I Have, Therefore, The Disadvantage Of Seeing Cuba Not Only In The
Dry Season, But Near The Close Of An Uncommonly Dry Season.
Next month the
rainy season commences, when the whole island, I am told, even the
barrenest parts, flushes into a deep verdure, creeping plants climb over
all the rocks and ascend the trees, and the mighty palms put out their new
foliage.
Shade, however, is the great luxury of a warm climate, and why the people
of Cuba do not surround their habitations in the country, in the villages,
and in the environs of the large towns, with a dense umbrage of trees, I
confess I do not exactly understand. In their rich soil, and in their
perpetually genial climate, trees grow with great rapidity, and they have
many noble ones both for size and foliage. The royal palm, with its tall
straight columnar trunk of a whitish hue, only uplifts a Corinthian
capital of leaves, and casts but a narrow shadow; but it mingles finely
with other trees, and planted in avenues, forms a colonnade nobler than
any of the porticoes to the ancient Egyptian temples. There is no thicker
foliage or fresher green than that of the mango, which daily drops its
abundant fruit for several months in the year, and the mamey and the
sapote, fruit-trees also, are in leaf during the whole of the dry season;
even the Indian fig, which clasps and kills the largest trees of the
forest, and at last takes their place, a stately tree with a stout trunk
of its own, has its unfading leaf of vivid green.
It is impossible to avoid an expression of impatience that these trees
have not been formed into groups, embowering the dwellings, and into
groves, through which the beams of the sun, here so fierce at noonday,
could not reach the ground beneath. There is in fact nothing of ornamental
cultivation in Cuba, except of the most formal kind. Some private gardens
there are, carefully kept, but all of the stiffest pattern; there is
nothing which brings out the larger vegetation of the region in that
grandeur and magnificence which might belong to it. In the Quinta del
Obispo, or Bishop's Garden, which is open to the public, you find shade
which you find nowhere else, but the trees are planted in straight alleys,
and the water-roses, a species of water-lily of immense size, fragrant and
pink-colored, grow in a square tank, fed by a straight canal, with sides
of hewn stone.
Let me say, however, that when I asked for trees, I was referred to the
hurricanes which have recently ravaged the island. One of these swept over
Cuba in 1844, uprooting the palms and the orange groves, and laying
prostrate the avenues of trees on the coffee plantations. The Paseo
Isabel, a public promenade, between the walls of Havana and the streets of
the new town, was formerly over-canopied with lofty and spreading trees,
which this tempest leveled to the ground; it has now been planted with
rows of young trees, which yield a meagre shade. In 1846 came another
hurricane, still more terrific, destroying much of the beauty which the
first had spared.
Of late years, also, such of the orange-trees as were not uprooted, or
have recently been planted, have been attacked by the insect which a few
years since was so destructive to the same tree in Florida. The effect
upon the tree resembles that of a blight, the leaves grow sere, and the
branches die. You may imagine, therefore, that I was somewhat disappointed
not to find the air, as it is at this season in the south of Italy,
fragrant with the odor of orange and lemon blossoms. Oranges are scarce,
and not so fine, at this moment, in Havana and Matanzas, as in the
fruit-shops of New York. I hear, however, that there are portions of the
island which were spared by these hurricanes, and that there are others
where the ravages of the insect in the orange groves have nearly ceased,
as I have been told is also the case in Florida.
I have mentioned my excursion to San Antonio. I went thither by railway,
in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked
by an American engineer. For some distance we passed through fields of the
sweet-potato, which here never requires a second planting, and propagates
itself perpetually in the soil, patches of maize, low groves of bananas
with their dark stems, and of plantains with their green ones, and large
tracts producing the pineapple growing in rows like carrots. Then came
plantations of the sugar-cane, with its sedge-like blades of pale-green,
then extensive tracts of pasturage with scattered shrubs and tall dead
weeds, the growth of the last summer, and a thin herbage bitten close to
the soil. Here and there was an abandoned coffee-plantation, where cattle
were browzing among the half-perished shrubs and broken rows of trees; and
the neglected hedges of the wild pine, _pina raton_, as the Cubans call
it, were interrupted with broad gaps.
Sometimes we passed the cottages of the _monteros_, or peasants, built
often of palm-leaves, the walls formed of the broad sheath of the leaf,
fastened to posts of bamboo, and the roof thatched with the long
plume-like leaf itself. The door was sometimes hung with a kind of curtain
to exclude the sun, which the dusky complexioned women and children put
aside to gaze at us as we passed. These dwellings were often picturesque
in their appearance, with a grove of plantains behind, a thicket of bamboo
by its side, waving its willow-like sprays in the wind; a pair of
mango-trees near, hung with fruit just ripening and reddish blossoms just
opening, and a cocoa-tree or two lifting high above the rest its immense
feathery leaves and its clusters of green nuts.
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