The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba(12)

I refuse to be cowed by these men. I refuse to let them shame me.

“What are you charging me with?” I ask him.

“Instigating an uprising against the Spanish military. You lured a Spanish officer—the island’s commanding officer, no less—into a deadly trap when your friends accosted him. You will stand trial for your crime.”

“I am guilty of no such thing.”

Don Jose makes an impatient noise. “You cannot escape this. You can cooperate or you will be punished. Those are your options.”

“Is that all?” I ask. “If you are not going to listen to me, then I have nothing else to say.”

“No, that is not all. Your sister is being released.”

Relief floods me that Carmen will be let go, no longer forced to pay for my sins. But then it hits me—

I will be alone here.





1897





Four





Marina


They gave us eight days.

Eight days to leave our homes and report to camps in the nearest Spanish-held city or town throughout Cuba. Eight days to leave everything behind—our livestock, our land, our homes, our memories, our dreams. Eight days to make the journey across Cuba’s battered countryside, our world on our backs and sorrow in our hearts. They gave you eight days whether you were a babe fresh from your mother’s womb or days away from death; they gave you eight days whether you could run, walk, or crawl.

General Weyler reconcentrated the residents of the Havana province on January 8, and the Spanish printed the decree in the government’s newspaper, the Gaceta de la Habana. Local newspapers carried the news, but for those who could not read or write, the announcement was brought by the Spanish troops who dragged them from their homes and marched them into cities.

We have no home to return to; we are all refugees in our own country.

The Spanish dressed it up prettily enough, claiming their reconcentration camps are a manner of “protecting” us by bringing us into the fortified cities they command, but we know the truth. It’s General Weyler’s aim to cut off the support for the Cuban revolutionary armies by moving the population from the country to cities controlled by the Spanish to prevent us from supporting the revolutionaries with food and shelter, from enlisting in their ranks as I have dreamed of since my husband Mateo joined the cause.

Weyler is a fool if he thinks separating us will kill the spirit and means of those fighting for a free Cuba. We’ve come too far now to turn back.

They gave us eight days to leave the countryside and report to a camp before every man, woman, and child would be shot. Then they burned our homes so we would have no shelter, so we would have nothing to return to. They forbade us from bringing food, animals, our treasured possessions.

I didn’t want to leave. But what choice did they give us?

Black plumes of smoke fill the sky around us, the charred remains of others’ homes. We left before we had to see ours burn, the horses we raised and sold throughout Cuba stolen and slaughtered, all of our hopes and dreams disappearing in a flash. Our home was a far cry from the mansion I grew up in in Havana, but when I think of the life we lived there, the memories we made, the laughter, and hope, and joy, I cannot speak for the lump in my throat at the idea of watching those walls go up in flames.

We walk to Havana, my mother-in-law Luz on one side of me, my daughter Isabella on the other.

The country has essentially been divided between the Spanish and the Cuban army. The Spaniards control the fortified cities and towns throughout the island, the seaports, and the railroad lines. The rural areas are vast and much more difficult for them to administer. The revolutionaries exist in all other spaces, in the countryside, in the plains, and in the mountains. And still, our country has become like a prison, our movements dictated by the Spanish. It’s not enough that they’ve taxed us and legislated us to ruin, but now they’ve taken our homes away from us, too.

The island has been divided in two from the north in Morón to the south in Júcaro by an immense trocha. Stretching for fifty miles across the width of the island, the trocha is a military defense of barbed wire fencing, armor-clad railroad cars, wire-trapped bombs, fortified structures and more—the materials purchased from American companies despite their pretense of neutrality—held by the Spanish in an attempt to keep the growing momentum in Cuba’s eastern provinces from spreading to the western provinces, and strategically, Havana.

My countrymen have liberated enough territory to start a provisional government, but it is difficult to gain control of the entire island when Spain has sent 150,000 troops to defeat us and declared martial law. They’re building more and more forts throughout the island, fortifying the ones they already had, so the countryside is filled with Spanish outposts. Still, the Cuban Liberation Army has achieved the impressive feat of crossing the trocha that divides the island and entering the western part of Cuba for the first time since we’ve begun this battle decades ago.

“What have they done?” Luz whispers, her voice filled with horror as her gaze sweeps across the countryside.

Cuba used to be a tropical paradise. Now, it is a barren wasteland.

Last year, the revolutionaries seized what crops they could to feed themselves and then burned much of the countryside to punish the wealthy plantation owners who sided with the Spaniards and to keep the crops from falling in the hands of the Spanish military. General Weyler seems to have retaliated by burning every single field, large or small, that could be used to feed the revolutionaries. For wealthy landowners, those loyal to Spain, there have been exceptions: for sugar barons and the like. But for so many of us who work to sustain ourselves, there have been no such provisions. Only reconcentration.