CHAPTER VII.

WEALTH FROM NATURE'S STORES IN THE FORESTS AND FIELDS OF CUBA.

The Palm Tree, the Queen of the Cuban Forests-Sugar Cane and Its Cultivation-The Tobacco Industry-Tropical Fruits and Flowers-Beauties of a Garden in Cuba-Enormous Shipments to Spain-The Wealth of the Island.

The forests of Cuba are of vast extent, and so dense as to be almost impenetrable. It is estimated that of about 20,000,000 acres of land still remaining perfectly wild and uncultivated, nearly 13,000,000 are uncleared forest. Mahogany and other hard woods, such as the Cuban ebony, cedar, and granadilla, valuable for manufactures, cabinet work and ship building are indigenous, and are exported to a considerable extent.

The palm is the queen of the Cuban forests and is its most valuable tree. It grows in every part of the island, but especially in the west, giving at once character and beauty to the scenery. The royal palm is the most common variety, and frequently grows to a height of one hundred and twenty feet, the branches numbering from twenty to twenty-five, in the center of which are the hearts or buds of the plant, elevating themselves perpendicularly with needle-like points.

This heart, enveloped in wrappers of tender white leaves, makes a most delicious salad, and it is also boiled like cauliflower, and served with a delicate white sauce. The trunk of the palm is composed of fibrous matter, which is stripped off and dried, forming a narrow, thin board, which the natives use for the walls of their cottages. The boughs are sometimes made to serve for roofing, though palm leaves are usually used for this purpose, as well as for the linings of the walls. "El yarey" is another variety of the palm tree that is of great utility. From it the native women make the palm leaf hats that are worn by almost all the villagers and country people of Cuba.

Tropical Fruits in Abundance.

The fruits of Cuba are those common to the tropics. Bananas, pineapples, oranges, lemons and bread-fruit all grow in abundance, delicious to the taste and delightful to the eye.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., after returning from a vacation trip to Cuba, wrote a charming description of a fruit garden that it was his good fortune to visit there:

"The garden contained a remarkable variety of trees, including some thrifty exotics. Here the mango, with its peach-like foliage, was bending on the ground with the weight of its ripening fruit; the alligator pear was marvelously beautiful in its full blossom, suggesting, in form and color, the passion flower; the soft, delicate foliage of the tamarind was like our sensitive plant; the banana trees were in full bearing, the deep green fruit (it is ripened and turns yellow off the tree), being in clusters of a hundred, more or less, tipped at the same time by a single, pendent, glutinous bud, nearly as large as a pineapple. The date palm, so suggestive of the far east, and the only one we had seen in Cuba, was represented by a choice specimen, imported in its youth. There was also the star-apple tree, remarkable for its uniform and graceful shape, full of green fruit, with here and there a ripening specimen; so, also, was the favorite zapota, its rusty coated fruit hanging in tempting abundance. From low, broad spreading trees depended the grape fruit, as large as an infant's head and yellow as gold, while the orange, lime and lemon trees, bearing blossoms, green and ripe fruit all together, met the eye at every turn, and filled the garden with fragrance. The cocoanut palm, with its tall, straight stem, and clustering fruit, dominated all the rest. Guava, fig, custard apple, and bread-fruit trees, all were in bearing.

"Our hospitable host plucked freely of the choicest for the benefit of his chance visitors. Was there ever such a fruit garden before, or elsewhere? It told of fertility of soil and deliciousness of climate, of care, judgment, and liberal expenditure, all of which combined had turned these half a dozen acres of land into a Gan Eden. Through his orchard of Hesperides, we were accompanied also by the proprietor's two lovely children, under nine years of age, with such wealth of promise in their large black eyes and sweet faces as to fix them on our memory with photographic fidelity. Before leaving the garden we returned with our intelligent host once more to examine his beautiful

specimens of bananas, which, with its sister fruit, the plantain, forms so important a staple of fruit in Cuba and throughout all tropical regions. It seems that the female banana tree bears more fruit than the male, but not so large. The average clusters of the former comprise here about one hundred, but the latter rarely bears over sixty or seventy distinct specimens of the cucumber-shaped product. From the center of its large, broad leaves, which gather at the top, when it has reached the height of twelve or fifteen feet, there springs forth a large purple bud ten inches long, shaped like a huge acorn, though more pointed. This cone hangs suspended from a strong stem, upon which a leaf unfolds, displaying a cluster of young fruit. As soon as these are large enough to support the heat of the sun and the chill of the rain, this sheltering leaf drops off, and another unfolds, exposing its little brood of fruit; and so the process goes on, until six or eight rings of young bananas are started, forming, as we have said, bunches numbering from seventy to a hundred. The banana is a herbaceous plant, and after fruiting, its top dies; but it annually sprouts up again fresh from the roots. From the unripe fruit, dried in the sun, a palatable and nutritious flour is made."

The Tobacco Industry.

Cuban tobacco is famous throughout the world, and is one of the most profitable of all its products. Prior to 1791 the crop was sent to the national factories in Spain, by the "Commercial Company of Havana," under government contract, but during that year the "Factoria de Tobacco" was established in Havana by the government. The tobacco was classified as superior, medium and inferior, and was received from the growers at fixed prices. In 1804 these were six, five and two and a half dollars per arrobe (a Spanish unit of weight, subject to local variations, but averaging about twenty-seven pounds avoirdupois).

By comparing the different prices with the quantity of each class of tobacco produced, we find that the "Factoria” paid an average price of $16 per hundred pounds for the leaf tobacco. With the expense of manufacture, the cigars cost the government seventy-five cents per pound; snuff, fine grain and good color, forty-three cents, and common soft, or Seville, nineteen cents a pound in Havana. In good years, when the crop amounted to 350,000 arrobes of leaf, 128,000 arrobes were manufactured for Spain, 80,000 for Havana, 9,200 for Peru, 6,000

for Buenos Ayres, 2,240 for Mexico, and 1,100 for Caracas and Campeachy.

In order to make up the amount of 315,000 arrobes, (for the crop loses ten per cent. of its weight, in loss and damage in the transportation and manufacture) we must suppose that 80.000 arrobes were consumed in the interior of the island; that is, in the country, where the royal monopoly did not extend. The maintenance of 120 slaves and the expenses of manufacture did not exceed $12,000 yearly; but the salaries of the officers of the "Factoria" amounted to $541,000. The value of the 128,000 arrobes of tobacco sent to Spain, in the abundant years, either in cigars, leaf or snuff, at the customary prices there, exceeded the sum of five million dollars.

It is surprising to see in the returns of the exports from Havana (documents published by the Consulado), that the exports for 1816 were only 3,400 arrobes; for the year 1823, only 13,900 arrobes of leaf tobacco; and in 1825 only 70,302 pounds of cigars and 167,100 pounds of leaf tobacco and strips; but we must remember that no branch of the contraband trade is more active than that in cigars. The tobacco of the Vuelta de Abajo is the most celebrated, but large quantities are exported which are produced in other parts of the island. The cultiva tion of tobacco has been one of the most uncertain branches of industry in Cuba. Trammeled by restrictions and exactions, it was confined almost entirely to the poorer classes of the population, who were enabled to raise a scanty and uncertain crop through the advances of capital made them by the "Factoria." Since the suppression of this monopoly, it has had to contend with the more popular and profitable pursuit of sugar planting, which has successfully competed with it for the employment of the capital, skill and labor of the island.

Sugar Cane and Its Cultivation.

Maturin Ballou, in his "Cuba Past and Present," published in 1885, when the sugar industry was in its best days, writes an interesting account of cane cultivation:

"Sugar cane is cultivated like Indian corn, which it also resembles in appearance. It is first planted in rows, not in hills, and must be hoed and weeded until it gets high enough to shade its roots. Then it may be left to itself until it reaches maturity. This refers to the first laying out of a plantation, which will afterwards continue fruitful for years, by very simple processes of renewal. When thoroughly

ripe the cane is of a light golden yellow, streaked here and there with red. The top is dark green, with long, narrow leaves depending, very much like those of the corn stalk, from the center of which shoots upward a silvery stem, a couple of feet in height, and from its tip grows a white fringed plume of a delicate lilac hue. The effect of a large field at its maturity, lying under a torrid sun, and gently yielding to the breeze, is very fine, a picture to live in the memory ever after.

"In the competition between the products of beet-root sugar and that from sugar cane, the former controls the market, because it can be produced at a cheaper rate, besides which its production is stimu lated by nearly all of the European states, through the means of liberal subsidies both to the farmer and to the manufacturer. Beet sugar, however, does not possess so high a percentage of true saccharine matter as the product of the cane, the latter seeming to be nature's most direct mode of supplying us with the article. The Cuban planters have one advantage over all other sugar-cane producing countries, in the great and inexhaustible fertility of the soil of the island. For instance, one or two hogsheads of sugar to the acre is considered a good yield in Jamaica, but in Cuba three hogsheads are the average. Fertilizing of any sort is rarely employed in the cane fields, while in beet farming it is the principal agent of success. Though the modern machinery, as lately adopted on the plantations, is very expensive, still the result achieved by it is so much superior to that of the old methods of manufacture, that the small planters are being driven from the market. Slave labor cannot compete with machinery. The low price of sugar renders economy imperative in all branches of the business, in order to leave a margin for profit.

"A planter informed the author that he should spread all of his molasses upon the cane fields this year as a fertilizer, rather than send it to a distant market and receive only what it cost. He further said that thousands of acres of sugar cane would be allowed to rot in the fields this season, as it would cost more to cut, grind, pack and send it to market than could be realized for the manufactured article. Had the price of sugar remained this year at a figure which would afford the planters a fair profit, it might have been the means of tiding over the chasm of bankruptcy which has long stared them in the face, and upon the brink of which they now stand. But with a more than average crop, both as to quantity and quality, whether to gather it or not is a problem. Under these circumstances it is difficult to say what