CUBA’S STRANDED ALIENS

Evening Star, Issue 19003, 27 July 1925, Page 8

CUBA’S STRANDED ALIENS

Cuba to-day presents a curiously cosmopolitan countenance to the world. Owing to her close proximity to the United States she has fallen heir to_ a problem altogether alien to her. Fifteen thousand forlorn, penniless, and almost desperate immigrants—Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian, Finn —are. crowded together in the centre of Havana’s most insanitary and disreputable quarter as a direct result of America’s latest restrictive immigration laws (writes Kathleen Ussier, in the ‘Daily Mail’). Hoping to enter the United States by means of tho old law, which permitted immigrants to come in through “ contiguous territory,” after a delay of ono year, these unfortunates have suffered every kind of hardship. With tho new law their chances vanished, and Cuba’s aliens have become a grave menace. It is the boast of the Cuban police—notwithstanding the record of that amiable brigand Arroyito, a modern Robin Hood, whose talents an optimistic gaoler hopes to turn to the gentle art of reading aloud to the employees of a cigar factory—that the worst crimes in the island are committed not by Cubans, but by foreigners. According to prison statistics, the number of serious crimes is small, but, as in all Latin countries, where a word commonly leads to a blow, and a blow to a knife, the proportion of murders to other crimes is relatively high. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Havana is nowhere more marked than in the brilliantly-lit Casino. Hero the croupier rakes in the bills carelessly tossed on to tho roulette tables by tho wealthy 'New Yorkers who pass a few hilarious weeks-on this isle where the cocktail is not banned. At small tables laughing throngs sip the seductive daiquirri, the sweeter presidonte, and bacardi. (How the very names spur the imagination!) And around you is the sound of many tongues. The AngloSaxons outnumber the Latins, particularly among the women. For in Havana the Spanish social customs have undergone little modernising, and the transplanted Spanird is as conventionally punctilious as the grandee of two centuries ago.