It appears that balls as an amusement were not approved of, which seems a contradiction in a society which was by no means puritanical. Although social evenings in private houses frequently ended in a dance, there were few indications that large affairs consisting mainly of dancing took place in the public assembly halls. The _Papel Periodico_ of December sixteenth, 1792, contains an announcement which for its brevity gives room to manifold interpretation. "The gentlemen are informed that there will be a dance today" is so laconic, that one is almost induced to believe that these dances were given at places known only to the initiated. In this particular instance it was subsequently learned that this dance of the sixteenth of December, 1792, took place at the house of a man who was considered "a dangerous reformer of the customs of Havana." Did this dangerous reformer perhaps admit to his dance the ravishingly beautiful and cultured women that had come from Santo Domingo, where they freely moved in society, but were barred in Havana, because they had a white father or grandfather and a colored mother or grandmother? Foreign visitors to Havana at that period were so warm in their praise of these refined unfortunate victims of miscegenation, that they may have converted some of the gilded youth of the smart set or the Bohemia of Havana to their point of view. The fine arts were not at first considered in the planning and building of the city of Havana. Though much money was spent upon public buildings, no artistic effect whatever was aimed at and the impression of a crude utilitarianism prevailed. The churches, too, did not possess the noble dignity of the great cathedrals of France, Italy and Spain. The most ambitious ecclesiastical edifice in Havana, the church of San Francisco, was architecturally mediocre in style and barbarously overornamented. In all the churches the sculpture and the wood-carving on the altars were over-elaborate and bewildered by their decorative details. Besides all these buildings were too low and narrow, and by their endless decoration diminished the sense of space and produced one of oppression. On special saints' days the decorations were pathetically crude and primitive. Angels of paper tissue, artificial flowers, birds, lambs, etc., were displayed with a profusion which was distracting, instead of adding to the fervor of religious sentiment. [Illustration: MONTSERRAT GATE IN CITY WALL OF HAVANA, BUILT 1780]