shade trees. A tree may be left if there happened
to be one when the village was born, but rarely do the inhabitants turn
their streets into tree-shaded avenues. There would be an excellent
opportunity for the activities of Village Improvement Societies in Cuba, if
it were not for the fact that such tree-planting would involve pushing all
the houses ten or fifteen feet back from the roadside.

I have never studied the system of town building in the island, yet it is
presumable that there was some such system. In the larger places, there is
usually a central park around which are arranged the church, the public
buildings, and the stores. Whether these were so constructed from an
original plan, or whether they are an evolution, along a general plan, from
the long, single street, I do not know. I am inclined to believe that the
former was the case, and that it followed the location of a church. The
custom is, of course, of Spanish origin, and is common throughout the
greater part of Latin America. It finds a fair parallel in our own country
custom, by no means infrequent, of an open "green" or common in front
of the village church and the town hall. Tree-setting along the Cuban
highways, more particularly in the neighborhood of the cities, is not at
all unusual, and some of these shaded roads are exceedingly charming. Some
are entirely over-arched by laurel trees and the gorgeous _flamboyan_,
making long tunnels of shade "through whose broken roof the sky looks in."
Evidently the Spanish authorities were too much interested in making money
and enjoying themselves in the cities to care very much for what happened
to the Cubans in the villages, as long as they paid the money that filled
the official pocket and paid for the official entertainment, and the Cubans
were too busy getting that money to have much time for village improvement.
The Spaniards, following their home custom, might decorate a military
highway to some extent, but the rough trail over which the peasant carried
his little crop did not concern them. That was quite the business of the
peasant who had neither the time nor money to do anything about it.

The question of good roads in Cuba is very much what it is in this country.
Cuba needs more good roads than its people can afford to build; so does the
United States. At the time of the American occupation, in 1899, there were
only 160 miles of improved highway in the entire island. Of this, 85 miles
were in Hava