The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,15

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not just the land—they have slaughtered every animal they can find.

In the few letters Mateo was able to send me, he spoke of subsisting on a diet of lizards, and eating fruits like mangos for all of his meals. How can you fight one of the greatest armies in the world with so little to sustain you? How will we survive with nothing available to us?

I squeeze Luz’s hand, begging her for silence. The sights surrounding us are as horrible as any I could have imagined, but at seven, Isabella hears everything, and she’s already been through enough having to leave her home behind for a city she’s never visited, a life in one of Weyler’s reconcentration camps.

“How much longer, Mami?” Isabella asks me.

“Just a little farther.”

This will be her first time seeing Havana. Her childhood has been our little farm, the animals she cared for, our family, and now everything is changing. I’ve tried to prepare her for what it will be like in the city, but then again, I left in very different circumstances than the ones in which I’m returning.

“Will Papi come visit us?”

“Shh,” I whisper, hating that I must deny her this, the link to the man we love. “Remember what we said? Your father has to be a secret for now. He’s off doing something important. We can’t speak of him until he’s back safely with us.”

Rumor has it that the Spanish are denying provisions to those with ties to the revolutionaries.

“Will you leave, too?” Isabella asks.

“No, I’ll never leave you.”

It is a complicated thing to love the man you send off to war, to be filled with an immense pride at his loyalty and his love for his country, the lengths to which he will go to defend what he believes is right. And at the same time, I envy Mateo the ability to take up arms, to leave his family behind to follow his principles. We’re forging a new identity for our country, one where we are all united under the banner of Cuba. I want to fight for that, too.

There are those who say a war camp is no place for a woman, but there are women in those camps. Women spilling