I twice visited the island of Cuba, living there first for three months, and then for six weeks. Bonpland and I visited the neighborhood of Havana, the beautiful Guines valley, and the coast between Batabanò and the port of Trinidad.

After two hours' navigation we reached the mouth of the Tomo and the small mission of Davipe, founded in 1755 by an army lieutenant, and not by monks. Father Morillo, the missionary on the spot, with whom we stayed a few hours, received us with great hospitality, and even offered us some Madeira wine. As far as luxury foods go we would have preferred wheat bread; the absence of bread is felt far more over a long time than any alcoholic drink. Every now and then the Portuguese bring small quantities of Madeira wine to the Río Negro. But the word madera in Spanish means 'wood', so some monks, poorly versed in geography, were reluctant to celebrate mass with Madeira wine; they took it for a fermented liquor from some local tree, like palm-tree wine, and asked the superior of their order to decide if the vino de Madera was in fact a wine made from grapes or the sweet juice from a tree (de algún palo). Already, from the beginning of the conquest, the question of whether priests could celebrate mass with another fermented liquor similar to wine had been raised. The question, predictably, was decided negatively.

At Javita we had the pleasure of meeting a cultured, reasonable monk. We had to stay in his house the four or five days it took to carry our canoe along the Pimichín portage. Delay allowed us to visit the region, as well as rid us of an irritation that had been annoying us for the last two days: an intense itching in the articulations of our fingers and the backs of our hands. The missionary said this came from aradores (literally, 'ploughers') encrusted under our skin. With the aid of a magnifying glass we saw only lines, or whitish parallel furrows, which show why it is called an arador. The monks called for a mulatta who knew how to deal with all the little insects that burrow into human skin, from niguas, nuches and coyas to the arador. She was the curandera, the local doctor. She promised to remove all the insects irritating us, one by one. She heated the tip of a little stick on the fire and dug it into the furrows in our skin. After a long examination she announced, with that pedantic gravity peculiar to colored people, that she had found an arador. I saw a little round bag that could have been the egg of the acaride. I should have been relieved when this clumsy mulatta poked out three or four more of these aradores. But as my skin was full of acarides I lost all patience with an operation that had already lasted until well into the night. The next day a Javita Indian cured us incredibly quickly. He brought a branch of a shrub called uzao, which had little shiny leathery leaves similar to the cassia. With its bark he prepared a cold bluish infusion that smelled of liquorice. When he beat it it became very frothy. Thanks to a washing with this uzao infusion the itching caused by the aradores disappeared. We were never able to find flowers or fruit of this uzao; the shrub seemed to belong to the leguminous family. We dreaded the pain caused by these aradores so much that we took various branches with us right up to San Carlos.