frozen over; Yucatan is hell aflame." But I did not see many points in common between the two countries. True, the Yaquis are exiles in a sense, and political exiles at that, but they are also slaves. The political exiles of Russia are not slaves. According to Kennan, they are permitted to take their families with them, to choose their own abode, to live their own life, and are often given a small monthly stipend on which to live. I could not imagine Siberia as being as bad as Yucatan.
The Yucatan slave gets no hour for lunch, as does the American ranch hand. He goes to the field in the morning twilight, eating his lump of sour dough on the way. He picks up his machete and attacks the first thorny leaf as soon as it is light enough to see the thorns and he never lays down that machete until the twilight of the evening. Two thousand of the big green leaves a day is his "stint," and besides cutting, trimming and piling them, he must count them, and he must count the number of leaves on each plant and be sure that he does not count too many nor too few. Each plant is supposed to grow just 36 new leaves a year. Twelve of these, the 12 largest, are cut every four months, but whatever the number cut just 30 leaves must be left after the clipping. If the slave leaves 31 or 29 he is beaten, if he fails to cut his 2,000 he is beaten, if he trims his leaves raggedly he is beaten, if he is late at roll-call he is beaten. And he is beaten for any other little shortcoming that any of the bosses may imagine that he detects in his character or in his make-up. Siberia? To my mind Siberia is a foundling asylum compared to Yucatan.
Over and over again I have compared in my mind the condition of the slaves of Yucatan with what I have read of the slaves of our southern states before
