CHAPTER XI

OUR PORTO RICO

“When the queen asked for a description of the island,” says an old chronicle, “Columbus crumpled up a sheet of paper and, tossing it upon the table, cried, ‘It looks just like that, your Majesty!’”

If we are to believe more modern documents, the intrepid Genoese made that his stock illustration for most of the islands he discovered. Even the firm head of Isabela must have wobbled under its crown as one after another of the misnamed “West Indies” were pictured to her in the same concise fashion, and brushed off into the regal wastebasket. Fortunately, paper was cheaper in those days. Or was it? Perhaps it was the wrath born of seeing her last precious sheet turned into an island that soured the queen’s gratitude, and brought the doughty discoverer to dungeons and disgrace.

Questions of wanton waste aside, there could be no more exact description of Porto Rico. The ancient jest about quadrupling the area of a land by flattening it out all but loses its facetiousness when applied to our main West Indian colony. Barely a hundred miles long and forty wide, a celestial rolling-pin would give old Borinquen almost the vast extent of Santo Domingo. Its unbrokenly mountainous character makes any detailed description of its scenic beauties a waste of effort; it could be little more than a constant series of exclamations of delight.

For all its ruggedness, it is as easy to get about the island as it is difficult to cover the larger one to the westward. There is not a spot that cannot be reached from any other point between sunrise and sunset. A railroad encircles the western two thirds of the island, with trains by night as well as by day. When the Americans came, they found a splendidly engineered military road from coast to coast, with branches in several directions. If this sounds strange of a Spanish country, it must be accounted for not by civic pride or necessity, but in the vain hope of defending the island from armed invasion. To-day there are hundreds of miles of excellent highway covering Porto Rico with a network of quick transit that reaches all but the highest peaks of its central range. It is doubtful whether any state of our union can rival this detached bit of American territory in excellence and extent of roads, certainly not in the scenic splendor that so generally flanks them.

Automobiles flash constantly along these labyrinthian _carreteras_, many of them bearing the licenses of “the Mainland.” If the visitor has neglected to include his own car among his baggage and trembles at the thought of the truly American bill that awaits the end of a private journey, there are always the _guaguas_, pronounced “wawas” by all but those who take Spanish letters at full English value. Scarcely a road of Borinquen lacks one or two of the public auto-buses each day in either direction, carrying the mails and such travelers as deign to mix with the rank and file of their fellow-citizens of Spanish ancestry. My tastes no doubt are plebeian, but I for one gladly pass up the haughty private conveyance for these rumbling plow-horses of the gasolene world. They have all the charm of the old stage-coaches that prance through the pages of Dickens, except for the change of horses. In them one may strike up conversation with any of the varied types of rural Porto Rico, and the halt at each post-office brings little episodes that the scurrying private tourist never glimpses.

“We divide the people of Porto Rico into four categories for purposes of identification,” said the American chief of the Insular Police, “according to the shape of their feet. The minority, mostly town-dwellers, wear shoes. Of the great mass of countrymen, those with broad, flat feet, live in the cane-lands around the coast. The coffee men have over-developed big toes, because they use them in climbing the steep hillsides from bush to bush. In the tobacco districts, where the planting is done with the feet, they are short and stubby. It beats the Bertillon system all hollow.”

The man bent on seeing the varying phases of Porto Rican life could not do better than adopt the chief’s broad divisions of the population; for our over-crowded little Caribbean isle is a complex community, as complex in its way as its great stepmother-land, and one that defies the pick-things-up-as-you-go method. Small as it is, it contains a diversity of types that emphasizes the influence of occupation, immediate environment, even scenery, on the human family.

San Juan, the capital—to give the shod minority the precedence—is compacted together on a small island of the north coast, attached to the rest of the country only by a broad macadam highway along which stream countless automobiles, and strictly modern street-cars and their rival auto-buses in constant five-cent procession. It was a century old when the Dutch colonized New Amsterdam. Small wonder that it looks upon its scurrying fellow-citizens from “los Estados” as parvenus. Palaces and fortifications that antedate the building of the _Mayflower_ still tower above the compact, cream-colored mass, most of them now housing high officials from the North. Casa Blanca, built for Ponce de Leon—the younger, it is true—now resounds to the footsteps of the American colonel commanding the Porto Rican regiment of our regular army. The governor’s palace, almost as aged, has an underground passage that carried many a mysterious personage to and from the outer sea-wall in the old Spanish days, and through which more than one American governor is said to have regained his quarters at hours and under conditions which caused him to mumble blessings on Castilian foresight, though it is hard to give credence to this latter tradition, for how could he escape the all-seeing American chief of police who occupies the lower story? The Stars and Stripes still seem a bit incongruous above the inevitable Morro Castle, while the tennis-court in its moat and the golf-links across its grassy parade-ground have almost a suggestion of the sacrilegious. Of the cathedral with its green plaster covering there is little to be said, except that the solemn Spanish dedication over the bones of Ponce de Leon loses something of its solemnity in being signed by Archbishop Monseñor Bill Jones. The mighty sea-wall that holds the sometimes raging Atlantic at bay, and massive San Cristobal fortress at the neck of the town are worth coming far to see, but they have that in common with many a Spanish-American monument.

For after all, San Juan is still a son of Spain, despite the patently American federal building that contains its post-office and custom-house. Its architecture is of the bare, street-toeing façade, interior-patio variety, its sidewalks all but imaginary, its noise unceasing. Beautiful as it looks from across the bay, heaped up on its nose of land, it has little of the pleasant spaciousness of younger cities, and withal no great amount of the Latin charm with which one imbues it from afar. Its Americanization consists chiefly of frequent “fuentes de soda” in place of its bygone cafés, and a certain reflection of New York ways in its larger stores, whose almost invariably male clerks sometimes know enough English to nod comprehendingly and bring an armful of shirts when one asks for trousers. Something more than that, of course; its dressier men have discarded their mustaches as a sign of their new citizenship, and many a passer-by who knows not a word of English has all the outward appearance of a continental American. Base-ball, too, has come to stay, though the counter influence may be detected in the custom of American schoolmarms of attending the bet-curdling horse races in the outskirts of the capital on Sunday afternoons.

The central plaza on a Sunday evening has a few notes of uniqueness to the sated Latin-American traveler. It is unusually small, a long, narrow rectangle with few trees or benches, cement paved from edge to edge, and burdened with the name of “Plaza Baldorioty.” The Porto Rican seems to like free play in his central squares; more than a few of them have been denuded of the royal palms of olden times, and are reduced to the bare hard level of a tennis-court. A few years ago a venturesome American Jew conceived the plan of providing concert-going San Juan with rocking-chairs in place of the uncomfortable iron _sillas_ that decorate every other Sunday-evening plaza south of the Rio Grande. Strangely enough, the innovation took. Now one must be an early arrival at the weekly _retreta_ if he would exchange his dime for even the last of the rockers that flank the Plaza Baldorioty four rows deep on each side. While the municipal band renders its classical program with a moderate degree of skill, all San Juan rocks in unison with the leader’s baton. All San Juan with the color-line drawn, that is; for whether it is true that the well-groomed insular police have secret orders to ask them to move on, or it is merely a time-honored custom, black citizens shun the central square on Sunday evenings, or at most hang about the outskirts. There is no division of sexes, however, another evidence perhaps of American influence. Señoritas sometimes good to look at in spite of their heavy coating of rice powder trip back and forth beside their visibly enamored swains as freely as if the Moorish customs of their neighboring cousins had long since been forgotten. For the time-honored promenade has not succumbed to the rocking-chair. One has only to turn his rented seat face down upon the pavement, like an excited crap-player, to assure his possession of it upon his return from the parading throng, whose shuffling feet and animated chatter drown out the music a few yards away, and no great harm done. In that slow-moving procession one may see the mayor and all the “quality” of San Juan, a generous sprinkling of Yankees, and scores of American soldiers who know barely a word of English, yet who have a racial politeness and a complete lack of rowdyism that is seldom attained by other wearers of our military uniform. Then suddenly one is aware of a tingling of the blood as the _retreta_ ends with a number that, far from the indifference or scorn it evokes in the rest of Latin America, brings all San Juan quickly to its feet, males uncovered or standing stiffly at salute—the Star-Spangled Banner.

From the sea-wall one may gaze westward to Cabras Island, with its leper prisoners, and beyond to Punta Salinas, “poking its rocky nose into the boiling surf.” Ferries ply frequently across the bay to pretty Cataño, but it is far more picturesque at a distance. From San Juan, too, the tumbled deep-green hills behind the little town have a Japanese-etching effect in the mists of the rainy season that is gradually lost as one approaches them, as surely as when the sun burns it away.

But there is more to modern San Juan than this old Spanish city huddled together on its nose of rock. It has grown in American fashion not only by spreading far beyond its original area, but by boldly embracing far-flung suburbs within the “city limits.” Puerta de Tierra, once nothing more than the “land gate” its name implies, is almost a city of itself, a pathetic town of countless shacks built of tin and drygoods boxes, spreading down across the railroad to the swampy edge of the bay, where anemic babies roll squalling and naked in the dirt, and long lines of hollow-eyed women file by an uninviting milk-shop, each holding forth a pitifully small tin can. It is far out across San Antonio Bridge, however, that the capital has seen most of its growth under American rule. More than half of its seventy thousand, which have raised it, perhaps, to second place among West Indian cities, dwell in capacious, well-shaded Miramar and Santurce. Time was when its people were content to make the upper story of the old town its “residential section,” but it is natural that the desire for open yards and back gardens should have come with American citizenship.

* * * * *

Ponce, on the south coast, gives the false impression of being a larger city than the capital, loosely strewn as it is over a dusty flat plain and overflowing in hovels of decreasing size into the low foot-hills behind. It is the most extensive town in Porto Rico, and, like many of those around the coast, lies a few miles back from the sea, for fear of pirates in the olden days, with a street-car service to its shipping suburb of Ponce-Playa. Air-plants festoon its telephone wires, and its mosquitos are so aggressive that to dine in its principal hotel is to wage a constant battle, while to disrobe and enter a bathroom is a perilous undertaking.

It was carnival time when we visited Ponce. By day there was little evidence of it, except for the urchins in colored rags who paraded the streets and the unusual throngs of gaily garbed citizens who crowded the plaza on Sunday afternoon. At night bedlam broke loose, though, to tell the truth, the uproar was chiefly caused by automobile-horns. The medieval gaieties of this season have sadly deteriorated under the staid American influence. What there is left of them takes place chiefly within the native clubs, each of which has its turn in gathering together the élite of the city and such strangers as can establish their ability to conduct themselves with Latin courtesy. We succeeded in imposing ourselves upon the Centro Español. But there were more spectators than spectacle in its flag and flower-festooned interior. Toward ten the throng had thickened to what seemed full capacity, but it was made up chiefly of staid dowagers and solemn _caballeros_ whose formal manners would have been equally in place at a funeral. Only a score of girls wore masks, and these confined their festive antics to pushing their way up and down the hall, squeaking in a silly falsetto at the more youthful oglers. Even confetti was strewn sparingly, evidently for lack of spirit of the occasion, for the mere fact that a small bag of it cost $1.50 seemed no drawback to those who would be revelers. At the unseemly hour of eleven the queen at length made her appearance, escorted to her throne by pages, knights and ladies-in-waiting, while courtiers flocked about her with insistent manners that could be called courteous only in Latin-American society. But her beauty was tempered by an expression that suggested bored annoyance, whether for the tightness of her stays or the necessity of avoiding lifelong disgrace by choosing one of these pressing suitors before a year had passed there was no polite means of learning. The most aggressive swain led her forth and the dancing began. It differed but slightly from a dance of “high society” in any other part of the world. I wandered into the “bar.” But alas! I had forgotten again that I was in my native land. There was something pathetically ludicrous in the sight of the score of thirsty Latin-Americans who gazed pensively at the candy, chewing-gum, and “soft drinks” that decorated what had once been so enticing a sideboard, for after all they were not of a race that had abused the bottled good cheer that has vanished.

* * * * *

Mayagüez was more like the ghost of a city than a living town. Its ugly plaza was a glaring expanse of cracked and wrinkled cement across which wandered from time to time a ragged, hungry-looking bootblack or a disheveled old woman, dragging her faded calico train, and slapping the pavement in languid regularity with her loose slippers. On his cracked globe pedestal in the center of the square the statue of Columbus stood with raised hand and upturned gaze as if he were thanking heaven that he had not been injured in the catastrophe. Of the dozen sculptured women perched on the balustrade around the place several had lost their lamps entirely; the rest held them at tipsy angles. The massive concrete and mother-of-pearl benches were mostly broken in two or fallen from their supports. Workmen were demolishing the ruined cathedral at the end of the square, bringing down clouds of plaster and broken stone with every blow of their picks, and now and then a massive beam or heavy, iron-studded door that suggested the wisdom of seeing the sights elsewhere. House after house lay in tumbled heaps of débris as we strolled through the broad, right-angled streets, along which we met not hundreds, but a scattered half-dozen passers-by to the block. The majority of these were negroes. The wealthier whites largely abandoned the town after the disaster. Spaniards gathered together the remnants of their fortunes and returned to more solid-footed Spain; Porto Ricans began anew in other parts of the island. The sisters of St. Vincent de Paul have a bare two hundred pupils now where once they had two thousand. It was hard to believe that this was a city of teeming, over-crowded Porto Rico.

Eighty years ago earthquakes were so continuous in this western end of the island that for one notable six months the population ate its food raw; pots would not sit upon the stoves. But the new generation had all but forgotten that. Guide-books of recent date assert in all sincerity that “Porto Rico is as free from earthquakes as from venomous snakes.” Then suddenly on the morning of October 11, 1918, a mighty shake came without an instant’s warning. Within twenty seconds most of Mayagüez fell down. The sea receded for several miles, and swept back almost to the heart of the town, tossing before it cement walls, automobiles, huge iron blocks, débris, and mutilated bodies. Miraculous escapes are still local topics of conversation. A merchant was thrown a hundred yards—into a boat that set him down at length on his own door-step. A great tiled roof fell upon a gathering of nuns, and left one of them standing unscratched in what had been an opening for a water-pipe. Scientists, corroborated by a cable repair-ship, explain that the sea-floor broke in two some forty miles westward and dropped several hundred fathoms deeper. Lighter quakes have been frequent ever since; half a dozen of them were felt all over Porto Rico during our stay there. The inhabitants of all the western end are still nervous. More than one American teacher in that region has suddenly looked up to find herself in a deserted school-room, the pupils having jumped out the windows at the first suggestion of a tremor.

Mayagüez is slowly rebuilding; of reinforced concrete now, or at least of wood. Little damage was done on that October morning to wooden structures, which is one of the reasons that the crowded hovels along the sea front have none of the deserted air of the city proper. A still more potent reason is that this class of inhabitants had nowhere else to go. By Porto Rican law the entire beach of the island is government property, for sixty feet back of the water’s edge. As a consequence, what would in our own land be the choicest residential section is everywhere covered with squatters, who pay no rent, and patch their miserable little shelters together out of tin cans, old boxes, bits of driftwood, and _yagua_ or palm-leaves, the interior walls covered, if at all, with picked-up labels and illustrated newspapers.

One can climb quickly into the hills from Mayagüez, with a wonderful view of the bay, the half-ruined city, with its old gray-red tile roofs, rare now in Porto Rico, and seas of cane stretching from the coast to the foot-hills, which spring abruptly into mountains, little huts strewn everywhere over their crinkled and warty surface as far as the eye can see.

* * * * *

Its three principal cities by no means exhaust the list of important towns in Porto Rico. Indeed the number and the surprising size of them cannot but strike the traveler, the extent even of those in the interior astounding the recent visitor to Cuba. There is Arecibo, for instance, a baking-hot, dusty place on a knoll at the edge of the sea, with no real harbor, but a splendid beach—given over to naked urchins and foraging pigs—and a railroad station that avoids the town by a mile or more, as if it were suffering from the plague. San Germán, founded by Diego Columbus in 1512, destroyed times without number by pirates, Indians, all the European rivals of Spain, and even by mosquitos, which forced its founders to rebuild in a new spot, has moved hither and yon about the southwestern corner of the island until it is a wonder its own inhabitants can find it by night. Or there is Cabo Rojo, where hats of more open weave than the Panama are made of the _cogolla_ palm-leaf of the palmetto family.

Yauco, a bit farther east, is striking chiefly for the variegated haystack of poor man’s hovels resembling beehives, that are heaped up the steep hillside in its outskirt and seen from afar off in either direction. Guayama is proud, and justly so, of its bulking new church, which is so up-to-date that it is fitted with Pullman-car soap-spouts for the saving of holy water. Maunabo, among its cane-fields, lies out of reach of buccaneer cannon, hurricanes, and tidal waves, like so many of the “coast” towns of old Borinquen, and does its seaside business through a “Playa” of the same name. It still holds green the memory of the stern but playful young American school-master who first taught its present generation to salute the Stars and Stripes, but though it boasts a faultless cement building now in place of the hovel that posed as _escuela pública_ in those pioneer days, it seems not to have learned the American doctrine of quick expansion as well as some of its fellows.

Beyond Maunabo the highway climbs through huts and rocks that look strangely alike as they lie tossed far up the spur of the central range, then past enormous granite boulders that suggest reclining elephants, and out upon an incredible expanse of cane, with pretty Yabucoa planted in its center and Porto Rico’s dependent islands of Vieques and Culebra breaking the endless vista of sea to the southward. Humacao and Naguabo have several corners worthy a painter’s sketchbook, and soon the coast-line swings us northward again to sugar-choked Fajardo, with its four belching smokestacks, and leaves us no choice but to cease our journeyings by land or return to San Juan. There we may dash across or around the bay to Bayamón, a “whale of a town and a bad one,” in the words of the police chief, but also the site of the “City of Puerto Rico” that afterward changed its name and location and became the present capital. Of the towns that dot the mountainous interior the traveler should not miss Caguas and Cayey, Coamo and Comerio, Barranquitas and Juana Diaz, Lares and Utuado, and a half-dozen others that are no mere villages, including Aibonito (Ai! Bonito!—Ah! Pretty!) set more than two thousand feet aloft, and famed for its _fresas_, which in Porto Rico means a fruit that grows on a thorny bush beside the little streams of high altitudes, that looks like a cross between a luscious strawberry and a mammoth raspberry and tastes like neither.

But it is high time now to descend to Coamo Springs for the one unfailingly hot bath in the West Indies—when one can induce the servants to produce the key to it.

Some eighty years ago a man was riding over the breakneck trail from Coamo to Ponce to pay a bill—there is a fishy smell to that last detail, but let it pass—when he lost his way and stumbled by accident upon a hot spring. Making inquiries, he found that the region belonged to a druggist in the southern metropolis and that his own broad acres bounded the property on the left. He called on the druggist and after the lengthy preliminaries incident to any Spanish-American deal, offered to sell his own land to the apothecary.

“It’s of no use to me,” he explained, “and as you have the adjoining land—and—and”

“Why,” cried the druggist, “my own _finca_ is not worth a peseta to _me!_ Why on earth should I be buying yours also?”

“Well, then, I’ll buy yours off _you_,” suggested the horseman; “there is no sense in having two owners to a tract that really belongs together. Let’s settle the matter and be done with it. I happen to have two thousand dollars with me. I was going to pay a debt with it”—the fishy smell was no olfactory illusion, you see—“but—”

The druggist jumped at the chance, the titles were transferred, and the horseman rode homeward—no doubt giving his creditor a wide berth. He built a shack beside the hot spring, carved out a bath in the rock, invited his friends, who also found the strange custom pleasant, and gradually there grew up around the place a hotel famous for its—gambling. Clients willingly slept in chairs by day, when rooms were full, if only they could lose their money by night. By the time the Americans came Coamo Springs was synonymous with the quick exchange of fortunes. A more modern hotel had been built, with a broad roofed stairway leading down to the baths, and rooms enough to ensure every gambler a morning siesta. Then one day—so the story goes, though I refuse to be hauled into court to vouch for it—an American governor who was particularly fond of the attraction of the place, betook too freely of the now forbidden nectars and ended by smashing up most of the furniture within reach, whereupon the proprietor sent him a bill for $1000 damages. Two days later the governor learned officially, to his unbounded surprise, that gambling was going on at Coamo Springs! The place was at once raided, and to-day the most model of old ladies may visit it without the slightest risk of having her sensibilities so much as pin-pricked.

* * * * *

I came near forgetting entirely, however, what is perhaps the most typical town of Porto Rico. Aguadilla, nestling in the curve of a wide bay on the northwest coast, where the foot-hills come almost down to the sea, and with a pretty little isle in the hazy offing, has much the same proportion between its favored few and its poverty-stricken many as the island itself. A monument a mile from town commemorates the landing of Columbus in 1493 to obtain water, though Aguada, a bit farther south, also claims that honor. The distinctly Spanish church, too, contains beautiful hand-carved reproductions in wood of Murillo’s “Assumption” and “Immaculate Conception,” noteworthy as the only unquestionably artistic church decorations in Porto Rico. The merely human traveler, however, will find these things of scant interest compared to the vast honeycomb of hovels that make up all but the heart of Aguadilla.

The hills, as I have said, come close down to the sea here, leaving little room for the pauperous people of all Porto Rican suburbs. Hence those of Aguadilla have stacked their tiny shacks together in the narrow rocky canyons between the mountain-flanking railroad and the sea-level. So closely are these hundreds of human nests crowded that in many places even a thin man can pass between them only by advancing sidewise. Built of weather-blackened bits of boxes, most of them from “the States,” with their addresses and trademarks still upon them, and of every conceivable piece of rubbish that can deflect a ray of sunshine or the gaze of passers-by, they look far less like dwellings than abandoned kennels thrown into one great garbage-heap. Of furnishing they have almost none, not even a chair to sit on in many cases. The occupants squat upon the floor, or at best take turns in the “hammock,” a ragged gunnysack tied at both ends and stretched from corner to corner of the usually single room. A few have one or two soiled and crippled cots, but never the suggestion of a _mosquitero_, though the mosquitos hold high revel even by day in this breathless amphitheater. For wash-tubs they use a strip of _yagua_ pinned together at one end with a sliver and set on the sloping ground beneath the hut to keep the water from running away at the other. The families are usually large, in spite of an appalling infant mortality, and half a dozen children without clothing enough between them to properly cover the smallest are almost certain to be squalling, quarreling, and rolling about the pieced-together floor or on the ground beneath it.

For the hovels are always precariously set up on pillars of broken stone under their four corners, and the earth under them is the family playground and washroom. There is no provision whatever for sewerage; water must be lugged up the steep hillside from the better part of the town below. Break-neck ladder-steps, slippery with mud and with a broken rung or two, connect ground and doorway. The poverty of Haiti, where at least there is spaciousness, seems slight indeed compared to this.

Yet this is no negro quarter. Many of the inhabitants are of pure Caucasian blood, and the majority of them have only a tinge of African color. Features and characteristics that go with diligence and energy, with success in life, are to be seen on every hand. Nor is it a community of alms-seekers. It toils more steadily than you or I to be self-supporting; the difficulty is to find something at which to toil. Scores of the residents own their _solar_, or patch of rock on which their hut stands; many own the hut itself. Others pay their monthly rental, though they live for days on a handful of plantains—pathetic rentals of from twenty to thirty cents a month for the _solar_ and as much for the hovel, many of which are owned by proud citizens down in the white-collar part of the town.

For all their abject poverty these hapless people are smiling and cheerful, sorry for their utter want, yet never ashamed of it, convinced that it is due to no fault of their own. That is a pleasing peculiarity of all the huddled masses of Porto Rico. They are quite ready to talk, too, on closely personal subjects that it is difficult to bring up in more urbane circles, and to discuss their condition in a quaintly impersonal manner, with never a hint of whining.

I talked with an old woman who was weaving hats. She lived alone, all her family having died, of under-nourishment, no doubt, though she called it something else. The hat she was at work upon would be sold to the wholesalers for thirty cents; it was almost the equal of the one I wore, which had cost five dollars,—and the material for two of them cost her twenty cents. She could barely make one a day, what with her cooking and housework. Cooking of what, for Heaven’s sake? Oh, yams and tubers, now and then a plantain from a kind friend she had. One really required very little for such labor. She smiled upon me as I descended her sagging ladder and wished me much prosperity.

A muscular fellow a bit farther on, white of skin as a Scandinavian, was “a peon by trade,” but there was seldom work to be had. He sold things in the streets. It was a lucky day when he made a profit of fifteen cents. His wife made hats, too. With three children there was no help for it, much as he would like to support his family unassisted. The house? No, it was not his—yet; though he owned the _solar_. The house would cost $32; meanwhile he was paying thirty cents a month for it.

A frail little woman in the early thirties looked up from her lace-making as I paused in her doorway. In her lap was a small, round, hard cushion with scores of pins stuck in it, and a wooden bobbin at the end of each white thread. She clicked the bits of wood swiftly as she talked, like one who enjoyed conversation, but could not afford to lose time at it. Yes, she worked all day and usually well into the night—nodding at a wick in a little can of tallow. By doing that she could make a whole yard of lace, and get eighty cents for it. It took a spool and a third of thread—American thread, _mira usted_—at ten cents a spool. Fortunately, she was young and strong, though her eyes hurt sometimes, and people said this work was bad on the lungs. But she had her mother to support, who was too old to do much of anything—the toothless crone, grinning amiably, slouched forward out of the “next house,” which was really another room like the incredibly piece-meal shack in which I stood, though with a separate roof. The rent of the two was thirty cents; they were worth thirteen dollars—the lace-maker mentioned that enormous sum with a catch in her breath. Then she had a little girl. There had been four children, but three had died. Her husband was gone, too—Oh, yes, she had been really married. They had paid $3.75 for the ceremony. She had heard that the Protestants did it cheaper, but of course when one is born a Catholic.... Some women in the quarter were “only married by God,” but that was not their fault. She never had time to go to mass, but she had been to confession four times. There had been no charge for that. Her daughter—the frizzly-headed little tot of six or seven had come in munching a mashed _boniato_ in a tiny earthen bowl, with a broken spoon—went to school every day. She hoped for a great future for her. She had gone to school herself, but she “wasn’t given to learn.” She couldn’t get the child the food the teacher said was good for her. Even rice was sixteen cents a pound, and those—pointing to three or four miserable roots in the burlap “hammock”—cost from one to four cents apiece now. And clothing! Would I just feel the miserable stuff her waist was made of—it was miserable indeed, though snowy white. Then she had to buy a board now and then for two or three cents to patch the house; the owner would never do it. Once she had tried working in a warehouse down by the wharf. The Spaniards said they paid a dollar a day for cleaning coffee—because the law would not let them pay less, or work women more than eight hours a day. Yet the cleaners _must_ do two bags a day or they didn’t get the dollar, and no woman could do that if she worked ten, or even twelve, hours. Clever fellows, those _peninsulares_! The little basket of oranges in the doorway? Oh, she sold those to people in the gully, when any of them could buy. Some days she made nothing on them, at other times as much as four cents profit. But “that goes for my vice, for I smoke cigarettes,” she concluded, as if confessing to some great extravagance.

Down in the plaza that night a score of ragged men lolled about a cement bench discussing wages and the cost of food. Beans cost a fortune now; sugar was sixteen cents; coffee, their indispensable coffee, thirty-two. They did not mention bread; the Porto Rican of the masses seldom indulges in that luxury. And with the sugar _centrals_ in the neighborhood paying scarcely a dollar a day, even when one could find work! “I tell you, we working-men are too tame,” concluded one of them; “we should fight, rob....” But he said it in a half-joking, harmless way that is characteristic of his class through all Porto Rico.

* * * * *

It is time, however, that we leave the towns and get out among the _jíbaros_, as the countrymen are called, from a Spanish word for a domesticated animal that has gone wild again.

The American Railroad of Porto Rico was originally French, as its manager is still. Though it is narrow-gauge, it has a comfort and _aseo_ unknown even in Cuba, a cleanliness combined with all the smaller American conveniences, ice water, sanitary paper cups, blotter-roll towels—prohibition has at least done away with the yelping trainboy and made it possible to drink nature’s beverage without exciting comment. Its fares are higher than in the United States,—three cents a kilometer in first and 2¼ in the plain little second-class coaches with their hard wooden benches that make up most of the train. The single first-class car is rarely more than half filled, for all its comfortable swivel chairs. Automobiles and the lay of the land, that makes Ponce less than half as far over the mountain as by rail, accounts for this; though by night the sleeping-car at the rear is fully occupied by men, usually men only, who have adopted the American custom of saving their days for business. The sleeping compartments are arranged in ship’s-cabin size and run diagonally across the car, to leave room for a passageway within the narrow coach. These two-bunk cabins are furnished with individual toilet facilities, thermos bottles of ice water, and electric lights, and many Porto Ricans have actually learned that an open window does not necessarily mean a slumberer turned to a corpse by morning. The trainmen are polite and obliging in an unostentatious way that make our own seem ogres by comparison. In short, it is a diligent, honest little railroad suiting the size of the country and with no other serious fault than a tendency to stop again at another station almost before it has gotten well under way.

For nearly an hour the train circles San Juan bay, the gleaming, heaped-up capital, or its long line of lights, according to the hour, remaining almost within rifle-shot until the crowded suburbs of Bayamón spring up on each side. Then come broadening expanses of cane, with throngs of men and women working in the fields, interspersed with short stretches of arid sand, or meadows bright with pink morning-glories and dotted with splendid reddish cattle. Beyond comes a fruit district. Under Spanish rule scarcely enough fruit was grown in Porto Rico to supply the local demand. The Americans, struck with the excellency of the wild fruit, particularly of the citrus variety, began to develop this almost unknown industry. But among the pathetic sights of the island is to see acre after acre of grape-fruit, unsurpassed in size and quality, rotting on the trees or on the ground beneath them. While Americans are paying fabulous prices for their favorite breakfast fruit, many a grower in Porto Rico is hiring men to haul away the locally despised _toronjas_ and bury them. Lack of transportation is the chief answer—that and a bit of market manipulation. Not long ago the discovery that the bottled juice of grapefruit and pineapple made a splendid beverage led a company to undertake what should be a booming enterprise, with the thirsty mainland as chief consumers. But the promoters quickly struck an unexpected snag. The available supply of bottles, strange to relate, was quickly exhausted, and to-day the company manager gazes pensively from his windows across prolific, yet unproductive, orchards.

The pale-green of cane-fields becomes monotonous; then at length the blue sea breaks again on the horizon. Beyond Arecibo the railroad runs close along the shore, with almost continuous villages of shaggy huts half hidden among the endless cocoanut-grove that girdles Porto Rico, the waves lapping at the roots of the outmost trees. These without exception are encircled by broad bands of tin. During an epidemic of bubonic plague the mongoose was introduced into the island, as into nearly all the West Indies, to exterminate the rats. The rodents developed new habits and took to climbing the slanting cocoanut trees, which afforded both food and a place of refuge. The bands of tin have served their purpose. To-day both rats and snakes are scarce in Porto Rico, but the inhabitants discovered too late that the chicken-loving mongoose may be an even greater pest than those it has replaced. Cocoanuts brought more than one Porto Rican a quick fortune during the war. Now that the gas-mask has degenerated into a mural decoration, however, immense heaps of the fibrous husks lie shriveling away where the armistice overtook them, and even the favorable state of the copra market seems incapable of shaking the growers out of their racial apathy.

Several pretty towns on knolls against a background of sea attract the eye as the train bends southward along the west coast. Below Quebradillas the railroad swings in a great horseshoe curve down into a little sea-level valley, plunges through two tunnels, and crawls along the extreme edge of a bold precipitous coast, past mammoth tumbled rocks, and all but wetting its rails in the dashing surf. A few tobacco patches spring up here, where the mountains crowd the cane-fields out of existence, women and children patiently hoeing, and men plowing the pale-red soil behind brow-yoked oxen. Crippled Mayagüez drags slowly by, new seas of cane appear, then the splendid plain of San Germán, with its vista of grazing cattle and its _pepinos gordos_, reddish calabashes clinging to their climbing vines like huge sausages. Beyond, there is little to see, except canefields and the Caribbean, until we rumble into Ponce, spread away up its foothills like a city laid out in the sun to dry. On the southeastern horizon lies an island the natives call Caja de Muertos—“deadman’s box,” and it looks indeed like a coffin, with the lighthouse on its highest point resembling a candle set there by some pious mourner. Local tradition has it that this is the original of Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”

The train turns back from Ponce, but the railroad does not, and one may rumble on behind a smaller engine to Guayama. Some day the company hopes to get a franchise for the eastern end of the island and encircle it entirely. A private railroad covers a third of the remaining distance as it is. But the traveler bent on circumnavigating all Porto Rico must trust to _guaguas_, an automobile, or his own exertions through this region, and swinging in a great curve around the Luquillo range, with the cloud-capped summit of the island purple and hazy above him, eventually fetches up once more in sea-lashed San Juan. By this time, I warrant, he will long for other landscapes than spreading canefields.

* * * * *

Sugar was shipped from Porto Rico as early as 1533, but the Spaniards gave it less attention than they did coffee. For one thing their methods were antiquated. Two upright wooden rollers under a thatched roof, turned by a yoke or two of oxen, was the customary cane-crusher. Here and there one of these may be seen to this day. The big open iron kettles in which they boiled the syrup are still strewn around the coast, some of them occupied in the plebeian task of catching rain-water from hovel roofs, many more rusting away like abandoned artillery of a by-gone age. All the coastal belt is dotted with the ruins of old brick sugar-mills, their stocky square chimneys broken off at varying heights from the ground, like aged tombs of methods that have passed away. They do not constitute a direct loss, but rather unavoidable sacrifices to the exacting god of modern progress, for barely sixty per cent. of the sugar contents was extracted by the contrivances of those ox-gaited, each-planter-for-himself days.

It is natural that combinations of former estates, with immense central _engenios_, should have followed American possession. To-day four great companies control the sugar output of Porto Rico, from Guánica on the west to Fajardo in the east. Like the mammoth _central_ of Cuba, they reckon their production in hundreds of thousands of bags and utilize all the aids of modern science in their processes. Their problem, however, is more complex than that in the almost virgin lands of Cuba and Santo Domingo. The acreage available for cane production is definitely limited; virtually all of it has been cultivated for centuries. Charred stumps and logs of recent deforestation are unknown in Porto Rican canefields. Instead there is the acrid scent of patent fertilizers and, particularly in the south, elaborate systems of irrigation. After each cutting the fields must be replanted; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic they reproduce for eight to twelve years. A few areas never before devoted to cane have recently been planted, but they are chiefly small interior valleys and the loftier foothills well back from the coast. For the Porto Rican sugar producer is forced to encroach upon the mountains in a way that his luckier fellows of the larger islands to the westward would scorn, and his fields of cane are sometimes as billowy as a turbulent Atlantic.

Porto Rico was in the midst of a wide-spread strike among the sugar workers during our stay there. All through this busiest month of February there had been constant parades of strikers along the coast roads by day and thronged _mitines_ in the towns each evening. The paraders were with few exceptions law-abiding and peaceful despite the scores of red flags that followed the huge Stars and Stripes at the head of each procession. When the authorities protested, the strike leaders explained that red had long stood as the symbol of the laboring class in Spanish countries. They were astounded to learn that to people beyond the blue sea that surrounds them, the color meant lawlessness and revolt by violence, and they lost no time in adopting instead a green banner. When this in turn was found to have a similar significance in another island somewhere far away, they chose a white flag. It was not a matter of one color or another, they said, but of sufficient food to feed their hungry families.

Negro spell-binders from the cities, evil-faced fellows for the most part, whose soft hands showed no evidence of ever having wielded a cane-knife, harangued the barefoot multitudes in moonlighted town streets. When the head of the movement was taken to task by neutral fellow-citizens for not choosing lieutenants more capable of arousing general public sympathy and confidence, he replied with a fervent, “I wish to God I could!” But the ranks of Porto Rican workmen do not easily yield men of even the modicum of education required to spread-eagle a public meeting. Held down for centuries to almost the level of serfs, they have little notion of how to use that modern double-edged weapon, the strike. They do not put their heads together, formulate their demands, and carry them to their employers. Inert by nature and training, they plod on until some outside agitator comes along and tells them they shall get higher wages if only they will follow his leadership, whisper to one another that it would be nice to have more money, and quit work, with no funds to support themselves in idleness or any other preparation. It is the old irresponsibility, the lack of foreplanning common to the tropics. Then, that they may not be the losers whichever side wins, they strive to keep on good terms with their employers by telling them that only the fear of violence from their fellows keeps them from coming to work, being so docile by nature that they would not hurt even the feelings of their superiors.

This time the strikers had been encouraged by what they mistook to be federal support. The American Federation of Labor had sent down as investigating delegates two men of forceful Irish wit who were naturally appalled to find their new fellow-citizens living under conditions unequalled even among their ancestral peat-bogs. What they did not recognize was that all over Latin-America, even where land is virtually unlimited and there are no corporations to “exploit” the populace, the masses live in much the same thatched-hut degradation. Their familiarity, with the Porto Rican environment was as negative as their knowledge of the Spanish language; they made the almost universal American mistake of thinking that what is true of the United States is equally so of all other countries, and their straight-forward national temperament made them, no match for the wily, intricate machinations of native politicians.

Porto Rico had not been so lively since the Americans ousted the Spaniards. I had an opportunity of hearing both sides of the case, for with the privilege of the mere observer I was equally welcome—whatever the degree may have been—in the touring car of the delegates and at the dinner-tables of the sugar managers.

“These simple fellows from the States,” said the latter, “think they can solve the problem of over-population by giving $2.50 a day to all laborers, good or bad, weak or strong. The result would be to drive the best workmen out of the country, and leave us, our stock-holders, and the consumers, victims of the poorest. Like the labor union movement everywhere, it would give the advantage to the weakling, the scamper, the time-killer. We have men in our fields who earn $3.50 a day, and who will tell you they do not know why on earth they are striking. Men who can cut six tons of cane a day on piece-work will not cut one ton at day wages. Then there are men so full of the hookworm that they haven’t the strength to earn _one_ dollar a day. We _centrals_ insist on keeping the _ajuste_ system that has always prevailed in Porto Rico—the letting of work by contract to self-appointed gang leaders; and we will not sign a minimum wage scale because there is no responsible person to see that the terms are carried out on the laborer’s side. We refuse to deal with the strikers’ committees because we cannot listen to a lot of bakers and barbers from the towns who do not know sugarcane from swamp reeds. There is nothing but politics back of it all any way. This is a presidential year; that explains the sudden interest of politicians in the poor down-trodden laboring class. Our men earn at least $1.75 a day—and they seldom work in the fields after two in the afternoon. Besides that we give every employee a twenty per cent. bonus, a house to live in if he chooses, free medical attention, half-time when they are sick, and the privilege of buying their supplies in our company stores at cost. Cuba pays higher wages, but the companies get most of it back through their stores. We run ours at a loss; I can prove it to you by our books; and we give much to charity. Hungry indeed! Do you know that our biggest sales to our laborers are costly perfumes? They may starve their children, but they can always feed fresh eggs to their fighting-cocks. There is hardly a man of them that is not keeping two or three women. If we paid our men twice what we do, the only result would be that they would lay off every other day. Let them strike! We can always get hillmen from the interior or men from Aguadilla who are only too glad to work for even less than we are paying now.”

I found Santiago Iglesias literally up to his ears in work at the headquarters of the Socialist-Labor party, a few doors from the governor’s palace. About him swarmed several of the foxy-faced individuals he had himself privately deplored as assistants. A powerful man in the prime of life, of pure Spanish blood, the radical Porto Rican senator was quite ready to recapitulate once more his view of the situation. If he was “playing politics”—and what elective government official is not every time he opens his mouth or turns over in bed?—he gave at least the impression of being genuinely distressed at the condition of Porto Rico’s poverty-bred masses. We had conversed for some time in Spanish before he surprised me by breaking forth into a vigorous English, amusing for its curious errors of pronunciation. The minimum wage demanded, for instance, which recurred in almost every sentence, always emerged from his lips with the second f transformed into an s. That is the chief trouble with Santiago, according to his opponents—his methods are “too fisty.”

“There has been a vast improvement in personal liberty in Porto Rico under American rule,” he began. “But the island has been surrendered to Wall Street, to the heartless corporations that always profit most by American expansion. Moreover, American rule has forced upon us American prices—it always does—without giving our people the corresponding income. Formerly all our wealth went to Spain. Now it goes to the States, but with this difference,—under Spanish rule wages were low but the employers were paternal; they thought occasionally about their peons. At least the workers got enough to eat. The corporations that have taken their place are utterly impersonal; the workmen who sweat in the sun for them are no more to the far away stock-holders than the canes that pass between the rollers of their sugar-mills. When they get these magnificent returns on their investment do the Americans who hold stocks and bonds in our great _centrals_ ever ask themselves how the men who are actually earning them are getting on? No, they sit tight in their comfortable church pews giving thanks to the Lord with a freer conscience than ever did the Spanish conquistadores, for they are too far away ever to see the sufferings of _their_ peons.

“The sugar companies can produce sugar at a hundred dollars a ton; they are getting two hundred and forty. The common stock of the four big ones, paid from fifty-six to seventy dollars last year on every hundred dollars invested, not to mention a lot of extra dividends, and their profits for this _zafra_ will be far higher. The island is being pumped dry of its resources and nothing is being put back into it. In the States not twenty per cent. of the national income goes out of the country; the rest goes back into reproduction. In Porto Rico seventy per cent. goes to foreigners, and of the thirty left wealthy Porto Ricans spend a large amount abroad. We do not want our land all used to enrich non-resident stock-holders; we need it to feed our own people. There is not corn-meal and beans enough now to go round, because the big sugar _centrals_ hold all the fertile soil. They have bought all the land about them, even the foot-hills, so that the people cannot plant anything, but _must_ work for the companies. Stock-holders are entitled to a fair profit on the capital actually invested—_actually_, I say—and something for the risk taken—which certainly is not great. But the Porto Ricans, the men, and women, and the scrawny children who do the actual work in the broiling tropical sun should get the rest of it, in wages. We should tax non-resident sugar companies ten per cent. of their income for the improvement of Porto Rico; we should borrow several millions in the States and give our poor people land to cultivate, and pay the loan back out of that tax. But what can we do? The politicians, the high officials are all interested in sugar. They and the corporations form the _invisible_ government; they are the law, the police, the rulers, the patriots. Patriots! The instant the Porto Rican income-tax was set at half that in the States the corporations made Porto Rico their legal residence. When the federal government would not stand for the trick and forced them to pay the balance they cried unto high Heaven. Porto Rican law forbids any company or individual to own more than five hundred acres. They get around the law by trickery, by dividing the holdings among the members of the same family, by making fake divisions of company stock. The Secretary of War and other federal officials come down here to ‘investigate.’ They motor across our beautiful mountains, have two or three banquets in the homes of the rich or the _central_ managers, and the newspapers in the States shout ‘Great Prosperity in Porto Rico!’ I tell you it is the criminal lack of equity, the same old blindness of the landed classes the world over and in all ages that is driving Porto Rico into the camp of the violent radicals.

“You admire our fine roads. All visitors do. You do not realize that they were built because the corporations needed them. And did we pay for them by taxing the corporations? We did not. We paid for them by government bonds—that is, we charged them up to the children of the peons. You have probably found that we have inadequate school facilities. The corporations, the invisible government, do not want the masses educated, because then they would not have left any easily manipulated laboring class. Nor do I take much stock in this over-population idea. At least I should like to see the half million untilled acres turned over to the people before I will believe emigration is necessary. Sixty per cent. of Porto Rico is uncultivated, yet eighty per cent. of the population goes to bed hungry every night in the year. Then there is this cry of hookworm. Do not let the Rockefeller Foundation, a direct descendant of the capitalists, tell you lies about ‘anemia.’ The anemia of Porto Rico comes from no worm, but from the fact that the people are always hungry. It is the sordid miserliness of corporations, bent on keeping our peons reduced to the level of serfs, in order that they may always have a cheap supply of labor, that is the fundamental cause of the misery of Porto Rico, of the naked, barefoot, hungry, schoolless, homeless desolation of the working classes.”

The calm and neutral observer, neither underfed nor blessed with the task of clipping sugar-stock coupons, detects a certain amount of froth on the statements of both parties to the controversy in Porto Rico. But he cannot but wonder why the sweat-stained laborers in the corn-fields should be seen wearily tramping homeward to a one-room thatched hovel to share a few boiled roots with a slattern woman and a swarm of thin-shanked children while the Americans who direct them from the armchair comfort of fan-cooled offices stroll toward capacious bungalows, pausing on the way for a game of tennis in the company compound, and sit down to a faultless dinner amid all that appeals to the aesthetic senses. Least of all can he reconcile the vision of other Americans, whose only part in the production of sugar is the collecting of dividends, rolling about the island in luxurious touring cars, with the sight of the toil-worn, ragged workers whose uncouth appearance arouses the haughty travelers to snorts of scorn or falsetto shrieks of “how picturesque.”

* * * * *

The problem in Porto Rico, as the reader has long since suspected, is the antithesis of that in Santo Domingo. In the latter island the difficulty is to get laborers enough to develop the country; in the former it is to find labor enough to occupy the swarming population. Barely three-fourths of a million people are scattered through the broad insular wilderness to the westward; the census of 1920 shows little Porto Rico crowded with 1,263,474 inhabitants, that is nearly four hundred persons to the square mile. There are several reasons for this discrepancy; for one thing Santo Domingo has been fighting itself for generations, while Porto Rico has never had a revolution. The obvious solution of the problem has two serious drawbacks. The Dominicans do not welcome immigration; they wish to keep their country to themselves. The Porto Rican is inordinately fond of his birthplace. Send him to the most distant part of the world and he is sure sooner or later to come back to his beloved Borinquen. Emigration from the island can reach even moderate success only when entire families are sent. The letters of Porto Rican soldiers no nearer the front than Florida or Panama were filled with wails of homesickness that would have been pitiful had they not been tinged with what to the unemotional Anglo-Saxon was a suggestion of the ludicrous.

There is a Japanese effect in the density of population of our little West Indian colony. When the traveler has motored for hours without once getting out of sight of human habitations, when he has noted how the unpainted little shacks speckle the steepest hillside, even among the high mountains, when he has seen the endless clusters of hovels that surround every town, whether of the coast or the interior, he will come to realize the crowded condition. If he is a trifle observant, he will also see everywhere signs of the scarcity of work. Men lounging in the doors of their huts in the middle of the day, surrounded by pale women and children sucking a joint of sugar-cane, are not always loafers; in many cases they have nowhere to go and work. While the women toil at making lace, drawn-work, or hats, the males turn their hands to anything that the incessant struggle for livelihood suggests. The man who spends two days in weaving a laundry basket and plods fifteen or twenty miles to sell it for sixty cents is only one of a thousand commonplace sights along the island highways.

A job is a prize in Porto Rico. If one is offered, applicants swarm; many a man “lays off” in order to lend his job to his brother, his cousin, or his _compadre_. Naturally, employers take advantage of this condition. The American labor delegates told the chief of police that he should be the first to lead his men on strike, for certainly he could not keep them honest at forty-five dollars a month.

“Oh, yes, I can,” retorted the chief, “for while we have barely eight hundred on the force, there are twelve thousand on the waiting-list, and every policeman knows that if he is fired, he will have to go back to punching bullocks at a third as much.” _Mozos_ and chambermaids in the best hotels seldom get more than five dollars a month. Street-car men get from sixteen to twenty-five cents an hour, depending on the length of service. In a large clothing factory of Mayagüez, fitted with motor-run sewing-machines, only a few of the women get a dollar a day; the majority average fifty cents. The law, of course, requires that they be paid a minimum wage of a dollar; but what is a mere law among a teeming population which the Spaniards spent four centuries in training to be _manso_ and uncomplaining? The favorite trick is to pay the dollar, and then fine the women fifty cents for not having done sufficient work. Among the regrettable sights of the island are groups of callous emissaries frequenting the leading hotels who have been sent down as agents of certain American department stores to reap advantage from the local poverty. These _comisionistas_ motor about the island, placing orders with the wretched native women, but by piece-work, you may be sure, to avoid the requirement of paying a dollar a day. American women who are paying several times what they once did for Porto Rican lace, blouses, and drawn-work, may fancy that some of this increase goes to the humble _mujeres_ who do the work. Not at all. They are still toiling in their miserable little huts at the same ludicrous prices, while their products are being sold on the “bargain” counters in our large cities, at several hundred per cent. profit. So thoroughly have these touts combed the country that the individual can nowhere buy of the makers; their work has all been contracted far in advance.