Havana 1881: Impressions from an American Novelist
Boom! Two ruddy old castles domineering a narrow harbor entrance; on the other side a city, gray, warm-colored, and time-stained, and the bells of the Church of the Angels chiming for very early morning service! It was Havana!
This is from the book Old Mexico and her lost provinces
A journey in Mexico, southern California, and Arizona by way of Cuba from novelist William Henry Bishop - he studied in the University of Yale and later became a professor.
The travel happened in 1881, and he published this travelogue two years later. Bishop spent some days in the Spanish colony and also visited the Cuban city of Matanzas.
The money of the debt-ridden island is that of our “shin-plaster” war period, of unhappy memory. A couple of boiled eggs in a common restaurant cost forty cents; a ride in a horse-car, thirty-five. The wages of a minor clerk at the same time were but $30 or $40 a month. How does he make ends meet and provide for his future?
(Note: "Shin-plaster" was a derogatory term from the 1800s used for paper money with little to no backing in gold or silver. A money so worthless that it was better used as a bandage - a plaster - for a sore shin.)
This picture reminds the situation of Cuba today. The author also points to the corruption around the Cuban war of independence from Spain - the Ten Years' War - between 1868 and 1878 that was also known as the Great War (Guerra Grande) and the War of '68.
Forty million dollars had been stolen, by collusion between contractors and the commissariat, since the outbreak of the rebellion in 1868.
Even captured the gossip around the old Havana.
The talk of not a few intelligent persons was, that the ten years’ insurrection had been purposely kept alive by rings of contractors for purposes of spoliation, and by ambition for military advancement. Dulce, they said—going through the list of Captains-General—had married a Cuban wife, and was secretly a traitor;
Bishop also saw slavery - not abolished in the island until 1886 - and the practice of baseball introduced to Cuba in the 1860s by Cuban students in the United States.
I visited a sugar plantation, where the negro slaves, swarming out of a great stone barracks—the men in ragged coffee-sacks, the women in bright calicoes—were as wild and uncouth as if just from the Congo. Next I went to the bathing suburb of Chorrera, where there is a battered old fort that has done service against the pirates, and where the American game of base-ball has been acclimated.
The fort refers to the small defensive tower at the mouth of the Almendares River. The original fortress was destroyed by British ships in 1762 when they captured Havana.
Interesting old book with firsthand accounts. The text later covers the travels of William Henry Bishop through Mexico and the frontier states in the south of the United States.