ied it
with them in their own attitude toward their hosts. Many of us, probably
most of us, in the United States, make a sort of fetich of the privacy of
what we call our home life. We are encased in walls of wood or masonry,
with blinds, curtains, or shades at our windows. It might be supposed that
we wanted to hide, that there was something of which to be ashamed. It
might at least be so interpreted by one unfamiliar with our ways. It is
only, like the open domestic life in Cuba, a custom, a habit of long
standing. Certainly, much of the domestic life of Cuba is open. The
mistress of the house chides a servant, rebukes or comforts a child, sits
with her embroidery, chaffers with an itinerant merchant or with the
clerk from a store, all in plain sight and hearing of the passer-by. What
everyone does, no one notices. The customs of any country are curious only
to those from other countries where customs are different. Our ways of life
are quite as curious to others as are their ways to us. We are quite
blind to that fact chiefly because of an absurd conviction of the
immense superiority of our ways. We do not stop to consider reasons for
differences. A cup of coffee on an American breakfast table usually
consists of about four parts coffee and one part milk or cream. Most Cubans
usually reverse these percentages. There is a good reason for it. In
our climate, we do not need the large open doors and windows, the high
ceilings, and the full and free ventilation that make life endurable
in tropical and sub-tropical countries. Their system here would be as
impossible as would be our system there. Houses in Cuba like those of an
American city or town would make life a miserable burden. The publicity, or
semi-publicity, of Cuban home life is a necessary result of conditions.
It is, naturally, more in evidence in the city proper, where the houses,
abutting immediately on the street, as do most of our city houses, are
built, as ours are, in solid rows. We avoid a good deal of publicity by
piling our homes on top of each other, and by elevators and stair-climbing.

The location of a residence in Havana gives no special idea of the wealth
or the social standing of those who occupy it. Not a few well-to-do people
still live in the old city, where the streets are narrow and where business
is trying to crowd out everything except itself. The home in that quarter
may be in a block in which a number of buildings are residences, or it
m