Cuba has few four-footed native wild animals.  There are rabbits, but their nativity is not quite certain.  There are deer, but it is known that their ancestors were brought from some other country.  There are wild dogs, wild cats, and wild pigs, but all are only domestic animals run wild.

Perhaps the only animal of the kind known to be native is the jutia, sometimes spelled, as pronounced, hutia.  Some observers have referred to it as a rat, but it climbs trees and grows to the size of a woodchuck, or groundhog.  It is sometimes eaten and is said to be quite palatable.  Reptiles are fairly common, but none of them is dangerous.  The best known is the maja, a snake that grows to a length, sometimes, of twelve or fifteen feet.  The country people not infrequently make of it a kind of house pet.  When that is done, the reptile often makes its home in the cottage thatch, living on birds and mice.  They are dull and sluggish in motion.  While visiting a sugar plantation a few years ago one of the hands asked if I should be interested by their maja.  He dipped his hand into a nearby water-barrel in the bottom of which two of them were closely coiled.  He dragged out one of perhaps ten or twelve feet in length and four or five inches in diameter, handling it as he would the same length of hawser.  He hung it over the limb of a tree so that I could have a good chance for a picture of it.  The thing squirmed slowly to the ground and crawled sluggishly away to the place from which it had been taken.  Of bird-life there is a large representation, both native and migratory.  Among them are some fifty species of “waders.”  In some parts of the island, the very unpleasant land-crab, about the size of a soup-plate, seems to exist in millions, although thousands is probably nearer the actual.  The American soldiers made their acquaintance in large numbers at the time of the Santiago campaign.  They are not a proper article of food.  They have a salt-water relative that is most excellent eating, as is also the lobster (langosta) of Cuban waters.  In the swamp known as the Cienega de Zapata are both alligators and crocodiles, some of them of quite imposing dimensions.

[Illustration:  ROYAL PALMS]

The insect life of the island is extensive.  From personal experience, particularly behind the search-light of an automobile that drew them in swarms, I, should say that the island would be a rich field for the entomologist.  There are mosquitos, gnats, beetles, moths, butterflies, spiders, and scorpions.  The bites of some of the spiders and the stings of the scorpions are, of course, uncomfortable, but they are neither fatal nor dangerous.  With the exception of an occasional mosquito, and a perhaps more than occasional flea, the visitor to cities only is likely to encounter few of the members of these branches of Cuban zoology.  There is one of the beetle family, however, that is extremely interesting.  That is the cucullo, which Mr. Hazard, in his book on Cuba, calls a “bright peripatetic candle-bearer, by whose brilliant light one can not only walk, but even read.”  They are really a kind of glorified firefly, much larger than ours, and with a much more brilliant light.  I do not know their candle-power, but Mr. Hazard exaggerates little if at all in the matter of their brilliancy.