their huts but palm leaves, but those huts were made stoutly to endure.
When a man built one of them he was building his home, not a shelter
tent, and they were placed well apart from one another, with the free
air of the plain or mountain blowing about them, with room for the sun
to beat down and drink up the impurities, and with patches of green
things growing in rows over the few acres. I have seen them like that
all over Cuba, and I am sure that no disease could have sprung from
houses built so admirably to admit the sun and the air.

I have also seen them, I might add in parenthesis, rising in sluggish
columns of black smoke against the sky, hundreds of them, while those
who had lived in them for years stood huddled together at a distance,
watching the flames run over the dry rafters of their homes, roaring
and crackling with delight, like something human or inhuman, and
marring the beautiful sunlit landscape with great blotches of red
flames.

The huts in which these people live at present lean one against the
other, and there are no broad roads nor green tobacco patches to
separate one from another. There are, on the contrary, only narrow
paths, two feet wide, where dogs and cattle and human beings tramp over
daily growing heaps of refuse and garbage and filth, and where malaria
rises at night in a white winding sheet of poisonous mist.

The condition of these people differs in degree; some are living the
life of gypsies, others are as destitute as so many shipwrecked
emigrants, and still others find it difficult to hold up their heads
and breathe.

[Illustration: A Spanish Guerrilla]