HAVANA. 
25 
and banana, orchids and roses and other flowers, and ferns and vines, 
with caged birds, a fountain plashing in the center, and perhaps a piece of 
statuary. It is all very cool and inviting as one catches a glimpse of it 
from the hot street. 
I11 flat-roofed houses the walls are carried up above the roof to form 
parapets, and the roof thus inclosed, called an azotea, is sacred to the 
washerwoman’s use by day and a favorite gathering place of the family 
in the evening. On bright moonlight nights it is a delightful resort. 
“In the evening, after tea, I go up to the roof of the house, which is fiat, as are all 
the roofs here, and is called azotea, surrounded by a low parapet, upon which stand 
urns, which are generally gray, with raised green ornaments, and little gilt flames at the 
top. Here I walk alone till late into the night, contemplating the starry heavens 
above me, and the city below my feet. The Morro H^ht, as the lofty beacon fire in 
the Morro fortress is called, is kindled, and beams like a large, steadily gleaming star, 
with the most resplendent light over the ocean and city. The air is delicious and 
calm, or breathes merely like a slumbering child; and around me I hear on all sides 
the sweetest, most serene little twitter, not unlike that of sparrows with us, but more 
serene, or with a softer sound. I am told that is the little lizards, which are here 
found in such abundance, and which have the gift of voice.” — Fredrika Bremer, 1851. 
Many Havana houses are of immense size, and cost enormous fortunes. 
The city was the home of a large class of wealthy sugar planters, whose 
incomes were reckoned by the hundreds of thousands, and who, leaving 
their rarely visited sugar estates to the control of the manager (mayoral), 
built themselves palaces here and lived in the midst of every luxury money 
could buy. Such a home was that one built by Miguel de Aldama, at the 
corner of Amistada and Reina streets, facing Colon Park. Aldama was 
Havana’s richest man; his income was estimated at $3,000,000 a year, when 
in i860 he built this home, which cost $400,000 and was famed as the 
largest and most magnificent house in the city. Aldama was a Cuban 
patriot, and when at the breaking out of the rebellion of 1868 he was obliged 
to flee from the city, the Spanish Volunteers ransacked the house and 
wrecked the ornaments and destroyed the paintings and statuary; and the 
house was afterward converted into a tobacco factory, in which room was 
found for 450 cigarmakers. Some of the finest houses are on the Prado, 
the Paseo de Tacon, and in the Jesus del Monte and Cerro sections; but 
Havana has no exclusive residence district; it is one of the anomalies that 
a costly house and a carpenter shop, a rich man’s mansion and a shoe¬ 
maker’s shop may be cheek by jowl in any part of the city. 
“Havana is a city of palaces, a city of streets and plazas, of colonnades and towers 
and churches and monasteries. The Spaniards built as they built in Castile; built 
with the same material, the white limestone which they found in the New World as in the 
Old. The palaces of the nobles in Havana, the residences of the Governor, the convents, 
the cathedral, are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid, as if by some Aladdin’s 
lamp a Castilian city had been taken up and set down unaltered on the shore of 
the Caribbean Sea. * * * The magnitude of Havana and the fullness of life which 
was going on there, entirely surprised me.”— James Anthony Froude, 1887. 
