Once, as a child, María Isabel had accompanied her father to the city center of Camagüey to deliver baskets of a plantation owner’s coffee yield to a market vendor. She watched wonderstruck as wealthy Spanish families paced the city’s promenade, the women with their parasols and flouncing petticoats of fine linen, the children playing with hoops and sticks, and carrying schoolbook bundles. At the market, she watched enslaved women trail white women and gather their purchases, how the Spanish women would point and the Black women would gather, their dresses more like the countryside smocks she was used to.
She’d asked her father then, pointing to her skin, “Where are the people like me?” He’d hushed her with a smack. Children did not speak their minds, he reminded her. Children did not ask, children answered. Children did as they were told.
Now she knew the answer. The women were here, in these fields, some free and some not, some passing as creole. The not-so-whispered dictate of enslavers: mix to mejorar la raza. Spanish men, your violence is a favor, your violence is bettering the race of this colony. So that someone like her could be told, you are not Black. You are mulata and mulata is mejor, and maybe your future generations will blanquear, closer and closer to white, take on the dictate as their own. Some plantations kept enslaved people, and peasants who earned their keep on small plots of land tended others. For their own reasons, the peasants and enslaved people, the guajiro farmers and criollo landowners, they all hated Queen Isabel II.
In the final days of war, the reports through the provinces grew more and more dire: public executions, entire villages burned to the ground, formerly free Black farmers forced into slavery. People were hungry, famished. Disease spread and wiped out whole families, whole prisons filled with mambises fighters. Their heroes were dying.
And still each day during lunch, for an hour, Antonio and María Isabel sat beneath the shade of banana leaves for reading lessons. Antonio read her poetry from Cuba’s orators and political theory from European philosophers. Karl Marx, other men. They often debated. He taught her to spell her name, held a quill in her shaking hand as she formed loops and curves over a small scroll, and though she could not decipher the letters, she saw in the marks a kind of art, a kind of beauty.
“I have a special reading,” he said one day. “Today, in the afternoon. A treat for the workshop.”
“You’ll not read from Les Misérables?” They were on the last volume, and its reading seemed the only event worth anticipating in those dark days when every sound of hooves brought fear of more loss.
“Yes, but first, a special reading.”
María Isabel was still the only woman in the factory, now shrunken. The other rollers were fathers and husbands but also children whose hardened demeanor belied their innocence, who smoked puros larger than their hands. María Isabel knew to count her blessings—some of these boys had also lost entire families, had grown into men over one bloody night, had woken up the guardians of younger siblings, bellies rumbling.
“Today brings a rousing announcement,” Antonio said from the lectern as the workers settled back to their desks. “One of our own great thinkers in exile in New York, Emilia Casanova de Villaverde—leader of the women’s independence movement and wife of the famed author of Cecilia Valdés—wrote to Victor Hugo. Our beloved señora Casanova de Villaverde informed señor Hugo of Les Misérables’ popularity in this, our tobacco workshops, that bring Cuba’s artisanship to the masses. She informed him of the lot our women begin to occupy—how their hands, too, have taken up the work of men as they seek to liberate our island. I have in my very possession, a translation of Victor Hugo’s remarks to his faithful admirer Emilia Casanova de Villaverde—and to you, the people of Cuba.”
A murmur overtook the workshop, and Porteños lifted his head from his accounting desk on the second floor to note the disruption. But all were silent and attentive as Antonio unrolled a large scroll whose black ink filtered through the fibers in the light.
“‘Women of Cuba, I hear your cries. Fugitives, martyrs, widows, orphans, you turn to an outlaw; those who have no home to call their own seek the support of one who has lost his country. Certainly we are overwhelmed; you no longer have your voice, and I have more than my own: your voice moaning, mine warning. These two breaths, sobbing for home, calling for home, are all that remain. Who are we, weakness? No, we are force.’”
María Isabel’s hands shook, and she tried to still them, tried to still her rage.
“‘Consciousness is the backbone of the soul. As the conscience is upright, the soul stands; I have in me that strength, and it is enough. And you do well to contact me. I will speak up for Cuba as I spoke up for Crete. No nation has the right to hammer its nail over the other, not Spain over Cuba nor England over Gibraltar.’”
Antonio trailed off, and María Isabel looked up to see Porteños stomping across the overlook and down the stairs, his face red and sweaty, the workers silent as he grabbed the papers from Antonio and commanded him to read from Les Misérables and only from Les Misérables.
Everyone had feared Porteños’s arrival. Workers whispered that he’d broken the legs of an insouciant servant, that he knew about cigar factory strikes in the US and said he’d shoot anyone in his own workshop who dared complain.
“You are not to incite our workers with the imbecile ramblings of European artists with little understanding of the practical labor our good people perform!” he yelled.
Antonio looked at the crumbled scroll in Porteños’s sun-spotted hand. He muttered what
