The ferryboat was ancient in make and slow in movement. We were to cross the bay to the little suburb where we were to take the train which was to carry us through the rolling country and level plains of middle Cuba into the rich and fertile sugar-producing province of Matanzas.
Our track over the now clear waters of the bay led us close alongside the crushed and bended wreckage of the United States Steamship _Maine_, while not far beyond lay at easy anchor three modern warboats of the navy, the _Kearsarge_, the _Kentucky_ and the _Massachusetts_, a proud trio for Spanish and Cuban eyes to look upon. The wreck still lies there, its lonely foremast a mournful monument to the tragedy it marks.
The railroad runs almost due east, from the low-lying suburbs, and passes close by the village of Guanabacoa, where were gathered so many of the _reconcentrados_, where Spanish cruelty developed its most wanton crimes, and where yellow fever played most deadly havoc with Spaniard and with Cuban alike. We sped between rolling grass-covered hills, passing great groves of that most graceful and stately of tropic trees, the royal palm, large plantings of luxuriant bananas, and many cocoanut palms as well. The country was more flat than toward the west, and soon we were moving through wide reaches of the feathery sugar cane. There were miles of it, leagues of it, and all taller and more robust than the cane I saw while traversing the sugar lands of Louisiana.
In the black, deep and wonderfully fertile soil, the cane grows without care or heed. Here the cane once planted need not be reset for full twenty years, and the stock may be cut at six months’ intervals through all that time. No wonder the sugar-growers of Louisiana cry aloud, for they must reset their roots every third year, and can only count on two sugar crops from that; while their cane does not yield nearly so much sugar to the ton as the crops from these Cuban lands. Nor can the sugar grower of the Florida Everglades compete with the fertility of Cuba. Seven years, at most, to a single root is there the limit, five years is more often the rule, and the stalk is but little sweeter than that of Louisiana growth. The American sugar men are now scouting the land in Cuba. I met them from Louisiana and from Texas and from Florida. They are bound to come in numbers greater yet.