Two of the most characteristic and at the same time unpleasant features, may be noted among those that have disappeared during the new administration of affairs. One is the ever-present professional street-beggar who infested the streets, invaded the cafés, and stood guard at every church-door; the other is the horrible bone-pit in the Cristobal Colon Cemetery. There are few prettier places allotted to the resting of the dead than this cemetery, on the outskirts of the city.
[Illustration: A Court-yard in the Tenement District.]
The entrance to the enclosure is superb, the chapel is impressive, and the monuments are costly works of art, but away off in a far corner of the unused part of the cemetery was an enclosure about seventy-five feet square and fifty feet deep, with ghastly skulls and bones in all conditions of preservation, and piles of burial cases of all degrees from a costly casket down to a cracker-box or an oil-can. This is the inhuman manner of disposing of the bodies buried in a plot upon which the rental is not renewed every three years. There is ample room that is unused, so it is not the lack of space that causes the disturbing of the rest of the dead; it must be merely for gain for the cemetery corporation. In many cases the bodies of the poor are never buried at all, but at one side of the cemetery is a building, called the "Dead-house," in which arrangements are made for burning the bodies with lime until there is nothing left but the bones, which are then thrown into this pit. Thousands upon thousands were here in a pile that was fully forty feet deep and as large as the area of the pit.
The residents of Havana did not seem to know of the presence of this place, and if any did they seemed to take it as a matter of course, and no notice was taken of the horrible custom; but when the Americans took charge it was the most talked-of place in Havana, and became one of the sights of the city, creating such an amount of adverse criticism that the cemetery authorities caused dirt to be thrown in the pit to cover the bones.
Not only in Havana have reforms been going on, but all over the island the same work is being done by the American officers and men. Under General Fitzhugh Lee the province of Havana has seen the same radical changes, and all of the little towns have been washed and fed and begin to live anew.