The lowest Cuban of the country will welcome you with dignified self-possession to the hut in which his naked children are tumbling about among the pigs and the chickens. You will have no difficulty in realizing that you may not pity nor patronize him, however miserable his condition may appear to be. He will be glad to do you a service for pay, and will overcharge you if you permit, but you can not offer him a gratuity without risk of offence. His air of independence is not without a basis of fact for its justification. His simple needs are supplied with little labor. He works when he wants to, and loafs when he pleases. The _guajiro_, or white peasant of Cuba, is first cousin to the _gibaro_ of Puerto Rico, whom I have described in a former volume.[2] They are much alike in character and in manner of living, but the former is the better man. He has not had to contend against the hookworm, which has played havoc with the Puerto Rican _campesino_, and he has gained something in fibre and backbone from his hard experience as combatant or _reconcentrado_ in the rebellions of late years. The ancestors of the _guajiro_ came mainly from Catalonia and Andalusia, and were a good, hardy stock. Time was when he occasionally owned slaves and a fair extent of land, but nowadays he is more often than not a squatter in a little corner of that no-man’s-land which seems to be so extensive in the central and eastern portions of the Island. In comparatively few instances he has title to a few acres, lives in a passably comfortable _cabana_, possesses a yoke of oxen, a good horse, half a dozen pigs, and plenty of poultry. Much more often he lives in a ramshackle _bohio_, the one apartment of which affords indifferent shelter to a large family and is fairly shared by a lean hog and a few scrawny chickens. There is nothing deserving the name of furniture in the house, and the clothing of the family is of the scantiest. A nag of some sort, usually a sorry specimen of its kind, is almost always owned by the _guajiro_, who loves a horse and rides like the _gaucho_ of the Argentine pampas. The _guajiros_ are handsome, manly fellows. While they have frequently become tinged with African blood, a majority probably have maintained the purity of their origin, and this is conspicuously the case with the peasantry about Cienfuegos. They speak a _patois_ which is a mixture of Spanish and negro dialect, picked up from the blacks, with whom their intercourse has always been more or less close, and with whom they live on the best of terms.