University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XI.

Took the train for Limonar, at 2.30 p.m.

There are three classes of cars, all after the
American model, the first of about the condition
of our first-class cars when on the point
of being condemned as worn out; the second,
a little plainer; and the third, only covered
wagons with benches. The car I entered had
"Davenport & Co., makers, Cambridgeport,
Mass.," familiarly on its front, and the next
had "Eaton, Gilbert & Co., Troy, N. York."
The brakemen on the train are Coolies, one of
them a handsome lad, with coarse, black hair,
that lay gracefully about his head, and eyes
handsome, though of the Chinese pattern.
They were all dressed in the common shirt,
trowsers and hat, and, but for their eyes, might
be taken for men of any of the Oriental races.

As we leave Matanzas, we rise on an ascending

grade, and the bay and city lie open
before us. The bay is deep on the western
shore, under the ridge of the Cumbre, and there
the vessels lie at anchor; while the rest of the
bay is shallow, and its water, in this state of
the sky and light, is of a pale green color.
The lighters, with sail and oar, are plying between
the quays and the vessels below. All is
pretty and quiet and warm, but the scene has
none of those regal points, that so impress
themselves on the imagination and memory
in the surroundings of Havana.

I am now to get my first view of the interior
of Cuba. I could not have a more favorable
day. The air is clear, and not excessively
hot. The soft clouds float midway in the
serene sky, the sun shines fair and bright,
and the luxuriance of a perpetual summer
covers the face of nature. These strange
palm-trees everywhere! I cannot yet feel at
home among them. Many of the other trees
are like our own, and though, tropical in
fact, look to the eye as if they might grow as
well in New England as here. But the royal
palm looks so intensely and exclusively tropical!

It cannot grow beyond this narrow belt
of the earth's surface. Its long, thin body, so
straight and so smooth, swathed from the foot
—in a tight bandage of gray canvas, leaving
only its deep-green neck, and over that its crest
and plumage of deep-green leaves! It gives
no shade, and bears no fruit that is valued by
men. And it has no beauty to atone for those
wants. Yet it has more than beauty,—a
strange fascination over the eye and the fancy,
that will never allow it to be overlooked or
forgotten. The palm-tree seems a kind of
lusus naturœ to the northern eye—an exotic
wherever you meet it. It seems to be conscious
of its want of usefulness for food or
shade, yet has a dignity of its own, a pride
of unmixed blood and royal descent,—the
hidalgo of the soil.

What are those groves and clusters of
small growth, looking like Indian corn in a
state of transmigration into trees, the stalk
turning into a trunk, a thin soft coating half
changed to bark, and the ears of corn turning
into melons? Those are the bananas and
plantains, as their bunches of green and

yellow fruits plainly enough indicate, when
you come nearer. But, that sad, weeping
tree, its long yellow-green leaves drooping
to the ground! What can that be? It has
a green fruit like a melon. There it is
again, in groves! I interrupt my neighbor's
tenth cigarrito, to ask him the name
of the tree. It is the cocoa! And that soft
green melon becomes the hard shell we break
with a hammer. Other trees there are, in
abundance, of various forms and foliage, but
they might have grown in New England or
New York, so far as the eye can teach us;
but the palm, the cocoa, the banana and plantain
are the characteristic trees you could not
possibly meet with in any other zone.

Thickets,—jungles I might call them—
abound. It seems as if a bird could hardly
get through them; yet they are rich with wild
flowers of all forms and colors, the white, the
purple, the pink, and the blue. The trees are
full of birds of all plumage. There is one
like our brilliant oriole. I cannot hear their
notes, for the clatter of the train. Stone
fences, neatly laid up, run across the lands;

—not of our cold bluish-gray granite, the
color, as a friend once said, of a miser's eye,
but of soft, warm brown and russet, and
well overgrown with creepers, and fringed with
flowers. There are avenues, and here are
clumps of the prim orange-tree, with its
dense and deep-green polished foliage gleaming
with golden fruit. Now we come to
acres upon acres of the sugar-cane, looking
at a distance like fields of overgrown broomcorn.
It grows to the height of eight or ten
feet, and very thick. An army could be hidden
in it. This soil must be deeply and
intensely fertile.

There, at the end of an avenue of palms,
in a nest of shade-trees, is a group of white
buildings, with a sea of cane-fields about
it, with one high furnace-chimney, pouring
out its volume of black smoke. This is a
sugar plantation,—my first sight of an ingenio;
and the chimney is for the steam
works of the sugar-house. It is the height
of the sugar season, and the untiring engine
toils and smokes day and night. Ox carts,
loaded with cane, are moving slowly to the

sugar-house from the fields; and about the
house, and in the fields, in various attitudes
and motions of labor, are the negroes,
men and women and children, some cutting
the cane, some loading the carts, and some
tending the mill and the furnace. It is a
busy scene of distant industry, in the afternoon
sun of a languid Cuban day.

Now these groups of white one-story buildings
become more frequent, sometimes very
near each other, all having the same character,
—the group of white buildings, the mill, with
its tall furnace-chimney, and the look of a distillery,
and all differing from each other only
in the number and extent of the buildings, or
in the ornament and comfort of shade-trees and
avenues about them. Some are approached
by broad alleys of the palm, or mango, or
orange, and have gardens around them, and
stand under clusters of shade-trees; while
others glitter in the hot sun, on the flat sea of
cane-fields, with only a little oasis of shade-trees
and fruit-trees immediately about the
houses.

I now begin to feel that I am in Cuba;

in the tropical, rich, sugar-growing, slave-tilled
Cuba. Heretofore, I have seen only
the cities and their environs, in which there
are more things that are common to the
rest of the world. The country life tells the
story of any people that have a country life.
The New England farm-house shows the heart
of New England. The mansion-house and
cottage show the heart of Old England. The
plantation life that I am seeing and about to
see, tells the story of Cuba, the Cuba that
has been and that is.

As we stop at one station, which seems
to be in the middle of a cane-field, the negroes
and Coolies go to the cane, slash off
a piece with their knives, cut off the rind,
and chew the stick of soft, saccharine pulp,
the juice running out of their mouths as they
eat. They seem to enjoy it so highly, that I
am tempted to try the taste of it, myself. But
I shall have time for all this at La Ariadne.

These stations consist merely of one or two
buildings, where the produce of the neighborhood
is collected for transportation, and at
which there are very few passengers. The

railroad is intended for the carriage of sugar
and other produce, and gets its support almost
entirely in that way; for it runs through a
sparse, rural population, where there are no
towns; yet so large and valuable is the sugar
crop that I believe the road is well supported.
At each station, are its hangers-on of free negroes,
a few slaves on duty as carriers, a few
low whites, and now and then some one who
looks as if he might be an overseer or mayoral
of a plantation.

Limonar, appears in large letters on the
small building where we next stop, and I get
out and inquire of a squad of idlers for the
plantation of Señor C. They point
to a group of white buildings, about a quarter
of a mile distant, standing prettily under
high shade-trees, and approached by an avenue
of orange-trees. Getting a tall negro to
shoulder my bag, for a real, I walk to the
house. It is an afternoon of exquisite beauty.
How can any one have a weather sensation,
in such an air as this? There is no current
of the slightest chill anywhere, neither is it
oppressively hot. The air is serene and pure

and light. The sky gives its mild assurance
of settled fair weather. All about me
is rich verdure, over a gently undulating surface
of deeply fertile country, with here and
there a high hill in the horizon, and, on one
side, a ridge that may be called mountains.
There is no sound but that of the birds, and in
the next tree they may be counted by hundreds.
Wild flowers, of all colors and scents,
cover the ground and the thickets. This is
the famous red earth, too. The avenue looks
as if it had been laid down with pulverized
brick, and all the dust on any object you see is
red. Now we turn into the straight avenue of
orange-trees,—prim, deep-green trees, glittering
with golden fruit. Here is the one-story,
high-roofed house, with long, high piazzas.
There is a high wall, carefully whitewashed,
enclosing a square with one gate, looking like
a garrisoned spot. That must be the negroes'
quarters; for there is a group of little negroes
at the gate, looking earnestly at the approaching
stranger. Beyond is the sugar-house, and
the smoking chimney, and the ox carts, and the
field hands. Through the wide, open door of
the mansion, I see two gentlemen at dinner, an
older and a younger,—the head of gray, and
the head of black, and two negro women, one
serving, and the other swinging her brush to
disperse the flies. Two big, deep-mouthed
hounds come out and bark; and the younger
gentleman looks at us, comes out, and calls
off the dogs. My negro stops at the path and
touches his hat, waiting permission to go to
the piazza with the luggage; for negroes do
not go to the house door without previous
leave, in strictly ordered plantations. I deliver
my letter, and in a moment am received with
such cordial welcome that I am made to feel
as if I had conferred a favor by coming out
to see them.[1]