07b THE DEATH OF RENÉ CUERVO

René Cuervo was not quite a friend, for I did not know him that well. Yet, even if he was not related, he was as a kind of older distant cousin. Thus he was given, and he returned, the loyalties due to a member of our vast extended tribe-like family where relationships were often defined in irregular fashion.

When René Cuervo joined the rebels in the mountains, sometime in early 1957, he became a mysterious, brave, hero. We younger males looked up to him in envy of his adventures and in respect for his courage.

To fully understand what happened it is useful to place the events in local and historical contest. These mountains have been long centers of resistance to the powers that be. Thus, in order to be in a position to control the new left wing forces allied with Castro had to control the area completely.

This one can presume that Castro and or his associates such as the Che Guevara knew, or intuited subconsciously, from his long association with the Caribbean Legion and José Figueres, that a successful democratic revolution of the kind that Figueres carried out in the Costa Rica in 1948, would destroy any chance of control.

For this reason, René Cuervo, and escopeteros like him, urban resistance organizers such as the País brothers, and René Ramos Latour, and comandantes such as Huber Matos, William Morgan and Humberto Sorí Marín after him were in the way. I of course did not know this then; I doubt that René knew this. Perhaps Huber Matos did understand this at the time.

René's father lived across the ridge from the coconut grove of Entre Ríos, over precipice and river, to the east and south. He had, as I described previously a rural store, a galvanized metal roofed "tienda" and a palm-thatched house nearby under a very large mango tree in a place called simply after the river, Guamá.

The Cuervo shop and house sat just at the edge of the flood plain of the Guamá River, less than a mile upriver from Paso Caimanes. These buildings were adjacent to tall guinea grass pastures, hedged by living fences of leguminous Piñon Florida trees. Between these fences well-cared-for cattle grazed. This was grandmother’s brother’s, Tío Ming, land.

René’s father, a rigid middle aged Spaniard, got on well with Tío Ming who was the eldest son of “Coronel de las Guerras de Independencia," Don Benjamín Ramírez.

The Ming part of “Tío Ming” was merely an abbreviation for Benjamín. Tío is not a title, it merely means uncle, but somehow that implied respect, it kind of substituted for the title “Don.” So calling him Tío Ming avoided confusion, since he had the same first name as his long lived father, who died well into the 20^th Century on July 2, 1924. The younger Benjamín Ramírez could not be called Don, for father and son to share the same title would be socially unacceptable, and after the elder died the custom continued.

Tío Ming, had a half brother, almost full blooded Taíno. This half brother who since he was illegitimate could also be called Benjamín, after their father. He too had a nickname; he was called Ping Ping, another play on his father’s name. Ping Ping, had a big head, and was said to have three testicles, which of course led to ping-pong jokes. Ping Ping lived above Arroyón at a place called Gibraltar, more on this will follow.

In the much honored tradition of Cuban revolutions, the rebels ate the cows. After the long wars of independence, which really hurt the cattle industry, Cuba had a lot of revolutions, 1906, 1912, 1917, 1933, and then 1956-1958. Now in 21^st century Cuba not many of the cattle are left, and the common people are not allowed to eat beef. Only the Castro Government can give the order to slaughter cattle; in consequence these cows are now called “Ganado del Comandante.”

While all this gave the family continued war experiences, this was bad for the cattle business. Tío Ming was known for his rigid dignity, severe demeanor, and old fashioned ideas. He preferred cattle raising to coffee, for although far less lucrative, it involved less dealing with people. Perhaps in retrospect he was right.

Most of these revolutions involved family in one way or the other. We often lost the cows. Thus, after a while, Tío Ming said he would not own any more cows. From this experience Tío Ming charged "piso" by the head, a charge for each head of cattle “treading” his land.

For instance, Lionel remembers Fajardo a physician or veterinarian who owned the cattle that fed on Tío Ming's pastures. Perhaps Fajardo was the same man who owned the cattle that Uncle Marcos lost on his land. It is likely that this Dr. Fajardo knew the Cuervo family because he would have to pass by their house, since it was the only other dwelling for miles along the way, to see Tío Ming.

It could be that Dr. Fajardo was (Manuel) Piti Fajardo Rivero who joined the rebels in March 1958. Piti, even though an experienced guerrilla fighter, died in supposedly in an ambush on November 29, 1960. He was chief of operations in the Escambray mountains at the time fighting against anti-Castro forces in the “War Against the Bandits.” It is said he was killed by his own men, in a “friendly fire” incident.

Doubt lingers since Castro’s officers often came to such an obscure end, and Cuban government sanctioned histories are not reliable. Castro moves so adroitly behind the fog of war, one never knows for certain what was fate and what was planned betrayal..... Still it is most dangerous to be close to Castro....

Perhaps Dr. Fajardo was related to Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo. This Juan Nápole Fajardo, a lyrical siboneyista poet, was known as Cucalambé for his verse interlaced with Siboney (Taíno) words. He wrote in La Piragua which was the publication of the Siboneyistas.

The siboneyistas were a group which, in middle 19^th Century, undercover of a Taíno revival literature, criticized Spanish rule. This was dangerous for then Spanish even executed poets who opposed them. Family tradition tells that Don Benjamín Ramírez, who had a beautiful voice sang of the Siboney and probably, given his record in Ten Year War, also was a secret member of this group.

Cucalambé was born in Victoria de las Tunas far north of here, and from his poetry which sings of his love for “Rufina,” it is known that in his many local travelings he wandered near family land. And thus for that was the custom, almost certainly was invited into Don Benjamín’s rural residence in Guamá.

When he was old, sometime early in the 20^th Century Don Benjamín used to sing a typical siboneyista song sitting down, his taburete leaning against the wall of the old adobe house in Guamá:

Siboney con orgullo me llamo

Y soy hijo del sol y del agua

Con mi arco y mi linda piragua

Soy feliz y no espero otro bien

(I am a proud Taino, child of sun and water, with my bow and my beautiful canoe I happy and content expect no more.)

Yo sufro, yo sufro, yo sufro

Por volver a mí Cuba querida

A Cuba, a Cuba done donde yo nací.

(I suffer! I suffer! I suffer, waiting for return to my beloved Cuba, where I was born.)

Cucalambé believed conspiring against the Spanish, disappeared somewhere in or near these mountains in 1862, three years before the Ten Year War started. These hills hold many such tragedies and hidden graves. The Castro government web sites put forward the hypothesis that Cucalambé committed suicide. However, most consider it probable that Cucalambé was killed by Spanish government agents.

The shop and the house of René Cuervo's father were just below the little plateau that held the batey of Tío Ming that was fortified by a high fence of thirteen strands (I counted them as a child) barbwire, and guarded by dogs and sometimes even a wild boar. Here Tío Ming’s family resided in a long adobe house roofed with galvanized metal sheeting. Nearby, close to Tío Ming’s cattle corral, in an orange and grapefruit grove two of the dead from a 1933 Batista army raid are buried.

About half a mile to the east and was an old dried out bed of the river. That place was called Madre Vieja. In Madre Vieja there were ruins of Don Benjamín’s ancient trapiche sugar mill. It had been burned-out in the race war of 1912.

My mind sees the area in 1957, the year of René Cuervo’s death:

The land rises slightly going east and north towards the far greater plateau of Los Llanos. Here stand the adobe walls of a metal-roofed house and the unpainted wooden farm buildings of the batey of Levarbo. The house is not too well cared for, because Levarbo drinks and, as is traditional has a second family, but the roof keeps out the rain. Levarbo is son of Tío Ming. Levarbo’s legal wife, my Aunt Lucia, is a small robust, pretty, woman always called Muñeca or the doll.

The adobe walls of Levarbo and Muñeca's house still bear pockets from 1933 bullet strikes. The bark of the trunk of their mango tree, where the executed had stood, has grown to cover its wounds.

To the south, the curving Guamá River runs moving gently. Across the river the land rises steeply. The river laps at the feet of the mountains, under rainforests, canyons, and coffee plantations. The Guamá, I know from my geography classes, is an old river, older than the mountains it borders. Guamá is the name of a tree and that of a Taíno chief who resisted the Spanish. The name is old enough to be common not only in Taíno but in also in other Arawak languages. Guama, without accent on the last a, symbolizes rule; there are Guamá Rivers in several parts of Cuba, in Venezuela and in Brazil.

My mind envisions the area as it changed through geological times:

The volcano grew, and the Guamá River adapted and flowed around it. In the primordial times of its youth and the greatest strength this river had gathered to itself the waters spilling over the brim of the then caldera lake. For then the big stream now called Arroyón burst through the high mountains walls of the ancient broken crater of what we call today Los Números. Now great cliffs gave testimony to the joint power of these streams that had once ripped apart that crater’s northern wall.

Returning to the middle 20^th century:

Periodically, perhaps once a week, until the 1940s, a yoke of oxen pull a crude V shaped “stoneboat” made of a thick excised tree crotch. The castrated beasts drag the stoneboat apex first, ever, so slowly, uphill, sliding it over soil and ancient boulders. Polished glossy by constant rubbing, the forked timbers of the sled creak as if in tortured pain. The drover pokes the oxen with his púa prod, urging the beasts on crying “Thisa! Thisa!” as he does it. Thus, for a long, long time oxen had brought Guamá River water hundreds of gallons at a time uphill from the river to the batey of Tío Ming.

Tío Ming also had a cistern system that held rain water in one of the great iron pila pots from Don Benjamín Ramírez’s little sugar factory, the one burned out in 1912. Tío Ming was a primitive, but sage, and prudent man. He may have wanted to be more able resist a siege.

Uncle Rafael, my mother’s eldest brother, Tío Ming’s nephew, at the petition of the women of Tío Ming’s household, had installed a water pump. Tío Ming never did see why.

It would seem that old Cuervo and Tío Ming, two stiff men, had the old ways in common, despite the conflicts, and enmities of the wars of the past. The Cuervo store sold lots of liquor. and the sons of Tío Ming, especially Levarbo, often drank rum there.

René's Cuervo’s father was respected, but his son, René, was considered to be somewhat wild. It must have been 1957 when we heard in hushed tones that René had joined the rebels.

My brother, Lionel, who then lived higher up in the mountains, provides a context and a follow up, of the events that followed our last sighting of René. René had come from Santiago. After crossing our hilly pastures, and the Guamá River near his home, had reached Teófilo’s Espinosa’s land. Espinosa’s fields are the north side of the curving Guamá River which there runs approximately east-west.

René crossed this river again a little west of the Los Horneros, and ascended to Los Números by the eastern Bejucero trail. He stopped at Raúl Martínez’s house.

Raúl, a dark skinned man, son of one of Uncle Calixto’s colonos (contract coffee producers) had married Marina, daughter of Bartolo Díaz a Spaniard. Bartolo was a colono on Grandmother’s land at this place, a little, relatively flat place called Bejucero, the place of the tangling vines.

Bejucero was part of a far more ancient coffee plantation, at least from the time of Don Benjamín. A certain Ricarte Martínez had also lived in Bejucero before he sold out his interest and bought his own land on the higher ridge of La Maestra. The two Martínez, one dark, one Spanish, were not related. It is Raul Martínez who tells this part of this tale.

Ricarte Martínez, who has been mentioned earlier, was a Spaniard whose father may have fled the fall of the Spanish Republic in about 1938. Ricarte was a prosperous communist and harsh driver of his workmen; he insisted on an illegal 12 hour day and provided poor food “sopa de hueso blanco y fideo,” bad vermicelli pasta and scraped bone soup. We will learn still more of Ricarte later in this book.

Raul Martínez tells:

René then took the main eastern trail from Lot Three of Los Números, through Lot Four. René went through the coffee plantations and by the remains of rain forest. He reached the strange store of Ito Martínez. I know that René Cuervo must have stopped there because the store was a front used to supply rebels. Ito had yellowish skin and thus probably part Taíno; he even though his last name, Martínez, is very common may have been related to Ricarte. Everybody nearby knew that pack mules unloaded there, but few goods were sold at the store.

Avoiding the branch path to the west side of the crater René Cuervo went on to Lot Seven. Lot Seven was Mother’s land. Mother called it “El Rosario.” Ito Martínez’s store supplies were sent down the back to the southern slope of that ancient crater. The supplies were carried on mules along the Lot Seven path down to the little mountain stream, now erroneously known as the Bayamito. The real Bayamito stream falls into the sea on the other side of the mountains, and once marked the western edge of the vast lands of Don Benjamín.

From Ito’s store the supplies went across the false Bayamito up to Ricarte Martínez’s place lost on the north side of the vast main ridge of the Maestra (Master, or more accurately Mistress) ridge. There Castro’s rebels picked them up.

The name of this little stream is a sore point for my family because in the law suit by which Don Benjamín recovered some of his land from Spanish confiscation this stream was labeled falsely Bayamito. This seemingly trivial name change meant that Don Benjamín’s land no longer reached south to the sea.

Formerly, two other south running streams the Guamá del Sur and the real Bayamito were the boundaries of Don Benjamín, and he hid his family there in time of war. Thus, Don Benjamín’s land then also included the main ridge or the Maestra) ridge to sea. This spurious legal decision reduced Don Benjamín holdings tremendously, still at that time these lands seemed endless.

René, did not take that path down to the false Bayamito, but after passing beneath the south west side of the great Peña Prieta crag, he turned south east and crossed into Lot Eight. Lot Eight was Uncle Calixto Mario’s land named after the great red-tailed hawk of Cuba the Guaraguao.

René went through Lot Eight, south of the huge Peña Prieta Crag to Lot Nine Aunt Rosita’s plantation which she called La Golondrina. Aunt Rosita, rich, former movie star, still had beautiful skin when she died in her nineties. Rosita was a romantic who enjoyed the pleasures of life to the fullest. La Golondrina is the Spanish word for fast flying swallow.

Golondrina can also mean any number of things from the romantic bird, the “swallow of lost love” of Carlota the bride of Maximillian the executed Emperor of Mexico, to a graciously vague euphuism for a man’s testicles. Such a name appealed to Rosita.

None of this was on René’s mind. To him important thing was that somewhere in La Golondrina was the guerrilla band of the man of the angelic face, and the murderous fanatic marxist mind, Castro’s follower, Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

And René came to return to troubled rebel ranks. It is not known, if this return was completely voluntary or was if he was led by guile and deceit. Remember René was fearless, and such valor leads to constant danger.

When I saw René, in the coconut grove at the start of the hills, he was alone. However, he had reached Los Números and Raúl Martínez wife, Marina, cooked for him. By this time, several people with submachine guns were with him. Raul Martínez tells that he was impressed by the guns they brought, since they had long clips; perhaps they were Madsen machine guns.

The Che is known, in those days, to have at least one Madsen, a gift from Fidel Castro “himself.” The Che is also shown in photographs of this time holding a Thompson. However, the Madsen is lighter 9 mm caliber weapon, not .45 like the far more common, far heavier, Thompson submachine gun. A Madsen would be far easier to travel with.

In those days, the Madsen was important armament, and thus its possession gave status as well as power. Three such weapons in a group define a main force unit. Strangely, there was no talk at this place of a fight for possession of weapons. That would have occurred if René Cuervo had possession of these guns because it was well known that the Che squabbled endlessly over such weapons

Lionel tells me that René was bringing money in from Santiago, most of it donated by his father and the rest from Frank País’s urban action group, a moderate left non-communist anti-Batista faction that had been absorbed into Castro’s movement. País had visited Mexico to coordinate Castro’s 1956 landing and provide effective distractions to the Batista forces and rescue the survivors.

Perhaps as some suggest, some of the money came from official US sources, a matter Marxist Che strongly opposed. The Che had already tried every excuse to gain control of a group sent up by País under the direction of Jorge Sotús, an experience resistance fighter, in March 1957. That is the year I saw René for the last time in that coconut grove.

Later when I had just joined the rebels, in April of 1958, the following year, I asked about René. Someone, probably El Mejicano, told me not to ask about that "desgraciado" again, and he let me understand Cuervo had been a traitor and was executed.

I was to learn later that El Mejicano had also been involved in the Cuervo matter, but the Che strangely enough had “forgiven him.” Perhaps the Che could not afford to rid himself of all his brave and experienced fighters. El Mejicano was certainly one of these, for he had already distinguished himself in battle.

El Mejicano went on to distinguish himself further in the war against Batista and become Captain under Universo Sanchez. Then he fled to the US, where it is said he indulged in crime and cockfighting.

As did El Mejicano, and René Cuervo, over time, most of the Che’s men left him, by death or by defection. The Che, it seems, carried the gift of short life. Before Guevara died, he had buried friends and enemies, from Algeria to the Congo, and finally in Bolivia.

According to the Che, the place where René Cuervo was killed was La Botella hill. This was one of the guerrilla camps. It happened sometime in October, 1957.

René was not armed when he was seized. However, published descriptions of the condemned man shot there do not fit René, and some reports record the Che ordering but not being present at the execution. Yet in other reports by the Che, the communist guerrilla leader refused to shake hands with Cuervo, saying “...he had summoned him to have him shot, not to greet him.”

The Che, justified this action with complex accusations, including a charge that René had deserted with a Remington rifle. The other charges against René made by the Che are strangely varied, broad, and all encompassing.

The Che has written that he executed Cuervo, because René had executed spies, and was victimizing an entire section of the Sierra, perhaps in collusion with Batista forces, plundering country folk, participating in gang rape, and he was raiding marijuana plantations.

The exact date is important. The October date for his execution given by the Che, in one account, would fix the “desertion” of René Cuervo in early August, not July. Yet in other accounts, the Che clearly states that René “deserted” July 11^th.

This is date is between the time when the anti-Batista Urban Civic Resistance lost its two leaders the brother’s Josue País (July1) and Frank (July 30). Frank is, commonly believed, betrayed by rivals Armando Hart and Haydée Santamaría, leading communist activists in Castro’s organization, thus, lending credence to the idea that René Cuervo was killed to help consolidate communist control over the rebels.

Esteban Ventura Novo --the same Batista Police Captain who beat up my cousin MJ in April 1958 and tortured by stepfather Enrique Sanz at the end of that year-- has written that when Frank País was killed, he had been betrayed to Mariano Faget, the head of Dictator Batista’s notoriously ineffective, but brutal, “communist control” group, the BRAC.

Historians were reluctant to accept this link of the communists to Faget until recently. Now we may know differently, because Faget’s son, also called Mariano, was discovered to be a Castro agent. Faget, the younger, had infiltrated the US Immigration and Naturalization Service at its highest levels. This further suggests that the René Cuervo killing was part of such a communist takeover or purge.

As time passed, many other such known and suspected betrayals of non-communist members of the resistance to Batista have come to light. One of the most prominent betrayals led to the killing of escaped members of the assault on Batista in the Presidential Palace.

This killing, a gruesome event, took place on the lower floors of same building where mother lived (Humbolt 7) in Havana. Even Castro had to admit that this was due to a betrayal, and the present dictator, was forced to try some of his own henchmen.

The country folk said that the reason for René Cuervo’s execution was that he had made certain people contribute to the July 26 movement. Now this in itself is strange, since subtle coercive pressure was commonly brought about by many in Castro’s forces to induce contribution. There were standard taxes to pay to the July 26 organization. It would seem that the Che was either jealous of not getting to control these funds or just interested in ruthlessly promoting himself and his marxist ideas.

Apparently the Che was more than willing to take credit for the things that René Cuervo did, and the Che admits recruiting marihuana growers. The Che is reputed to have captured and eventually killed Vejerano the "Guardia Rural" who was collecting the numbers racket money from the Banqueo del Oro for his lieutenant in Guisa.

The Banqueo del Oro a road along the extremely steep hillsides of the gorge of the upper Bayamo River. Here the Camino Real twists climbing towards the main ridge of the Maestra.

Vejerano was last seen as he started up the steep road of the Banqueo. However, it was not the Che who caught Vejerano. My grand-Aunt Manuela Jimenez, who lived near by the Banqueo del Oro, stated that it was René Cuervo and his men who captured Vejerano.

Vejerano was last seen heading into the mountains on the Banqueo road, riding a borrowed mule, because his horse was spent. However, it seems clear that Che did kill Vejerano when he was his captive, for the guerrilla leader was always ready to shoot captives. Vejerano's borrowed mule was eaten by the Che and his men.

It is notable that El Mejicano was also accused of plotting to desert at that same time as René left; however, according to the Che, he did not leave, confessed, and was forgiven. This must have been a busy day for the Che since he normally executed all and sundry at the least excuse. El Mejicano, if memory serves, wore a hat like that of a Rural Guard when I first saw him, perhaps it was that had been Vejerano’s hat.

I had already met Vejerano, when on his rounds he stayed at Grandfather’s batey. The family knew him well. Before "the revolution" Vejerano, abandoned by his Rural Guard partner who fled, had been savagely slashed by machete by a montuno he was trying to arrest for illegally cutting down forest.

Uncle Calixto Leonel put both the wounded Guardia Rural, and the Montuno who had cut him down with a machete, into his four wheel truck. Then he took them both to Guisa. Vejerano was taken to Dr. Joaquin Bueno’s Clínica for treatment. The Montuno was taken to jail so he would be booked, and thus on record could not be killed “fleeing arrest” as was the custom for such circumstance.

My Grand-Aunt Manuela Jiménez also told me that her abandoned house, was the site from which several ambushes of Batista convoys by the Che's forces effected. It is probable that both René Cuervo and El Mejicano participated in these actions. These encounters led to Batista reprisals.

The people of the area always privately maintained that René had a reputation for bravery and command that was overshadowing the Che. Perhaps that last time I saw René, he was returned with money donated by people on the plains and in the cities. The Che, who other rebels (Santiago de Juan, personal communication) said “se le aranca a cualquiera” (was always ready to kill anybody) brought up false charges and had René executed.

Despite the Che’s writings saying that René Cuervo was buried elsewhere, I favor the idea that he is interred in "La Hortaliza," the Che's private burial ground or at least one of them. La Hortaliza is supposed to be somewhere on a back slope of Aunt Rosie’s Lot Nine the most remote of the lots of Los Números. It is the lot closest to "La Maestra" the main ridge of the Sierra.

La Hortaliza is possibly nearby where Facundo Mantecón, had his store. I remember Facundo had a .410 shotgun that also shot .44 calibre bullets. He was a fat, bright, talkative, inventive man, but apparently a double agent for both Castro and Batista.

In "La Hortaliza" also lay the bodies of "El Negrito," the little black thief, who the Che is reputed to have kicked to death. Also buried there is Merengue a murderous shopkeeper and Batista informant.

There seems little doubt that René Cuervo was ready to kill in war against Batista; Grand-Aunt Manuela Jimenez, told of such.

However, the Che was a fanatically ambitious man, who killed so many that it appears he did not really remember who René Cuervo was, nor where he was buried. The goddess Canaima showed her approval of the Che’s deeds by soon taking him to her cruel bosom in the earth of a far South American land.

The land of Entre Ríos, with its coconut groves, pastures, batey and houses, will never be as it was. Now all of it, except for the heights of the ridge, is beneath the waters behind the large Corojo dam. These waters now block the Guamá and Bayamo Rivers from their northern union at Las Bocas, to reach deeper towards the foot of the mountains almost as far south as René Cuervo’s father’s shop.

Larry Daley copyright@1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006

07a RENÉ CUERVO IN THE COCONUT GROVE

In April 1958 when I arrive at the rebel encampment at Arroyón, I am greeted with far more reserve and suspicion than I expect. Unknown to me, the rebel strike has failed. The city rebels of Daniel have been badly blooded, and Castro’s mountain forces are in retreat.

Relief at my escape from the very lethal clutches of Batista’s shadowy spies and minions fades as a different and unexpected fear arises. The rebels are clearly very afraid that they may recruit infiltrators.

The first thing I remember was being asked if I had a weapon.

Opening my backpack, Aunt Rosie’s long barreled .38 Police Special raised interest, and the box of fifty bullets sparked much gladness; I had not known that ammunition was in such short supply. I am interrogated by the then Captain and Lieutenant in charge of the camp, Universo Sánchez, and the “Mexican” which was the name by which Francisco Rodríguez Tamayo was called.

They ask why I want join the rebels. I respond saying frankly and little scared that:

“! Me habían denunciado al ejército!”

“I have been reported as a rebel to the army!”

Then I tell why I know this and how Nicia had helped me.

Continuing I mention democracy and freedom.

Universo and the Mexican mutter between themselves and ask those gathered around about me, an assembled motley crew of mostly new rebels, a few more bearded rebels, and some “civilians” who I do not then realize are part of Castro’s extensive spy and support network.

The “Asturiano,” the proud Spanish mule skinner, speaks up for me:

“! El es buena gente!”

“He is a good person!”

That is enough. The others mutter assent. Then they ask if I would share my bullets.

“! Si! !Yo solo necesito cinco balas!"”

Yes, I only need five cartridges.”

“Why five, not six!” they ask. So I reply that I do not want to leave one under the hammer, in case a shot goes off in a fall. They look at me with respect.

I am in.

It was then that they gave me the .410 bolt action shotgun.

They ask if I needed a hammock and I say:

“No I prefer to sleep on the ground; it is safer.”

They look puzzled.

I do not know if they fed me that day, but I went to sleep early, wrapped in the blanket I had brought.

With the luck of innocents, I had made no mention of knowing René Cuervo. Later that year, I would ask the Mexican about René. The Mexican said, in scary tones:

“! No hablas de eso!

Do not talk about that!”

Forty years later:

I did not, but I thought about it a bit. It was forty years later that I began to learn something more substantial about what happened.

About six or seven years ago, I met Miriam Mata on e-mail. Her father had been a Batista policeman in the town of Guanabacoa. Although apparently innocent of crimes, he was executed in 1959 by the Argentine born rebel Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Miriam was cataloguing the Argentine killer’s crimes, so we started corresponding on the matter.

I tell Miriam that the last time I saw René Cuervo was in a cocal, a coconut grove, on our land about a mile upriver from "Las Bocas." Las Bocas is a confluence of waters, where the usually older, usually peaceful, Río Guamá sedately joins with her younger, bigger, more violent sibling, the Bayamo River.

More memories of life and reading float to the surface of my mind as I dredge from memories the last time I saw René Cuervo.

It is 1957, school is out. We are in an old coconut grove on our family’s land. I am an immature but well educated twenty, trying to forget the terrors of revolutionary violence in Havana. My sisters and cousins here, except for Cali, are at least five years younger. We do not know that these brief days in the summer of 1957, are the last time we are to be on our land as a family.

I am there among cousins and siblings, gathering fallen coconuts. All is peace and happiness. We forget our troubles. Well-educated, we know intellectually of the hopeless death fears and furious revenges of the Ancient Greeks. We are aware of the savage poetics of slow violent death of South American goddess, Canaima, that have plagued our Latin American cultures for millennia. We also are aware of the floods of cruel bloody violence of past Cuban wars and the growing creciente of gore of present circumstances.

So far such sadness has not touched us personally, except for MJ our eldest cousin who is not here and thus we can let ourselves forget his narrow escape from death three long years ago. We are not in Havana or even Bayamo, around here, since the Ros have left their plantation house, there is no TV for many miles. Here we avoid the radio, and no longer receive newspapers and news magazines. We are young, at home in our so seemingly peaceful land; and set disturbing thoughts aside.

Thus, we ignore the growth of the dark barbaric forces of chaos and tyranny. We cling tightly, irrationally, to the thoughts of the refuge of Bayatiquirí, that legendary Taína land of happiness, peace and love. Yet, the horrors of the patient stealthy kills of Canaima were soon to come right to this, their often chosen island playground, in these very mountains, hills, and plains.

For now, we can still pretend that times are good. Finding peace in our illusions, we gaze at the rounded, tree capped, hills, protruding sparsely from the flat lands to the northwest. We note with proprietary satisfaction that these hills near the plains are very low compared to our coffee and forest holdings in the mountain barrier that blocks the southern sky.

Others in the family are already affected. My younger brother Lionel is not here; he always precocious already lives with a woman in our high mountain coffee plantation in Los Números, where the war is closer. Cousin Rafael Garcia Iñiguez, far more sophisticated than us, has already graduated as a Cuban Airforce pilot, and probably patrolling skies above the island in a F-47; the last time we saw Rafaelito was some years ago when he was flying dangerously low up the Bayamo River valley, appearing to our worried eyes to be dodging among the trees. MJ is somewhere in Bayamo or Havana studying.

It is convenient to forget that Castro is in the south on the highest, furthermost mountains with his guerrillas. The attack on the Palace is known to us but that was tumultuous Havana. We do not know that the Guisa area is a re-supply zone for the guerrillas, nor that the Che Guevara is conducting a blood purge weakening the rebels’ forces and aggressiveness; and these last two factors make for relative calm in the Bayamo Valley. Here none of that seems important.

The varied spectrum of our hair shows our mixed origins. There is the jet-black straight hair of my youngest sister Leonor, and light brown of Lucia her elder sibling. Beautiful fair-skinned cousin Madelyne Hatswell has sandy locks. Madelyne’s bratty younger brothers, darker haired Michael, and very blond Gary are also with us in that grove.

Cousin Cali, half brother of the Hatswell kids, is older, sharper featured, and darkly handsome. He, I guess because we had noticed some years back when we male cousins bathed in the river, already had been shaved by Nicia to better enjoy her sophisticated delights. There was some jealousy among us; however, Cali refused to talk about that.

Bucolic beauty surrounds us. In a full blue sky flecked with moving ships of white cloud, the Taíno Sun Lord Guami güey shines intense and yellow-bright, bringing its light and heat to the complex emerald brocade of this florid green land. Multi colors blotch the hide of the lizards, chipojo, guaná and many more that run on ground and the palm trunks. Some of the many birds of Cuba fly by. This semi-wild countryside basks languid in solar heat, lost in the tranquility of satisfied fertility. No storms seem near.

The coconut grove is old. The palms are perhaps thirty or forty feet high, leaning at curving angles to the ground, their palm trunks ring-notched with the scars of fallen fronds. The coconut palms’ canopies far above us give pleasantly moderate shade, with occasional flecks of direct sun light.

Our old, gray donkey Avellana meaning Hazelnut, just stands there, at the northwest edge of the coconut grove Her has sparsely napped hair looks much like the worn pelt on a beloved old teddy bear. She has a single short, black, zebra stripe to the right of her boney shoulder blades. A few flies that having so far escaped the lizards’ fast tongues wing in. Her fuzzy, long ears twitch as she shakes her head to shrug these insects off.

The donkey’s tufted tail is sporadically and languidly lashing away other insects. Her plump haunches, wide belly and only slightly swayed back without patches of white hair over old scars, testified to a life of careful care. These beasts live long. Avellana’s large eyes are not as deep and liquid black as when she was young, many “donkey years” ago. Yet, her now sparser lashes are still languid, and she can still see well.

Avellana was already too old to work, when she had been bought for five dollars about seven years before, to serve our infrequent and undemanding whims of childhood. This was a kind of donkey retirement; this way the burra could live without much work and pass the rest of her life in peace grazing on tall guinea grass, malva and other forbs in our lush pastures.

Avellana wears a jáquima, an ancient Arab style rope bridle. In English, twisting sounds of ancient Arabic or was it Aramaic, we say halter. The jáquima was really just a single rope tied in a certain complex way.

The rope lazo, a lasso, was first placed over her head to loosely drape around the neck of the beast. Then the free end of the lasso was wrapped thrice around her muzzle. A loop, of the rope was, tucked under these muzzle wraps, pulled over her ears and around her head. I still recall the prickly feel and stiffness of the thin, coarse rope.

The loose end of the rope was tugged down through the muzzle wraps, so that it was tight behind her ears. Avellana did not object to the rough rope rubbing across her neck and face. The free end was left as a single guiding line, making a rein long enough so that its knotted end could be used to lash her rump gently to tell her when she was to move.

The end of the untied rein lay on the ground. Avellana was old enough and set in her ways; she did not need to be tethered to something to hold her.

Here seems eternal, in this placid grove we seem to have connections to all portals of history. Such a rope halter might well have been used since Babylonian times; it probably was as unnoticed and as commonplace then, as now, a mere tool of man through ages. One could imagine processions of ancient, now long dead, ghost donkeys stretching back over the millennia and the vastness of continents, beasts of burden, gray, quiet and enduring.

Memories and more memories, drag me back to that grove:

We all wear yarey, fan-palm frond hats. The women wear hats which are as is customary broader, floppier, with wider brims, filigreed edges and ribbons to tie them on. These women’s hats are far more ornate than those boys and men use.

Women cannot run well in their hats since they tend to blow off. Men’s hats with the narrower brims tend to stay on. Women stay better shaded, skin less tanned by the burning sun of the plains of Oriente Province. A least by day to maintain their dignity, women must move more sedately.

To move faster, women run, hip-swinging, slightly knock-kneed, hat in hand.

Young middle class women of this time in Cuba, are respected half-repressed half free, but almost always loved. They do not have the freedoms or the hardships of Güajira women, nor do they yet have the sophisticated wiles and discrete sexual lives of their married elder sisters. They are, at least supposedly, set aside, cocooned, chaperoned and protected from the wiles and wars of predatory men.

We, boys as well as young men, wear machetíns, short pointed machetes, at our sides. They are perhaps phallic emblems of our virility which by custom cannot be physically directed at respectable young women, only at those women whose status allows such.

These cutlasses could provide some protection against less well intended strangers. By law in Cuba, full machetes were sold with cropped tips. Jabbing machetín points can keep the longer full machete at bay, and reach to stab under longer weapon’s slower curving slice.

The portals of history open:

Machetíns are also ancient tools, for Romans had used such short stabbing swords. The Roman gladius hispanus was about two feet long and pointed. The barbarians use the far longer spatha slashing sword.

Luis was the wildest of Juan Ramo’s Taíno sons. My brother, Lionel, once used a machetín to fend off an envious and boastful Luis Ramos. Lionel, unknowingly, repeated the ancient duels between ancient Romans and Barbarians, or the Romanized Iberians and the invading Visigoths, showing once again that the machetín, the gladius, could be more effective than the spatha-like long machete.

Before these nineteenth century Cuban wars, Máximo Gómez had left his native island of “Quisqueya La Bella” or Hispaniola and had lived seeking peace near here in a little hamlet called El Dátil, the place of the date tree. This hamlet was not more than fifteen miles northwest of here, on the Cauto plains just over the horizon near Bayamo. One could almost, but not quite because of the distance and intervening isolated foothills, see the place from this coconut grove.

As a little old man, Gómez was a bad-tempered, strict and skilled guerrilla general. He was a friend of Calixto senior, for over thirty years and his campaign diaries often place him in close proximity to Don Benjamín. El Chino Viejo, as he was called then was once the leader of all Cuban rebels; he, the last of the great Mambí warrior-leaders, died in bed when Cuba was free of Spain.

In the wars of Independence, Mambí General Máximo Gómez Báez, experienced in war in the mountainous Caribbean island of Quisqueya, had taught the lethal advantages of such relatively short swords in mounted combat. Still the short sword was not always an advantage in those battles. Grandfather, on foot, in the battle for Tunas, as I have already mentioned coerced surrender of a fort using a far longer and very flexible paraguayo machete, but that was against a fortified enemy hiding behind rifle slots.

My machetín was given to me by grandmother; I do not know why but it was a most treasured and useful possession. In the 1950s, riveted Bakelite® was the common material for machete handles.

This machetín, this short cutlass, was different. Its hilt had a boss of brass, and was made of leather disks over a steel spike that joined the blade. Its leather scabbard was short too, indicating that the machetín was designed to be used as a weapon, and not a mere mocho, a worn down old work machete.

I know that Grandmother had used the weapon to defend against the majás, the great rainbow boas that came of out the rainforest and pastures to eat her roosting chickens at night. Perhaps it had even been a war weapon in those nineteenth century wars. Some time before illness took her to a rocking chair I had seen her use the machetín. Even in her seventies dressed in solemn black, a nightmare of rage and vengeance, she would rush towards the roosts of the cackling scared chickens, machetín on high screaming a terrifying shrill war cry ready to cut the snakes in half if she could catch them. I now wore the weapon proudly thinking on its unknown, but surely bloody, history.

My mind returns to that coconut grove:

Our clothes are light and worn, t-shirts and jeans for us, floppy loose dresses for our young women kin. The weather is warm, but not overly so; thus, I guess, it is just the beginning of July. The hot August of the plains is yet to come.

The alliance of these bossy young women asks help to gather a few of green coconuts. They talk Cousin Cali, short for Calixto, into helping them collect these fresh coconuts. This is an old grove, the palms are tall, reaching towards the sky. Cali, much lighter and far more agile than I, could climb the highest palms. I could only climb far lower palms.

The young women, we call them “girls,” do not need the green nuts still hanging on the palms for their project. The coconut milk from the green fruit is for refreshment.

What the girls want is the firm white flesh of the mature nuts. They plan to mix the coconut “meat” with brown sugar to make the lumpy, crunchy, very sweet candies we call dulce de coco.

We were too old for such play at being children, yet we did it. Collecting mature fallen coconuts, we search as if for gigantic Easter eggs. The great nuts lay partially hidden among the decaying fallen fronds, sparse weeds, and discarded coconut husks under the high roof of the coco palms tops.

Flecks of lights shine down drifting and dancing brightly among the jumbled detritus on the grove floor. By this moving light, among the deep shade, we find what we seek.

Streaked gray on gray, the oval nuts are as if slightly deflated, slightly larger, American footballs. We roll the nuts over with our booted feet before we lift up our prizes.

We do this to drive away any guabá, the alacrán scorpions, great hairy araña pelu’a tarantulas, or centipedes so commonly found in the damp spot of matted crushed vegetation, where the coconut had fallen from far above. We do not fear them, for the bites these guabá are merely painful, not deadly.

As we lifted up the coconuts, we expose the damp and darker underside, and see the fine line cracks formed by drying that would, if left alone, allow the great seed to sprout. Little pill bugs scurry away, or holding on curled up to rise clinging with their many weak feet to the lifted nut, only to fall off to ground.

The hill behind the grove is still forested, steep and almost cliff-like, part of a low ridge. This ridge is at the end of the immense whale’s back at “Entre Ríos,” dead Grandfather’s more than 1,000-acre farm.

Ghosts of ancestors wander by:

This area of cliffs and rolling hills was a small part of the Marquis de Guisa land grant that Don Benjamín Ramírez had inherited in the early 19^th Century. Don Benjamín then had seemingly endless land. Entre Ríos was merely one little section of it.

Grandfather had bought Entre Ríos from Don Benjamín at the beginning of the 20^th century. Grandfather was proud and prosperous in his new position as Cuban Consul to Uruguay. He married Rafaela Petronila, one of Don Benjamín’s daughters.

Grandfather had needed Entre Ríos to give him the status of landowner, for Rafaela, his bride, would inherit far vaster lands. He married grandmother by proxy, more of a betrothal than a marriage, for she was then too young. She, madly in love sent him photographs of herself. Grandfather waited, satisfying himself with other women.

In Uruguay in 1906, grandmother would bear her first child of many, for eight would live. The first was Rosita, the most beautiful, Rosita the movie star.

The young couple was a union of first cousins; this was an accepted practice in those rural areas, and even condoned by the rigid Spanish clergy, who at first had resisted it until the force of practicality in these scarcely populated realms intervened.

Aurora Petronila was daughter of Manuela Enamorado, Don Benjamín’s wife. Manuela’s sister, Leonela Enamorado, had birthed Grandfather, during the 1868-1878 Ten Years’ failed independence War, against the Spanish. A love child of Leonela and the great general Calixto García Iñiguez, grandfather was born in the manigua forests of the wilderness

The war lost and her adventures done, Leonela shared the reflected glory of the famous General. After the end of the Ten Years’ War, General Calixto had rebelled again in a disaster called the Guerra Chiquita, the little war. The little war was fought in these very lands, and ended in a straggling march of perhaps half a dozen disillusioned survivors, their clothes ripped off by thorns and branches, their limp yuans dangling in naked defeat, on the banks of this very river. Calixto was held imprisoned in Spain and then held under watch for total of eighteen years.

Leonela had married a certain Spaniard by the name of Pérez. She settled down with him in Manzanillo and gave birth to another child, Eduardo Pérez. We called him “Tío Eduardo.”

Tío Eduardo was a rake, and a philanderer, even by Cuban standards. He had sired a number of children, including a daughter also called Leonela. One of Eduardo’s granddaughters, breathtakingly beautiful Leonela González became a classical dancer in the Cuban National Ballet.

Before the 1895-1898 War of Cuban Independence grandfather, of course, was named Calixto after his father. The young man grew up in the city of Manzanillo on the bay of Guacanayabo, lost from this coconut grove, beyond its sunsets to the west. He was educated in the de la Guardia academy there.

Calixto, the younger, was 20 in 1895 when he joined in the last war of Cuban independence, in a place near the mountains somewhat west of this coconut grove. The next day, Batista’s father Belisario also joined these Mambí fighters. Grandfather would become general like his father; Belisario would not advance to officer.

The war of 1895 was fought mainly on Cuban plains, since the Cuban Mambí were far more successful in this conflict than they had been in Ten Year War. At this time the Spanish forces learned to fear the complexity and abundance of ambush sites of this range. In this war, these Sierra Maestra Mountains were soon safe from Spanish.

Grandfather’s land was in the northern foothills at the place where the Sierra Maestra protruded most deeply into the Cauto River plains. This area had long been family refuge in times of war. This coconut grove was almost at the western hills’ northernmost limit. Yet to the east beyond the Guisa River and west of the Contramaestre, other hills extended miles further north of the town Guisa.

Going to our north, the ridge, the backbone of our farm, came to die, plunging beneath the ground, in deep lava edged pools at the confluence of the Guamá and Bayamo rivers. In modern times these rivers gave this piece of land its name “Entre Ríos” means between rivers, a Spanish name between Taíno waters. And that is what Grandfather called his hacienda.

Back to 1957

At the time of my part in this account, Taíno descendents, the Ramos, still lived there, at Las Bocas, the joining of the river mouths. They lived in a batey of tree-shaded bohíos, just where the waters met, and a mile or so north of this coconut grove. They too had a coconut grove, which was even older than this one.

We, prosperous, well-traveled and well-educated, tied proudly close to the war honors of our rebel Spanish side, denied our links to these peoples who called Grandfather, El Babo or the chief. Only the children of Grandfather’s eldest son, born out of wedlock, addressed Juan Ramos, with the title of “Tío” or uncle.

We did not know our origins well then; school was out for summer, so resting from our studies and not yet having to make a living, we peacefully played at working. We occasionally looked to the west and south, beyond the tree-screened high bank at the curving power of the now crystal-clear, but still fast running Bayamo River.

Beyond the river, the large boulder field and the much more extensive flat alluvial deposits gave testimony of the Bayamo torrent’s power. The river came to full strength to become a vast raging brown, boulder rolling, killing, flood in the time of heavy rains. We called these floods crecientes. We, and all who lived by that river, feared them.

We were carrying un-husked coconuts, surprisingly light for their size, and loading them into large panniers woven of yarey palm fronds. We called these panniers serones. And one of these serones was slung across the back of endlessly patient Avellana.

It was easy work; we were in the shade of the palms’ fronds; and it did not take many coconuts to fill the serones. We were bantering with each other in the light rivalry of siblings and cousins who cared for each other. We were having fun.

Suddenly he appeared, as if from nowhere, on foot,at the edge of the raised riverbank. He was coming from the river’s edge, moving south and upriver. He had crossed the riverside fence by slipping easily between the barbwire strands.

Then I saw René Cuervo for the last time:

René Cuervo was slight, and short; his brown hair combed slicked back and darkened with Vaseline. Despite the river crossings of his journey, his starched and pleated guayabera and pants were well pressed and clean. How these clothes defied the mud-smears of his journey is a secret only a successful, woman hunting, Montuno dandy could know.

Apparently unarmed and unburdened, he gave us a brief salutation. We returned his greeting with the warmth of family, and yet he did not stop as was customary in that sparsely populated area.

René just continued walking rapidly past the large, high, straight gray trunk of the jobo, hog-plum tree. Beneath the high canopy of that tree, he opened and closed a gate behind him, and disappeared up a pasture trail towards the southern mountains.

We of the family try to control of our beasts’ fate by fences. Good barbwire fences kept the pastures in good shape by helping limiting the grazing and allowing the grass to re-sprout and grow. By separating the animals, these fences also stopped the mules from attacking and killing foals. In addition these fences discouraged our massive Brown Swiss breeding bull from finding other bulls to fight with, or finding cows belonging to other owners and thus wastefully expending his expensive sperm.

These fences also stopped cows from straying keeping them from wandering near the dangers of the fast waters of the Bayamo River. We were told by our elders to keep the gates near the rivers closed, since cows drown far easier than horses, because water enters through the cows’ anuses even when they are swimming. Especially here near the river, we were careful to close all gates behind us.

Across the gulf of years, I cannot remember some details. Was René wearing a hat, or was the gate wooden, or was it simply was collapsible device made of barb wire strung between movable poles. However, I do remember he closed the gate, since René Cuervo like us, was trained in county manners. Neither of us knew that simple gate would divide the last semblance of Bayatiquirí from the spreading shadows of the land of Canaima. René was going to unknowing betrayal and death. A tale of his last days would take long to uncover, but now I know enough to tell of it in the next chapter.

Larry Daley copyright@1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.

05 NICIA, THE GENEROUS WOMAN, SAVES MY LIFE 05b CHE EL GRANDE

05a NICIA, THE GENEROUS WOMAN, SAVES MY LIFE

05b CHE EL GRANDE

Nicia, the female form of Nicolas, is a very old name, used proudly at least since the time of the Romans, and ancient Greeks. In this context, Nicia means victorious army.

Among the Montuno Güajiros, it was the custom to give a child the name of the saint of that day on which she or he was born. Perhaps Nicia was born on some December 6^th in the 1930s.

Memory kicks in with images and emotions:

Nicia is no saint. She is beautiful, sensual and experienced. She, that smart woman, has a commercial past. One of my cousins told me her smoothly-shaven, well-trained, xoxa is very adroit, winking lewd invitations to entice visitors and adeptly entertaining them to fullest satisfaction. Now retired from those commercial endeavors, Nicia is in charge of our kitchen and with some assistants, cooks for all at the batey of “La Casa de los Generales.”

Nicia is, as are the women of this time, defined by her present man. Thus, she is known as the, often unfaithful, woman of "Che el Grande." Her “Che” is one of the mayorales, the top-hands or foremen of our lower land, our finca “Entre Ríos” in the foothills of Sierra Maestra Cuba.

Che el Grande is very tall in this place of short people, well over six feet, a strong man, with a trim figure. He was vain about his strength and unlike most tended to work without a shirt, proudly displaying well defined and large muscles. He was known for his strength which was considerable even in comparison to the strong Güajiros of this place. Once I saw him helping change a tire on a jeep using a fence post as a lever to jack the vehicle up. Later we would find that his courage did not correlate to his size.

For all this, plus the authority and perks of his position, make Che el Grande a man of some importance locally. Strangely because of the time and place, Nicia’s unfaithfulness did not seem to bother him; this is fair since he also often wanders. Thus, they share an open relationship.

That beautiful day in April 17, 1958, she called to me. Nicia’s call was both secret and urgent.

Montuna women usually speak little to men. They sing more than talk in the melodious Oriente Province accent. Stressing some syllables slowly and purposely, omitting others, they let few words tell their meaning, and silence and posture tell the rest.

I go to her hurriedly. We stand close. She, that generous former “woman of the life,” whispers to me. I go closer.

We stand on the bare ground under the shade of a large Salvadera tree, a thorny Euphorbia bearing exploding fruit, and exuding lethal poisonous sap. Somehow although we are standing in the open air, there is nobody else near, and our conversation is very private

Nicia's kind voice is low. She is addressing me as a friend in the intimate rather than formal Spanish case. It is not just because she is using the familiar address Güajiros almost always do, it is something else. Her voice and words tell me that in her eyes I am no longer protected by being one of the highly respected family of Los Generales.

Nicia tells me that through an informant the Batista forces have me listed as a rebel sympathizer. Now that I am betrayed, I am helpless, and even more unprotected from the powers that be as she is for the Batista forces rarely kill women. She can stay I must leave.

In memory her words ring:

“!Te denunciaron!”

They have denounced you to the Batista Army!

“!Te va’ a matá si no huyes!”

“They will kill you if you do not flee!”

Then the chill of urgent dangerous reality resolves my doubts, I realize that joining the rebels is my only salvation. Branded as a rebel, because of the help I had given the Castro forces, I am forced, finally to become one.

“!Nicia not tengo armas! !Sin armas no me puedo alzar!”

“Nicia I have no weapons! Without weapons I cannot join the rebels!”

Constantly, in my mind is what had happened when the rebels had come one dark night not too many days ago. They came with my brother Lionel. They were seeking to find guns in our great house, the La Casa de los Generales. I had helped, not knowing that Lionel was there under coercion.

Even now in my old age, the images of those days -vivid and real as if they were from yesterday- come back to me:

The rebels, many so new to rebellion that they have not yet let their beards grow out, appear suddenly out of the darkness. I, the only member of the family in the house, meet my obligation and go out. I walk into the night past the veranda, to meet them under the mango tree of the inner batey.

These rebels were “la gente de,” that is the followers of Lorente. Perhaps, given Lorente’s habits of caution, they were under the command of Ricarte. The rebels ransacked the house, and the rest of the farm buildings of the batey looking for arms. The rebels do not find anything but grandfather’s war machetes and some sabers in the attic beneath the Spanish tiled roof of the main house. They take the ancient weapons and leave, still in the company of my brother, Lionel.

One of the weapons was a paraguayo machete. This paraguayo, a straight, long, narrow, very flexible war sword had been the instrument of one of grandfather’s most noted heroic deeds.

In the vivid family memories and in the graphic histories I later read of the event Grandfather, Calixto Enamorado, is a hero:

It is the siege of the fort complex at Tunas, August 28, 1897. Grandfather at 23 is now a very young Lieutenant Colonel. He is given charge of the Vega regiment.

Before dawn, Lieutenant Colonel Calixto Enamorado moves his men stealthily to a hundred or so yards from the key Spanish position “la Cuartel de Caballería.” He arrives at the cover of the riverine forest around the arroyo Ahoga Pollos, the stream of the drowned chicken.

There, Grandfather motions his men to silence and the regiment waits. At dawn, at his father’s command, precisely at 5:45 AM the Mambí bugles blow signaling the Cuban artillery to open fire.

With deadly precision, the low-slung rifled Krupp cannons of Fred Funston blast holes in the fort’s walls. The dynamite cannon of Juan Portuondo fires, its high arching shells enter through the roof of the fort; each shot exploding with the dreadful force of six pounds of nitro-gelatin inside the enclosed walls of the Cuartel de Caballería.

Smoke is everywhere around the fort. The smaller, flanking Spanish forts, Aragón and Concepción, open fire on the Cuban forces. Portuondo moves the dynamite cannon, and Funston turns his Krupp to blast fort Aragón. The Spanish garrison of this fort flees down a trench, to be literally cut to pieces by the machetes of the madly charging forces of Ángel de La Guardia. Ángel who went to school with grandfather in Manzanillo, is like, or perhaps was a brother.

Grandfather leads his men through mud and brush and approaches his target below the defender’s Mauser rifle fire. Once near enough, Calixto Enamorado, paraguayo in hand, breaks from the cover to lead his men charging the fortification. His brother, Granduncle “Tío” Carlos, is there also, running forward leading his own men on. Behind them, Mario García Menocal a future president of Cuba, lies wounded; Mario’s men also now follow Carlos and Calixto.

The Spanish in this blockhouse and those in all the others are firing desperately with their own Krupp cannon and deadly Mauser rifles. The fighting goes back and forth, some Spanish surrender. The Cuban’s dynamite cannon knocks-out the Spanish defender’s Krupp.

Grandfather reaches this blockhouse and stands to the side and very close to the Spanish rifle slots. There, he is in a blind spot of the fortifications, protected by simple geometry, from the Spanish rifles inside which cannot now aim and shoot at him. The other enemy riflemen in the remaining Spanish forts cannot fire effectively either without risking hitting their own.

With his very long machete paraguayo, curving-in, poking, flexing, cutting and slashing through rifle slots, Grandfather coerces the surrender of the terrified men in this blockhouse.

As the siege goes on, one by one the other Spanish forts fall. Towards the end and near victory, Ángel de la Guardia, is killed. Some say that Ángel was drunk, with both alcohol and the guilt that he carried since he, charged with the protection of the national hero, survived the death of José Martí. Great grandfather, that tough Major General, mourns Ángel like the son which he well may have been.

Time accelerates forward:

However, that much larger war, ended with Cuban independence from Spain. Grandfather becomes a member of the Cuban House of Representatives and Consul General in far flung countries, siring at least twelve children with his wife and with beautiful mistresses such as Carmen Muñoz. Mario García Menocal will become a Cuban president. Funston goes on to the combat the Philippine Insurgency, leads in the capture of the principal of the insurgents and receives a medal of honor. Funston combats the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. And by 1917 he is a Mayor General US Army charged with the Southern Command, directing John Pershing in his futile chase after Pancho Villa.

Funston, by dying suddenly in 1917, misses being commander of US forces in WWI. That year again at Victoria de las Tunas, in eastern Cuba, Grandfather leads a victorious Conservative cavalry column against the Liberals of the Chambelona who were believed allied with the Germans. Tío Carlos becomes Ambassador to the Court of Saint James in London; and is honored by England for slipping through German U-boat blockade to supply vast amounts of sugar for British troops and civilians. The return cargo is from the false Scandinavian destination, ballast of Swedish granite cobblestones for the streets and plazas around Havana docks.

Again we return to 1958.

None of those 1958 rebels, nor even I, at the time, knew of the historic importance of that paraguayo. Even then only some, mostly historians, and the few old veterans still alive, know of this matter.

These edged weapons are now useless, for this is 1958, not 1897. This is a much smaller, very different war. Their choice to take these long steel antiques is strange; they are not riding, and when walking they are far too short to wear these very long swords. The rebels go carrying the old weapons. It is far, and the steel is heavy, and yet still they take them. Perhaps, they find these death-dealing blades a kind of consolation prize, or protective talismans.

The rebels leave with these swords, held in the scabbards they had also found and taken. The paraguayo and curved sabers drag. The scabbards score the ground behind them. They walk away, passing outside the fence, but still under the canopy of the very same poisonous salvadera tree. They go south into the dark of night. It is all quite absurd.

05b CHE EL GRANDE

“Che el Grande” had come to our land from the manganese mines of Charco Redondo. Nicia, although from our area, apparently had been “working” there. They apparently had befriended each other, for it seems they left Charco Redondo together.

All the Güajiro workers, especially “Che el Grande,” who Uncle Calixto had left in charge of the batey of the farm, see me with the rebels. None speak to me.

This Che is a lover not a fighter and should, not to be confused with the bloody-minded Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This Che is a man who bides his time, keeps his own council, avoids conflict and tries to seize every opportunity for peaceful advancement. Uncle Marcus is now staying in Bayamo, so Che el Grande often spent his nights in Marcus’s apartment at the Batey.

Che does this principally because two of the three Taína daughters of Tenazas still stay there. This perhaps was an indication that our extended family’s power had waned considerably since these women had been Uncle Marcus’s pair of live-in mountain mistresses. Or perhaps not; Uncle Marcus may have merely passed down Tenaza’s daughters to men of lesser status, as if they were hand-me-down used clothes or more likely he may have let these insatiable sisters live in his apartment as a measure of gratitude and friendship.

This is tradition: Hernán Cortés, married off his Native Meso-American interpreter and most valuable ally the brilliant Doña Marina “La Malinche,” and Great Grandfather Calixto set up Great Grandmother Leonela Enamorado in this way. Or perhaps Uncle Marcos had left them for Nicia or the daughters of Tenaza’s left him when he married, perhaps the sisters services were merely a rural convenience. I do not know, for I try not to pry too much.

Who knows the real reasons for such is the human soul. Uncle Marcus is really fun loving. He lives a wild life, especially after one of his wives had humiliated him by running away with Plácido.

Plácido is a skilled coffee drying expert who works for us in the coffee harvest season. He is a Haitian black, who between working on the plains cutting sugar cane and drying our coffee, is building up his own coffee plantation high up in the Sierra at “Agua Revés.

Plácido is jet black, lanky, thoughtful and slim. He always seems to in a good mood. Marcus is shorter, and far lighter his skin has just a tinge of brown, his hair only slightly wavy, he is still strong but quite stout. Although usually merry, Marcus drinks a lot, a trait perhaps he had acquired while a student at Louisiana State University Baton Rouge.

I doubt that Plácido’s color entered much into the occasion, because when Marcus was studying at LSU in the 1940s, he had successfully proclaimed his right to drink at a segregated black bar. Marcus replied, to those who said he was white, that he was Cuban.

Maybe these events relate more to the time when Marcus came back from town under treatment by Dr. Bueno for a social disease. Perhaps, Marcus objected to rumors about his wife’s preference which somehow related to the customary belief of racial differences in comparative endowment. However, too much of this may be speculation, additional details belong to a different story.

By that time the April 1958 strike had begun, and the Batista forces were busy suppressing it, spilling blood of the innocent and enemy alike. I was very worried and scared, because the Batista forces were always much more interested in body count than in determining the truth.

Confused and very much afraid, my mind raced. I did not like Batista, and I believed in democracy and freedom. However, the light spotter “avioneta” planes, the much heavier bombers and long powerfully armed convoys of Batista soldiers that now so frequently rolled along the El Camino Real filled me with dread. We called these soldiers “casquitos,” the little ones with hard shells, because of their youth and steel-helmet covered heads, but never, never to their faces.

A few days before, I had heard the drone of the coming light plane and watched it, fearful that this avioneta would come far too close. I could see it from the east window of my second story room in the southeast corner of the Casa de Alto, a two-story house on the finca the farm, “Entre Ríos,” which was what we called this lower part of our lands. This house, once a storage barn, was now part residence and part office.

That window in Casa de Alto looked out over the now empty concrete flatness of our numerous secaderos, our coffee-drying aprons. Beyond, I could see the cattle corral, an untended array of one of grandfather’s collections of different fruit trees, a hillside patch of sugarcane for cattle feed, and a gully, with royal palms rising steeply from it drained, the hilltops beyond.

The spotter plane with its deadly .30 caliber belt-fed Browning machine-gun, flew gracefully south, seeking traces of rebels. Its right wing tipped down as it followed the curve of the hills to search among the folds, trees, tall grass, and grazing cattle of our finca's mountainous pastures. That tipping to the right lifted the left wing, exposing the machine gun barrel to my view.

Until then, watching that graceful flying machine was one of the most terrifying experiences of my young life. It seemed that the plane was looking into my room to check on me personally; supernaturally it seemed able to plumb my very thoughts. In my irrational terror, I felt that this sentient airplane did not like my thoughts.

My Uncle Calixto Lionel had told me that the rebels were communists. That made no sense at the time, for I also knew that the official communist party supported Batista and his armies. Moreover, Uncle Calixto was in Bayamo, staying near the Cuartel de Bayamo, the famous Batista army’s fort.

The rebels said they were not communist; Herbert Matthews the famous New York Times reporter had said it, too. Thus, it seemed clear, at that time, that the opposition to Batista was a true case of "Just War", which one of my teachers, Father Pastor Gonzales, explained was a war of good against evil. The rebels were good, democratic, and not communists, and Batista's group was a bunch of corrupt killers.

In retrospect: I was right about Batista's people. They were indeed a bunch of corrupt killers. How wrong my assumptions were about the rebel leadership, would not fully come to me for several years.

As the years passed, I learned that in the Spain of the 1930s, Herbert Matthews had diligently reported the atrocities of the right, but neglected those of the extreme left. Not only that, but also Miguel Ángel Quevedo, the editor of Bohemia, the most prestigious magazine in Cuba, admitted before his suicide that he had withheld unfavorable information on Castro. Clearly then, I, among many, had been mislead.

At that time all I had was a terror that shamed my ancestors. Yet it seems that as part of his obligations, Che el Grande had reported on me and my brother to Uncle Calixto Leonel. How this information reached the Batista forces is a matter of conjecture. I certainly can credit Nicia with telling me so swiftly how the news of the Batista forces reactions in my regard. In the fullness of time I would have the opportunity to save Che el Grande from the vengeance of the Castro Rebels, and I would do this rescue gladly, for Nicia and because of my family’s tradition as protectors. After all my grandfather in life was El Babo, he had been the chief, the Cacique, the protector of the area.

Larry Daley, copyright 1996, revised 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.

06 RUNNING TO JOIN THE REBELS

06 RUNNING TO JOIN THE REBELS

As most in Cuba during April of 1958 my understanding political circumstance was confused. I had little idea that our seemingly local struggle for democracy was being co-opted by marxists and that the whole country was being dragged into the “Cold War.”

My mind turns back to that time:

Right now, my only concern was the fear that filled me. I had seen many graphic photographs of the murdered opposition. Bohemia magazine was never shy about publishing them. They were horrible pictures of torture and murder. The dead rebels’ bodies were “escribillados con balas,” their deaths “written with bullets.”

To be an enemy of Batista was very dangerous. In these days corpses of those who Batista forces murdered were found seemingly everywhere in Cuba. It concerned me most that these dead were found as “warnings written with bullets” in places I knew well. They were found in urban places such as the Humbolt 7 apartment building where my mother and Enrique Sanz lived in Havana; and they appeared over five hundred miles away on the rural Oriente Province dirt road of the Camino Real across the river from where I lived now.

Clearly from what Nicia was telling me, right at that crucial time of April 1958, I must do something decisive or I would die. Yet, my worried mind was not completely sure if rebelling openly was the right decision, and besides a gun was required to join the rebels.

The morning after the rebels came to la Casa de los Generales, Nicia aware of my confusion and dilemma, takes matters into her strong, thin, long-fingered hands that have pleasured so many. She stands there a moment, in a loose and simple, once bright, calf-length dress, which was now, with many washings faded gray. It was the kind dress she wore most working days.

Her hair is thinning, receding a little, running back at the sides of her forehead, but it is still glossy black and softly wavy. It was not long, cut barely above her shoulders, showing that she had some urban experience. Her feet are in small, black, low-heel working pumps. New crows-feet edge her eyes; near her nose, traces of pincer lines are beginning to crease her face.

Nicia’s cheekbones are prominent and high on her triangular face in the Taína Indian fashion, and her eyes are deep and shiny black. Since she worked indoors, her skin is not the darkest brown, yet it shines as bronze contrasting with the black-blue highlights of her hair and gray of her clothing.

The Casa de Alto throws long shadows to the west. A slight breeze blows cool morning air. Elegant, shiny and toxic, the salvadera tree’s heart-shaped leaves flutter in the slight breeze trembling fearfully aspen like on long petioles. She motions without speaking and takes me through the west door of the Casa de Alto.

She goes up the stairs. There are no windows here in the stairwell; we are in deep shade within concrete walls. There is a strong smell of Spanish cedar wood. She goes up towards the odor of cedar and the bright purity of morning light that is pouring through open windows of the second floor. I follow.

A couple of the worn steps in the wooden staircase creak as always. The second floor is built of plainly carpentered tropical woods. The stairwell is protected by a fence of un-carved wooden banisters. As we reach the second floor, we turn west along the banisters that surrounded the stairwell.

We are in a large room that here extends across the width of the house. The windows have no screens, merely large shutters, hinged on top. The shutters are propped open now by squared wooden rods. Removing the rods drops the shutters when necessary to keep out the driving tropical rain.

The unfinished walls and the unpolished furniture’s rough simplicity humbles the fine wood from which they are made. The floor is simple tongue-in-groove joined board. We walk west. The floor boards creak.

Lapped by thin strips, vertical planks of Spanish cedar divides the space into two more rooms to the north and two more to the south. Behind us is a door that opens on to the sloping roof that covers the place where amid a chorus of distinct strong smells of well sweated canvas, wood crosstrees, thin rope, brass rings and straw padding, the mule aparejo packs are stored. Why this brass has such a strong presence I do not know.

I can see crowded together at the ends of a few branches, some big, obovate that is broadest towards the apex, leathery leaves of an East Indian almond tree. This is the tree under which the horses and mules are tethered for shoeing; and the male stud donkeys are held for service. Old dried and faded, broken apples of horse, donkey and mule dung lie about on sand and gravel. These droppings cannot be seen from here, but I can smell their presence faintly floating in the air.

This door is open. Bright eastern light makes sharp diagonal shadows on the walls. South of us, in a walled alcove to the right, against the building’s east wall, is a large new bathroom that Uncle Rafael and Guillermo Ramos built. And doors open to a balcony to the west. Uncle Rafael died of guilt soon after this was built. Guillermo Ramos, who stole the goods Uncle Rafael had purchased to support his seven families has taken his wives to live away from here.

There is no family in the batey of course, they have all left; yet their presence is still here. Nicia and I go to the northwestern corner room on the upper floor of this “Casa de Alto.” This once was Uncle Marco’s room; it is still lined with bookcases holding his technical information and a vast collection of two-prong bayonet bound USDA agricultural instructional pamphlets.

Here, Nicia shows me where Aunty Rosita's 0.38 Police Special and a yellow box of 50 precious rounds of ammunition is hidden. These are lodged between the double walls of unfinished, rough-surfaced, Spanish cedar. I look at the ammunition in its tidy upright rows, dark-tipped with lead, and wrapped in shiny nickel casings. The cardboard ammunition box is surprisingly heavy. How Nicia knows where this was hidden I do not know. Yet house servants know everything.

The revolver, a gun for the country not the city, is even deeper blue-black than Nicia’s hair; it is shiny and smells of cleaning oil. The gun has an especially long barrel for accuracy. That is good!

The revolver must have had a holster, and I must have taken it, for later use. I do not remember the holster at this frightful time.

Now there was hope for me. Perhaps I might live. The Batista forces are far and the rebels are supposed to be in "El Corojo," the hamlet across the river. I must go to them!

I take a light open-weave tropical blanket, a rubberized canvas ground sheet, and the gun and ammunition and put them in my backpack. The backpack was the WWII surplus rucksack my father had brought for me from England. It hung far too long at my back, for it was meant for paratrooper drops.

I adjust the rucksack around my shoulders; it still feels uncomfortable. Filled with apprehension and fear but also a little thrilling joy at the adventure and the relief of a decision made, I leave for El Corojo.

The hard dirt and rock road out of the batey of the Casa of de los Generales is as usual empty. This is not surprising, for it is one of our family’s gated private roads.

Hurrying, I do not notice to my left, the row of thorny maya, Bromelia pinguin, a poor relative of the pineapple and bears small bear like single fruit. My legs know the maya fence is there; and I simply walk around it, avoiding it without conscious thought. This is the species of plant that long ago in 1895 made impenetrable thickets to trap the Spanish troops at Peralejo. Grandfather had ordered it planted for fences in several places around the batey, perhaps in memory of those long gone days.

Nor to my right do I see the barbwire fence that keeps cattle and people from falling off the cliff edge. Without looking, I know that the fence is there and that is enough.

The narrow strip of lush guinea grass and bush leading to the edge of the steep cliff down to the lagoon also goes unnoticed. I am frightened; in tunnel vision my eyes, are focused rigidly ahead.

At the tall, gray trunk of the anacahuita tree, I turn west towards the Bayamo River. Seeing and yet not consciously noticing, for my mind is busy, familiar sights, I go over a broad and shallow, forb and grass covered, dry stream-bed of pebbles and boulders that the Bayamo River only uses when in its creciente floods. The large lagoon is to my right, the little lagoon to my left.

Walking up slope out of the dry river bed, I pass to the right of the spreading branched mamonsillo tree which my sisters had climbed rapidly to take refuge from some angry half Brahma cows. There often are great ugly chipojo lizards in that tree. Today, I do not care about the chipojo’s scary colors and habit of leaping down when the sun becomes too hot at midday.

Here, for the soil is poor, the grass is thin, low, wiry, esparta, which grows between half-buried boulders. I go through a heavy wooden gate in the fence near the river edges, by the oak-like bark of a mahogany tree’s trunk. Since mahogany trees are becoming rare, I usually check it for seed to plant. Today, I do not look up, for even looking may take time, as I make the sharp left turn south towards a ford on the Bayamo River.

I follow the dirt road for a short distance in the shade below the low tree covered cliffs that line the river here. I go on until I reach the dynamite cut road to the pass cleaves these cliffs; here I turn west again, crossing the river. Past the ford on the other side, Rufino, the “Gallego” Cuban vernacular for Spaniard, storekeeper has planted a row of now magnificent Spanish cedars shading a small patch of coffee. The walls of Rufino's shop come in sight on the left, south side of the road. The desperate need to move faster than my legs can carry me drives me on and on.

Finally, I reach the store at the cross road of the hamlet of El Corojo. I see the jupiter tree fence that lined the Camino Real to the west. The far shadowy side of the cockfighting arena is to the south. The frantic and mad echoes arising the shouts and screams of those attending this killing sport are only heard in my mind. There is no cockfight today; these sounds, praises to gods of violent death, are not real now. Grandfather had belonged to the Conservative Party, who once opposed the cockfighting Liberals. Thus, we were forbidden to attend this barbaric blood sport, even more so because these events were often accompanied by human fights with knives and machetes.

I look! I look again and again! There are no rebels here! That is scary! That is very scary! It is all very quiet.

With great relief, I don’t see the enemy here either. There is only a undisturbed layer of dust resting on the road to the north where the Bayamo Batista Garrisons are about fifteen miles away. Yet, the dust of the road to the south, towards the rebel-held mountains, is also undisturbed.

Nothing is there either. Nobody is outdoors all is silent. I look south again, and again nothing. Nothing, the rebel forces I desperately need to find are not here either. It is clear that this place now between the constantly shifting lines of this war is a no-man’s land, a place of great danger.

The rebels are not there!!! Panic!!! Then, breaking the silence, a friendly voice, from the dark inside of Ruffino’s store says: “They went to Arroyón. Get out of here! Vete! Go! Go, go, go...!”

In a desperate rush, I re-cross the Bayamo River. I don’t feel wetness as I rush through the ford. Crossing, I reach the dark, little, crooked gorge that starts the road to the Guamá valley.

It is some slight relief to be on our family’s land again. I climb on the lava, laja, rocks of the road to Guamá. I run up the road. To my left is the dull, red, pocked soil surface of a large oval termite mound, perched on and covering the middle part of an old thick fence post.

The road turns south, then east just before the summit. Here there are newer “jupiter” living, termite-resistant, fence posts, planted between the old posts. The road is sunken here, and the jupiter fence-trees are now high to my left where the road is cut deep. Reaching the summit, I feel more relief.

Down to the Guamá River from the summit I go. The familiar high cliff is to my back and to my left.

Today, I still see the road go down and curve to the flat floor of the Guamá Valley. This is the place where Batista's soldiers had ambushed escapees of the Gamboa revolt of 1933. Here in the 1860s and 1870s, the evil Count of Valmaseda's troops had rushed, riding hard on narrow trails through thicket and forest to surprise and murder innocents in their homes.

Splashing across the ford at Paso Caimanes, memories come. I think of family stories of Uncle Rafael's horse tripping on that small, but vicious jumping crocodile, here, exactly here, some uncounted years before.

On her death bed, Aunt Rosie recalled seeing these armored reptile beasts. They were sunning here on the sandy east bank.

Beyond the ford of the crocodiles, the flat road is also lined with jupiter trees. These solid fences were built by Don Benjamin’s grandson, Uncle Ronaldo. I go south along the fence, the shade of trees, provides cover from any wandering avioneta spotter plane.

Satellite imagery shows these fences still exist today.

Behind the fences to the east is the guinea grass and limestone karst of the Llanos Plateau, part of the old lands of Don Benjamin’s Hacienda Guamá.

Rene Cuervo's father's store, its thin porch columns and raised foundation touching the base of the plateau is here. The enormous, 150 year-old mango tree, planted long ago by escaped slaves, shades the Cuervo's modest residence. I hurry by their house, a nice and sturdy palm thatched, yagua board walled, bohío, with a fenced batey.

Nobody comes out.

Rising beyond the river to the south and west, the ridge of Cacaíto extends its arm to the north and promises safety. On this side of the river, is a long field of boulders on the Guamá River flood plain. Guava bushes, growing between boulders, seem to be emerging straight out of these rocks. The bushes are sparse and do not provide much cover.

Now I know this is the place where the Guamá River, now joined by the strong Arroyón Stream pouring out of the ruptured old crater, had eons ago found its once westward way blocked by the massive volcanic uplifting of the Cacaíto ridge. Here, blocked by that ancient lava dyke, the waters turn north. Then I did not know what geological event caused its genesis, all I felt was mystical strangeness of the place.

East and upriver from where the river turns north is another ford I desperately need to cross. I cross swiftly the open boulder field and the river.

On the other, the south side of the river a little to the east-southeast is a glistening white karst limestone hill, cave riddled and forest covered. This hill marks Aunt Muñeca's land the first, lowest and largest numbered subdivision of the ancient volcano that comprises our land of Los Números.

From high in Los Números, in the place of the hidden woman “La Escondida,” El Salto de Guamá comes down the south wall of the caldera. It falls like a silver chain from heights of Uncle Marcos’s land. El Salto de Guamá is the highest waterfall in Cuba. We were always proud of that.

There on high, the Arroyón stream is born. Today, I know that here at the ford, there once had been a complete northern crater wall. Many eons ago, water had filled the volcano’s caldera and then broken through the crater wall to reach the Guamá River. The northern parts of Aunt Muñeca’s hilly land and the eastern slopes of the heights of Cacaíto are all that remain of that north wall.

After crossing this ford on the Guamá River, I reach the deep shade of the narrow Arroyón valley trail, crossing and re-crossing, and re-crossing the cold, clear waters of the stream of Arroyón. As I entered into the jumble hills on the once crater floor I wonder:

When I got there, would the rebels accept me, would they?

I push that negative thought aside expecting to be greeted by my friend, rebel leader René Cuervo. I did not know then he had been executed on “Che” Guevara’s orders.

I will get to that later.

Larry Daley, copyright 1996, revised 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.

04 LORENTE ATTACKS GUISA

04 LORENTE ATTACKS GUISA

In the 1950s, the Montunos, hill-people, of the Sierra Maestra were mostly poorly uneducated. Many were illiterate, unlearned in all except oral traditions and the distortions of unrealistic radio shows. Thus some were easily misled. For some years, demagogues posing as rural labor or land reform leaders organize and then betray their montuno followers for coerced bribes. Even as early as the 1940s Grandfather, in his letters, had already noted communist activists gathering supporters and building infrastructure.

In those days the Montunos gave much credence to supernatural faith healing.

In memory I recall:

“Clavelito,” the little carnation, is the voice-radio-persona of a curandero, almost a Bohique, a Taíno shaman, “espiritista,” certainly a faith-healer. He, Miguel Alfonso Pozo, sings his “sermons” to the cords of the traditional Güajiro tres guitar: “Pon tu pensamiento en mí, y su mano sobre el radio, y ya tu verás Eladio…. ". Place your thoughts on me, and your hand upon the radio, and you will see Eladio….”

Thus, sings Clavelito proclaiming his ability to help “Eladio,”was a shamed man from the once Taíno town of Jiguaní. Eladio’s penis had been penis severed by his jealous-wife. The radio shaman song tells this poor unfortunate Eladio to rest a hand on the radio receiver then through the mysterious “magnetic force of the radio’s magnetism” and Calvelito’s faith will allow the stub of his severed member to re-grow itself. Miguel Alfonso Pozo eventually became a successful elected politician. I heard no information on the fate of Eladio’s mutilated member.

The impact of not understood new technology upon the once unchangeable rural life seemingly makes anything possible. Years earlier before the war, it must have been late 1940s or very early 1950s because the family and the place was at peace, Uncle Calixto Leonel would loaned me his copies of the latest Amazing Stories and other pulp science fiction. We understood that these stories were not real, although Uncle Calixto did believe in flying saucers.

However, sometimes at night I would turn sleepy and forget the magazines on the young people’s dining table on the south veranda. Then someone among the workers and the servant women would with the greatest stealth tear off and steal the bright lurid covers. The cover illustrations were all in primary colors, showing the purple-dark of space, cadmium yellow interstellar rockets and bright scarlet uniforms. These images showed, luscious, strategically covered but almost nude women, and somehow completely covered space suited men or tentacle armed BEM (Bug eyed monsters). I, puzzled by this adroit pilferage would be blamed and catch h…ll from Uncle Calixto for this vandalism. Later I would learn that the walls in the servants and workers quarters were plastered with these quasi-icons of an impossible, but believed, future.

In Guisa some few miles north of us and tens of miles west of Jiguaní, Doctor Joaquin Bueno is busy armed with the powerful glory of the new antibiotics and his surgically skilled hands, to repair the damage that Clavelito and his ilk had done Dr. Bueno, a man of much kindness and patience, heals the peritonitis of ruptured appendices that the magical belly-massages of the delusional “sobadores” had caused.

There are other false persuaders in these mountains, for at least a generation, communists have been building a stronghold for their evil faith. That today, so long ago in early 1958, these deceivers have decided to test their followers with a march supposedly to support the April 1958 strike against Batista.

Since being of the wrong political persuasion and social class I was not there, I merely heard this story.

Still, in that April of 1958, there were many untutored so dazed by the advances of sciences they would believe almost anything new if presented the “right” way. Now they and their descendents still march as ordered but now they are far more cynical, and require more coercion.

This is how my memories envision Lorente’s march.

The montuno men are marching in north to Guisa, in long sparse arrays following each other, at perhaps two steps of distance. They move alternatively as the paths and road permit in single, or truck track spaced double files.

Few marchers are tall, but all are strong. Most are ignorant, but most are also canny in the way of wild montuno güajiro. All, however canny, are tired of working for others and have been mislead by their greed for free land and prosperity. Beguiled by the marxist words of their leader, and unaware of their betrayal they march, bent forward, in the particular stiff very long legged stride of Cuban mountain folk that eats away the miles of road.

The April 1958 march goes on. Some, but very few of these montuno güajiro marchers are Black. Mostly they are part Taíno Indian, part Spanish. Many, perhaps most, have the azabache jet-black hair which in these mountains often comes with bronze skin tones and speaks of Taíno inheritance. One cannot see their hair now, for it is beneath their sombreros.

A few of these Montunos have this same azabache hair in combination with, and in surprising contrast to light eyes and pale skin burnt leathery gold by the sun. These strands of jet hair had replaced childhood blond. They are the children of present day Canary Island immigrants.

These Canarios “Isleños” we call them, perhaps share with the Taíno a faint common biological bond as well as the once use of the conch bugle the fotuto or guamo. Perhaps there is an ancient blood link between two peoples from these two groups of isles beyond rocks of Gibraltar, once called the Pillars of Hercules. In legend the Canary Islands were considered to be the gates to Atlantis by Irish monk Saint Brendan, and sought again by 16th-century Spanish explorer Gabriel de Socarrás as the island of San Borondón or San Bernardo. However, that island was reported too close and too small to have been one of the Major Antilles.

Perhaps the ancestors of the indigenous Canary Islanders had once crossed a then shrunken, ice age Atlantic Ocean, from the most western isles of the Old World to the lost and perhaps more than mythical transatlantic ream of of Atlantis that is considered by some to be place in the Caribbean.

Perhaps, just perhaps, a lost Roman or Carthaginian vessel set sail from the Canary Islands and was dragged off to Cuba. Certainly to those Irish monks, such as Saint Brendan, the Atlantic was site of pilgrimage. a source of visions and mysteries. In a certain sense a similar kind of faith drives these marchers of Lorente.

Although the Isleños among the marchers, had genetic codes that may well hold these secrets, the marchers’ conscious minds know nothing of this. Some even think that Cuba’s provinces are islands; is this a remnant of legends from the flooding that occurred during the greatest polar ice melting? Is this a memory of Arawak legends from coastal South America?

Columbus, on his first voyage, stopped on these volcanic islands off the west coast of Africa on his unknowing way to the Caribbean. Columbus’s ships rode the ocean current called "Canaries Stream" that flows southwesterly direction and then west ready towards the Caribbean. Here on these islands, the Spanish chronicles record Columbus picked up picked up fresh water, wood and the famous Gomera goat cheese.

The marchers go on. They are dressed in drab and ordinary work-clothes: faded long-sleeved gray-green shirts worn outside their blue jeans. Rips in their clothing show hard, lean muscle and flat stomachs. They work hard. Lorente, is known for his slave-driving ways and his meager pay. He, the marchers’ employer and their ideological leader, is a marxist, a true believer in a doctrinaire need to rob his workers of “plus value” to enrich himself and his cause.

Most marchers wear ankle high rough boots, but no socks, cover their broad callused feet. Some wear rough canvas alpargatas, closed sandals with tire tread soles. Their traditional fan-palm thatch “yarey” hats are yellowed by many tropical rains. Made of long dried leaflets from these spreading yarey fronds these hats are assembled from plaited flat ribbons sewn in spirals on hand peddled Singer^TM machines. These sombreros were made locally by industrious independent women. I did not hear of any woman participating in this march.

Machetes, the work tool and lethal weapon once called cutlasses by pirates, are in well-scuffed and worn leather scabbards. The cutlasses leather scabbards are carried cinched to their belts. The cutlasses hang down loosely, to sway with each stride, at men’s left sides. The black Bakelite pommels of the machetes show one vertical row of shining white metal studs rivets through perforated tangs onto the long, flat blades. .

Worn on left in the customary quick draw position, the machete’s protruding fat bellied grip and flat-topped beaked pommel face forward, waiting, always waiting, always ready to slide out of the scabbard for an incredibly swift, cross-handed, upward slash. These montuno-güajiros fight often in deadly duels, over such simple things as stolen chickens and over the priceless delights of wild güajira women.

A few güajiros also carry, foot-long, wooden-handled, flat-bladed, sharply-triangular, one-sided knives in slim sheaths. The knife sheaths have leather “tongues” to hold them on their belts under their shirts. These smaller blades can effortlessly chip and chew through the neck bones of the vertebra of a cow, or slice to expose the guts of a rival for the love of some woman.

The stiff, flat brims of their yarey sombreros shut out the bright sun and make deep masks of shadows. These shadows move with their movements and the way of the road to drift across their usually beardless faces, obscuring their countenances and hiding their identities. It is as if hundreds of masked Zorro’s were marching of Guisa.

The montuno güajiros are true warriors, descended from the guazábara warriors of the Taíno Nation and the Spanish conquistadores. They love bravery and song, dances and fighting. They always are counted in Cuban wars. Today their weapons are outdated.

In April 1958, the time of the strike against Batista, most of the province, storeowners are seen to be behaving strangely. The owners unlock to open and lock to close their store doors continually. Loud commands to open come from rough spoken Batista soldiers, all tidy in smooth “casquito” helmet liners, tan uniforms, trousers tucked into shiny black combat boots, and web-cloth weapon belts.

The Batista army soldiers carry short modern bayonets in gray metal scabbards, great .45 caliber revolvers or flat-sided .45 1911 pistols, and rifles: semiautomatic M-! Garands, or very accurate 1903 bolt action Springfields. The soldiers are backed by Browning machine guns, mortars and their little strafing spotter and larger fighter bomber planes.

Thudding and thudding, the metal heel-plate of a Springfield rifle-butt hits and splinters the thick wood of a store’s closed door. These soldiers know what they are doing there is no round in the weapons chamber, no unexpectedly triggered firing. The door opens very fast, bowed and gray the protruding head of shop owner mutters profuse and abjectly desperate apologies. The door stays ajar at least until the soldiers pass.

As time goes on, the sun rises to noon-height. In the heat of midday, beads of sweat mark the soldier’s efforts dripping out from under the helmet liners to their faces. The sun beats down mercilessly.

The soldiers move with tense caution. They fear if they are not alert, they will be killed for their weapons. Sweat wets the center line of the vulnerable back of their shirts, sticking the cloth uncomfortably to their spines.

Quieter, but at first even more compelling, educated voices of the discrete, shadow flitting, civilians demand closure. The civilians are not armed, but their white, clean, tidy clothing, well-combed bare heads, and heavy horn-rimmed glasses signal their middleclass status and their education.

These civilians barely sweat in the heat and the smell of strongly scented deodorant follows them. It “is not done” for educated people to smell of sweat. These, although I still do not know for certain, are probably the people of the undercover “Civilian Militia,” formerly the Agrupación Nacionalista Revolucionaria (ANR), now the urban part of Castro’s organization.

These civilians are not fully Castro supporters. These are the men who once obeyed Frank País and now his successor. There are many such groups fighting Batista and to some extent each other.

In the summer of the year before, in 1957 Frank and his brother Josue País García, were separately and secretly betrayed. Sold out by the Communists close to Castro, they are killed on the streets by the brutal Batista red-infiltrated “anti-communist” police.

Camilo Cienfuegos and the escopeteros of Lara are on the plains too. However in the towns and cities most resistance to the Batista dictatorship comes from these civilian urban activists who answer now more to “Daniel,” the war name of René Ramos Latour, than to Castro. Daniel (René Ramos Latour), the secret National Chief of the anti-Batista 26 of July urban “Milicias,” is the successor to the dead Protestant País brothers. Daniel takes the strike to the plains with a few victorious assaults and a number of losses in towns and places near Santiago such as La República, close to Boniato and also at Ramón de Las Yaguas. Then Daniel retires to the part of the Sierra Maestra known as Gran Piedra where Castro was captured, seemingly long ago in 1953. The repression in Santiago is brutal, but Manzanillo holds on for about five days. Sporadic risings are suppressed throughout the Island. Camilo returns to the Sierra…

Daniel is also to be betrayed in the future. Victim of the ancient biblical ploy, once used by King David, to possess Bathsheba, exquisitely beautiful wife of his warrior Uriah, Daniel dies because of a “strategic withdrawal” and slow return by Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his men. However, this is an account in for another chapter. All one has to remember now is that the “Che” is ruthless in ridding himself of rivals.

In the here and now of April 1958, in Guisa, the leadership of the anti-Batista resistance includes Alberto Soler. Alberto is middle aged, fat and ugly. He is only of medium height a mere civilian, a local pharmacist. He has not turned gray, his still black hair at that age is a trait that, as I said before is common, among those with Taíno ancestry.

Soler is quite intelligent. In Guisa, where centuries meld and mingle, he, and his pharmacist counterparts are known by their medieval title. He is “el Boticario,” apothecary Soler.

Perhaps El Boticario whispers orders to his allies. It is time leave. This part of the resistance to Batista, this strike, is over for now. Then El Boticario, starts to think of a future plan to rid Guisa of the Batista forces.

El Boticario’s plan will lead to a bloody action which will in about eight months break the back of the dictator’s armies. Fat and ugly does not mean powerless; however, fat and ugly does mean that others take credit for this plan.

The mothers of the province’s town and cities, knowing something dangerous is going on, pray for their young men. These women and their daughters drag the young men home from the street. The soldiers are gaining control; Frank País civilian resistance militias can do little to stop them now. There are some arrests by the authorities; torture elicits information and more arrests; the April General Strike against Batista is failing. Bodies of young men are strewn around the countryside.

About the 10^th of April 1958, the day after the rebel call to start the general strike through all of Cuba, cousin MJ Norman is arrested. He is caught while waiting for a bus just outside the Bohemia magazine building in Havana. He is with a friend, later to be a Bay of Pigs invasion veteran, Raul Hernandez.

MJ and Raul are held in the gray and grim stone walls of the ancient hilltop castle of El Principe, one of the many such fortresses that once guarded Havana and the Spanish Treasure Fleet against pirates and the return of the English. They are beaten by Batista Police Captain Esteban Ventura Novo,

MJ and Raul’s torturer Esteban Ventura Nova is the well dressed polite and cruel prototype of Capitan Segura described by Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, published that very same year. Aunt Manuela (M.J’s mother) said Captain Ventura was always polite. MJ described to me how cruelly he was beaten,

MJ and Raul had been trying to get photographs of atrocities from Bohemia to a French Canadian reporter for Paris Match and The Toronto Star. They, hungry students, had been paid 160 Canadian dollars, and asked to get some more photos.

The rule in such circumstance is that one can do anything once. MJ and Raul did not know this rule, and having been successful the first time, tried again. This was not wise. Rumor has it, that the Paris Match reporter was interrogated by the Batista police, and may have revealed their names.

Whatever, Raul always was too brave; and had more passion than good sense. He brought police attention to himself and to MJ by carving the name of “Rebecca,” an American Missionary “girl,” Raul was infatuated with on a tree in a Havana Park. What saves their lives was that MJ, who is tall and dark, claims rightfully to be English, and Raul who is blond and short says truthfully he is Cuban.

Ventura, who is as paranoid as any good dictator’s police officer has to be, feels that this is some kind of plot to trick him into killing an Englishman and thus to precipitate an international incident. In an unusual act, for him, Ventura spares both their lives.

MJ already has a record with the Batista Police. in the aftermath of the July 26 Cuartel Moncada assault at Santiago de Cuba, and Bayamo, way back in 1953, he had been caught up, quite innocently but suspiciously dressed in kaki Boy-Scout leader uniform. . My cousin was arrested in Holguín, a city far from Santiago, in the northern part of the province. Luckily for MJ, he is merely held and does not join the far less fortunate and soon dead young men being found at that time all over places near Bayamo and Santiago.

The barracks where MJ was held in 1953 were named after great grandfather Major General Calixto García Iñiguez. Great-grandfather had won La Loma de Piedra (Hill of Stone) battle near here. This was just one of our famous ancestor’s many victories; we tend not to remember his defeats. Uncle Calixto Leonel, now on Batista’s side, pulled the strings that freed MJ that time.

Now in 1958 it would take the full power of the British Embassy to release him. MJ, who’s real name is Manuel José Norman, reached the safety of London, England May 18^th. 1958.

Now to Lorente’s march

So in these circumstances, in our area of the Sierra Maestra Mountains, between the Guisa and Bayamo Rivers, ambitious Lorente, part-time contract coffee planter, full-time communist, is making trouble. His mind stuffed with the marxist nonsense of “peasant masses,” sets out to lead a protest march to the town of Guisa.

Lorente has communist party orders to do this, to dilute the influence of the anti-Batista non-communist civilian militias of Daniel already in the town. Thus, Lorente, his many workers and his fellow comrades, Ricarte Martínez, and Majin Peña, with the men of their households and fields, march on this strategic place.

The güajiro montunos marchers, I am told, went singing. Perhaps they even sang the melancholy, oddly rhythmic singsong words of the communist anthem the "Internationale." The güajiros, as some told me later, also went along shouting and waving machetes.

Using machetes against machine guns is madness. The march’s cynical real purpose is to make “martyrs.” The communists wish to “poner los muertos.” That is, these communists wish to pay a late fee for entry into the “Revolution;” they plan to pay with their own followers’ bodies.

As yet the marchers do not know what is waiting for them. "Al machete," the old independence patriot slogan, they yell. "Al machete," the war cry their fathers and grandfathers once shouted, is the old Mambí order to charge with naked blades. The blood and glory of these past charges fill their minds as they start towards Guisa. Visions of easy victory of the massed proletariat heroic charges stir their "nonexistent" socialist souls. They follow the heroic-looking tall, broad-shouldered, loyal communist party member. Surely with such a leader as Lorente, what could they fear; victory must be at hand.

The marchers really do not know Lorente’s scheming ruthless ways. They, unlike their leaders, are not really communists; what they want is the promised socialist paradise, which to their confused ideology, includes their own capitalist plot of land. They march blinded with the fervor of those seeking an impossible dream, for they truly believe this is a time of “scientific” miracles.

Unfortunately, dictators are by definition and necessity selfish and ungrateful. After Castro reaches power, some of these marchers will die, at the new dictator’s hands for seeking these illusions. Of course at this time of this march nobody knows this.

The march, this “demostración,” starts at Lorente's batey, his compound way up the gorge of the Guamá River. This batey was raised only a few feet above the river, among the great rough boulders of the west river bank in the canyon on the upper Guamá River, far from the town of Guisa. This place is now long gone, destroyed by massive, hillside collapse driven by Flora’s-rending hurricane driven floods.

Some days later in that April of 1958, after the strike has been suppressed, I would visit Lorente’s headquarters. I remember these low raw wood buildings of the batey with their galvanized metal roofs, standing on bare pebbles over boulders packed smooth with tamped down hardened dirt. The crudeness of the buildings was then not softened by tropical vegetation. The place lacked the crudest sanitation, and the clean mountain air was tainted by the pungent smell of urine and the sharp stench of human wastes.

Lorente’s batey then insulted the narrow exquisite landscape of naturally rough flood-hewed steep-walled canyon. Here this man’s work had sullied by its crude presence at the edge the usually transparent waters of the Guamá River. Here the rushing river drops fast as it wends around huge fallen rocks.

I recall the interior of Lorente’s flea-infested shed where he had his workers sleep. Here we visiting rebels, as Mojena's Escopeteros would spend an uneasy night. We spent it lying awake, itching, slapping, rubbing and scratching in the dark. We watched as Lorente’s assassin slept on the dirt floor, peaceful as a baby, fresh blood just spilled by his hands (more about him follows later). Surely, at the time of the march this assassin must have been at Lorente’s side, but, that too, I really do not know.

Back to Lorente’s march:

Lorente’s 1958 April strike march is on. The marchers walk down the beautiful valley, the Guamá River running clear over speckled boulders and pebbles. Gradually, the boulders of the flood plain of the river get smaller and rounder. The river’s valley widens to tree-shaded tranquility an the river shifts to the west..

The marchers pass the small crop fields. The marchers sweep past the prosperous shops of Los Horneros resting on the valley floor below the high pasture. Royal palms, green tufted sprays on erect smooth white trunks, climb in straggled ranks the infolded depths of rising gullies. The palms lead upwards towards the shade-coffee covered heights of the northeast ridge of Los Números.

A small plaque commemorating Cuban Independence Mambí hero, Franciso Maceo Osorio is passed unnoticed. He had taken Guisa in 1868, yet in the forgetfulness of mankind. I think somebody was using it as a stove top. Maceo Osorio had been a loyal friend and ally of Calixto and Don Benjamin during the Ten Year War. He died here of fever more than eighty years before, hiding from the Spanish, on Don Benjamin’s land.

Many have died in wars here before. This is one of the places where the evil Count of Valmaseda sent his killers to wipe out all Cuban Güajiro country folk, men, women, and children. These cruel soldiers killed whoever they could find here to stop them from supplying the Mambí with food and shelter.

The far more recently dead ghost of the Bandit King of the Sierra Edesio Hernandez is surely there. Edesio’s ghost -- he always had a sharp sense of humor-- smiles down at the marchers’ stupidity from the early mountain mists in the hollows of the heights of Bejuquero, the place of the tangled vines on the lower eastern part of ruptured crater that forms the ridges of Los Números. Here the communists had formed a secret cell years ago.

They cross the river, going north. They go by the guinea grass pastures of Teófilo Espinosa, perhaps most prosperous, and certainly the most gregarious and garrulous of all Guisa merchants. Purple-tinged green when heavy rains feed rapid growth, emerald when the rains are gentle, straw yellow in the dry season, the guinea grass covered slopes rise with increasing steepness to cliffs to wall-in the marchers’ right north flank.

The air smells faintly, but not unpleasantly and almost sweetly, of grass-fed cattle dung. Criollo and Brahma mix cows, mottled in light brown, white and black, great horns like lyres on their heads, graze bucolically, on the tropical richness. The tranquil beasts ignore the marchers and do not stir; but stand heads down munching on grass, their bovine stomachs rumbling ever so softly. They are tame; they are cattle; their fate does not cause them concern; they leave their future to destiny.

The marchers, sweating slightly now, climb up out of the Guamá Valley, going northeast through the land of the Espinosas’, although the grass is far taller is now as green as the hills of Wales. They climb upward again through the emerald landscape on the winding steep lava-rock road, hemmed in by the poisonous piñon, top-coppiced trees, that form living fences on either side of the road.

The marchers climb to the top of the smoothly rounded and complexly folded ridge of Pueblo Nuevo, which looks like a green rumpled bedspread over a gigantic bed. Here the land is poor and eroded and the grass is short. There are little seeps and springs of bad water, wet spots between the folds. The smell of human perspiration attends the multitude, but they do not notice. They are rural laborers. They are used to the varied scents of sweat.

On the ridge road of Pueblo Nuevo, steadily but now less surely, the marchers go on. They go in file towards a small, plank footbridge over tree shaded stream, and a white, forested, cave ridden, limestone karst hill. They are near the little crossroad at El Sordo, the place of the deaf man. Here on the bottoms the land is richer again.

In El Sordo, Spanish immigrant Miguel Angel Calvo, watches them from his shop but does not join; he is too intelligent for that. It as if Miguel knows that in November of this same year, his antitank mines will help take Guisa for real.

Past the heights of the ridge road, this part of El Sordo is now more shaded, more fearful. They are too near to the Batista held garrison town of Guisa.

Less than two years previously violent death walked near by. Just ahead, this road crosses another road that goes south to la Toronja, the place of the grapefruit. Then, the brave happy bandit Edesio Hernandez, who loved his women who bear his children gladly, his rum, and the songs of the country folk, had walked by. He had walked without noise in his trademark tennis shoes, on to the Toronja and his betrayal and death at that barbed wire fence.

The marchers take the branch of the road that leads towards the ancient garrison town of Guisa with its fort-like Cuartel and fearsome Batista soldiers. The thought –“Is this is where we are going?”-- wakens the marchers minds a little to reason. Their chanted slogans become a little weaker.

On the walk these rural communists, their less wise followers, and Lorente's more or less coerced workers have had time to think. As they think, surely their minds consider the deadly weapons of the Guisa garrison and the proven eagerness of the Batista soldiers to use these weapons against the less well-armed.

This is not just a day with free food, and no labor. Working for Lorente is hard, for he -who could forget- is a true communist is convinced that to be successful in a capitalist world one must exploit one’s workers. Yet today is not just a day away from Lorente’s harsh orders to work ever more in his coffee gardens and his root crops conucos. Today is a day of more sinister intent.

The marchers feel the long rock ribbed road sapping the strength from their legs. As they tire, their fear grows greater. Steadily their enthusiasm ebbs. Their confidence in their strong arms and razor sharp machetes, resting, ready in the worn leather scabbards at their sides, is dimmed.

The marchers’ suppressed worries about being the guests of honor at an approaching massacre became sharper, more realistic, and more terrifyingly clear and urgent. The odor of their sweat changes and becomes far more pronounced and unpleasant.

The marchers know that Batista is quite ready to order blood spilled.

They are less aware that death of country folk in far Oriente Province counts for little, even nothing, in Havana. Lorente knows much more clearly than his followers that a given day Batista is the communist’s friend, another day their executioner, and the next day, as if all never happened, a pal of these marxists again.

Lorente also knows that the top leadership of the covert “black wing” of this marxist party is free from such bourgeois notions as the debts of loyalty, after all for them “gratitude is a vice of dogs.” They seek this war, knowing that it will bring them to an opportunity to take positions from which to seize power. He must be careful of them too, for he could easily become an offered sacrifice.

There has been yet another alliance of convenience between communist jackals and the tiger-clawed dictator. Now this evil alliance is about to be broken once again.

Both, the communists and Batista have done this a number of times before. The marchers do not clearly know, some old ones, and certainly Lorente, remember that communist blood was apparently spared by Batista 24 years ago near here. During the break-up of the “Workers Soviet” at the Mabay sugar factory, a place perhaps twenty miles on the plains to the west there the strike was broken, but there is no apparent record of communist deaths.

Having betrayed Batista once again, the communist leaders march their pawns at the dictator men; they know this time the dictator may well demand blood payment. Yet, this is not chess.

In chess, pawns cannot escape their board; in real life there are options. In real life, even pawns think and fear. These güajiros are not stupid, just un-tutored.

Trembling rushes cause the muscles of Lorente’s marchers to shake; the thin hairs of their arms rise like the back of a Rhodesian ridgeback hound. They are no longer living pawns, but frightened human beings.

Lorente, prudent as always, turns around to look. The marchers are no longer following him closely. Shirts are now streaked white by the salts of dried sweat, his men are straggling then disappearing, slipping away at every turn of the road.

Adrenaline blinds reason, to leave only fear, fear turns to panic. Hearts beat furiously. The men’s instincts scream: run!!! The Montunos’s calf muscles twitch; they are ready to bolt until safety is reach or their hearts stop. And run they do, fleeing for the hills.

Lorente makes a quick decision, hurries south too, following his men to the safety of the hills. His legs are longer; he runs faster. After all, Lorente is the leader, thus it is proper, and certainly safer, if he leads the retreat.

The march is over. The demonstration did not make it to Guisa.

Some time it must be just before this, Lorente sends his people to try to find weapons in La Casa de los Generales. I have joined the rebels, after the strike has failed, and the Batista soldiers have driven all of us out of Arroyón, we gather at the camp at El Sordo We are the Mojena’s escopeteros, Mojena's group, shotgun picket irregulars. We are a much mixed bag, we do not follow Lorente. Some of us are capitalists, some feudal minded, the youngest is a killer, bandit spawn, Edesio Hernandez’s son or nephew; another is a professional gambler. One, a town kid from Guisa, is unknowingly the son of a doomed Batista informant. Most are merely normal adventurous young county folk, Montunos from the mountains and Güajiros from the foothills.

I remember how: we escopeteros all would laugh as the story of how Lorente’s march came apart was told and retold in the evenings. The pretty, nubile, Güajirita daughter of the house slides a demure glance at her beloved Machado the tallest of our Güajiro escopetero group, as our food is served. Our bellies are full of the good fresh corn meal and "expropriated" beef. The good royal palm frond thatch keeps the rain out of that house behind the hill above El Sordo.

We laugh, for Lorente months after the event still cowers in his far canyon refuge, fearing even the rebel column of Huber Matos. However, Lorente is not afraid to send others to do his dirty work.

Our future is to be full of surprises:

Since then we are surprised that in Cuba, the last laugh will be on us. We did the fighting; they, the communist cowards, are going to steal the revolution. After victory, Machado, the beloved Güajiro, will abandon his naïve Güajirita and take up with a sophisticated Habanera who pleasures him most delightfully, and go with most of the rest of Mojena’s band to help guard Castro's house on that hill above Cojima.

Naranjo, “El Rubio Tuerto,” the one-eyed blond gambler, will throw in his lot with anti-communist breakaway commander, the lawyer Humberto Sorí Marin, and both will lose.

I am a mere soldier without rank, but even so I will not be trusted and will resign two weeks after victory, and not be allowed to visit my friends in the Rebel Army. In three years I will be forced to leave Cuba to spend my life in another land.

Larry S. Daley copyright@1997, revised 1998, 1999 and 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006

03 DETAINED IN GUISA

In these increasingly violent days of late 1957 and early 1958 to be “found suspicious” by Batista’s people was not good for your health. Paid informers were everywhere. It seemed that every week, young men, especially the non-Castro Student “Directorio,” caught or suspected to be trying to fight to restore democracy, appeared shot dead on the streets.

Havana press photographers took pictures of heads with rumpled black hair resting, but now unfeeling, on hard concrete. Their bodies were in the relaxed disorder of death, bullet-holed, sprawled and pallid because their blood was splattered in thin streaking splotches on walls and gathered in dark smoothly lobed pools on the ground all around the cadavers.

Published in the daily newspapers and especially in the magazine “Bohemia,” these graphic horrors served both as a warning and as an indictment of the ruling dictatorship. Strangely, only the Havana dead seemed important; here in Oriente Province, far from the capital, our dead were not commonly deemed, newsworthy.

In Havana, cousin MJ Norman and his friend Raúl Hernández had been caught passing the photographs from the offices of Bohemia magazine. They were imprisoned and beaten severely only narrowly escaping execution through intervention of powerful friends (more on this later).

Dictatorship brings rebellion, and Batista’s army was again trying to suppress rebels in the hills. These soldiers were known family enemies. About twenty-five years before in 1933, in Batista’s first dictatorship, there had been a small action on Don Benjamín’s estate, between the guerrilla forces of Gamboa, apparently linked to a Batista rival the violently radical Antonio Guiteras. Caught in between, two members of our untidy and very large extended farm family had been placed against a mango tree and shot.

Here in 1957, apprehension was commonplace. I knew that not being involved was not a guarantee of safety. Foreboding came to me with increasing frequency, drowning my youthful contentment in dark thoughts of powerless trepidation. It was as if life was this road, with places of bright sun and safety and shadowy dangerous gulches were death lurked waiting for the unwary.

The Guardia were also there in Guisa. They were headquartered in the fort they called the barracks or “El Cuartel.” At first they were Guardia Rural (Rural Guard) charged with keeping the peace in the countryside. Their uniformed were then US style kaki, with wide brimmed felt hats quadruple creased in World War I style, and full length well polished high laced riding boots. The Guardia would often carry 1903 Springfield rifles in a saddle scabbard, as well as .45 caliber revolvers in a holster at their sides, but they were essentially a rural police force.

The Guardia also carried a long flexible whip-like machete called a “paraguayo”, used to punish miscreants and to break up unruly crowds. The stroke of the paraguayo, which reached over the shoulders to lash at the unprotected back, was much feared. All polished leather, steel and kaki, the Guardia militaria was worn with pride, eliciting an aura that inspired trepidation by on lookers. Usually fearless, shielded, wrapped, in their pride, they rode in pairs high on their tall horses; they were the personalized law in the countryside.

Riding hard in the mountains the Guardia’s horses sweat profusely; and the heaving haunch muscles of their mounts metabolize to leave a trail of pheromones. Being a Guardia was a very masculine profession that the Güajiras and Montunas still admired, and many young country men still aspired to. Others hated their very presence. While these men on horseback seemed all powerful, they were unknowingly doomed. With the year these Guardia Rural would be terrorized, and after many executions they would be dead or gone.

In the late 1940s and the early 1950s the Rural Guard were a little more friendly to us since they were professionals, not political appointees. And they were always fed, as Cuban rural courtesy dictates, when they passed through. Lionel, my brother, tells me they were also given small gifts of money for protection. With some frequency the Rural Guard stayed overnight in one of the buildings of our compound which we called by the Taíno name of batey of grandfathers lands called Entre Ríos (between the rivers) but that most locals called “La Casa de los Generales”.

I remember the Guardia Rurales’s large trotting quarter-horses, really too big and too heavy for mountain work, and really uncomfortable to ride, tied up at a hitching post near the great kitchen were the workers were fed. However, with the increased repression, the horse mounted troops of the Guardia Rural, once a source of protection even friendship for the law abiding had turned to another fount of fear.

Arrested in Guisa

My thoughts on this are vivid, and as real as the day they happened:

Arriving at Guisa I go to the "almacén," a wholesale supply store. The store has a galvanized metal roof and is partially sunk below grade on the north side of the west road into town. I ready to make the purchases my brother requested. Outside there is hot sun, dust and the pungency of recently deposited horse and mule dung.

I go in. The store is cool and dark with a myriad of smells, the faint coldness of beans, the fine powder dust tickle of rice, the sharp smell of the leather on new saddles. Then riding above all was the mildly erotic stink dried cod. This was the smells of that eighteenth century vanity, the cod-piece. These are aromas of the tree the Montunos called “la verijua.” This tree when it was cut it gave off the pungent odor of “she of the great crevice” Mother of Taíno gods, She the Most High, Goddess of Caguana, Earth Goddess, Frog Woman. She is Atabeyra, Atabey, Atabei. Carved shell amulets of her great verija, her ready vagina, her plump lipped xoxa, open wide or closed tight, are still found near Holguín, close to where great grandfather was born, perhaps a hundred miles to the north.

Dried salted cod was then, as it had been for centuries a common and well accepted food in Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. It had been known to the Europeans since perhaps before Columbus, and to the Indigenous peoples far longer than that. And comprised for centuries one of the three legs of the cod-rum-slave trade.

Then I did not know that its fishy aroma came from the decomposition of the protein in the dead fish’s flesh to (putrescine, cadaverine, spermine, spermidine, etc). These are compounds necessary for cell growth. These are the sex pheromones, the whiff of carnal scent of a well used vagina, a sharp smell of a penis during urination or the far stronger stink of a cadaver in decomposition. This is the trail that buzzards and cadaver dogs follow. Again death and life are linked.

My nose stings as it is cleansed by the alkaline scents of plain un-perfumed laundry soap. There is the powerful biting odor of cured hide from new rough leather shoes, the sharp smell of polish on embossed saddles, the cold-steel, teeth-grating taste-smell of canned goods, and dull black chill hardness of metal tools and deadly machetes.

I find myself engaging in an inane vehement discussion with one of the sons of the store-owner. The discussion is about being able to use algebra to decode his father’s price tags and deduce the wholesale price. I say it could be done; the boy quite upset and angry, but seemingly worried, says defensively that it could not be done.

Now a friend tells me that the Spaniards used phrases, like HIJO DE PUTA (with 10 letters that are not repeated) easy to remember and substitute in order: H for 1, I for 2, etc. It is a fool’s code, since even then I knew, from memories of hearing such in Sherlock Holmes films of WWII England that such simplified key phrase codes that letters have to be repeated in each use. Thus each particular letter has a certain frequency of use, the key phrase is readily revealed.

This very unwise discussion turns out badly for me. After all the almacén owners are Spanish, recent immigrants who still considered Spain as their mother country. They commonly do not feel Cuban; they speak Spanish differently frequently lisping as if in high Castilian. Often such Spaniards carry serious grudges against the Cubans who had broken free from the motherland, for in the Spanish view this humiliated and beggared Spain.

Now in retrospect, I do not know why I offended that kid. In those days, I was very young and very, very foolish.

Suddenly, for my memory still refuses to tell me how I got there I am in the Cuartel. It is something about permission to take goods into what is becoming a war zone:

I am within the thick concrete walls of the Cuartel being questioned by the Guardia Rural. It is a horrible helpless nightmare. Being here is so unexpected, and so full of impotent fear, no matter the prominence of my family, a wrong answer at the wrong time could cost me my life in this place. I am very confused about what is happening and did not know what to say to get myself out of trouble.

After a while, the almacén owner arrived and talked the Guardia into releasing me. It seemed that an item on my brother’s list -Coñac Fundador- was causing the trouble. The Guardia had believed that this cognac, supposedly both Batista’s and Castro's favorite brandy, was a special order. Thus they had falsely concluded that I must be a member of Castro’s supply system. Now I know that Castro’s supplies often came through Guisa. Lionel tells me that some of the stores on the heights of “Los Números” were part of the guerrilla supply chain.

Batista and his minions seemed to have a lot of information about the Castro brothers’ life. This is not so strange since much later it would become better known that Batista had links through marriage to the Castro’s and was said by some to be Raúl Castro’s godfather. However, I as most Cubans, were not aware of such links at the time.

The Batista and the Castro families lived near to each other in northern Oriente Province. The place Batista was born is called Banes (from Baní “the father of waters,” a river and a Taíno province part of the Cacicazgo of Bayamo). The place where the Castro family lived is called Birán, apparently named after the Taíno dog-god of death Opiyél-Guao-Birán.

Today as Castro fades, there is much discussion on this matter. The mother of the Castro brothers, Lina Ruz, is reputed to have been unhappy with her husband, and to share her favors with others. Raul’s male parent is usually referred to as the mysterious “El Chino,” the “China man.” One can speculate that Batista, for he was short and had Taíno features, or as others suggest, one of his army officers Gilberto Carrillo, or Felipe Miraval may have been “El Chino.” Who ever “El Chino” was, he has left his Taíno features stamped all over Fidel Castro’s, noticeably shorter, younger brother’s face.

I did know then that Batista had executed lots of the Castro brother’s followers captured after their failed attack on the Moncada barracks, July 26, 1953. However, although the Castro brothers were also captured, they themselves were spared. At the time this was attributed solely to the intervention of the Catholic Church. The Cuban press was never as informative as it could be.

All I cared about then was that although the Guardia Rural had set me free, now, and “forever” afterwards, for the Batista forces kept good records, they would always look at me with suspicion. I was terrified and found it wise never to go into Guisa again. I could not know that perhaps a year later, as a rebel I would help drive the Batista forces out that town.

So I stayed put for sometime more in grandfather’s fine house “La Casa de los Generales” in the foothills. Even there, beset with thoughts of terrors real and imagined, I did not feel safe.

Larry Daley Copyright@2001, revised 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006

02 RIDING TO GUISA

02 RIDING TO GUISA

By the fall of 1957, I had taken my last exams before college. While I had been in school Úbero had fallen to the rebels, distant cousin Calixto Sánchez and Frank País had died. Early that summer, I had arrived in Oriente from Havana and gone to work on our land at the batey of La Casa de los Generales. There, it was a different world somehow I missed news of the suppressed rising in Cienfuegos on September 5th an uneasy relative quiet returned to our area. Much has been happening in the Sierra Maestra. However, war is at least on wide valley away, but creeping nearer, then retreating moving further away, going back and forth but it was still distant.

On July 27, there is an attack to the far west at the foothill sugarcane factory “Central Estrada Palma. This was followed on the 31^st by an attack on the army barracks one valley to the west at Bueycito. The fighting retreats to near the Turquino peaks to our far south west. The nearest action is at the Hombrito, on still hidden but near and hidden mountains to the southwest on August 29^th.

Autumn approaches and with it the coffee season. The essentials of life must go on. My brother, Lionel, asked me to go to the town of Guisa, the closest place to buy supplies wholesale, to make purchases for his little store in our mountain lands.

I was visiting Lionel in the high mountains in the war zone where the rebels, still mainly poorly armed escopeteros, who only occasionally were able to strike effectively, but almost always able to enforce their rules on the locals. To go to get supplies meant going down through the foot hills past La Casa de Los Generales where I usually stayed, on into the flat lands, where, like most of Cuba, Batista’s forces still had almost complete control. This was dangerous not only because it is never wise to cross the ever shifting battle-lines of guerrilla warfare, but also since although some of the family had made peace with Batista, others had not. Thus, in the flat lands not only was there no protection against Batista’s goons, but there might well be some who wishing to curry favor with the Dictator might wish to inform on some minor member of the family like myself.

Family oral history mentions that Fulgencio Batista and Grandfather Calixto Enamorado disliked each other. Grandfather’s record during the Cuban War of Independence protected him from direction action. However, Batista tried to force Grandfather, then Consul General of Cuba in New Orleans, to abuse his access to diplomatic pouches by passing contraband. Apparently the idea had been if grandfather did it, Batista would have him under his control, and if he did not Batista could terminate his Cuban Foreign Service appointment for refusing orders.

Grandfather had refused and resigned, but not before his daughter, Victoria, or Betina as we know her had been made pregnant by the vice-consul, who it was said, was a relative of Batista’s puppet president from 1936 to 1940 when Batista took over in his own name, was Féderico Laredo Brú. Brú strangely enough was the last of the Mambí to hold the title of President of Cuba, he also was at least in part responsible for turning away the German Jews of the Saint Louis, and of the founding of initially communist controlled CTC the major union in Cuba. Grandfather according to his letters was very anti-communist, and already very early knew about communists in the Sierra Maestra, something only coming to light now as old Cuban communists write their memories.

As the clouds of WWII were rising Betina went off to bear the child in France, probably staying with Aunt Rosita the “movie star” who lived mainly in Paris while Aunt Manuela feigned pregnancy with cushions. Betina’s child was named Calixto. Aunt Manuel and Uncle Norman, José Norman (Norman Henderson) the composer and band leader, raised Calixto as their own. So as you can see there was friction between most of our family and the Batista government.

However, as difficult as these incidents may have been the conflict between Batista and Grandfather may have gone back to when their fathers when General José Maceo with whom Belisario served, was passed over for promotion and died in battle. Calixto García Iñiguez, Calixto Enamorado’s father, became commanding general for Camagüey and Oriente provinces, the main war theater, and remained so on to victory. However, more about this later...

It was quite a difficult ride. It is perhaps twenty miles of rough, often rocky path, and dirt road, from our coffee plantation on the heights of Los Números to the town. It took most of the morning riding down on Lionel’s surefooted slim roan mare.

The roan was a pacing horse, called so because it did not trot but strides fast at a gentle gait. The animal was very comfortable to ride. It carried a tightly cinched light-weight, utilitarian, McClelland U.S. cavalry saddle. The stirrups were leather over wood, set long, so that my legs could stretch forward to balance. These mountain roads are very steep.

My body remembers. My thighs and back move as I am in thrall of my recall. In my memories I am still riding down that road:

“On the worst down slopes, I lean back sitting on the back of the quilted soft leather of the saddle’s seat. My feet push on the down and my legs are stretched out and set wide. I smell the saddle soap from the leather.”

“The flexible leather of the saddle’s skirt and the stirrup fenders press down on the “basto” saddle pad to closely embrace the back of the mare. With my weight, the rocking of the saddle and the pressure of the cinches, the grass fed mare releases droppings as she strides along. After the pungent smell of the dropping horse apples fades with distance, there is a pleasant scent of healthy horse sweat.”

“And so with the roan mare stepping carefully and I lean back rocking with her pace, we go down the long and steep mountain paths. We go through coffee plantations, tall bromeliad festooned remnants of rainforest tower above us.”

“At the bottom of the mountains, the mare splashes water high and foamy, as the mare and I ford in deep tree shade, the noisy rush of mountain and upper valley streams. The splashes rise in parabolas. The flying water scatters white light and ephemeral specular reflections of shade, tropical vegetation and sky and sun. Then the drops fall back on to the arroyo’s waters making chains of splatter circles that move swiftly down on with the racing current. The water wets the lower part of my trousers turning them darker.

The stream fords grow deeper as the arroyos become rivers. Now the waters move smoothly, slower, and more quietly, as the mare pushes them aside with her chest as we cross the Guamá River at the deep Paso Caimán, the ford of the little Cuban river crocodiles.”

Even then, these crocodiles were for the most part, gone. Years before, when he was far younger, our Taíno Indian Mayoral, Juan Ramos and his sons, had dived in after the caimanes chasing them underwater to their caves where the animals hid in the fetid air of those refuges.

The caimanes were good eating, especially their fat tails. Never one to neglect a good meal, Juan Ramos, his women, and his offspring had eaten most of them. And yet the beasts were not quite gone since about a mile down-stream, for I had seen what seemed to be crocodile tracks.

The tracks had been a little further downstream from here. They had been made on the coarse sands along a little river beach, beneath the great cliff, that was the back eastern border of our lower foothill lands of Entre Ríos.

Quite some years before, a caimán had attacked a horse here. Luckily, it was the nasty little Cuban freshwater kind, the leaper Crocodilus rhombifer, not the much larger sea crocodile Crocodilus acutus which usually lives near the coast. The horse had been Uncle Rafael’s large mount, and he had simply broken free riding his horse’s heavy steel shod hoofs over the relatively small caimán. The mythical western version of a dragon is traditionally portrayed to resemble a crocodile. I am reminded of this event and of dead Uncle Rafael when ever I see the traditional images of Saint George, his horse ridding above the beast trampling it, and his lance spearing to kill “the” dragon.

Since crocodiles had not been seen at this ford for some years, only as children had we greatly feared them. Now grown the thought did not bother me, even when I crossed on foot. At this ford, my major thought was that my trousers and ankle high boots were getting really wet.

The voice of my memory goes on:

“The mare’s hoofed feet clop across the road over the rounded pebbles of the boulder field at the other side of the river. She climbs the tricky path up the step-like old lava rocks of the Barrenos. I cross the hill divide between the two river’s watersheds; the great cliff of Entre Ríos, product of a massive and geologically recent earthquake, is to my right. The mare’s hooves sound out loud as iron hits against bedrock. Then I ride down a smoother part of the lava road and cross pebbles to approach another ford the faster running, more shallow ford at Lajas on the Bayamo River.”

“Hooves make gentle chipping sounds, as the pebbles give way slightly. Then the mare splashes through the river, spilling, then dripping, water on the other side.”

“The mare moves faster. Dust rises, and tickles my throat. Hooves make little noise as we go along the soft dirt of the flat so called “Royal Road” the “Camino Real.” I know she is a good horse, and since I ride “easy,” this for her no great effort. She enjoys the exercise and sweats just a little. In the hot sun my pants and boots dry fast.”

I cross the Bayamo River again, here still running clear it is flowing slower. The surrounds are cattle country and the terrain is flat but still surrounded by hills to the west and the east.

Some miles in the distance beyond some hills and unseen is the battleground of Peralejo. This battlefield is to my back to the west. On June 13, 1895, the Spanish Governor of Cuba, Martinez Campos, was defeated by the forces of Antonio Maceo and nearly killed. The Spanish forces are trapped by maddened cattle, and vicious maya thorn hedges. Facing almost annihilation of his forces, Martínez Campos’ general Santocides died protecting the governor’s retreat. Great-grand father Major General Calixto García Iñiguez was not in Cuba; however Grandfather, Calixto Enamorado received one of his many battlefield promotions for bravery there.

Dictator Batista would say that Belisario, his father, had been a sergeant in that great and final war of independence, the ”War of 1895.” However, Belisario’s rank is listed on the records as a mere soldier.

It is probable that Belisario Batista, who then served under José Maceo, was at the battle of Peralejo. If so, it seems clear that Belisario Batista was either not promoted in rank in this or any other battle, or demoted at some point during the war.

“I not yet knowing of Belisario, go east now and cross the Guisa River below the canyon at Santa Barbara. I leave the Corojo-Bayamo Camino Real “Royal Road,” to take the road to Guisa. “

Further down, a little off this road and to the right, across a rocky field, are the great caverns of Santa Barbara. These caves are set into the walls of the lower canyon of the Guisa River like holes in Swiss cheese. This extensive cave network in the then heavily wooded areas were once hiding places for the Mambí during the Ten Year War. As yet I do not know their secrets.

“The mare’s hoofs again sound loud as we pass the sun dazzled white karst rock of the lower Guisa River Canyon. and go on though towards low western hills outside Guisa. I am approaching the residence of Senator “Mon” Corona. It is a lot warmer in the low lands.”

“Going through cuts in the low rises, the road approaches the hills west of Guisa. On the northern side there is a long driveway that leads to the estate “Hoyo de Pipa,” the water hole of Mon Corona. Mon, (Ramón) Corona was a former very popular governor of the province. This was the roadway I use to enter Guisa.”

“Despite the bucolic scene the country I feel intimidated by the fear and turmoil of resistance to a dictatorship. After March 10^th 1952, when Batista and his people in the armed forces took power from the democratically elected government of Carlos Prío Socarrás, things kept getting more and more alarming as attempts to mediate a peaceful transition kept failing.”

“Alarmingly, ever turned to worse Batista’s intimidation of opposition became more and more aggressive and bloody. It was clear that Batista would leave only if he was forced out. Batista needs to kill to stay in power. However, Uncle Calixto Leonel has told me the rebels are communists. I do not quite believe him. Castro has denied this in newspaper accounts, but I am uncertain about that as well.”

However, I think: “In Guisa I must be most careful.”

Larry Daley Copyright@2001, revised 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006

01 GUISA

01 GUISA

5/21/2006

Section A The place and its mountains.

Surrounded by hills in eastern Cuba, San José de Guisa is a “plaza fuerte.” It is a fortified town. It guards this place where that constant refuge of the rebellious, the Sierra Maestra Mountains protrude most deeply towards the flatlands. For its strategic location, Guisa as it is known now has always been of military value in times of war. As early as 1848, a Spanish military heliograph was installed on a nearby hill. Despite increasing Spanish defenses it was taken many times by the Mambí rebel forces including the actions of 1868, 1869, 1872, and 1897, and 1958.

Here the foothills protrude out of the Sierra as if the fossil head of some enormous dire wolf. These hills bite as if doubled twinned rows of blunted teeth into the vulnerable belly of the rich plains of the Cauto. The road north north-west out of Guisa protrudes through the gaping maw between these jaw-like hills. This road extends to reach for the Central Highway lapping into the flatlands like a dexterous, immensely long, but very thin tongue.

The once heavily forested lands around Guisa were frequented by bands of the free roaming Taínos called the Guis. And this site was a major Native American settlement. The Taínos, according to Spanish chronicles, were almost as light skinned as the Spanish. The Spanish soldiers, officers, and crews found it far more exciting that the Taíno, both men and women, went around nude. The Taína women were most attractive and quite uninhibited. These women I would learn much later were secretly in the family line.

The Spanish held these Native Americans in cruel captivity using them for free labor and the Taínas for their carnal pleasures. Thus, as time passed, the descendents of the surviving Guis and other Taínos intermingled with the Spanish, and became almost indistinguishable.

Guisa was “founded” as a Spanish town by Señor Don (José) Antonio de Silva(s) y Ramírez de Arellano, Marquis de Guisa on August 12, 1741 (alternatively confirmed August 16, 1765). A century later the Mambí of my family (1868-1898) warred for freedom against the Spanish. Thus in the 1950s like many places in Cuba the central plaza of Guisa had a bust of great grandfather, General Calixto, which stood on a small pedestal among the dusty plants in the small forlorn central square.

Above the statue’s nose, a hole in his great square forehead represents where a bullet flew out from Calixto’s living head. Since in the 1950s the town’s foremost businessmen considered themselves Spanish. These merchants had not forgotten the expensive disasters accompanying my family’s repeated habit of taking this town in war. Thus this bust seems intended to be a site where these merchants could pray for protection. It was a kind of idol, a Taíno Zemí, demanding fearful homage to the ghost of wrathful Calixto. Calixto’s third eye glared at all who passed.

Section B Family ancestry

Honor was very important in Cuba. This is often more important than death, far more significant than mere morality. A brave pimp, hero to his women and their clients achieves fame by honorable death on the streets of Havana. A doomed revolutionary dies in the 1930s, amid a madness of sex and cocaine at the hands of Batista’s assassins. Communists worship a bust of an apostate hero they themselves have killed, and riot violently if his memory is sullied. A politician who failed to substantiate his accusations kills himself at the end of a radio speech and thus recovers his honor. As in the Greek or Viking Sagas war hesitates, as truces for ceremonies are held. These heroes have funerals that respected by their killers are matter of great processions and their lives are constantly remembered.

Heroes are not celebrated as much for their victories, but because of their defiance of fate. Family ancestry is important. To be descendent of heroes (ascendencia de estirpe valiente) brought respect in and obligations to the motherland that were difficult to understand and imposed obligations of bravery and honor that were sometimes too great to bear.

Each of my two maternal great grandfathers, Major General Calixto and Colonel Don Benjamín were Mambí officers of the brave armies of Cuban independence who made the wars that first liberated the Cuban slaves and then gave the country independence. After more than thirty years of war and troubled peace, the Mambí set the stage and participated mightily in the defeat of the cruel Spanish in 1898.

General Calixto and Don Benjamín loved one of two brave, wild, part Taíno Enamorado sisters. Both of these sisters, Leonela and Manuela, Enamorado Cabrera became my maternal great-grandmothers and their mitochondrial DNA confirms their native origins. Cabrera is one of the most ancient Spanish names in the area, and since their surnames are of course Spanish they are derived from the first Spanish either by inheritance or Spanish Baptism. Cabrera is the last name of the Taíno Cabrera clan.

First Names

Names and the particular cultures of old Latin American honor are tightly linked. In a Spanish tradition of centuries names of ancestors are repeated in their descendents, since as in the Ancient Greek and Mediterranean tradition hidden under layers of Catholicism, as long as one’s name is recalled, one’s shade lives on after death.

Leonela is a fictional personage in Don Quijote. Leonela in real life was also the first name of one of my indigenous great-grandmothers, a diminutive of Leonor and female equivalent of Lionel. It means little lioness. Yet, it is far more ancient than that. Thus, in memory of honor, my mother is Leonela too, as is Leonela Perez her cousin. My cousin Leonela González, daughter of Leonela Perez, is a famed ballet and cabaret dancer. My uncle Calixto Leonel carried the name, as does my brother Lionel. My sister Leonor is also such, in memory of a Spanish great grandaunt who adopted my grandfather to give him the family name, for his father had not had time to recognize him formally. Likewise Aunt Manuela carries the name of her other Taína grandmother, and thus MJ my cousin, was baptized Manuel José.

Don Benjamin has a son called Benjamín but we called him Tío Min and as did another son the illegitimate Taíno we called Ping Ping, he of the three testicles. However, in the Güajiro Culture illegitimacy is no disgrace but great potency, the size of a man’s tool, and the greatness of the dimensions of his gonads are considered a mark of honor and give a reputation for valor. There is even a special two handed gesture to indicate this. In ancient indigenous cultures, Américo Vespucio (circa 1454-1512) writes “”…because their women are lecherous, lustful, voluptuous, lewd, and libidinous, they make the members (penis) of their husbands (or lovers) swell to such a great extent that they seem 'brutally deformed'. They do this with a certain practices and with the help of the bite of certain venomous animals (probably blister beetles)..." (more on this later)

Calixto is a name repeated in my family for many centuries, from the Ancient Kings of Pamplona from the line of Iñigo Arista (the Oak in Basque) and his descendent with the hispanicized name Calixto García Iñiguez. Iñiguez of course means son of Iñigo. You will find here mention of Calixto de Luna, Calixto García Iñiguez, Calixto Enamorado, my two Uncles Calixto Mario and Calixto Leonel, and cousins Calixto those we called Cali Norman, and Calixtín García Iñiguez. In these names of living souls the ghosts of their ancestors survived. Then there is Calixto Sánchez White a distant cousin who died in the Cuban wars of the late 1950s.

Family ancestry part I Don Benjamín Ramírez (de Arellano)

Don Benjamín Ramírez (de Arellano) was descended from the same Don (José) Antonio de Silva(s) y Ramírez de Arellano, Marquis of Guisa. The first Marqués de Guisa was colonel in the Spanish Militia, Lieutenant Governor of San Isidro de Holguín and councilman for life of Bayamo. He was granted the hacienda of Santa Bárbara de Viriviví, in 1716, fought the English at Havana in 1762 and is known to have had two legitimate wives.

El Marqués de Guisa apparently was a descendent of Don Juan Ramírez de Arellano Governor of Jamaica who was captured fighting the English in 1655 and died in captivity soon after. Much to the anger of the advancing English, the Spanish living in Jamaica, abandoned their houses, took their treasure and religious objects to Cuba and set their cattle free. The governor’s wife Doña Maria Salvatierra escaped ahead of the English and fled to Bayamo (near Guisa) with her sons Don Juan and Don José.

The slaves of the Spanish of Jamaica were freed, organized into fighting militias, trained and set loose to fight the English. These militias held fast for long years in the karst strewn strange eerie cockpit country of the hills of San Juan, on the Vermejales Savanna and on the Juana River to become the Maroons (from the Taíno Cimarron, or wild ones).

Great-grandfather Don Benjamín, he was always called that, as a mark of much respect. The informal title “Don” is followed as in royalty by the first, not last name, for it is an individual mark of respect for class, dignity and honor but not necessarily inherited. By then the title Marqués de Guisa, had been “extinguished,” because of disputes between the last two heirs to the title, the vast estates between the Cautillo and the Bayamo Rivers were now once again in the Bayamo Municipality.

Don Benjamín was almost always grumpy and closed mouthed, thus we do not know if he was fruit of a semi-legal union with enough status to inherit vast holdings but not enough to retain a formal title of nobility. Others say he was Señor de Horca y Cuchillo of Guisa, Lord of the Noose and the Knife. That title would mean he was a magistrate with power of life and death, and the portals of his house could give refuge to all who could touch his door.

Oscar Ros, our family genealogist reports that Don Benjamín’s inheritance came from his first wife Susana Almenares, perhaps La Marquésa de Guisa. He was born in the municipality of Bayamo, Oriente. However, his father died when he was young, but he was raised by his mother perhaps with the help of family friends, the Rondóns. Benjamín Ramírez (Ferral) Rondon’s father was reported to be Manuel Jacinto Ramírez (de Arellano); mother Rafaela Ferral.

What we do know is that Spanish society in Cuba of the time was, as were most of the western world in those days, still very stratified and sexist. There were very different rules which depended on one’s status of honor and gender. Women of high status had to protect their public honor with secrecy. Men of the upper classes were required to demonstrate bravery but on the other hand outside of their marriages, they were allowed to enjoy the favors of any available woman. The lower classes of both sexes were allowed much sexual freedom, but little social advantage. Thus, Don Benjamín, as was expected of a man of his social stature, took mistresses and fathered a number of illegitimate children.

It is doubtful that Don Benjamín, as a medieval European noble might, used La Pernada, the right of the first night. He did however, have at least two Taíno children outside of his marriage. This matter was never discussion, perhaps because in Güajiro-Taíno tradition virginity was neither highly prized nor customary; a woman’s skills in physical love were far more prized than clumsy first fumblings.

In the Taíno traditional marriage the bride was shared by all on the first night. Spanish chronicles relate that thighs shining with spilled seed, the bride would emerge triumphant with the cry of “Manicato! Manicato!” or Victory! Victory! This matter left devout and innocent Father Bartolomé de las Casas puzzling how these very willing Taína women could manage that so easily. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, also reports this; however, being far worldlier and possibly a participant, found the mechanics of these customs quite feasible, and thus unremarkable

In the Ten Year’s war he lead the Regiment of Baire and for a time Don Benjamín was charged with the protection of deposed President in Arms Carlos Manuel de Cespedés. His mother Rafaela left for Jamaica during these ten years with his brother Juan Bautista Ferral (Rondón). Yet Don Benjamín, lived long returning to Cuba and dying, well into the next century on Feb 7, 1924. His wife Manuela, Doña “Lica,” survived into the 1930’s and is reported to have tried to prevent execution of a family friend, and the Mayoral of the farm, by Batista forces in the forgotten Gamboa rising of 1933.

Often Rondón is used, albeit incorrectly, as Don Benjamín’s second surname. Once, a woman, I think it was the Taína Indian Conchita Ramos, told me quietly that the surname that followed Rondón was Canao. Canao is perhaps a Taíno (Island Arawak), or at least an Arawak name, for there is a place in Venezuela, near the Orinoco delta of that name. Canao was given as a second (maternal) Spanish surname. However, Taíno inheritance is counted through the mother’s line. All this is quite puzzling. Perhaps some of the family’s Taíno genetics comes through him too.

Coronel Don Benjamín Ramírez Ferral (Rondón) left his Genealogy to the family. The surname Ramírez de Arellano did not come from his father, but from his Ursula Tamayo Ramírez de Arellano (circa 1770s Bayamo), (his GGGGreatGrandmother) the line passed on through his mother, Rafaela Ramirez de Arellano. Tamayo is one of the oldest names in Bayamo’s written history, deriving from Rodrigo Tamayo who arrived in 1513 and perhaps his illegitimate, probably half Taína daughter, María Agustina.

What ever Don Benjamín used his mother’s last name which implies either illegitimacy, Taíno inheritance or both. Don Benjamín had lived in Guamá, still a wild Taíno area before the 1868-1878 war.

Legitimacy mattered less than paternal inheritance, since the Spanish term for nobility is Hidalgo, which means the recognized son of somebody. One does not have to be born legitimate to be hidalgo, “recognition” by one’s noble father is sufficient. A bastard at birth, William the Conqueror would have understood. Although considered crude by some of the more class conscious elite in the nearby and larger city of Bayamo, Don Benjamín was thus once a Hidalgo. Hidalgo however, is a feudal title and thus lost to him for his rebellion against Spain.

During the Ten Year War, the first big war for Cuban independence, Don Benjamín was disenfranchised by the Spanish for rebellion and his vast lands confiscated. On the 9^th of January 1869 Don Benjamín fought at the Cauto Ford at Saladillo as a captain under the orders of Donato Mármol, where despite a successful cavalry charge lead by Antonio Maceo. The Mambí were defeated by the artillery of the evil Count of Valmaseda; although some did reach the Spanish cannon. Perhaps 2,000 Cubans died there in awful carnage. Yet the Cubans retreated fighting and killing and dying, but they could not hold the Cauto River line nor could they successfully defend the City of Bayamo. The Mambí burned their houses in Bayamo on the 12 of January 1869 and fled to the countryside.

Don Benjamín fought on; his lands (inherited from his first wife Susana Almenares) which then extended to the sea, were so large that after he was wounded in an attack on Guisa, he still was able to hide there with his whole family, including the two Enamorado sisters, and his retainers. His mother Rafaela endured what she could during the Ten Year War but eventually left with his brother Juan Bautista Ferral (Rondón) to Jamaica. Susana Almenares was butchered by the Spaniards in or near Holguin.

From 1868 to 1898, ancestors Calixto García Iñiguez and Benjamín Ramírez, and their numerous clan of relatives fought for independence from Spain. They were among the leaders of the Mambí. In the Ten Year War these two Mambí warriors often united their forces to fight the Spanish who tried to hold Guisa. Calixto and Benjamín finally stormed Guisa taking it, for a while, from the Spanish in the 19^th Century Ten-Year War.

Don Benjamín did not fight in the battles 1895-1898 war but he supported the insurrection from Jamaica. Jamaica was an important station of the Cuban rebels for it was from here that Lieutenant Andrew Rowan took the Message to Garcia. Don Benjamín would legally recover property rights to at least some of these lands after independence. And that was where I would live in Cuba.

Family ancestry part 2 Major General Calixto García Iñiguez

Calixto García was also from an older and even nobler family than Don Benjamín. When I was young, I knew that Calixto was important, although then I did not know how important. It seemed strange to see streets named after him, and see busts and statues of him, in common public display. Even the great university hospital in Havana was named after him.

Calixto’s genealogy, like that of Don Benjamín, is discontinuous and his family’s origins disappear into the fogs of time. Besides the daughters of Caciques, like his grandmother Doña María de los Ángeles González, if they married to a husband of high social status, were considered honorary Spaniards.

The original Calixto García Iñiguez (circa 810-882), a Basque warrior known in Arab chronicles as Wannaqo ibn Wannaq, was king of the Basque city of Pamplona. Whatever his links to ancient warriors, Great-grandfather Calixto, carried the exact same name as that Ninth century Warrior-King.

Great-grandfather’s grandfather Calixto García de Luna e Izquierdo fought in the Spanish armies in Venezuela. Born in Soria, Castilla somewhere around 1768, he was a Spanish merchant in Valencia Venezuela, and may well have been brother to Spanish Expeditionary Force Colonel don Manuel García de Luna victor in the battle of Santa María de Ipire in 1815 and interim Capitan General of Venezuela (governor of Venezuela) in 1816. Putative brother Don Manuel may have been the Manuel de Luna executed by independence forces in Ecuador circa 1821.

Don Calixto apparently survived being run through with a sword in 1816, and he certainly lost a hand in the final decisive battle in 1821. This was when the Spanish were defeated by Bolivar and the English Troops at the battle of Carabobo. The place name, Carabobo, means in Spanish “the place of the face of a fool.” However, in Arawak, the word may mean the place of the dreaded cannibal Caribs.

Leaving his Indian princess wife and daughters in Venezuela forever, Calixto García de Luna e Izquierdo fled to Cuba with his three sons in a small boat. Since the “de Luna” part of García de Luna’s name, is a link to nobility, the Inquisition, and even to a Pope. A changed Calixto dropped this part of his name after he left Venezuela. He thought “de Luna” was too closely linked to royalty, and he was no longer loyal to the king. In Cuba, he raised his sons, prospered in commerce, and made trouble, as he plotted to support Cuban independence. In 1836 he was jailed for a year for supporting the 1812 Spanish Constitution and for trying to hang a pro-Spanish cleric. His sons grew up in Cuba, and one grandson also called Calixto would become famous.

This grandson Calixto García Iñiguez inherited ancient American genes from his Venezuelan grandmother, a daughter of a Cacique, a Chief. Yet in Spanish tradition the male line counts far more than the mother’s ancestry; and the children of a Cacique were considered part of the nobility and thus de facto Spanish.

General Calixto’s statues, like Taíno Zemí, like native idols, still stand throughout the land. Of course unlike the explicitly phallic Zemí, Calixto’s statues are not so graphically masculine; that trait is merely recorded in history books (following the customary ancient Greek euphism, see Oedipus (swollen foot) as in Oedipus Rex) as a large foot size; and testified to by the birth records of his seemingly endless illegitimate descendents. Calixto, as was his conceded prerogative, took mistresses during the wars; however he always returned to his armies before the sun rose, since the Spanish never attacked before dawn.

The wound in General Garcia’s forehead is part of his legend. In the Ten Years War, in early September of 1874, General Calixto was surprised by the Spanish who were tracing a cut telegraph line at a place halfway westward to the sea from Guisa, south west of Bayamo. Calixto’s men, fought back at the low wet place of the bagá, the pond-apple tree about five miles from the Spanish post at Veguita and the Yara River. This was once a Taíno place, re- made as Spanish and known as Saint Anthony of Bagá (or Baja).

There, surrounded, General Calixto’s forty or so escort troops were dead or dying, his foraging armies too far away to help. Honor demanded escape from the disgrace of capture. Calixto shot himself under the chin with his .45 caliber revolver. The bullet traveled up through his head, and yet somehow Calixto survived. In captivity Calixto recovered his damaged voice, and bright tactical mind. Yet even in captivity and exile he fathered children with a good number of women. It is said that his mother stopped him from taking a willing nun who was nursing his wounds.

Wearing a shining jagged silver star to cover the exit wound on his brow he continued to plot and war against Spain for twenty four years more until he saw victory. At the end of the Ten Year’s War, still in prison he was released when the peace treaty was signed and most of the Cuban forces surrendered. General Calixto who had not signed the peace treaty, promptly went to war again, and again he lost. This time after fighting, and his decimated forces reduced to four, fleeing among the crags and thorns of the jungle, he was forced to surrender stark naked and proud. The Spanish requisitioned clothing and large sized boots. In a tradition at least as old as Rome he was taken to Spain as a trophy.

After a number of failed attempts at revolution, war came again to Cuba in 1895. My grandfather Calixto Enamorado his son mothered by Leonela Enamorado was already fighting there. Major General Calixto escaped Spain. Two of his legitimate sons Carlos and Mario and at least one illegitimate son he had with Spanish woman followed. There is a tender legend in which this Spanish woman, knowing Calixto is leaving, brings his son to him. She is reputed to have said, words to the effect “This is your son! Take him he should fight at your side.” This son died of fever on campaign in Cuba. Carlos and Mario survived the war.

Now General Calixto arrived in Cuba well equipped. His armies and cannon took Guisa again in the final War of Independence at the close of that century in November of 1897. Guisa was then protected by nine blockhouses including a fortified church. These defenses protection did little good. At the beginning of this siege the heliograph was destroyed by General Calixto’s dynamite cannon. After the siege, the town was burned disobeying his father’s wishes by order of Carlos García Vélez, the second of Calixto’s legitimate sons.

Major General Calixto García Iñiguez’s first son Calixto García Vélez, brother to my grandfather and to Carlos, had died in the dénouement of a famous love triangle. Leonela Enamorado had provided him with a second Calixto, and so would my grandfather who also would have five daughters and four sons, including one legitimate and one less so both called Calixto. Such is the rich life of these lines of once hidalgos instinctively fulfilling the urge of these warriors to perpetuate their line and their names towards all eternity. It is said that there are five hundred relatives of the Major General in the city Holguín alone.

Major General Calixto García was designated first President of a free Cuba by proclamation of the Mambí leadership in 1898. He died on a diplomatic mission to Washington DC on December 11, 1898. Initially he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full U.S. military honors, before transport to Cuba. Then his body was taken to Cuba for further honors. Today a great equestrian statue of the Major General stands along the Malecón seawall-highway close to the former US Embassy in Havana.

Family ancestry part 3 Brigadier General Calixto (García Iñiguez) Enamorado.

Brigadier General Calixto (García-Iñiguez) Enamorado, illegitimate son of Leonela Enamorado Cabrera by Major General Calixto García Iñiguez, my maternal grandfather, was also Mambí. He had married Rafaela Petronila Ramírez Enamorado daughter of Don Benjamín. Grandmother and Grandfather were first cousins, so I had both of the Enamorado sisters as great grandmothers.

Calixto Enamorado, grandfather was born in war torn fields of eastern Cuba at Canapú, near Holguín on June 1^st 1974. The troubles in Cuba intensified by the early 1890s, then Calixto Enamorado looked even younger than he was. Family verbal histories relate that he was caught by a Spanish patrol; standing orders directed his captors to hang him as they did with any male captive, caught in the Cuban wilds. The patrol leader could not bring him-self to do it and Calixto Enamorado was let go presumably with his mother.

When the war started fully by 1895 he joined the Mambí forces on March 9^th with the rank of a soldier. Calixto Enamorado then 20 would participate in many battles, first under the command of Antonio Maceo, and then his father. Showing almost mad courage in battle, he had arisen from the ranks to become brigadier general at the end of the 1895-1895 Cuban War of Independence.

Calixto Enamorado saw action and victory, amid maddened cattle, barbed wild pineapple fences, a dead Spanish General and a fleeing Spanish Governor, at Peralejo and rode among the flames in the madly charging Antonio Maceo’s war columns, defeating the Spanish armies as they traversing almost the whole length of Island in “La Invasión.” During this classic military advance, he fought at Iguará against the Spanish when Winston Churchill won the enemy’s medal on a Cuban battlefield. Calixto then fought in his father’s battles, leading his own regiments at Tunas and at Auras, and numerous actions in between. His illegitimacy was hidden to outsiders for he was using his mother last name Enamorado; thus some war reports refer to him as a “nephew” of his father.

Showing almost mad courage in battle, he had arisen from the ranks to become brigadier general at the end of the 1895-1895 Cuban War of Independence. He was one of the youngest generals in that war.

Calixto Garcia Iniguez Enamorado, was small and thin. Gustavo Cardelle, his doctor and father of cousin Leonela Gonzalez that most beautiful ballet dancer, members him as having the energy and power of a giant. Although I only knew him when, old and dying and had once grumped at me because I, not yet being used to Spanish, did not use the honorific form when I addressed him. Grandfather’s friends recall him as been well humored, educated with out vanity or ostentation. He was always helpful and generous. In his strength he showed, great interest in women, a matter to which grandmother objected, but grandfather’s half-brother Eduardo Perez (son of Leonela Enamorado and Eduardo Perez) had shared together. Grandmother was not pleased.

In addition grandfather had been Cuban consul in diverse foreign lands for many years, once member of the Cuban House of Representatives, and leader of a Column of Cavalry in the 1917 Chambelona War. He built his hacienda residence “Entre Rios” (La Casa de los Generales) on a large section of land he purchased from Don Benjamín. Calixto Enamorado, the name he preferred, died on the 19^th of May 1951, on exact anniversary of the death of his hero Jose Marti, for he also had been there then 56 years before.

Grandfather never knew that Fulgencio Batista had once again taken power by force. Grandfather, committed to democracy and Batista committed to power, were longstanding enemies; perhaps since the time when in the Cuban War of Independence, Batista’s father Belisario had served in his regiments.

Sixty years later

The Spring of 1956 Cuban Army Goicuria barracks near the city of Matanzas was attacked on April 29. The attackers lead by Reynold García García, they belonged to the Authentico Party lead by Carlos Prío Socarras. They were betrayed and machine-gunned down by .50 caliber machine guns after the entered the barracks in sandbagged trucks. I remember my horror seeing the photographs fo the dead bodies in Bohemia magazine.

The Fall of 1956 Frank País, leader of the urban guerrillas of Castro’s 26^th of July movement attacks the police and army in Santiago de Cuba on November 30^th. Castro lands near Niquero on December 2^nd. Batista disperses Castro’s forces and Castro is believed dead.

The Spring of 1957 By January 17, the attack on the garrison at the mouth of La Plata River, on the south side of the Sierra shows that Castro is still alive. Batista’s Palace was attacked on March 13^th in an assault by non-Castro rebels who were defeated in fierce fighting. Batista narrowly escapes with his life.

By the fall of 1957, My sisters Lucía and Leonor, had left our land for the last time; they were safe attending a convent school in Havana. I had taken all my final secondary exams and should have been attending Havana University.

In Cuba’s capital, the University was closed. Batista, the consummate and devious plotter, was dictator for his second or was it his third time. Wanting to keep the mostly anti-Batista students from gathering, he had ordered the University shut.

While waiting for the University to re-open I had gone to the eastern Province of Oriente at the other end of the Island. I then took to living in the batey, that farm compound on the land grandfather had bought from Don Benjamin when he married grandmother. It was called “Entre Ríos,” nestled far further into the foothills of the Sierra Maestra than Guisa.

There was much unrest against Batista in the towns, and there was military action far away from us south beyond our land in the very highest ridges of the Sierra. However, in our area apprehension smoldered.

Under its Spanish tile roof, our sprawling country house, the locals called “La Casa de los Generales,” was empty of family. I was there alone, living in another building. Our vast extended family was divided. Mother and stepfather were deep into urban resistance in Havana.

Dad was also in Havana. He, when not teaching, was spending much time eating leisurely meals, enjoying the food and good company at his favorite restaurant. Many evenings he would dress up in one of his hand tailored tropical suits, and go to repeat fancified gossip to woefully ignorant and credulous listeners, at the British Embassy in Havana. For this indiscretion Dad would be let die in Castro Cuba.

One of my many uncles, Calixto Leonel, had chosen the government side. He with his wife, Aida, was in dictator-controlled Bayamo on the Cauto Plains, staying with Grandmother in a modest house she owned near the Batista Army Barracks.

The family’s mayorales (the word roughly translates to overseers, but the position of mayoral has more status, privileges and obligations), our workers and servants were keeping the farm operations going as best as they could.

My brother, Lionel, alone of the family, was still working our coffee plantation, back lot seven in the southern heights, in the area called Los Números. The coffee was sent down and north on mule trains to Entre Ríos, the northernmost and lowest portion of our lands. I was charged with unloading, stacking, and guarding the precious crop. I slept on a cot among the coffee sacks.

I sometimes went to up to see my brother at his house in the mountains. As usual I climbed the hills and mountains on foot, and as also was usual and wise, I starting the steep climb in the refreshing cool of dawn just before sunrise. After I get there, we talk, and we watch the mountains, and worry. To the south, beyond a valley, high steeply rising mountains of the main ridge of the Maestra Mountains made a great wall that seemed almost to touch the uppermost southern sky. Lionel does not tell me everything for there was enough to worry about.

My brother now, almost fifty years later, tells me that in those days he had been help extinguish a fire at the foot of the crag of Peña Prieta. He tells it in first person and in the eternal present tense of vivid memories.

“I feel something pressing against my back. Turning around I see to my surprise a Springfield 1903 rifle wielded by Cabo (Corporal) Pinto of the Guardia Rural. Cabo Pinto then takes me all the way down to Guisa, to the Cuartel headquarters of the Guardia Rural just outside that town.“

“Sergeant Ortega comes out of the Cuartel, and greets me, asking Cabo Pinto why he is here. Cabo Pinto tells his sergeant that I am a “Fidelista,” a follower of Fidel Castro. That accusation is a death sentence. As proof Pinto states I was carrying a holstered long barreled .38 caliber S&W revolver.”

Of course Lionel was not a Fidelista; as to the revolver Lionel had bought it from Vergel, Uncle Calixto Leonel’s mayoral. To this, Sergeant Ortega responds to Pinto saying loud and severely, words to the effect: ”Don’t you know he, Lionel, is one of the family of the “Generales” and thus untouchable!”

So Ortega invites Lionel for a drink. As they go towards the town, Ortega mentions his family and their need; then he asks Lionel for twenty dollars. Lionel gives it to him; they do not share a drink. All seems to be a opportunity to elicit yet another bribe from the family.

At this point it seems the Batista forces are not taking Fidel Castro seriously. After all Castro’s forces reached land, late and at the wrong place, not only that but they were sick and weak, apparently having survived the trip on “rations” of amphetamines since survivors talk of taking food pills. Batista forces killed or captured, not necessarily in that order, at least half of these dazed rebels who landed with Castro. The rebels’ memories of these times are often incoherent, talking of air attack and fear. Frank País sent agents to help them escape and Batista’s forces made the mistake of breaking off pursuit. Castro under sporadic air attack and paranoid with fear, dealt harshly with spies real and imagined. The next time the Batista Government forces encountered the rebels on the ground was an attack by reorganized rebels on an isolated out post.

Úbero Later things change the war is no longer a mere game. Probably on May 26, 1957, while I was still in Havana, Lionel who was on our land in the heights of Los Números near the Crag of Peña Prieta, had seen what looked like a platoon of about twenty or thirty Batista troops passing right by where he lived. The platoon was heading southwest towards the southern coast, beyond the Sierra Maestra’s main ridge.

The Batista Government troops, wearing full battle dress, tan, not camouflage, uniforms start going downhill on Lot Seven on the sloping ridge that goes straight past Lionel’s house, towards the little river, now falsely know as the “Bayamito.”

These soldiers, although they looked so formidable and well trained, were going towards a losing action. The soldiers leapfrogged each other’s position, the lead man lying prone ready to provide cover, until he in turn was passed. Then they crossed the ”Bayamito” Stream and disappeared in the distance going and up to cross that massive main ridge

On that coast is the little and isolated village of Úbero. This village sits at the edge of the Caribbean at the foot of the mountains, just north of and above the immense undersea chasm that is the Deep of Bartlett.

Úbero, the place of the glossy wide-leaved purple fruited sea-grape tree, usually bakes quietly in the sun in the dry rain-shadowed south coastal side of the Sierra Maestra. However, this place was busy then, for the Batista garrison there was under attack by Castro’s rebels.

The brisk and deadly action was far from Los Números and Lionel’s house, beyond the massive wall of the main ridge, down on this wall’s southern far side, many steep miles away by land. Some of the soldiers Lionel saw were going to die. My brother would not hear the sounds of battle.

Calixto Sánchez White, was a distant relative according to Mother. Calixto was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1923, and thus probably in contact with grandfather who was almost certainly in England as Cuban consul general in Liverpool. Calixto was a WW II veteran World War II aviator, an anticommunist aviation labor leader and member of the Union Insurreccional Revolucionaria (UIR), loyal to deposed constitutional president Carlos Prío Socarrás. The UIR was a group of gunslingers led by war damaged Emilio Tró; Fidel Castro, Orlando Bosch, and others were members of this group.

On March 13^th 1957 Calixto and his men had not arrived at the Presidential Palace on time to support the failed presidential palace assault intended to end the dictatorship in one stroke by killing Batista. In Havana then, I had heard the shooting and was terrified but did not know what was going on. I only knew a little from one of the Batista bodyguards an American who attended the same Judo dojo as I.

April 8^th 1957 the Directorio Revolutionaria, a non-Castro Organization, landed a group under the direction of Foure Chaumont in the Escambray mountains of Central Cuba, and within a week was in action against Batista forces. I did not know of this.

That year what I did not know was legion. Some of those who escaped the failed assault hid in the lower floors of Humbolt 7, below the penthouse where mother and stepfather Enrique Sanz lived. These were betrayed by a communist member of their group and were killed on April 20, 1957. Luckily, my Mother, my sisters, Enrique nor I, were there at that building at that time.

When Calixto Sánchez escaped Cuba, and reached Florida, he was absolved by his friends of blame for not being in the Assault on the Palace. He returned and sailed back to Cuba. Calixto did not know his expedition “Corynthia” had also been betrayed to Batista, and landed in the Sierra Crystal the northern part of Oriente province probably May 24^th or 25^th 1957. Calixto Sánchez was soon killed after surrender (28^th of May) with somewhat less than twenty of his men.

However, Calixto Sánchez action kept many Batista troops occupied away from the May 28^th Úbero action in the southernmost part of the province. One of the few (three?) survivors of the Corynthia landing Fernando Mirelles (Virreyes) joined with the Che in the Sierra and became a rebel captain. Both Sánchez’s landing and the Úbero attack used weapons intended for the Palace assault.

Frank País the able urban leader of Castro’s 26^th of July movement is betrayed by communists in the same organization and killed by Batista troops in Santiago de Cuba on July 30, 1957. This removed Castro’s most able lieutenant and rival in his organization.

September 5, 1957, Batista, with B-26 air support (Douglas A-26 Invaders) suppressed with much bloodshed a Cuban Navy revolt at Cienfuegos, in middle Cuba.

Ana Elsa, Lionel’s daughter, was born December 14, 1957 in Lionel’s house on those heights beneath that great crag of Peña Prieta.

By February 16^th 1958 Batista’s B-26 would be bombing and strafing rebels near Pino del Agua, and I would gather with the people who worked for us at the edge of cliff above the lagoon below La Casa de Los Generales. We watch the planes flying and the bombs exploding far away in the mountains.

Larry Daley Copyright@2001, revised 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006

Chapter 00 THE CONVOY

My mother family’s ancestral lands, lost in these mountains of Eastern Cuba, are a favorite land of war.

When I arrived in Cuba in 1948, memories clashed with the then surprising present. My recall of the countryside of England and Wales, hills soft and rounded, pastures close cropped by sheep, lands tamed by man for centuries did not prepare me for the wilds of eastern Cuba. Here in Cuba the majesty of Wale’s Snowdon and the peak of Scotland’s Ben Nevis were dwarfed by greater heights. In Liverpool, parks were landscaped to give illusions of wide spaces; in wildest Cuba this space was real. Here, great trees grow tall and shade wide, rivers run fast, clean and free, tangled vegetation iss everywhere growing at fantastic rates. Left alone a lot I wandered far in excited wonder.

Before Batista came to power, in 1952 and before Castro attacked the Barracks at Moncada in 1953, “MJ” Norman, my cousin, two years old than I had joyously climbed the Sierra Maestra’s highest peak Turquino. We younger cousins were very proud of him and waited our turn to do the same. I would have to wait until nearly the end of the decade to do the same, and my circumstances then would be far less joyfull.

The arcane geological mysteries that drove this mix of ancient lava flows and karst so high had once made me puzzled and wonder. During the school year, in boarding school in the Escolapios of Guanabacoa, always lonely for these mountains, I had learned geography and geology from books. Finding joy in my studies sketching three dimensional figures of layers rocks of beneath the verdant surface, I imagining being there on holidays; I day-dream of looking with some kind of comic book style X-ray vision peering through these rocks to their very innards marveling at the complexity revealed.

Now I know that these mountains started to rise from wrinkled plains when Cuba floating on its own slab passed between the still unjoined North and South America to crash into the Bahama Platform near what would be Florida. Then there was the collision with Chicxulub that famous comet of extinction over sixty million years before, spraying iridium over the planet. The pressure of the Caribbean Plate, pressing upward, northward against the small Cuban plate, presses the island’s bedrock against the North American plate.

The power of the Caribbean plate projects northward, buckling, forcing subduction, convergence and shear across the incredible sea trench of the Deep of Bartlett. These tectonic forces have raised the steep mountains of the Caribbean plate in Jamaica, Haiti and Santo Domingo on one side and across the Deep in Cuba on other. There is now a height difference of at least twenty six thousand feet between the bottom of that Deep and the closeby Sierra Maestra in Cuba.

These processes continue. Spanish chronicles record periodic earthquakes causing the collapse of churches in Bayamo and Santiago. British logs record sea deaths of cruel pirates and their women of pleasure when in Jamaica, the wild city of Port Royal returned to the sea. As a child, just arrived from England I have felt the earth tremble here, holding on to table in the veranda of the great kitchen of La Casa de los Generales where we lived while my elders merely smiled. Since then these quakes go on, and landslides kill.

Now, in Cuba the torrent cut ravines of the Sierra are clogged by Castro’s Pharaonic Dams. These dams shiver when the earth trembles; the water behind them ripples ominously in unnoticed warnings. With their minds are filled with propaganda of faux US invasion the Cauto Plains’ people remain ignorant of these far more real, but unheeded, terrors. Nature is still far mightier than humanity. Some day these dams will fail.

The resulting mountains were coated thick with limestone, the kind pitted with sink holes and caves that is known as karst. Rivers submerged devoured by the karst, and then, further down their courses reappeared pouring out of fissures in the ground. After lights out in that school in Guanabacoa birth trauma dreams came. Asleep in sweltering heat, tossing in night sweats, beneath and within bleached walls of my mosquito net, my mind takes me squeezing breathless through the narrow passages within the almost transparent white of karst caves; etherial versions of the guano- sullied bat infested caverns that I know from life.

The Sierra Maestra although not the highest mountain range (maximum height a little less than 7,000 feet) in the Caribbean, has the steepness and complexity, with a mix of heavy tropical forest and cropland almost ideally suited to guerrilla war. These mountains arose in a series of wrinkles of huge sliced, tilted, fractured, slabs, to make ridges running east to west. The northern slab is oldest and thus worn lowest; here the rounded hills and the plains themselves are made from the eroded detritus of these first ridges.

This limestone, the mineral rich thanatocoenosis death assemblage, came from endless billion sea water creatures. On these, then under sea lava slopes the animals’ calcareous remains accumulated for eons; then rose with these mountains from the warm seas. Tropical rains came poured down on this emerging massif for millions of years, carving notched sierras, cutting channels, torrents, streams and rivers. Residual karst now makes more defenses, as cockpits and caves form at lower elevations. The endless great caves of Santa Barbara were just on the edge of our family land and had once sheltered ground sloth, great majá boa, the ancestral Tainos, Cimarón, and the Mambí.

At the seas edge to the south and east, crashing Comet Chicxulub brings kilometers high tsunami to cut the great steps, giant walls at Baracoa to the east and the south and west edges of the Sierra. Wall of immense volcano craters of far Canary Islands had collapsed to make more tsunamis. Strange wild beasts replaced the bolid and flood killed ancientreptiles. Birds came and, evolve to hugeness, and then died. The tsunamis carved the edge of the mountains into stepped tiers of cliffs at sea’s edge. Trees grew and evolved into dense forests.

Ancient peoples came here too, through rivers carved breaches in the cliffs and up the rivers that flowed through forested plains of debri. It seems the Jigües were here first for their names are everywhere. Jigües are said to be magical, dark short longed haired peoples, perhaps such as the San but their hair is straight; but although there are legends of such in Cuba and tropical South America the only known remains of such people are in Brazil. Next came the Guanacabibes, and then the Siboney, replaced the ghosts of maybe Atlanteans. Then the Taíno came in their huge canoes. They arrive to name rivers, and breed joyously with these other ancient peoples. The Taínos had fished in these river’s pools, and the lagoon, that lay below the cliff at our feet.

The highest, last of these ridges in the Sierra Maestra is the one nearest the sea. This is a highway for defenders, a path across this great natural rampart going east and west.

The Taíno, here sheltered from the sea raiding Caribs by the mountains and plains, had lived. Their vast knowledge of nature allowed naked, prosperous, sensual peace until the Spanish came to kill and conquer. The conquistadors took Taínas as brides or common law wives, or, more commonly, had casual sexual congress with these island women since few Spanish women crossed the Atlantic in those days of conquest. The rebel Taíno Caciques: Brizuela of Baitiquirí, Guamá, his jealous brother Oliguama, Oliguama’s unfaithful warrior wife Casiguaya, and their war-women ran swift and naked along these ridges fighting the Spanish to the death.

The Spanish brought and bought slaves from Africa to replace those Taíno they had killed. Some slaves fled and joined fugitive Taínos in Cimarron settlements the mountains. Later escaped slave hunters chased the Cimarones along these same routes, finding that the lower elevations are hemmed in by steep north south valleys. Thus aggressive mixed culture of the Güajiro mountain squires arose; these mountains with their heights, walls and caves were their fortresses.

Slowly, nervously, 1957 flows towards 1958. At Entre Rios, in our foothill lands, on the eastern back of the Bayamo River, in the Sierra Maestra, southern Oriente Province, Cuba I do not keep a calendar. I try to ignore the war and do normal things; uncounted days pass in worry and trepidation. Events happen and in their passing are burned into memory, to be seen vividly like mileposts along in the strange continuum of recall’s pseudo-time.

Memory replays “milepost 1”:

It is night. I am here alone standing on sloping rock at the edge of the deepest pool of Las Lajas the place of the ancient lava flows. We are using swamp eels, quimbolos as bait. Quimbolos are not true eels, and not closely related to their “normal” eels, they are slimy perhaps a little less than a foot long; and they breathe through a hole in their throats. They hide in the mud below the weeds at water’s edge for they are a much sought meal for other fish and are the premium bait for the great large mouth bass in daytime and the true eels at night.

Eels take the quimbolo slowly, so I wait, aside and above those dark, waters. I ready to land this eel with the spinning rod that my father had given me. The rod is an antenna connecting to the dark water world, amplifying the movements of my prey. The rod’s tip begins to move. I wait. Feeling the eel take the bait firmly, I lift the rod to hook it. The eel moves, not fast and thrashing as if a bass, but resisting with slow power as a fearful underwater demon. It seems the great eel is catching me as much as I am catching it.

Black against the black of the deep water, the eel is at first invisible, a strong force pulling at my line from those darkest depths. The shore of the other bank of the river is just a shadow, out lines of bushes, dull gleaming wet sand. I fight the eel for a long time and eventually get it close to the surface. It appears in the low and eerie starlight that trembles in reflection on the ripples of disturbed water. The eel is long; it thrashes, finned fluke tail stroking power menacing sinuous it moves much like the much smaller nasty aquatic miso snake. The eel is aggressive as an aquatic version of the aggressive rearfanged colubroid jubo. It is thick, almost as if a majá boa. .

Without a net, I cannot land it by hand; I must lift it out on the line, for eels bite. It is too strong. Large and heavy, it turns spinning as if a Cuban river caiman, a mean little jumping crocodile, thrashing to rip flesh. It is inevitable that the eel will get away, for the monofilament line I am using is too weak, yet I keep on trying to land it.

The fishing line turns and turns to become tightly twisted and weak, then slowly stretches, rubbing on submerged slabs of rock. The line stretches until it ruptures. The eel gets away, slowly sliding wiggling, moving in changing S-shapes down the sloping underwater ledges. The eel swims down to the deepest crevices, where even in daytime we thrill with fear when we dive.

In the lowest depths of the pool is where cold underground rock-filtered water coming from the highest mountains seeps in. The mountain water layers chill below the warmer river surface the sun has kissed in hot day light. Then by day, for we do not dive at night, I can only reach bottom with difficulty. Now at night, the escaped eel’s black body is hidden in blackness far beneath the broken strands of streaming lino river weed resting on soft sulfide foul-mud the eel digests its stolen químbolo. It recoups strength enough to go on living.

Perhaps, from there this eel will swim the long trip downstream on the Bayamo and then Cauto Rivers to the western salt water of the Guacanayabo Gulf, and from there to the blue Caribe.

Then it will go, eel-instinct driven, around most of Cuba flowing with the Gulf Stream. First west, then north, then eastm its fluke-finned body will drive in sinuous snaking speed through immense submerged canyons. Going on to reproduce others of its eel-kind, this eel will swim to that unknown deep beneath the immense tangle of swirling gyres of seaweed that is the fearful Sargasso Sea.

Time is passing swiftly in the pseudo timeline of my memory -- the next milepost comes to mind:

The day’s chores have ended. Some of the workers and I are fishing again at the same pool at Lajas.

The sun sets; it turns dark. The very distant lights of Bayamo and Guisa are completely blocked by hills. We are least a mile from la Casa de Los Generales, where we no longer use the farm’s generators. Even the weak soft light of kerosene lamps we use in the house now cannot be seen. The cliffs and trees and distance hide their shine. The velvet curtains of the tropical night have dropped, but the eels are taking the químbolo bait, so we stay hoping to catch more eels.

Enrobed in obscurity all is different when night fishing; we live, not at merely different times of day, but as if in a different place a different world. The river’s pools turn to jet wells; the air dankens slowly gathering humidity for the heavy dew of Cuban daybreak. Light only comes from the steel stare of stars; chill breezes alter reality to its most primitive condition.

This is the dark time of the world of the mabuya, the witching hours in which the great hawk moths, owl moths, black and white witches, ghost moths fly. Here even the greatest of these lepidoptera insects, huge grey witches with two hands span wings, flit.

These are the hours when our souls are most weak and our life force most tenuous. This is the time when bats pour from their deep caverns to hunt. This is the obscurity of the coming of the evil Taíno night spirits and the hupía ghosts wander. We worry and ready ourselves to fight fear.

First it is quiet, very quiet. All sounds are amplified; the river is noisy in its running, washing around boulders and above pebbles. From the grasses and bushes on the river’s banks we hear insects chirping. Then we hear a sound, a sound that is faint, low, but throaty deep. In the grassy cliff behind us, crickets stop chirping.

The sound is coming from far to the north from the Cauto Plains, from the direction of that old city of warriors named from the Bayamo River. Minutes pass. We stop moving and sit still reclining on the gritty, smoothly sloping laja rock.

The ancient lava rocks still hold some of the sun’s warmth. We wait feeling these rocks slowly chill. The sound throbs, vibrating through the rocks. It is coming from the Royal Road, El Camino Real, and getting louder. The noise is north, then northwest of us; it comes to us filtered through roadside trees, stores and houses in the Corojo hamlet, and the guásima trees and the guava bushes of pastures.

It is the sound of trucks, many trucks, moving smoothly on the sandy surface of that part of the road. In this dark night, we cannot see anything of what is going on. The noise changes tone. The trucks are moving over pebbles.

The truck wheels splash as they enter the river at the ford. We know where that sound comes from, it is only hundreds of yards away. The trucks are crossing at the ford of the little black Taíno demon, the lair of the crafty seducer of women, “El Paso del Jigüe.” Below this ford the river flows east over gentle rapids to turn north again at the southern pools of Lajas where we like to swim. Then the river flows on into the dark pool where we are fishing.

Strange, so many trucks moving at night, yet there are no headlights. Suddenly we realize, perhaps 400 yards away to our southwest, is a Batista army convoy that is crossing the river at the Jigüe Ford. Horrified, we realized we are within rifle and machine gun range. It is long range true, but still we are in range.

We feel the Batista army’s confidence; they know that the rebels have far fewer weapons to challenge their own overwhelming fire power. Batista soldiers care little about civilians. These soldiers often do “reconnaissance by fire,” shooting at potential ambush sites seeking to locate pockets of resistance. Thus they try to make any lurking rebel so fearful, that without thought he will pull his trigger returning fire to reveal presence and location. We worry about these probing shots. We fear that, thus testing for rebels in ambush, the soldiers will fire in our direction, and hit us instead.

We lay down still and quiet on the sloping rocks of Lajas, fearful and glad that it is dark. Finally sound quiets to the south. Today we will live. The rocks we lay on have turned cold; we shiver.

Now and for certain, our days of peace are ended. War has come to its old playground in the valleys of the Bayamo and the Guamá Rivers.

In later days, we take our nude daily river baths earlier in a nearer safer place than Las Lajas. We bathe as always, as had the ancient Taínos unashamed, but sexually segregated. In the river we lather with chips of harsh white Osa laundry soap, then swim beneath Zoila’s abandoned house perched where the eastern cliff begins; nearby a little to the north the bank is lower. This is the place where Conchita Ramos washes laundry by day.

Smooth wires for drying clothes stretch taut from around the young still smooth bark of an ateje sapling to twist tie around the rough trunk of an older bastard-elm guásima. The traditional three stones, speckled granite, head-sized, round, smooth and grey make a simple open air hearth. Here Conchita boils water with yuca starch in a five gallon square can sitting on the stones over an open fire. She stirs with a wooden paddle, pressing in and lifting up the steaming clothes

The extinguished fire wood pulled from the center of the fire to let it go out was tipped with jet black slit and diced charcoal. Chita’s busy bare feet had smoothed the ground as she worked. Then she would put on her shoes, lift the laundry onto her head and carry it up on the road along side the rising cliff to the batey of la Casa de los Generales. There plying her old fashioned flat irons, she would tell ancient tales. Conchita’s, all called her Chita, finished laundry was always immaculate, board-like stiff faded denims and brilliant crispy whites. She earned five cents apiece for washing clothes, getting more than a man in a day. She needed the money for she had about seven children, and was a good mother.

This was the 1950s, not earlier centuries. No longer is there lurid display of naked and well bronzed flesh as processions of Taína beauties hip sway going to the river to bathe. We are civilized, we are “christianos,” who wear clothing, so men and women now dress after bathing before they walk back home. One day a group of the local montunos working nearby had laughed when Chita, “unashamed,” had lifted her dress high to cross a nearby ford of the river. They had not mocked her nudity, but her fallen breasts and old sinewed nut-brown body; for secretly they feared for themselves because she reminded them of the ravages time would work on their own bodies.

In times before the “War Against Batista” proper city folk were shocked by river nudity. One time our main vehicle the WWII surplus for wheel drive truck, we called it La Sapa because it jumped like a toad, was bringing in some city guests. Suddenly one of the city slickers, a woman, shrieked: “There are naked men by the river.” Movie actress Aunt Rosita who knew these lands and rivers from her childhood, her more than part Taína inheritance surfacing from beneath a thick layer of education, merely joked: “Where! Where!”

We put our clothes; they cling to our still damp skins. We slide into our shoes standing on laja rocks so as not to make our feet muddy. Hair still wet under out hats, we climbed up the road at the side of the cliff. After eating supper we sit, as has become the recent custom facing the river at a safe distance, sitting spaced like birds along telephone wires on a great log. The road is far from here to the west beyond the river. Someone, perhaps Eliodoro, plays the tres guitar and sings songs of love and dueling challenges. Some women come to sit close beside their chosen partners for the night. Nicea cuddles under the great arms of our foreman.

Here we are almost at the lip of the cliff on which the grounds, the batey, of the Casa de los Generales stands, as if suspended in space. Deep below, almost at our feet is the laguna; further to the west the Bayamo River runs noisy in its power. We watch to the west-northwest admiring the brief but great show of sunset between the gaps of the foothills. To the north, shadows extend and run east across the plains of El Cauto. The still sunlit sea at the far unseen Bay of Guanacayabo, the Bight of Bayamo, near and beyond Manzanillo and the swampy delta of the Cauto River, reflects in blue green glints on the western part of the dome of sky, prolonging for instants the short sudden end of the tropical day.

Memories continue at milepost three:

After dark, we watch as el relamapageo, the amazingly intense play of lightning, seeing the sheet lightning make meshes of flickering light across the southern night sky. Bolts strike ground far up the gorges of the headwaters of the Bayamo