Has Returned From Cuba

Ex County Clerk William Dansingburg is Home

Pleased with Prospects

Of this Most Fertile Island -- What He Saw in Cube

Ex-County Clerk William Dansingburg has returned from a trip to Cuba, where he went to view some land on which he holds an option. He left Ann Arbor May 15 and reached Havana May 20, the anniversary of Cuban Independence, when everybody was out on parade. He went into Santa Clara province 175 miles from Havana and looked over the land he is contemplating planting to cotton and oranges.

Mr. Dansingburg explained that by planting the two together it would cost no more to cultivate the orange trees than it would to cultivate the cotton alone. Cotton with one planting in this climate lasts six years without replanting. Mr. Dansingburg was told by Mr. Floyd the superintendent of the Colonial company joining the land he looked at, that one gets about 3,000 cotton plants to the acre, which will produce at least a pound per plant per year, worth at present prices 25 cents a pound. The total expense up to the time of picking will not exceed $25.

It is a country of great possibilities. The people do not really work the ground. Mr. Dansingburg saw no American plows except those owned by the Colonial company. The Cubans plow with a straight stick and a yoke of bulls. Half the time a hoe is not put in the ground, but the crops grow just the same.

The Spanish owners of the land own large tracts. They will not sell small farms, but only whole tracts. The Colonial Land Co., of Detroit, has purchased a tract of 22 square miles and the 200 acres Mr. Dansingburg has in view is off this tract but lies by itself between two ditches and is very fine land. Mr. Dansingburg is very enthusiastic over the fertility of the soil. He saw all kinds of fruits growing in profusion. The boat he came back on had 30,000 cases of pineapples.

When he struck Havana, the first thing he noticed was the odor. Everybody uses garlic and he felt sick before he was half an hour in Cuba. Havana is a beautiful city, but in the older parts the streets are so narrow that where there are street cars you have to be careful on the narrow sidewalks not to collide with them.

He stayed one night in a town of 5,000 where not a person besides himself spoke English. He took dinner one day with a native. The dinner consisted of rice and chicken cooked together, baked chicken, good beef. Sweet potatoes, fried bananas and coffee. It was a good dinner, but he could not appreciate it thoroughly as the pigs, dogs and chickens ran all over the house. The house consisted of three rooms, one where they cooked, one where they ate and one where they slept. There were ten people in that family.

Mr. Dansingburg is very enthusiastic over the future prospects of Cuba as developed by American enterprise.