in most cases, any attempt at decoration by means of 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 Havana Province, and 75 miles in Pinar del Rio.  The remainder of the island had none.  Some work was done during the First Intervention and more was done under the Palma government.  At the time of the Second Intervention, there were about 380 miles.  That is, the United States and the Cuban Republic built, in six years, nearly 40 per cent, more highway than the Spanish authorities built in four hundred years.  During the Palma regime, plans were drawn