66 THte CUBA REVIEW 



PORTION OF CEBALLOS VIEWED FROM THE PLAZA HOTEL. 



bilities connected with the development of these natural resources strongly impressed 

 him, and he formulated plans having for their purpose the acquisition of these lands 

 and their subsequent development. After nearly two years of negotiations to get control 

 of the properties, The Development Company of Cuba, with a strong Directorate, was 

 formed in January, 1901. The first two years of the Company's existence were principally 

 devoted to perfecting titles and laying the foundation for the great work which followed. 

 The name "Ceballos" was given to the district and also to the town which later came 

 into existence. 



The Washington (D. C.) Evening Star, in its issue of July 14th, 1906, tells the story of 

 "Along the Trocha" in the following graphic lines : Go back eight years. Paint in your 

 fancy the beautiful, luxuriously indolent Island of Cuba in the convulsive clasp of 

 war and Weyler — Weyler the Tyrant, Weyler the Butcher, Weyler the Accursed, whose 

 every memory the Cubans fain would erase from their history. Across the narrowest 

 part of central Cuba, from Jucaro on the south to beyond Moron on the north, you see 

 stretched the famous — or infamous — trocha, that impassable line of barbed wire, designed 

 to prevent the insurgents of the west from joining forces with their comrades in arms 

 of the east. 



A kilometer apart block houses, crowded with Spanish soldiers, rise like sentinels. 

 The groans of the dying and the stench of the dead are everywhere, for the wholesale 

 devastation of the land along the Trocha by the Spanish soldiers, accompanied by shock- 

 ing atrocities, has acted as a boomerang, and the men themselves are daily dying of 

 starvation and the disease so rampant in tropical close quarters, where the lack of proper 

 sanitation quickly brings its dire result. 



At every ten miles is a Spanish barracks with a thousand eyes to spot the daring 

 rebel, who, in the intense blackness that precedes a Cuban dawn, ventures to force him- 

 self through the barricade with a message to those comrades across the line. Poof, 

 Bang! and another body is ready for the vultures which haunt the Trocha — another 

 man's hopes, loves and ambitions are ended! 



Ring up the curtain on the scene of igo6 and note the changes. One can now go 

 by train from Havana to Ciego de Avila, as sleepy a Spanish town, in the very center 

 of the Trocha, as one can well imagine; its few inhabitants lounge about their door- 

 ways unaffected by the hum of American industry that can almost reach them from 

 the north. 



I wish I could paint for you the contrast between these two types of towns, so con- 

 tiguous to each other — the sleepy inaction of the Cuban village and the bustle of the 

 American town, pregnant with force, vitality and enterprise. The Cubans live in their 

 palm-thatched huts, or more pretentious quintas, as happy as the day is long, with a 

 horse, a cow, a pig and a few plantation trees sufficing for their needs. 



They bid you welcome to their warm hospitality, and feed you on tortillas, arroz con 

 polio, and with delicacies of the Cuban cuisine, but these pall after a time upon the 

 northern palate. To the artistic eye, after the picturesque beauty of Ciego de Avila, 

 with its stone buildings colored into luscious tints by age, its stately colonnades, its 

 pictorial plaza, and its general subtle air of romantic mystery, the up-to-date, business- 

 like, generally prosperous but wholly utilitarian atmosphere of a town like Ceballos, the 

 largest American settlement along the Trocha, leaves one cold and unenthusiastic. But 

 there is a suggestion about Ceballos of "the pies that mother used to make," and the energy 

 and enterprise in this little mushroom-like town, which sprang into being not more than 

 three years ago, is anything but romantic. 



