The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba(95)

I approach Hearst the next afternoon after the bombardment of Morro Castle.

“We’re going to set sail for Baltimore,” Hearst tells me. “We’ll stop by Siboney and pick Creelman up—they say he’s recovering nicely from his injuries—and then we’re heading home.”

Now that the Spanish fleet has been destroyed, the end of the war feels like a foregone conclusion, and it’s clear Hearst’s sights are already on to the next story.

“There’s a cutter headed for Havana,” I say. “Some journalists are going to interview the Spanish officials there. I’d like to join them. I think it’s a good opportunity. I can catch a steamer back to the United States from the city.”

“Why Havana?”

Ever since I have been in Cuba, my days have been filled with guns and fighting, with the men’s side of the war. But war isn’t just waged on the battlefield, and I want to see the other side. What role have the women played? I saw them briefly walking from El Caney, but their stories have been largely forgotten.

“When I wrote the story of Evangelina Cisneros’s life, it felt like there were pieces missing. She took me inside Recogidas, she told me about the other women there, about her life there, but we showed so little of that to our readers.”

He shoots me a faintly incredulous look. “You want to write about Evangelina?”

For as famous as she was for a short period of time, the papers have moved on from her story, and she’s no longer the news of the day. It’s as though for Hearst, he sets out to conquer a story, and once he has done so, it is no longer important to him.

“No, I don’t want to write about Evangelina,” I reply. “I want to go to Recogidas.”





Forty-Three





Marina


I am surrounded by forgotten women.

They rail against their jailers, beat the iron bars with their fists until their knuckles are bloody, sit in the corner of the cells and rock, soft cries from their lips, their arms wrapped tightly around their bodies.

I find myself in prison.

In the damp that escapes the stone walls, the unforgiving cold from the floor that seeps into my pores and settles in my bones. In the cries that fill the silent night, the clanging of metal, the breaking of hearts, the abandonment of hope. It is always dark, and the endless night cloaks me, and that is perhaps the greatest surprise of all, that the darkness can be a comfort. That it can allow me to disappear, to leave this place and the uncertainty of tomorrow until I am left clinging with one thread to hold on to.

I will not let them break me.

I will not let them forget me.

They call this the Casa de Recogidas. It is a place for forgetting women society does not wish to face, for punishing those who have committed perceived slights against the Spanish, for condemning those who have dared to cast off the yoke of societal expectations and become someone other than that which has been decided for them. For those who fight for Cuba’s independence.

We are the abandoned women.

In the evenings, when I cannot sleep, my heart sick with all the unfinished things I have left behind, I imagine they whisper to me, all those women who lived and died here before me. Their stories become a part of me; the strength of the women who endured keeps me going.

If only I knew how to escape.

The Spanish wasted no time interrogating me about the papers I carried for Carlos Carbonell.

I denied everything, of course, said I had no idea of the contents, that I cannot read, that Carlos Carbonell hired me to do his laundering and nothing more.

I’m not sure if they believed me or not, but regardless, they threw me in Recogidas.

That was months ago.

Truthfully, besides the absence of freedom, I can’t say Recogidas is that much different from the camp. Both are their own form of hell.

When I dream here, it is of Isabella, my daughter my constant companion in this miserable place. I imagine her happy and healthy at my parents’ house in Havana. I dream of being reunited with her once again even as I fear I will die here. I linger over happier moments together, our life in our farm in the country, my days spent with Mateo, my memories of Luz.

I cling to hope to help me survive this unbearable place.

And then the first piece of news comes—

We learn through the prison grapevine that the Spanish fleet has been destroyed by the Americans who are currently laying siege to the fortified city of Santiago.

I can only hope that this is the final blow to Spain.

“You have a visitor,” a guard announces one day.

I turn to my cellmate Rosa in surprise, not sure which one of us he’s addressing. Rosa has been here far longer than I have, and she says nothing about her life before Recogidas; the only clue I’ve gleaned about her past is that she was once a mother, for she often cradles an invisible child in her arms, speaking and crooning to it as though it is alive and with her.

“Which one of us do they want to see?” I ask.

“You.”

I have had no visitors since I came here, not that there’s anyone to visit me, really. I’ve had no news of Mateo, and if my family knows that I’m in this wretched place, they’ve said nothing. I could have tried to reach them through one of the passed messages that so often fall beneath Spain’s notice, but I worried that linking them to me might put them at risk, and could jeopardize Isabella’s safety. These are dangerous times, the stakes high.