CHAPTER VIII

_When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must be content._

—As You Like It.

[Illustration]

People learn rapidly under the pressure of necessity. When we had begun driving over the roadless interior of Cuba we had favored the car. In crossing extremely bad places we invariably chose the route which made the car’s task the lightest. Later we learned that all the car needed was traction and we began to favor ourselves.

Going back from the sugar mill, in the early morning, to the farmhouse where we had left El Toro, we noticed two chances of crossing the muggy river where automobiling in Cuba had ceased the night before. One place was wide, low, and flat. It meant long hours of tedious filling in with brush. The other was a narrow cut between two precipitous walls. We chose the cut, for it required only a few minutes to fill the narrow bottom with enough brush to allow the car to be driven down one hillside and up the other as fast as all its power could take it.

Our underbrush pontoons were engineering triumphs. We knew exactly how much brush it required to support the car when driven rapidly over one of them. It would have been a mere waste of labor to have piled on enough brush to allow slow driving, stopping, or recrossing. The whole country was a wide morass. We were in the lowland, between two ranges of mountains. The only difference between what we called mud holes and the rest of the country, was that the mud holes had no bottom, whereas the hard ground or stone underneath the remaining miles of our travel allowed us to plow slowly through the surface mire.

Near the mill we halted before a strange and fascinating scene. A dozen heavy carts, loaded with sugar cane, that had been left outside the mill yard the night before, clogged the only available passageway to the country beyond. We sat in the car and watched a hundred men and fifty straining, tugging bulls try to get the heavy carts through the mud, in which they settled to their axles. Musical, yet vicious, pleading, yet commanding, using goad as well as voice, the violent drivers yelled at each struggling bull by name:

“Tamarindo! Canario!”

Often a dozen yelled in chorus. Failing to budge the foremost cart, all ceased their efforts and, wildly gesticulating, argued and wrangled while more bulls were brought from a rear cart and hitched to the one stuck in the mud ahead. It took a dozen of the wide-shouldered, powerful bulls, pulling all together, with all their might, to drag each cart to the hard ground in the mill yard. In the meantime, scores of idle mill laborers, representing every type which the island affords, lounged around, dividing their attention between the curious struggle and the strange sight which we made in our motor car. While they watched with curious eyes, they pared long sugar canes with skillful flips of their machetes and sucked the thin sweetness.

At last an opening was effected. Straddling the gaping ruts, with wheels twisted to the full limit of the springs, Waldon drove the car out of the mess. Leaving behind a great babel of unintelligible tongues, we went on our way toward Placetas. Sliding down embankments, crossing pools, digging trenches to obtain a footing for the wheels in the roughest ravines, we reached the bed of a dried river, whose hard bottom held only occasional pools of water made by the recent rains. We followed this to a hill, from whose brow a level path led to Placetas.

Here was a post of the United States Army and the entire force, commissioned and enlisted, turned out to welcome us and get what home news we had to offer. For seventeen months these regulars had been in the little interior town and were glad to talk with Americans. They told us about themselves and about their duties. They told us how they had put down insurrections without ever firing a cartridge. The Cuban is not a coward. Naturally he is a fighter, but he knows there is an awful wallop in the sinewy fist of Uncle Sam.

The soldier boys directed us to a trail, among four, at the other edge of town. We took the wrong one. After many miles of driving over the damp lowlands, with all sense of direction lost in the dark, sunless day, we learned from a passing farmer that we were going straight backward toward Santa Clara. Also, we found that we were on the trail which we should have taken before we had been sent up among the hills around Camajuani.

Retracing six or seven miles, we found an old, unused trail through the grass and mud, which looked like a short cut in the right direction. There was no variety and no town. We just plugged along in the mud, sweated under the hard work of crossing washouts, or worried through the tall, damp grass. We knew by our watches that the little daylight was about to depart, and, so, when we found a used trail, we took to it, although we had no idea where it went. At least, the trail meant a country store or a farmhouse.

Now it was raining again and we did our best to hurry toward a hut, just visible in the waning light. Almost in front of it, the front tire exploded, while warping the car over the jagged rocks of a washout. As we replaced it the interpreter negotiated with the storekeeper for shelter and food. It proved that the whole family was sick, and that we could not come in. However, we were informed that a tobacco grower lived a mile farther on. We took the tobacco grower for granted, drove through his fences and across his fields, and lost not one minute of time making the last of our twenty-seven miles for the day. When we got to his rather pretentious hut, which had two rooms and several lesser buildings surrounding it, we told Rogelio to inform him that he was our host, was very glad to see us, and that we could have everything there was in the place to eat. We got it.

They made the meal from the ground up; killing and cleaning guinea hens, roasting and grinding coffee—for, like many other farmers, this one grew his own coffee—cooking rice, and boiling pottage.

There is every opportunity to eat well in Cuba. Where they do not eat well, it is because they do not care or know how. Chickens and guinea hens are raised without care. There is generally a guinea hen or a quail or some other fat bird wandering around the house, anxious to be shot for breakfast, dinner, or supper. Anything that you can stick into the ground will grow. It is possible to raise coffee on one side of the house and sweet potatoes on the other, bananas just outside the lean-to and potatoes in the front yard.

There is a funny touch of Cuban innocence in their potatoes. They care little for the small ones which grow down there, and so they ship them to the United States, where the Broadway hostelries serve them as Bermudas and other varieties costing four times the usual price. In exchange, Cuba imports the vulgar Irish variety at extravagant prices and cares not that half of them have rotted away in transit. Bananas are the staple vegetable. They are rarely ripened and eaten as fruit. Generally, they are picked and cooked green, by frying, like potatoes.

The lack of household economy in eating also applies to meats. Although there is plenty of fowl and a bountiful supply of vegetables, the stock-yards of Chicago have an extensive Cuban trade in canned meats, of the doubtful, aged varieties. Domestic beef is muscular and better adapted to the pulling of ox carts than to the delectation of satiated appetites.

As we sat on the hard benches, in the dirt-floored living room, waiting for our supper, Rogelio slumbered. The three men of the establishment tried to talk with us, but we could only point to the peacefully sleeping interpreter. Although we protested, the family served our meal before it sat down to its own. They watched us eat, and then we were almost as curious and possibly as unreserved in our candid staring while we watched them eat.

The gathering was an unusual and picturesque one—planter in white starched suit, laborers in rough, nondescript garb, women in loose calico dresses, children in dirty cotton slips, a naked baby on the floor, oblivious to surroundings while it played with a coquettish kitten, and the eldest daughter of the house eating thick pottage from a large spoon with her fingers. Let it not be considered, however, because the señorita of the far-away tobacco plantation uses her fingers to segregate the meat from the soup, that she is a spurious señorita. She has the ordinary and universal charm of the backwoods maiden everywhere. You will notice that literature always is prone to get human interest by ringing in a peasant lass, a milkmaid, or some other daughter of the untonsured meadows. I simply imitate literature by offering an olive-tinted señorita who shyly glances over a huge spoon, from which she picks out choice chunks of chicken with her more or less dainty fingers.

It was a big family for such a small house, and they told us we might sleep in the tobacco store house. Señorita and señora departed to prepare our beds. Returning, they beamed hospitably, and said that they had made better provision for us, in another building close to hand. Waldon, with the lighted side lamp in one hand, gallantly accompanied the ladies as they escorted us to our bedchamber. He lost his gallantry and nearly dropped the lamp when his glance followed its feeble rays into the shed.

“Carajo!—and then some in English! Fellows, it’s a pig pen!”

He was right. One half the interior was fenced off by a few slabs. Back of the fence were a dozen grunting pigs. In front of the fence were piles of corn. Above the pigs was a platform on which was piled more corn. Two hammocks were swung on what Crebbin, who still had a laugh in him, naively called the mezzanine floor. On the ground floor were two more hammocks.

We matched for the mezzanine beds and retired. Outside, it rained. Inside, the pigs grunted. We made merry. Sleeping with pigs was more nearly a joke than a hardship. We repeated the name of the locality to ourselves, “Casa Cinco.” Never will we forget Casa Cinco. Bent like half-opened jack knives, in canvas hammocks, we talked and laughed, and laughed and talked, and fell asleep to the lullaby of grunting swine.

Camp Convenio to Casa Cinco—twenty-seven miles.

[Illustration: “_At last we found the promised highway._”

SEE PAGE 103.]

[Illustration: “_The oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly rising over the low tiled houses of the town._”

SEE PAGE 104.]

[Illustration]