Description - Cuban Sketches by James William Steele
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX. THE AMERICAN IN CUBA. SO nearly at the end of a series of desultory sketches of the Latin as he is among his gods at home, it has occurred to me that the American in Cuba is too interesting a subject to be passed without his appropriate chapter. He commands upon alien shores his due share of attention from those of whom I have thus far written. He is a figure in the community as strange, sometimes as grotesque, as those with whom he mingles seem to him. The relations of the American to the Spaniard are antipodal. It is plain that they will never be brought to think alike, and that they have separate worlds of desire, of endeavor, and of belief. As haste is the characteristic of one, so is slowness of the other. If the usual American does not see a thing in half a minute, the chances are he will never see it, though it is but fair to say that he usually does. The Cuban or Spaniard waits, deliberates, goes slow, ponders, and the opportunity usually goes by him. The ways of the American fill his Spanish friend with concealed astonishment. He never gesticulates. He will sit quietly and look calmly in the face of his interlocutor, growing angrier every moment, and never move until he means to break something. He sometimes commits the unusual offense of carrying his hands in his breeches pockets. Sometimes his hat is observed to be perilously perched on the forward corner of his head. He walks at a gait destructive of personal dignity. He is often guilty of the atrocity of whistling the airs of his childhood in the street. He will not submit to custom, and makes an unseemly disturbance about the quality of his cocktail, his coffee, and his beef. His clothes fit him like the clothes of a soldier, and he is addicted to straw hats, ..
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