The houses in the new Havana are, on the whole, vastly more cheerful than are the dwellings in the old city.  They are of the same general architectural type, but because of the wider streets, more air and sunshine gets into them.  Some of the best and most costly are along the Prado.  A Cuban house interior generally impresses an American as lacking in home-like quality.  Some of the best are richly adorned, but there is a certain bareness and an absence of color.  As is usual with customs unlike our own, and which we are therefore prone to regard as inferior to ours, there are excellent reasons for Cuban interior decoration, or rather the lack of it.  A little experience, or even a little reflection, shows clearly the impossibility of anything resembling American house decoration in such a climate as that of Cuba.  Our warm colors, hangings, upholstered furniture, rugs, and much else that we regard as essential in northern latitudes, would be utterly unendurable in Cuba.  There, the marble or tiled floors, the cool tones of wall and ceiling, and the furniture of wood and cane, are not only altogether fitting but as well altogether necessary.  Our glass windows would only serve to increase heat and shut out air.  As some barrier is necessary to keep passers, even Americans, from intrusive entrance by the windows whose bottoms are at floor level, the system of iron bars or elaborate grille work is adopted.  Few Americans see much, if anything, of Cuban home life except as they see it through these barriers as they pass.  It is not the custom of the country to invite promiscuous or casual acquaintances to call.  It is even less the custom there than it is with us.  A book about Cuba, published a few years ago, gives a somewhat extended account of what is called “home life,” but it is the home life of workmen and people who do laundry work to eke out a meagre living.  It is not even the life of fairly paid artisans, or of people of modest but comfortable income.  It is no more a proper description of the domestic life of the island than would be a presentation of the life in the palaces of the wealthy.  Such attempts at description are almost invariably a mistake, conveying, whether from purpose or from indifference to truth, a false impression.  Domestic economy and household management vary in Cuba as they vary in the United States, in France, England, Japan, or Mexico.  The selection of an individual home, or of several, as a basis for description, in Cuba or anywhere else, can only result in a picture badly out of drawing and quite misleading.

There are Cuban homes, as there are American homes, that are slatternly and badly managed, and there are Cuban homes that are as spick and span and as orderly in their administration as any home in this country.  Their customs, as are ours, are the result of environment and tradition.  To some of us, a rectangle of six or eight rocking-chairs, placed in the centre of a room, in which family and visitors sit and rock