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English Failure in the West Indies: Cuba

One of the most striking features of the scenery of cultivated Cuba is the Avenue of Palms. The Royal Palm is the most stately of trees. The trunk is so tough that it will often turn rifle balls that would strike through an ordinary wood. The palms rarely attain the height of 100 feet, but their grace makes them seem taller. When the flaunting leaf in order falls, it brings with it some feet of green husk of the tree which, as it grows, sheds the lower leaf always, so that there is the elegant trunk with its splendid plumage held on high, feathery and brilliant. The cast off envelope is used to cover bales of tobacco and the whole tree is admirably adapted to the wants of the people. Standing in delicate grandeur along the roads, these palms remind one of the Lombardy poplars trimmed to a top-knot of foliage that line the turnpikes of France, but the palm seems to tell tales in whispers of Egypt and the Orient. Doubtless it was the palm in Cuba that confirmed to Columbus his fancy when he landed, that he had found Cipango or Cathay--lands of Asiatic mystery. The once opulent planters of the Island were fond, in the days of pomp, of approaching their country palaces through avenues of royal palms, and now the solemn, neglected trees tell of the glories of the days that are gone. One of the beauties of Havana, of the most venerable associations, is the chapel erected on the spot where the first mass was celebrated in the New World. The service was under a noble tree, one of the giants of the Cuban forests, the Cieba; and not that tree, but one of the kind, rises above the snowy marble of the chapel and is reverently regarded. The location is between the palace and the landing.

Havana is paved with granite and harder stone blocks. The streets are excessively noisy, and, as a rule, unclean. It is thought remarkable in Washington city that dust arises within four hours after a shower. In Havana one hour after the streets are flooded, under the flaming sun and high wind, dust resumes its sway.

The most splendid residences in the city are of modest exteriors, but when you walk in, there are "marble halls" to remember in dreams, and areas surrounded with carved galleries, and floored as with solid snow, where the merchant princes and sugar and tobacco planters, before the evil days, sat in caned chairs and smoked under the stars.

There is not a fireplace to warm a room, or a window shielded with glass in the city, but there are openings from all sorts of structures on the streets--apertures guarded by bars of steel, often decorative, always strong, and each with two sets of curtains, and two of shutters; and there is one great charm, the highest achievement of architecture is ventilation. The beautiful picture, from a photograph of the corridor of the Havana casino, is valuable for displaying the splendor of the cool interiors of the highest class of buildings the Spanish race have reared in the tropics. It has been said that the tropical Spaniard is an exaggeration of the Spaniard at home--the Spanish characteristics, made picturesque, appear. The general expression of Havana, as compared with that of the grand old cities in Spain, gives a hint of this.

My gigantic eastern window, twenty feet high and eight feet wide, has the brilliant narrow frame of colored glass and two sets of shutters, the outer one with open work, by which the air may be regulated, and the inner of solid timber, behind which one might laugh a siege to scorn, if trouble came in that form. The shutters opened, the windows are festooned with lace curtains, and beyond, far out over the street, is a white balcony. When I enjoy one of many rocking chairs on this marble projection, the snowy form of Isabella, shining in the light of the moon and the electric lamps, is straight before me, and far down the Avenue of Parks shines the light of the famous Moro Castle--not a powerful fortress, any more, they say, but a gloomy, picturesque structure at which the American girls passing that way will forever, no doubt, snap their Kodaks. This would be a fine place to burn Cuban tobacco. The window shutters and door are of blue frames and gray panels. The mighty walls are a mournful green with gold moulding running around the ceiling and the door and the windows, and separating the corners that are a deeper blue than the great expanse of colors, from the other shade. There are in this enchanted apartment, including the floor, four distinct blues and three greens; and I trace two other blue tints, and crimson and orange, and some specks of rainbow mixture in the spread on the bed, which one is supposed to pull over the knees when midnight cools the air in sultry midwinter! The Spanish yellow predominates in the upper and inner window curtains--but, as they are six feet beyond reach, one does not become familiar with them. There are scarlet trimmings around the canopies of mosquito curtains, that on a steel frame adorned with bronzes and mother-of-pearl, making the bed Oriental, as it were; and the ribbon loops that hold back the gauzy curtains of the bed are vivid crimson. The splendid Spanish arms on broad, golden shields, are at the head and foot of the sumptuous couch; and there are curtains trimmed with lace that hide the legs of the steel bedstead, and have the effect of pantalets.

I cannot make oath that the towering wardrobe, which has not a hook in it, and the elaborate washstand, and the superb commode are solid mahogany, but they should be; and if a table with long, crooked, black legs, that stands against the wall, is not ebony, it is a fraud--and I do not care whether it is or not. There are so many frauds, so what is the difference? Do not regard me as boastful about this bedroom, for it is but a type of the Cuban sleeping apartment.

As for the breezy balcony, upon which there is room for more than one rocking chair--but it is quite vacant because too lonesome for one--the marble balcony, so cool and white, from which I hoped to see the Southern cross, but cannot--the fault being in the latitude, I believe; and as for the moon that climbs the divine sky of Cuba, we should say: "Roll on, silver moon; light the traveler on his way." If it were as big and magnetic as it was before the war, before the world knew war in my time, I would go down and buy the fragrant flowers that they silently sell apparently far into the nights; but perched in my bower, so to say, catch the faint perfume and behold the blush of the roses, and am carried away by precious memories to the "land that is fairer than this," and hear once again loved voices singing as long, long ago; and the burden of the song is still, "Beautiful star, thou art so near and yet so far."

The window shutters, mind, there is only a little colored glass in the windows, as the shutters naturally fall into their places, and, as the gorgeous bed is located, when my eyes open to the morning light, it streams in, red as blood. The glass covering that particular spot is a perfect circle, and it is divided, like a globe, into zones, only there are no temperate zones. The torrid one extends over all the temperate regions, and is a rich red, while the frozen poles are intensified sky blue. One must testify the regularity of the habits of the Cubans. There is sensitiveness to uniformity in the servants that gives one a hint of Chinese exactness. When I touch the button at the head of the bed at 7 o'clock in the morning, and feel bound by the iron rules in the air to do it, a bearded friend appears in 150 seconds, puts in a grim face on which there is no trace of a smile, and says one word, "Coffee?" I nod like a wooden man, and say, "Good morning." Five minutes pass, there is a light knock, and a man, dressed in undershirt, breeches and shoes, appears, and bears on a silver waiter two silver pots, one with the handle for the right hand, holding black coffee, and one with the handle for the left hand, full of hot milk. There is a small roll of delicious bread and a smaller roll of good butter, and they never vary a hair's breadth; two oranges, all the juicy cells opened by the keen knife that has shaved the skin away and not shed a drop of orange blood. The notable thing about the two oranges, next to it that they are good, is that usually they are of the same size; but if one is larger than the average the other is that much smaller, and this is as invariable as if the oranges were weighed on scales that accounted for the hundredth part of an ounce.