprise, taking with him only such trophies as he could tear from churches and fortresses. When, a hundred years ago, the wave of rebellion swept over all the Spanish colonies, Santo Domingo declared her independence and offered to coöperate with Porto Rico in winning hers also; but a majority of the inhabitants remained loyal to the crown. In 1887 a popular assembly in Ponce, while acknowledging allegiance to Spain, demanded a certain measure of autonomy. There was danger that the Cuban insurgents would send an expedition to Porto Rico to join the malcontents there. Hence on November 28, 1897, Spain granted Porto Rico local government in so far as internal affairs, budgets, customs, and treaties of commerce were concerned. She was to have an elective legislature, an upper house appointed by the governor, and a cabinet composed of residents of the island. The following February such a cabinet was appointed, and on March 27—note the date—elections were held. In other words Porto Rico had won autonomy without recourse to bloodshed, and was on the eve of exercising it when theMainewas blown up. Moreover, she had never in her history asked to be separated from Spain.
When the Americans came, a postal system was organized, the government lottery was suppressed, freedom of speech and of the press was restored, a police force of natives under American officials was established, strict sanitary measures were adopted, free schools were opened, provision was made for the writ of habeas corpus and jury trials, the courts were reorganized, imprisonment for political offenses, chains and solitary confinement were abolished, the foreclosure of mortgages was temporarily suspended, Spanish currency was replaced by American, local officials were elected, and a civil government was established on May 1, 1900. Note, however, that with all this Porto Rico did not get as much autonomy as it had already won from Spain. Gradually the island has almost reached the point politically where the Spanish-American War found it, but meanwhile there had been much discontent. Then along came the “Jones bill.” This provides for an elective legislature, extends the appointive judiciary system, admits a delegate to our Congress, and grants American citizenship to Porto Ricans. But the acts of the insular legislature must be approved by the American governor, and six of the heads of departments that make up the Executive Council are Americans. The Porto Ricans chafe at citizenship without statehood. The island complains that it is an organized but not an incorporated territory of the United States. Though it enjoys many of the rights of territories, and a larger exemption from federal taxation than ever did any other American territory, it is not politically happy.