The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,20

two realities. In Havana, the party continues on. The city’s inhabitants have lavish gatherings, attend concerts, and the theater, the women wearing elegant, brightly colored gowns. If not for the Spanish soldiers swaggering around in their uniforms, if not for the American tourists riding bicycles around as they leave the city environs to see where the latest battle has been fought in the countryside, if not for the execution notices in the newspaper, the sound of the firing squads, or the presence of those of us who have been sent to Weyler’s reconcentration camps, you wouldn’t realize there was a war going on or that the countryside has been destroyed.

In the western provinces, places where there are more Spaniards from the Peninsula than native-born Cubans, revolutionaries are outnumbered by our countrymen who fight under the Spanish flag. Revolution comes from the east and will, hopefully, spread throughout the country. Still—it is an uphill battle. Tens of thousands of Cubans fight for Spain, and Havana is decidedly controlled by Spanish interests, making the threat to revolutionaries that much more dangerous.

This war has shaped our identity, deciding what it means to be Cuban in this new nation we are building. There are those who cling to the past, but there are many of us who look to the future, to a Cuba where those who were enslaved and indentured for centuries and worked the very fields that formed the cornerstone of wealth for families like mine will be truly free and treated as equals.

There are those of us who dream of a better Cuba, one liberated from this colonial system Spain has thrust upon us where from the moment they first reached Cuba’s shores, Spain has subjugated, murdered, and enslaved. There are those of us who demand our ability to govern ourselves rather than be exploited to serve another’s interests. There are those of us who dream that one day women will have the same rights as men, that we will become the country so many have sacrificed their lives for, that we will all be equal and represented under one Cuban flag.

And there are others who would do anything to retain the power they wield, who would burn the whole island down rather than see it remade into something new, something powerful, something free. There are those who are afraid that the change we seek will leave them pushed to the fringes of a society they have mercilessly dominated for so long. They can’t envision a new country of independent Cubans.

It terrifies them.

Given my family’s sentiments, I can only imagine the shame they would feel if they saw me now and not just because of the political differences between us.

My hands are rough and calloused, blisters oozing and bleeding from the washing I’ve been doing for some of the women throughout Havana. I’ve little contact with the ladies of the house—former friends and companions of mine and their relatives—but instead am left begging to housekeepers. Truly, given life in the camp, it is a blessing to receive the money I do. Women and children are starving. Disease is rampant—cholera, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and dysentery all around us.

Countless have died, and according to reports, whispers spreading around the country, the situation is equally dire in all the reconcentration camps. Death carts come several times a day, emaciated corpses thrown into them unceremoniously like rubbish.

In an act of charity—and no doubt a bit of shame—the towns have organized to distribute to those of us living in the camps a meal of bones and beans per day. I stand in line with Isabella and Luz, miles away from the house where I grew up taking my meals at a lavish table where we wanted for nothing, and we accept their leavings with gratitude. I’d rather trade my portion for milk for Isabella, but milk is impossible to find.

The Spanish have created agricultural zones outside of the cities, controlled by Spanish soldiers and worked by those in the camps, which provide us with limited food options. It’s not nearly enough. The ground isn’t fertile, the work of growing food challenging, the harvest not stretching enough to feed so many of us. The revolutionaries raid the food in the cultivation zones, in part to rob the Spanish and to feed themselves since there’s little in the countryside to sustain them. At least in this instance when there is no food to be had, I can console myself with the hope that the food is being