Puslapio vaizdai
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The new presidential palace of Cuba, on the modified style of a French
château, is a thing of beauty, which will be enhanced when the remnants
of old Havana have been cleared out in front of it

largely given way to the business-first
teachings of the Yankee gospel. Bill-
boards are almost as constant eyesores
in Havana and her suburbs as in New
York; huge electric figures flash the
alleged virtues of the wares they sponsor
far into the soft summer nights. Blocks
of office buildings, modern in every
particular, shoulder their way upward
into the tropical sky. With few ex-
ceptions the sons of proud old Cuban
families scorn to dally away their lives,
Castilian fashion, on the riches and repu-
tations of their ancestors, but descend
into the commercial fray.

One sees the American influence in many amusing little details. The Cuban mail-boxes are exact copies of our own, except that the lettering is Spanish. Postage-stamps may be had in booklet form, which can be said of no other foreign land. Street-car fares are five cents for any distance, with free transfers, rather than varying by zones, as in Europe. Barbers dally over their clients in the private-valet manner of their fellows to the North. Department stores operate as nearly as possible on the American plan, despite the Spanish tendency of their clerks to seek tips. Cuban advertisers struggle to imitate in their newspaper and poster announcements the aggressive, inviting American manner, often with ludicrous results, for they are rarely gifted with what might be called the advertising imagination. In a word, Havana is Spain with a modern American virility, tinged with a generous dash of the tropics.

I have said that the two opposing influences do not mix, and in the main that rule strictly holds. A glance at any detail of the city's life, its customs, appearance, or point of view, suffices to determine whether it is of Castilian or Yankee origin; but here and there a fusing of the two has produced a quaint mongrel of local color. Havana bakes its bread in the long loaves of Europe, but an American squeamishness has evolved a slender paper bag to cover them. The language of gestures makes a crossing of two fingers, a hiss at the conductor, and a nod to right or left sufficient request for a street-car transfer. The man who occupies the center of a base-ball diamond may be called either a pitcher or a lanzador, but the verb that expresses his activity is pitchear. Shoe-shining establishments in the shade of the long, pillared arcades are arranged in Spanish style, yet the methods and the prices of the polishers are American.

BARELY had we stepped ashore in Havana when I spied a man in the familiar uniform of the American Army, his upper sleeve decorated with three broad chevrons. I had a hazy notion that our intervention in Cuba had ceased some time before, yet it would have been nothing strange if some of our troops had been left on the island.

"Good morning, Sergeant," I greeted him. "Do you know this town? How do I get to "

But he was staring at me with a

puzzled air, and before I could finish he had side-stepped and hurried on. I may have been unusually dense that morning, after a night of uproar on the steamer from Key West, for a score of his fellows had passed before I awoke to the fact that they were not American soldiers at all. Cuba has copied nothing more exactly than our army uniform. Cotton khaki survives in place of olive drab, of course, as befits the Cuban climate; frequent washings have turned most of the canvas leggings a creamy white. Otherwise there is little to distinguish the Cuban soldier from our own until he opens his mouth in a spurt of fluent Spanish. He wears the same cow-boy sombrero, with similar hatcords for each branch of the service. He shoulders the same rifle, carries his cartridges in the old familiar web-belt, wears his revolver on the right, as distinct from the left-handed fashion of all the rest of Latin-America. He salutes, mounts guard, drills, stands at attention precisely in the American manner. His "I. D. R." differs from our own only in tongue. The same chevrons indicate non-commissioned rank, though they tend in their size to greater insistence upon it, and have not yet disappeared from the right sleeve. His officers are indistinguishable, at any distance, from our own; they are in many cases graduates of West Point. An angle in their shoulder-bars, with the Cuban seal in bronze above them, and the native coat of arms on their caps in place of the spread eagle, are the only differences that a close inspection of lieutenants or captains brings to light. From majors upward, however, the insignia becomes a series of stars, perhaps because the absence of generals in the Cuban Army leaves no other chance for such ostentation. Snow-white ducks, adorned with the same indications of rank, constitute the dress uniform of officers.

The question naturally suggests itself, "Why does Cuba need an army?" The native answer is apt to be the Spanish version of "Huh, we 're a free country, are n't we? Why should n't we have an army, like any other sovereign people? Poor Estrada Palma, our first president, had no army, with the result that the first bunch of hood

lums to start a revolution had him at their mercy."

These are the two reasons why one sees the streets of Havana, and all Cuba, for that matter, khaki-dotted with soldiers. She has no designs on a trembling world, but an army is to her what long trousers are to a youth of sixteen, proof of his manhood; and she has very real need of one to keep the internal peace within the country, particularly under a Government that was not legally elected and which enjoys little popularity. There were some fourteen thousand "regulars" in the Cuban Army before the European War. Cuba is proud to be numbered among the nations that declared war against Germany. It is seldom, however, that one finds any evidence of personal enmity toward the nation's far-off foes. Cuban soldiers were as eager, no doubt, as the average youths of other lands to have their taste of the European battlefields, and as keenly disappointed that an early armistice denied them the privilege. No small number of men enlisted in Allied armies before the island had thrown off its neutrality, and Cuban subscriptions to the American Liberty Loans were moderately numerous; but both personal observation and the testimony of those in a position to know suggest that the island's chief motives for joining the Allies were that it was the fashion, and that she felt impelled to follow the lead of her big brother to the North. Nor was it her fate to suffer from the recent world holocaust. Instead, she was one of its chief beneficiaries, thanks to several causes, of which the chief was the sky-rocketing price of sugar.

Havana has just celebrated her fourhundredth birthday. She confesses herself the oldest city of European origin in the Western hemisphere. Her name was familiar to ocean wayfarers before Cortes penetrated to the Vale of Anáhuac, before Pizarro had heard the first rumors of the mysterious land of the Incas. When the Pilgrim Fathers sighted Plymouth Rock, Havana had begun the second century of her existence. In view of all this, and of the harried career she led clear down to days within the memory of men who still consider them

Her

selves youthful, she is somewhat disappointing to the mere tourist for her lack of historical relics. This impression, however, gradually wears off. background is certainly not to be compared with that of Cuzco or of the City of Mexico, stretching away into the prehistoric days of legend; yet many reminders of the times that are gone peer through the mantle of modernity in which she has wrapped herself. From the age-worn stones of La Fuerza the bustle of the city of to-day seems a fantasy from dreamland. In the underground passages of old Morro, in the musty dungeons of massive Cabaña, the khaki-clad soldiers of Cuba's new army look as out of place as a motor-car in a Roman arena. The stroller who catches a sudden unexpected glimpse of the cathedral façade is carried back in a twinkling to the days of the Inquisition; Spain herself can show no closer

it the streets grow wider, the buildings more modern, as one advances to the newer residential suburbs. Amusing contrasts catch the eye at every turn within the muzzled portion. Calle Obispo, still the principal business street, is a scant eighteen feet wide, inclusive of its two pathetically narrow sidewalks. The Spanish builders did not foresee the day when it would be an impassable

river of clamoring automobiles. They would be struck dumb with astonishment to see these strange devilwagons housed in the tiled passageways behind the massive carved or brass-studded doors of the regal mansions of colonial days. Their fair ladies would be horrified to find the family chapels turned into bathrooms by desecrating barbarians from the North. Office buildings that seem to have been bodily transported from New York shoulder age-crumbled Spanish churches and convents; crowds as business-bent as those of Wall Street hurry through narrow callejones that seem still to be thinking of Columbus and the bucaneers of the Spanish main. Long rows of massive pillars upholding projecting second stories and half concealing the den-like shops behind them have a picturesque appearance and afford a needed protection from the Cuban sun, but they are little short of a nuisance under modern traffic conditions. Old Colon market is as dark and unsanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day's purchases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. One

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The statue of Maceo, the negro general, popular hero of Cuba, killed just before the island won its independence from Spain

link with the Middle Ages than the vener.able stone face of San Francisco de Paula. The ghosts of monks gone to their reward centuries ago hover about the post-office where the modern visitor files his telegram or stamps his picture postals. The British occupied it as a barracks when they captured Havana in the middle of the last century, whereby the ancient monastery was considered desecrated, and has served in turn various government purposes; yet the shades of the past still linger in its flowery patio and flit about the corners of its capacious, leisurely old stairways.

Old Havana may be likened in shape to the head of a bulldog, with the mark of the former city wall, which inclosed it like a muzzle, still visible. The portion thus protected in olden days contains most of Havana's antiquity. Beyond

may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial Havana never tasted.

The city is as brilliantly lighted as any of our own, by dusky men who come at sunset, laboriously carrying long ladders, from the tops of which they touch

A Cuban milkman

off each gas-jet as in the days of Tacon. Ferries as modern as those bridging the Hudson ply between the Muelle de Luz and the fortresses and towns across the harbor; but they still have as competitors the heavy old Havana rowboats, equipped, when the sun is high, with awnings at the rear, and manned by oarsmen as stout-armed and weathertanned as the gondoliers of Venice. Automobiles of the latest model snort in continual procession around the Malecón on Sunday afternoons, yet here and there a quaint old family carriage, with its liveried footmen, jogs along between them. Many a street has changed its name since the days of independence, but still clings to its old Spanish title in popular parlance. A new system of house numbering, too, has been adopted, but this has not superceded the old; it has merely been superimposed upon it, until it is a wise door indeed that knows

its own number. To make things worse for the puzzled stranger, the two sides of the street have nothing in common, so that it is nothing unusual to find house No. 7 opposite No. 114.

Havana is most beautiful at night. Its walls are light in color, yellow, orange, pink, pale-blue, and the like prevailing, and the witchery of moonlight, falling upon them, gives many a

quaint corner or narrow street of the old city a resemblance to fairy-land. But when one hurries back to them with a kodak in the morning, it is only to find that the chief charm has fled before the grueling light of day.

The architecture of the city is overwhelmingly Spanish, with only here and there a detail brought from the North. The change from the wooden houses of Key West, with their steep shingled roofs, to the plaster-faced edifices of Havana, covered by the flat azoteas of ArabIberian origin, often the family sitting-room after sunset, is sharp and decided. Among them the visitor feels. himself in a foreign land indeed, whatever suggestions of his own he may find in the life of the city. The tendency for low structures, the prevalence of sumptuous dwellings of a single story, the preference for the ground floor as a place of residence, show at a glance that this is no American city. Yet the single story is almost as lofty as two of our own; the Cuban insists on high ceilings, and the longest rooms of the average residence would be still longer if they were laid on their side. To our Northern eyes it is a heavy architecture, but it is a natural development in the Cuban climate. Coolness is the first and prime requisite. Massive outer walls, half their surfaces taken up by immense doors and windows, protected by grat

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ings in every manner of artistic scroll, defy the heat of perpetual summer, and at the same time give free play to the all but constant sea breezes. The openness of living which this style of dwelling brings with it would not appeal to the American sense of privacy in family life. Through the iron-barred rejas, flush with the sidewalk, the passer-by may look deep back into the tile-floored parlor, with its forest of chairs, and often into the living-rooms beyond. At midday they look particularly cool and inviting from the sundrenched street; in the evening the stroller has a sense of sauntering unmolested through the very heart of a hundred family circles.

Old residents tell us that Havana is a far different city from the one from which the Spanish flag was banished twenty years ago. Its best streets, they say, were mere lanes of mud then, or their

cobbled pavements so far down beneath the filth of generations that the uncovering of them resembled a mining operation. Along the sea, where a boulevard, second only to the peerless Beira Mar of Rio, runs to-day, the last century left a stenching city garbage-heap. The broad, laurel-shaded Prado leading from the beautiful central plaza to the headland facing Morro Castle was a labyrinthian cluster of unsavory hovels. All this, if one may be pardoned a suggestion of boasting, was accomplished by the first American governor. But the Cubans themselves have continued the good work. Once cleaned and paved, the streets have remained so. Buildings of which any city might be proud have been erected without foreign assistance. In their sudden spurt of ambition the Cubans have sometimes overreached themselves. A former administration began the erection of a

presidential palace destined to rival the best of Europe. About the same time the provincial governor concluded to build himself a simple little marble cabin. Election day came, and the new president, after the spendthrift manner of Latin-American executives, repudiated the undertaking of his predecessor, which lies to-day the abandoned grave of several million pesos. The governor of

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A mounted policeman of Havana

the province was convinced by irrefutable arguments that his half-finished little cabin was out of proportion to his importance, and yielded it to his political superior. It is nearing completion now, a thing of beauty that should, for a time at least, satisfy the artistic longings even of great Cuba. For it has nothing of the inexpensive Jeffersonian simplicity of our own White House, fit only for such plebeian occupants as our Lincolns and Garfields, but is worthy a Cuban president-during the few months of the year when he is not occupying his suburban or his summer palace.

Havana has grown in breadth as well as character since it became the capital of a free country. While the population of the island has nearly doubled, that of the metropolis has trebled. Víbora, Cerro, and Jesús del Monte have changed from outlying country villages of thatched huts to thriving suburbs;

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