Still further out, in the west-and-south quarter-circle, are little towns, villages, and hamlets, typically Cuban, with here and there the more imposing estate of planter or proprietor.  But, far the greater number of visitors, perhaps with greater reason, find more of charm and interest in the city itself than in the suburbs or the surrounding country.  The enjoyment of unfamiliar places is altogether personal.  There are many who really see nothing; they come away from a brief visit with only a confusion of vague recollections of sights and sounds, of brief inspection of buildings about which they knew nothing, of the big, yellow Palace, of this church and that, of the Morro and the harbor, of sunny days, and of late afternoons along the Prado and the Malecon.  To me, Havana is losing its greatest charm through an excess of Americanization, slowly but steadily taking from the place much of the individuality that made it most attractive.  It will be a long time before that is entirely lost, but five-story office buildings, automobiles in the afternoon parade, steaks or ham and eggs at an eight or nine o’clock breakfast, and all kinds of indescribable hats in place of dainty and graceful mantillas, seem to me a detraction, like bay-windows and porticos added to an old colonial mansion.

VI

AROUND THE ISLAND

A hundred years ago, the Cubans travelled from place to place about the island, just as our ancestors did in this country, by water and over rough trails few of which could, with any approach to correctness, be described as roads.  It was not until about a hundred years ago that we, in this country, began to build anything even remotely resembling a modern highway.  Our towns and cities were on the seaboard or on the banks of rivers navigable for vessels of size sufficient for their purposes.  Commodities carried to or brought from places not so located were dragged in stoutly built wagons over routes the best of which was worse than the worst to be found anywhere today.  Because real road-making in Cuba is quite a modern institution, an enterprise to which, in their phrase, the Spanish Government did not “dedicate” itself, the Cuban wagons and carts of today are chiefly those of the older time.  They are heavy, cumbrous affairs with large wheels, a diameter necessitated by the deep ruts through which a passage was made.  A smaller wheel would soon have been “hub-deep” and hopelessly stuck.  So, too, with the carriages of the nabobs.  The poorer people, when they travelled at all, went on foot or on horseback, as our ancestors did.  The nabobs had their volantes, still occasionally, but with increasing rarity, seen in some parts of the island.  Forty years ago, such vehicles, only a little changed from the original type, were common enough in Havana itself.  About that time, or a few years earlier, the four-wheeler began to supplant them for city use.