WAR DIARIES

From Montecristi, Dominican Republic,
to Dos Ríos, Cuba,
February 14-May 17, 1895

On the brink of war, pursued by Spanish spies, and with a strong premonition that he was going toward his death, Marti began, for the first time in his life, to keep a diary. Initially intended as a link to two beloved young girls back in Brooklyn, the first part of the diary, which says little about Marti’s plans and the purpose of his journeys, is full of lighthearted character sketches and sensual appreciations that belie the constant peril through which he was moving.

The second half—whose first few pages were initially scribbled in the back of a copy of Thompson’s Pocket Speller—is more explicitly political; Marti’s personal diary had become a record of history in the making. Though most of his time was given over to far more pressing activities, he worked at the diary with his usual obsessive care, going back over his writing, rephrasing sentences, substituting a better word here and there, searching for the precise name of a plant. José Lezama Lima, Cuba’s greatest twentieth-century poet, considered the diary “the greatest poem ever written by a Cuban. ”

PART I

From Montecristi to Cap-Haïtien,
February 14-April 8, 1895

MY GIRLS:¹

Organize these notes, which I wrote for you, by date, along with the ones I sent you earlier. They were written for no reason but to show that day by day, on horseback and on the sea, and in the greatest anguish a man could endure, I was thinking of you.—

February 14

 

Six-thirty in the morning it must have been when we left Montecristi, the General, Collazo,² and I, on horseback for Santiago: Santiago de los Caballeros, the old city dating from 1507. As I write this now, while my companions have a siesta here in the pure home of Nicolás Ramirez, all that stands out in my memory from the journey are a few trees, a few characters, men and women, and a few phrases, phrases that have come down through time, picturesque, concise, suggestive: a kind of natural philosophy. Ordinary language is based in the study of the world, passed down from fathers to sons in subtle maxims and childish first impressions. A single phrase explains this country’s crude, needless arrogance: “When I’m given (gifts, gifts from friends and relatives to the home of newlyweds) it depresses me, because I’m the one receiving.” To give is a manly thing; to receive, no. Out of sheer ferocity, they deny themselves the pleasure of gratitude. But the wisdom of the campesino is in the rest of the phrase: “And if no one gives me anything then I have to kill the young hens I’m just starting to raise for my wife.” The speaker is a handsome youth with long, agile legs, bare feet, machete ever in hand, and a good knife at his belt; his eyes, in his earthen, fevered face, are healthy and distressed. He is Arturo, newly married, whose wife left to give birth among her own people in Santiago. From Arturo comes this question: “Why do they say, when my wife has a child, that my wife parió [dropped], but when Jiménez‘s³ wife has hers, they say she has dado a luz [given to light]?” And phrases like that are collected along the road. To a girl who goes past, her waist swaying freely, not much in the way of breasts, her yellow kerchief loosely knotted, and a campeachy flower in her black hair: “There’s a nice little frying pan for my cracklings!” To a country matron on a big Arab horse, wearing a ring over her glove, earrings, and a parasol, who in evil hour married her daughter off to a musié⁴— an orator of the Castelarian school and a Zorilla-esque poet,⁵ full of useless learning, “inchoate light,” and an “unquenchable thirst for the ideal”—her husband, in leather shoes and a manaca hat, who is holding the stirrup for her, says, “What did I tell you, but you didn’t want to listen: ’To every fish its own water.‘” We spur the horses on so a good run can refresh them, and while we’re drinking water from the Yaque River at Eusebio’s house, the General utters this phrase, which constitutes a whole theory of the healthiness and necessity of human effort: “The horse bathes in its own sweat.” Eusebio is alive out of pure manliness; his old head is protected by a blue-checked handkerchief, not because of the harsh sun, but because a blow from the butt of a revolver left him with a hole in the back of it that half a hen’s egg can fit into, and the edge of his hand fits into the two sword cuts that stretch across his ear and half his forehead: they left him for dead.

“And Don Jacinto, is he here?” Our three horses are resting, their muzzles at the fence. A door is pried open and there’s Don Jacinto, sprawled in a straw chair with one skinny arm resting on a cushion tied to a chairback, and the other in the air, held up by two loops of new rope suspended from the ceiling: the frame of a camp bed is leaning against the window: the dried mud of the floor is fissured with cracks. Resting on their sides in a row from the table to the door are two glazed gin jugs and an empty flagon corked with a corncob: the table, teetering and dusty, is strewn with jars, an inhaler, an atomizer, asthma powders. Don Jacinto has a rapacious profile and wears a green velvet cap that pushes his stiff ears forward; there are sticking-plasters at his temples; the two heavy, curving tips of his mustache meet at the small tuft of hair under his lip, his drowning eyes bulge out of his face, pained and fierce; his socks are made of flesh-colored wool, and his faded wool slippers are frayed. He was a leader among men, a firebrand general: once, when fleeing, he left his wife in the care of a close friend and she gave herself to the friend. He came back, found out, and at the door of his own house closed the unfaithful friend’s eyes forever with a shot from his carbine. “And to you, adiós! I won’t kill you because you’re a woman.” He wandered across Haiti into new territory, a local midwife’s fresh young daughter became attached to him, and now his own lovely daughter, eight years old, comes in shyly to kiss us, wearing slippers with no socks. From the store next door, a bottle of rum and some glasses are brought in. Don Jacinto is embroiled in disputes: he owns some land, and a friend—the friend who took him in when he was on the run after the carbine shot—wants to graze his animals on that land. “And the world must know that if I’m killed, it was José Ramón Pérez who killed me. And you can’t tell me he doesn’t hire killers, because he came to me once to ask if I’d find him a good peon who’d put a bullet into Señor So-and-So for one Spanish doubloon; and another time he had to kill someone else, and he told me he’d paid out another doubloon.” “And the man who comes to visit you, Don Jacinto, does he still have to eat a scorpion?” That is: does he find himself facing a valiant man: does he meet with some return fire? Don Jacinto’s eyes bulge out further, and the sickly pink of his cheeks rises. “Yes,” he says, gentle and smiling. And his head sinks onto his chest.

Across the comfortable, dry savanna covered with huisache and prickly pear we come, with the sun already setting, to the heights of Villalobos and the house of Nené, big mama of the town, with twenty or more offspring who all come running at the news and kiss her hand. “Y‘all please forgive me,” she says, sitting down at the table where we’re eating white rice and fried eggs with rum and coffee, “but I bin takin’ a machete to the cornfield the whole day.” Her tunic is black and she’s wearing a kerchief on her head. The whole hamlet of Peña respects her. At the first light of dawn we leave the hilltop and make our way through fields of plantains and corn, tobacco and yerba, and then down a footpath to Laguna Salada and the General’s hacienda. In one angle of the courtyard is a dense planting of banana trees, in another, a plot of sweet potatoes; behind the house, with four rooms facing it, and palm trees and spikes of cacti, is the garden of orange trees and amaranthus, with the high, naked cross of a tomb surrounded by lilies. Mercedes, a Dominican mulatta, fine and pure in her old age, cooks for us with wood that her Haitian husband, Albonó, breaks across his knees, a lunch of white rice, chicken with arrowroot, sweet potato, and squash; I prefer cassava to bread, and the coffee is sweetened with honey. In the thick of the day we converse about war and men, and later in the afternoon we visit the home of Jesús Domínguez, father of many daughters, one of whom has green eyes, finely curving brows, and a commanding head, her dress of crimson muslin all unkempt, her shoes dusty and misshapen, holding a silk umbrella, with a flower in her hair; and another daughter comes in smoking, plump and piquant, with a sock on one foot and a slipper on the other, her seventeen-year-old bosom bursting out of her red bodice, and a rose in the curls at her forehead. Don Jesus comes in from the field where he was burning off tobacco worms, “a tough job,” and lying at the door of his good house he talks about his crops and his sons, who’ve come in with him from working, because he wants “my sons to be like me” and he’s been rich and then rich no more, and when his fortune runs out he still holds his head high and no one knows anything about his ruin, and he goes back to the earth to ask for the gold he lost, and the earth gives it to him: because the miner has to crush stones to extract gold from them, but the earth gives Don Jesús “gold ready-made, and pesos ready-made.” And there is a remedy for everything in the world, even for a balking mule, because the mule balks only when its driver sets out without the remedy, which is a lemon or two, squeezed and rubbed vigorously into the mule’s hooves, “and it goes on walking.” On the table are chicken and beans, and rice and viandas, which is meat and vegetables stewed with garlic, and cheese from the North, and chocolate. The following morning, before we ride off to Santiago, Don Jesus shows us a corroded pick that he says dates from Columbus’s time and was dug up in La Esperanza [Hope] “from the Indian excavations,” in the days of the Bulla [Racket] mine, which was already known as “Bulla” in Columbus’s time because at dawn the sound of all the Indians getting up for work could be heard from afar. Then Don Jesus brings out a fine, basket-hilted sword, an old Castilian sword, with which the General, standing in profile, shields his entire body from bullets, except the elbow, which is the only thing the stance the General’s fencing master taught him leaves exposed. The youngest girl offers to have six flowering shrubs planted for me, for my return. She does not plant flowers, and her brothers, magnificent lads with brawny chests and eyes like honey, do not know how to read.

La Esperanza, made famous by Columbus’s route, is a hamlet of palms and yaguas on a wholesome stretch of level ground encircled by mountains. La Providencia [Providence] was the name of the first general store, back in Guayubin, the one that belonged to a Puerto Rican husband, who had some yellowing antique medical books and a fresh young Indian girl with a marble profile, an uneasy smile, and flaming eyes, who approached our stirrups to hand cigars up to us. The other store, Don Jacinto‘s, is called La Fe [Faith]. Another one nearby bore the name—written in inky letters on a strip of yagua palm—La Fantasia de París [Parisian Fantasy]. And in La Esperanza we dismounted in front of La Delicia [Delight]. From within, General Candelario Lozano, his hair too long and his pants too short, comes to open the gate—“la pueita” is how he says la puerta—for our mounts. He isn’t wearing socks and his shoes are made of leather. He hangs up his hammock, talks about the local padre, now in town “to pocket the money for the confirmations”; he shows us his office, glued together out of cardboard, from the days when he was a brigadier general under Báez; he listens, his legs dangling from his tilted perch, to Ana Vitalina, his literate girl, who with great aplomb and without pause reads the letter in which the Minister exhorts General Candelario Lozana to continue “keeping the peace” and offers to bring him the saddle he is requesting—but “later.” He sells beer, and has three half-barrels of it on hand, “poique no se vende má que cuando viene ei padre” [’cause it only sells when the padre comes]. He goes off to buy rum for us. There, some way away, where the town drops off, are the ruins of the fort of La Esperanza, from Columbus’s time, and of the first chapel.

From La Esperanza, walking and galloping with few stops to rest, we reach Santiago in five hours. The road is dark now and goes through tall trees. It follows the course of the Yaque, on the left, through a luxuriant palm grove. Powerful ceibas form arches above it. One of them is pocked with bullet marks, from roots to foliage. The open plain can be seen in quick glimpses, like a spark shooting up or the temptation of serene beauty and, in the distance, the blue of the mountains. When we reach the city, we look back from the top of a slope and see the dense valley and the road slipping away into the depths to dive straight for the plains and the low, rolling mountains beyond, and the long line of lush green that marks the course of the Yaque.

 

February 15

 

This is Santiago de los Caballeros, and the house made of palm and yagua that belongs to Nicolás Ramirez, who transformed himself from a rebel guajiro⁶ into a doctor and a good apothecary; across the way is a house almost in the style of Pompeii, but without the color: a single continuous floor, raised well above the ground, with five doors whose wide carved frames give out onto a spacious porch, and the entrance in one corner, through a sumptuous wrought-iron fence that leads up the stairway on one side, across the front, and at the rear through a graceful half-door, into the garden, full of roses and cayucos: the cayuco is a cactus. The portal’s slender white columns support a curving, elegant frieze. Soldiers wearing blue twill and kepis pass by resplendent on their way to mass at the new church, bearing the silk flag of the Yaque Battalion. The foot soldiers are black; the officers, mestizo and black. The architect of the church, Onofre de Lora, is from Santiago; its front door was made by the Cuban hand of Manuel Boitel.

 

 

 

 

 

Manuel Boitel lives on the other side of the river. Paquito Borrero, whose fine, saintly head resembles the San Francisco painted by Alonso Cano, looks for a place to ford the river on his white horse, with Collazo behind him on Gómez’s roan. Gómez and I await the raft, which is coming now, and is named La Progresista. We go back uphill to Manuel Boitel’s neat sugar-mill compound. From there, the other bank can be seen, all cabins and footpaths as it rises from the river, the summit a dark green with the two towers and cupola of the pink-and-white church emerging from it, and in the distance, through rooftops and hills, the crenellated wall and bonneted tower of the “patriotic redoubt” of the fortress of San Luis.

Everything in that little house bears the mark of hardworking hands: here is a toy wagon that will soon come up from the river loaded with beams, over there is a yellow-and-black phaeton made entirely, down to the last nut and bolt, by the skilled Boitel, and farther off is a silky dog, chained up and lying on the ground, guarding the doorway of the immaculate house. On the parlor table, among old books, are the Protestant Bible and a treatise on beekeeping. Sitting in chairs and armchairs all made by Boitel, we look out onto the serene landscape while Collazo sketches it. The mother brings us meringue. The father is at the sawmill. The eldest daughter goes past, driving an ox that is pulling beams. The garden is full of basil, poinciana, cotton, and rose of Sharon. We pick some flowers for Rafaela, Ramírez’s wife, her hands callused from work, her whole noble soul in her luminous face. Nothing less than noble: she is loyal, modest, and loving. The sun sets fire to the sky above the dark forest. The Yaque runs clear and wide.

 

 

 

 

 

They take me, still in my travel clothes, to the Centro de Recreo, the young people’s society. I begged them to give up on the public, ceremonious festivities they had wanted to welcome me with; the house is decorated for a gala occasion, but an intimate and simple one. Fine young people are waiting, sitting around tables. A crowd throngs at the doors. The shelves are full of new books. A band greets me with a local waltz, flowing and almost hushed, for piano and flute with guiro and tambourine. The mamarrachos enter, bringing their own music with them: those are the masked figures that come out at night here at the approach of carnival: the Corpus Christi dragon comes out, too, swallowing up little boys, and accompanied by some enormous giants. One giant was wearing gloves, and Máximo, Ramírez’s two-and-a-half-year-old son, says that “the giant is wearing his necktie on his hands.”

Conversation at the Centro was abundant and kind: about the country’s newest books, about the free reading room I would like the society to open for impoverished youths, about the traveling teachers who instruct the country people, an idea I suggested in an article many years ago,⁷ and that was put into law, with a solid grounding and much applause, by the Dominican government in the days of José Joaquín Pérez, during Billini’s presidency.⁸ We speak of the deficiency, and regional renewal, of Spanish thought: of the force and beauty of the local arts: of a book that would depict the customs and collect the legends of the epic and industrious city of Santiago. We speak of the city’s new houses and the rightness of their construction, full of air and light.

 

 

 

I hear this song:

El soldado que no bebe
y no sabe enarmorar,
¿Qué se puede esperar de el
Si lo mandan avanzar?

 

If a soldier never takes a drink
and can’t make a girl’s heart dance,
what’s he going to do, you think,
when he’s ordered to advance?

February 14⁹

 

—Day broke upon us on the way from Santiago de los Caballeros to La Vega, and its clarity was a property of the soul, deep and mellow. In the uncertain light on both sides of the wide road was all of American nature: the horses moved more spiritedly across that flowering landscape, bordered with distant mountains, where dense canebrakes grow at the foot of the leafy mango: the mango trees were in bloom and there were full-grown orange trees, and a fallen palm tree, with many threading roots still attaching it to the earth, and the coconut with its rugged fronds, sagging under its own weight, and the ceiba, whose strong arms open out high in the sky, and the royal palm. Tobacco pokes out through a fence, and star apple and guanabana trees bend over a stream. The chest swells steadily with authority and faith. Our conversation is measured and affectionate. We stop off at a small inn to have our cafecito and an amargo.¹⁰ A ragged old Haitian with ardent gray eyes, sitting on a tree trunk, a grubby bundle at his feet and his sandals in shreds, is surrounded by listeners. I speak to him in a long burst of French that startles him, and he gazes at me with something between gloom and mockery: who is this pilgrim who has dropped out of nowhere and drawn the crowd’s attention with his incoherent sing-song? People are laughing: so, then, another man speaks the saint’s language, does he, and even faster than the saint? “Look at him, there he was like God on a banana plantation!” “We were the yucca, and he was the tall guayo tree.” The old man shoulders his bundle and starts walking, chewing on his lips: walking to the sacred hill. The lady who keeps the local inn is very pleased with the walls of her house because of the clumsy figures her son has made on them with colored paint. Sitting in a corner, I draw, on the back of a useless letter, two heads, which he gazes at covetously. The man of the house is in jail: he’s a politician.

 

February 15

 

I dreamed that there were two lances: on the rusting lance the sun did not shine while the polished lance was a huge bloom of light, a flaming star. No fire can be drawn from a lethargic soul.—And from the sugar mill, I admired, with a son’s love, the eloquent calm of the illuminated night and a group of palm trees that seemed to be resting on top of one another, and the stars that shone above them. It was like a sudden, immaculate cleanliness, the revelation of the universal nature of man. Later, at noon, I was sitting next to Manuelico in the shade of the sugar mill. His wife and a serving woman were hulling rice at the door of the house, and a rooster was picking at the grains that spilled. “Careful, don’t let that rooster eat rice, it’s very bad for his stomach.” Manuelico is a cock-fighter and has many of them, tied to pickets in the shade or in the sun. He “suns” them so they’ll “know heat,” so they “won’t choke up during the fight,” so they will “be seasoned,” “knowing heat, even if it doesn’t make them run.” “I never talk up the fame of any rooster, good as it may be: on a good day, any rooster is good. And when it isn’t good, then forget it, not even with beef. Beef gives roosters great strength. The only liquid I give them is milk, and they eat corn, fine ground. The best way to take care of a rooster is to get it crowing and put it somewhere where it can scrabble around: there’s not a rooster that will end up lame like that.” Manuelico goes off to move a picket to the next spot, and the rooster turns on him, its neck feathers puffing out, and challenges him to a fight. From the house, they bring us coffee flavored with anise and nutmeg.

 

 

 

February 19

 

Everyone in the district talks about Ceferina Chaves: her house is the gracious one, with a commodious sugar mill and garden and a guesthouse in back where she invites respectable travelers to sit in her fine chairs and serves them sweet wine from her daughter’s hand. She buys what the district produces at a good price, sells it at a profit, and sends her daughters away to fine schools so they can later come back and live as she does in the well-being of the country, in the house that, with its luxuries and hospitality, presides over the whole pale-skinned region: Ceferina has fame and power throughout the area. We stop at a fence and she comes up from her distant field among the men who pick tobacco for her. She sets her elbows on the fence, holding some leaves in her elegant, dry hand, and speaks with ease and intellect as if the open countryside were a salon and she its natural mistress. Her husband doesn’t often show himself, or is busy with tasks of his own: Ceferina, who puts on gloves and jewels when she rides into town, is the one who, as her own mistress, and by sheer energy of will, began planting the fallow land, putting in beds of sweet potatoes, getting the tobacco to grow, fattening up a pig. She’ll marry her daughter to an educated man, but she won’t forsake her productive labor or the pride she takes in it. The rocking chair next to the mortar. Porcelain in the parlor, and out to the fields every morning. “Something must be given to the poor, so let the poor have all the divi-divi¹¹ on my land.” Her conversation has a natural authority; it flows and sparkles. Her gentle daughter, wearing a thimble, brings us cool wine: she has a frank smile and speaks loftily of hopes and injustices: she slips me the portrait of her mother I ask her for, as her mother is saying, with a rock of her chair: “We must see whether we are rearing good men.”

 

February 18

 

And we converse as we go along, about honey of lemon, which is lemon juice, boiled down, and cures lingering ulcers: about the Moorish way, unknown in Cuba, of stanching a wound with fistfuls of earth; about the guacaica, which is a good-tasting bird that lives on worms and yields a broth that stimulates the appetite; about honey, “perfect for coffee, better than sugar.” “If you want food enough for a day, squeeze a honeycomb that has larvae in it, so that all the milk comes out of the honeycomb along with the larvae, mixed in with the honey. It’s a day’s living, and a cure for excesses.” “I once saw Carlos Manuel—Carlos Manuel de Céspedes¹²—do a thing that showed how much of a man he was: it’s easy to pick up a live wasps’ nest because the wasps have a good sense of smell, so as long as you rub your hand on your sweaty armpit first the wasps quiet down from the smell it gives off and let the nest be moved without coming out to sting you. I wanted to pass myself off as a sorcerer in Carlos Manuel’s room and offered to take care of the wasps’ nest, but he cut me off: ‘Let’s see how it’s done, friend.’ But the wasps didn’t seem to find the medicine strong enough, and I saw two of them stab right into his hand, and with the two wasps there, he took the nest to the door without saying a word about the pain, and without anyone but me knowing about the stings on his hand.”

 

 

 

February 18

We go to dinner at Don Jesus’s house, the house where I saw the basket-hilted sword dating back to the time of Columbus, and the old pickax that was found in the mines, the house with the buxom young ladies whom I scolded because they don’t plant flowers even though they have sunny ground, women’s hands, and long hours of leisure. That day, a traveler accused them of being indelicate, of having souls that were not like flowers. And now, what do we see? They knew we were coming back, and Joaquina, brimming over with her eighteen years, comes to the doorway holding her lighted túbano between two fingers, her head covered in flowers: a carnation falls across her forehead, a rose peeps out from behind her ear: above her bangs she has a chignon of jasmine, and at the back of her neck a bunch of geraniums and purple guayacán flowers. Her sister stands beside her with a plume of yellow roses in her hair, which is done up like a flowerpot, and two green eyes beneath the fine arch of her brows. We get off our horses, and can see the table in a corner of the parlor, drowning in flowers, flowers in vases and cups, in bottles and basins; and up above, as if wreathing a saint, in two olive jars, two long, thick, green sansevieria leaves, slashed open here and there, and in every slash a geranium.

 

 

March 2

 

We leave Dajabón, sad Dajabón, the last Dominican town guarding the border in the north. There I have my man Montesinos, the volcanic Canary Islander, still a Guanche¹³ in his skeletal structure and rebelliousness; ever since he was imprisoned, at the same time I was, he will accept neither warmth nor favor from any Spanish hand. There lives “Toño” Calderón, widely renowned for his good looks, who, when I first came through during his tenure as Comandante de Armas, had exchanged no more than a few words with me before he made me get off the rented nag I was riding to Montecristi and gave me his roan, the horse he had never allowed anyone else to ride, “the horse that man loves more than his wife.” Toño, with his mysterious, threatening gray eyes, his anxious, yearning smile, his light step and straight, disheveled hair. There, too, is where Salcedo, a Cuban, practices, as if swimming to nowhere; a doctor without a diploma—a mediquín, as we say in Cuba—bewildered in his moral solitude, beaten down in his futile tenacity, his gentle soul overwhelmed in these hinterlands of the charlatan and the fist. Life, like a child, behaves badly toward those who fear it, and respects and obeys those who stand up to it. Hearing me say that the pants I’ve come in are torn, Salcedo, without complaint or flattery, brings me his best pair, made of fine blue twill, honorably patched: with his own hand he slowly mixes a dose of antipyrine for me: and when he embraces me, he clings to my heart. There, Pancho and Adolfo between them—Adolfo, Montesinos’s loyal son, who accompanies his father in his humble labor—bundle my cloak and trousers into an improvised saddlebag, and add the rum the group will drink, some hard bread, a good, salubrious, bracing Piedmont wine, and two coconuts. Then to horse, in Montesinos’s saddle, on a colt he rented from a “compadre” of “General Corona.” “The General is here now, he’s a friend already,” “judging by the look he gave us”: he has a broad-brimmed panama, a three-piece linen suit, a bone-handled umbrella, and is a fine, swarthy fellow with the mustache and sideburns of a guajiro. To horse, and on to the nearest Haitian town, which is visible from Dajabón: Ouanaminthe.

Across the Massacre River the land blooms. Behind are tumble-down houses, a few scattered gardens, dry ground, and the tight cluster of trees around the Bel Air fort, from where, at the moment of Dominican independence, the famous shot was fired that plugged the mouth of the Haitian cannon.¹⁴ Here, on the Negro side, suddenly there are mango, guanabana, custard apple, palm, and banana trees everywhere, and people coming and going. In a patch of shade at the edge of the ford, Haitians and Dominicans are talking among their flocks of animals; people from Ouanaminthe arrive, coming down the hill on good horses, along with a man from farther away and a horse trader from Cap-Haïtien. Going up the hill, her rounded torso wrapped in a cloth, is a girl of about fifteen: her wrapper covers her breasts beneath her arms, and goes no lower than the thigh: from her delicate, nappy head, two knots of hair stick out at the back of the neck: she walks along singing. “Bonjour, conmère. Bonjour, compère.” A barefoot old woman in a black robe cinched very tight around her waist and a wide-brimmed sun hat goes along behind her burro. A strapping girl with a predatory walk has on a purple gown with a train, her breasts high and compact, a black shawl around her shoulders, and on her head a white lace kerchief. The houses are no longer built of palm leaves and yagua, leprous and dusty; instead, the sugar-mill compound is clean and full of fruit trees, with a good fence, and the houses are plastered with unpainted mud, its natural dark color a pleasure to the eyes, with roofs of dried, blackish straw and doors and windows of planed wood, with solid latches—or else they’re painted yellow, with a wide border of white around windows and doors. Soldiers go by on their afternoon drill, squat or lanky, neat or torn, blue or faded, in sandals or boots, their kepis at their noses, their bayonets at the ready; they march and laugh: a swamp scatters them and they get back into formation uproariously. The top brass looks on from a balcony. The Dominican consul notes his authorization on the passport, “to continue on, after presenting yourself to the local authorities,” and gives me a cup of grenache wine. Corona arrives, prancing, and after a mutual tip of hat and consular cap we leave in the gold of late afternoon.

March 2

 

Ouana Minthe, the animated border town, is full of cheer because it’s a Saturday afternoon. I saw it once before when I first set foot in Santo Domingo: rushed along in the blackness of a storm by the Haitian guide who, as we went, told me about his new cabin and how he would soon be entering into matrimony with his beloved, and that he was going to put white curtains on the two parlor windows: and I offered him the ribbons. Seeing nothing in all the rain and the evening darkness, we rode into Ouanaminthe, our horses streaming with water, me out in the rain, and my Haitian fellow beneath Dellundé‘s¹⁵ parasol. We went to the guardhouse, looking for the Comandante de Armas so he could countersign our passports. And that was all I saw of Ouanaminthe then, the guardhouse, smoky and mud-smeared, lit by torches stuck into cracks in the wall, an old revolver leaning across the door, and grimy, barefoot men who came and went, taking puffs of the sentinel’s only tobacco, and the broken chair they gave me as a special favor, with listeners crowded around it. They spoke the rural Creole, which is not the same as the city’s, but easier and more French, though crude, and with Indian and African nouns. I spoke to them of war, and of our war, and their mistrust slowly diminished, and their affection was fired. Finally, one of them exclaimed this very sad phrase: “Ah! gardez-ça: blanc, soldat aussi. ”¹⁶—I saw the guardhouse, and then the Comandante, at the home of some women friends: a dim lamp on a pine table, all of them seated in rickety chairs, kerchiefs on their heads, and he, skinny and polite. That was how I passed through then.

This time the plaza is full of military exercises, and the lieutenants, on white or dun horses, wearing epaulets on their coats and tricornered hats with a feather in the crown, move to and fro at the head of the lines. Horses that are to be sold go prancing past. Viennese chairs can be seen in the big houses. The church is almost pompous, in the middle of a such a backwater, with its sturdy brickwork and square towers. There are tall houses with narrow, cheerful hanging balconies. It is the first Haitian settlement we come to, and there is life and faith here now. We leave the town, saluting the Dominican consul in Fort Liberté, an exuberant mulatto in a blue suit and panama hat who handles his white horse well, sitting on his varnished saddle. Droves of mules go by, and smugglers. When tariffs are unjust, or border justice is vengeful, smuggling is the people’s right of insurrection. The smuggler is the brave man who takes risks, the cunning man who deceives the powerful, and the rebel in whom others see and admire themselves. Smuggling comes to be loved and defended, as the true justice. A Haitian goes past on his way to Dajabón to sell his coffee; a Dominican comes up the road toward him, on his way to Haiti to sell his chewing tobacco, his famous andullo: “Saludo.” “Saludo.”

 

 

 

 

 

March 2

 

Corona, “General Corona,” rides beside me, talking. “Friendship among men,” according to Corona, “is a very great thing.” And with his “dimpués” for después, and his “inorancia” for ignorancia, he goes along depicting in luxuriant, flowery paragraphs the consolation and strength it is for the heart “crushed down from all the wickedness and double-dealing as there is in this world,” to know that “in a field over yonder is a brother you can give your life for.” “I can tell you that, at my age now, I’ve fought more than eighty battles.” He wants “decency in mankind,” and does not want a man who thinks a certain way to have to give it up for money or surrender out of fear “to anyone who wants to keep him from thinking.” “I don’t want to be, not even Comandante de Aimas, or any of what they want me to be; the governor offers it to me because he sees me upright, in order to bring me dishonor, or give me to fear his revenge, so I did not accept.” “But I go on living with my honor and my canefields.” And he tells me about the country’s political parties: and of how he set out with two friends to make the party that killed his father pay for his death: and how with only a few men, because the others failed him, he defended the fortress of Santiago, “the redoubt of San Luis,” when Tilo Patiño, “who’s now working for the government,” took up arms with him against Lilí.¹⁷ “I don’t revolt for this man or the other one, but out of great rage, and because it bothers me to see low-down men obeying or serving tyranny.” “When I see injustice, my two hands get to dancing and I go for my rifle, and I want no more knives or forks. Because I don’t know much about high politics, but to me, in my own way of feeling it, I think I know that politics is a kind of duty of dignity.” “Because for me, ó todo, ó náda, everything or nothing.” “Thirteen children I have, friend, but not from the same woman, because when I look around and see I’m going to have to be in a place for longer than a month or two, right away I go in search of my greater comfort”—and then, when it’s time to say good-bye, “she sees there’s no other way, and I leave her with her cabin and some coins: because for nothing in the world will I be unfaithful to my legitimate wife.” He always goes back to her, she kept his hacienda for him when he was in exile, paid his debts, helps him in all his labors, and “she has my dignity in her hands, and if I have to go out whoring to get work, I know I leave my little ones well taken care of, and that that woman doesn’t hold it against me if I act like a man.”—Suddenly, with night already upon us, a runaway mule from Corona’s drove goes by, dragging its harness, which breaks between two tree trunks. He takes off with his two men to look for the mule in the forest, and will spend the whole night at it. I’ll find myself a Haitian guide in that cabin up there where a light is showing. I must reach Fort Liberté tonight. Corona comes back, pained for me.—“You won’t find the man you’re looking for.” He speaks to them, and they don’t come. But I found him.

 

March 2

 

 

My poor Haitian Negro goes ahead of me. He’s a man in his fifties, long-legged, with a mustache and goatee, a battered hat, the shreds of his shirtsleeves hanging around his elbows, and a flintlock musket with a long bayonet at his back. He goes down the path in long strides, and I, in Creole and French, pay him his two gourdes, which are the Haitian pesos, and offer not to make him pass through the town gate, which is what he fears, because the night watch are under orders to take anyone who comes into town after nightfall prisoner. “Mosié blanc pringarde: li metté mosié prison. ”¹⁸ He warns me of each and every branch. At every bump or puddle he turns his head back. He holds a branch aside for me so I won’t run into it. The night is overcast with patches of moonlight, and my colt is jumpy and skittish. As we leave a clearing, I show the man my Colt revolver, gleaming in the moonlight, and right away, as if he were sucking in his voice, he says: “Bon, papá!”

 

March 2

 

It’s already after ten when I enter Fort Liberté, alone. From far off I could hear the evening’s military parade, the barking of dogs, the hubbub. From the locked house of a woman named Feliciana, who speaks to me through the door and has no room to let, I go looking for the home of Nephtalí, who may have one. My horse recoils at the strip of light shining through the half-closed door and I rein him in.—“Is Nephtalí here?”—I hear a noise, and a young woman comes to the door. We speak, and she goes back inside.... “... Bien sellé, bien bridé: pas commun . . . 3”¹⁹ That’s what they have to say about me in there.

Yes, I can go in, and the girl, with her broken Spanish, comes to open the gate for me. In the darkness I unsaddle my horse and tie him to a Palma Christi. The henhouse is full of hammocks where people who came for Saturday’s cockfights are sleeping. And inside “for charity’s sake,” would there be somewhere for a respectful passerby to sleep and something for him to eat? A slender, pallid young fellow comes to talk to me, wearing a black shirt and pants, with a chin beard, a thin mustache, and boils, speaking a pretentious, blue-blooded French. I rifle through some old books on the dusty table: textbooks that have lost their bindings, catalogs, a Bible, some Masonic reviews. From the next room comes laughter—and then the young woman, the daughter of the house, to arrange the Viennese chairs in facing rows, and bring out a mattress, which I throw on the floor, pushing the chairs aside. Who in there has given me his mattress? A black head peers out through the door, a big lad in a nightshirt who laughs. Dinner is a kind of peanut candy, and cassava, and the Piedmont wine that Montesinos packed for me, which I share with the daughter, who is confident and smiling.

The blue blood withdrew early. “Le chemin est voiturable”: the road to Fort Liberté: “Oh, monsieur: l‘aristocratie est toujours bien reçuel”:²⁰ adding that nothing can be expected of Haiti, and that there is great superstition here, and that he hasn’t been to Europe “yet,” and that if “the ladies next door would like, I’ll go and help them.” I caress the good girl’s delicate hand, and sleep stretched out beneath that kind roof.—At six, Nephtali is standing at the head of my bed: may the guest be welcome: the guest has caused no trouble: the guest must forgive him for not having been there last night at his arrival. His whole being smiles, with his clean twill clothes and muttonchop whiskers; in the course of the conversation some well-known names come up: Montesinos, Montecristi, Jimenez. He doesn’t ask who sent me. A fragrant breakfast is for me; the slight young fellow, enormously cravat-ted, sits down to enjoy it with me, and Nephtali and his daughter serve me. Breakfast is good cheese and soft bread from the house’s own ovens, and special small empanadas in my honor, made from the lightest flour, with a very large egg: the coffee is golden, with the best milk. “Madame Nephtalí” shows herself, tall and smartly dressed, carrying her missal and wearing a hat and a long cloak, and Nephtalí ceremoniously introduces her to me. In the yard, the rosebushes are sunning themselves, and trays of dough are carried in and out of the bakery, and the henhouse is so clean and well swept it’s like a jewel, and Nephtalí tells the blue blood that there is and is not superstition in Haiti, and anyone who wants to see it sees it, and anyone who doesn’t never does, and that he himself, a Haitian, has seen little superstition in Haiti. And to what does Monsieur Lespinasse, the blue blood, friend of a musician he has come to see, devote himself? Ah! He writes a few articles for L’Investigateur: “on est journaliste”; “l‘aristocratie n’a pas d‘avenir dans ce pays-ci. ”²¹ For the road, Nephtalí packs me some good cheese and the small empanadas and sponge cake. And when that good man takes me over to a corner and I ask apprehensively what I owe him, he grips both my arms and gives me a look of reproach: “Comment, frère? On ne parle pas d’argent, avec un frère. ”²² And he held my stirrup for me, and followed me on foot with his friends, to set me on the highway.

 

March 3 .

 

Petit Trou was like a great basket of light that Sunday, as loose knots of people, starched and radiant, watched the troops drilling.

The sunlight is a celebration; it seems clearer and calmer somehow, washing everything with a gold that is almost orange, all the bright, freshly pressed clothes, the people sitting in doorways, having a cold drink, or an absinthe with anise, or sprawling under a guanabana tree, within earshot of the gusts of laughter that greet a doddering old man’s attempts to woo an old woman, and young men dressed in white cotton twill who throw their arms around the waists of girls in purple gowns. A mother comes up to my horse to show me her jolly little mulatto baby, in a cotton chemise adorned with ribbons, a pink cap, and yellow-and-white knitted shoes.

His eyes devour me and he starts to giggle while I cuddle and kiss him. I turn back toward the blue general store so the colt can have a few minutes’ rest and I can spread out my empanada and cheese on a table, along with the beer I don’t drink. His cane raised high, an octogenarian in a fine striped suit and button-up boots appeared. The wife, lovely and sad, gazes at me, half-hidden behind a door frame, a story and a plea in her eyes as she plays distractedly with her daughter. The owner, his back turned, spies on me with his round eyes from his armchair, wearing half boots and a black jacket, with a good silver watch, his conversation edgy and tedious. Carrying books from the church, the ends of her kerchief tied under her neck, a woman friend enters, speaking good French. At a glance I take in the parlor, daubed green, with soft yellow stenciling and a pink stripe around the border. At the windows, the air is moving the curtains. Good-bye. The owner smiles, standing solicitously beside my stirrup.

 

 

 

March 3

 

I forded a stream, with a grove of sandbox trees on the other side, and through their high, airy fronds, ripping off leaves and breaking branches, a ripe fruit comes falling down and bursts open. Not far from there, I stop to mend the broken cords of my cloak strings, at the edge of the river, near a campesino, all buttoned up in his Sunday best, who is going along on his agile burro, his pipe at his bearded lips and the tip of his machete sticking out through a rip in his white cotton jacket. He jumps down, at my service. “Ah, compère! ne vous dérangez pas. Pas ça, pas ça, l‘ami. En chemin, garçon aide garçon. Tous sommes haïtiens ici. ” And he bites, and separates, and fastens the cords: and we go on, conversing about his house and his wife and the three children with whom “Dieu m’a favorisé,” and of the well-being a man feels when he meets up with a friendly soul and the stranger suddenly seems like a part of himself, and stays in his soul, strong and deep, like a root. “Ah oui!” with the Haitian oui, low and drawn out: “Quand vous parlez de chez un ami, vous parlez de chez Dieu.”²³

 

March 3

 

Going through the marshlands, which were extensive, I thought I’d lost my way. The sun is scorching and the colt strains to make its way through the thick mud. The jungle casts long shadows on both sides. I see a house in a clearing, and knock. Slowly a grandmother peers out, then the girl with a child in her arms, and then a big lad, in pants that are barely there, a rag for a hat, and a blue shirt hanging loose. This is the right direction. The saucy mother is sixteen years old. In order to leave them some small thing in payment for their goodness, I ask for a little water, which the big lad brings me. And when I go to give him a few coins, “Non: argent non: petit livre, oui. ”A book is sticking out of my jacket pocket, Paul Bert’s second scientific handbook.—Of mud and straw, atop a mountain of corn, is the “habitation de Mamenette, ” chemin du Cap.²⁴ Swampland and solitary jungle all around. On tiptoe, over the ramshackle fence, a pair of luminous eyes: Auguste Etienne.

 

 

March 2

 

At a crossroads, next to where the road opens out with the river down below, a wooden Christ stands beneath a zinc canopy, a French Christ, rosy and delicate on his green cross, with a fence made of wire. Across the way, within the jagged ruins of a spacious brick house, is a mud hut; a sentinel in a blue’ cap is standing at the door and presents arms to me. And the officer salutes. I go through an arbor into an inn to sprinkle my water with some anise-flavored rum, but no one has change for a peso. Shall I leave the whole peso, then, since I’ve partaken of something here? “Pas ça, pas ça, mosié. ” They don’t want my peso. I shake hands all around. “Bon blanc! Bon blanc!” At eight, Nephtali calls me his brother, in Fort Liberté: at five, circling the rim of the conch-shaped bay, I come across the salty sand into Cap-Haïtien. I set my feet back on the ground at the generous doorway of Ulpiano Dellundé.²⁵

 

March 2

 

The alert spirit sleeps badly. When something remains to be done, sleep is a fault, a desertion. I leaf through some old books: Origines des Ðécouvertes attribuées aux Modernes, by Dutens, London, 1776, when the French were irritated with Franklin’s fame, and Dutens says that “a trustworthy person has assured him that a Latin medal was recently found with the inscription Jupiter Elicius, or Electric, representing Jupiter on high, thunderbolt in hand, with a man below flying a kite, by which means a cloud can be electrified and fire extracted from it”—to which I could add what I was told in Belize by the wife of Le Plongeon,²⁶ the man who wanted to remove the Mayan ruins from Yucatán, where a painted rock, part of a frieze, shows a seated man with a thunderbolt coming out of his Indian mouth and aimed into the mouth of another man in front of him. Another of the books is a Goethe in French. In Goethe, and much earlier, in the Greek Anthology and the poetry of Oceania—the pantuns,²⁷ for example—are all the ritornellos, aphorisms, and eccentricities that novelty-seekers and people whose culture is pinned on take to be so contemporary: a prophecy and condemnation of all of today’s hairsplitting and hollow elegance can be found in Goethe’s lines on “A Chinaman in Rome.”

 

March 3

 

I find, in a pile of books forgotten under a console table, one that I was not acquainted with: Les Mères Chrétiennes des Contemporains Illustres [The Christian Mothers of Illustrious Contemporaries]. I leaf through and discover its spirit: it is a book written by the author of L‘Academie Française au XIXme Siècle [The French Academy in the Nineteenth Century], in order to make artful use of biography to promote practical devoutness, which it views as the supreme and creative virtue, in the home: confession, the “good priest,” the “holy abbot,” and prayer. And the book is lavish, with large pages, gilt edges, and a red-and-gold cover.

The index, even more than the book, belongs to the hollow society that is coming to an end: “The highest social spheres,” “The world of letters.” “The clergy.” “The liberal professions.”—Profession: the open, easy channel, the great temptation, the satisfaction of needs without the original effort that releases and develops a man, and makes him grow, through respect for those who suffer and produce as he does, in the only lasting equality, for the professions are a form of arrogance and egotism that ensure nations of peace, which is only truly attainable when the sum of inequalities reaches the minimum limit at which human nature itself keeps them.

The man who enjoys a well-being that is not of his own creation is useless and generally pernicious, a supporter of injustice or a timid friend to reason who, in the undeserved enjoyment of a degree of comfort and pleasure that bears no relation to his individual effort and service, has lost the habit of creating and all respect for those who create. The professions, as they are currently understood, are odious and harmful, a residue of the weft of complicities by which, turned by self-interest away from its initial and just unifying power, authoritarian society was and is still maintained—an authoritarian society being, of course, one based on the concept, feigned or sincere, of human inequality, in which persons to whom all rights are denied are forced to carry out social duties to serve the power and pleasure of those who deny them those rights: merely the remains of the barbaric state. All this with regard to the index of Les Mères Chrétiennes: “The highest spheres of society.” “The world of letters.” “The clergy.” “The liberal professions.”

I open the book where it says “Madame Moore.” Madame Moore, mother of Thomas Moore,²⁸ whose poem “Betsy” I admire: loyal and lighthearted, always faithful, and a true mother to her vain and giddy husband. The book presents Moore’s mother as very saintly, and her saintliness is borne out by her son’s life. But it does not give another fact: that the Christian son began his career with a highly spiced and felicitous translation of the odes of Anacreon.—It has much to say about Marguerite Bosco, the mother of a cardinal who is very reminiscent of the spoiled priest in La Regenta by Alas²⁹-that ruddy priest whose astute mother made his bed and set his table for him. I know a man who is Prince Bosco’s son: his father was the lover of the Queen of Naples, the last queen; the son had once been a captain in the Texas Rangers, and in Brooklyn he was a horsebreaker. Another mother is “Madame Rio,” of A. del Rio, “the illustrious author of L‘Art Chretien. ” Another, “Madame Pie,” is the mother of the Bishop of Poitiers. “Madame Osmond” is another, mother of the count who wrote Reliques et Impressions. Another is the mother of Ozanam, the eloquent, active Catholic. And yet another one is the mother of Gerando, he whose metaphysics were carefully perused by Michelet,³⁰ when, wearing a dress-coat and shoes with buckles, he gave history lessons to princesses.

 

 

 

March 3

 

I go to lose some hair at Martínez’s miserable barbershop on calle de la Playa: he is glowing clean, diminutive, and irreverent, in the barbershop which has wallpaper in some places and grime or old chromolithographs in others, and, high up on the ceiling, hanging from strips of cloth, six paper roses.—“And you, Martínez, would you be a married man?” “Man like me, traveling man, can’t marry.”—“Where’d you learn your Spanish?”—“In San Tómas: I was a santomeño, from San Tómas.” “But you aren’t anymore?”—“No, now I’m Haitian. I’m descended from a Dane, but that’s worthless; I’m descended from an Englishman, but that’s worthless; I’m descended from a Spaniard, even worse: Spain is the world’s wickedest nation. For a man of color, nothing is worth anything.”—“So you don’t want to be a Spaniard?”—“I don’t want to be Cuban, Puerto Rican, or Spaniard. A smart, white Spaniard, yes, because I’d get me the governorship of Puerto Rico with $500 a month: but a son of Puerto Rico, no. The worst in the world, Spaniard.”—To the beggarwoman who comes to the door: “I have yet to earn the first copper penny.”

 

 

 

March 4³¹

 

And I opened my eyes on the boat, to the song of the sea. The sea was singing. We left Cap-Haïtien at ten P.M., with looming storm clouds and a strong wind, and now in the wee hours of the morning the sea is singing. The skipper straightens up and listens, erect, with one hand on the planking and the other on his heart; the helmsman slackens his hold on the tiller: “Beautiful, that.” “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in this world.” “Twice in my life, no more, have I heard such beauty.” And then he laughs: the voudous, the Haitian sorcerers, will know what it is: today is the day of the voudou dance at the bottom of the sea, and now the men on land will know that there, down below, the sorcerers are working their enchantments.³² The music, long, broad, and sweet, is like the sound of a tumultuous orchestra of platinum bells. Steady and strong, its vibrant echo pulses. The body feels as if it were clothed in music. The sea sang for an hour, more than an hour:—The boat gives an impatient lunge and goes down toward Monte-Cristi.

 

March 6

 

Ah, the eternal barber, with his straw hat pushed to the back of his neck, the perfumed curls on his forehead, and his slippers with their stars and roses! The barbershop has only two mirrors, with wooden frames, and a shelf of empty flasks, a grimy comb, and some old pomades. On the wall, in a display case, are panama hats with fine bands, books without bindings, and papers in an untidy heap. In the middle of the shop’s main room, with its great damp stains, is the chair where the barber’s boy powders anyone who presents himself to be shaved.—“Look, you, boy with the tickets: come over here.”—“Buy a ticket from him: give him a peso.”

March 6

 

I hear a sound out in the street flooded with Sunday sunlight, a sound of waves, and I think I know what it is. It is. It is the starched white petticoat of a black woman who passes by in triumph, her eyes on fire, in her clean gown of dark purple calico with her shawl around her shoulders.—The Haitian woman has the legs of a deer. The natural, supple figure of the Dominican woman endows even the most wretched ugliness with rhythm and power. The form of woman is conjugal and melodious.

 

March 29

 

Over our meal we spoke of animals: of black ravens that are capable of talking and drink milk; of how the rat saves itself from fleas, and licks its own tail after sticking it into butter; of the toad, which eats wasps; of the bat, which eats the firefly, but not its fire. A rascally raven saw that a slave woman milked the cows every morning and put the milk in bottles, and he, with his hard beak, sipped the milk at the top, and when he had emptied the neck of the bottle, dropped pebbles into it so the milk would rise. The rat goes into the water with a piece of cotton between his teeth where the fleas rush to keep from drowning; and when the rat sees that the cotton is black with fleas he lets go of it. The toad plunges its front leg into a honeycomb, and then, sitting very still, puts the sweet leg in the air so the greedy wasp will come: and the toad swallows it. The bat snaps up the firefly in the air, letting its luminous head fall to the ground.

 

March 29

 

 

We were coming from the beach, from clusters of campeachy trees and dense mangroves: we were coming through prickly pears and huisache. And a barefoot man came along singing from far away, in a big, rasping voice, first a ballad that wasn’t quite audible, and then this one:

Te quisiera retratar
En una concha de nacle,
Para cuando no te vea
Alzar la concha, y mirarte.
I’d like to make your picture
In a seashell’s mother-of-pearl
And whenever I don’t see you,
I’d pick it up and look at you.

March 30

 

César Salas, who let his rich companions go off to Cuba, refusing to return there himself except “as a good Cuban must return,” is a creating man, a sower of seeds, and diligent, with a hand that deftly wields the machete and the paintbrush, and an equal capacity for sacrifice, work, and art. He comes now from the caves of San Lorenzo, over in Samana, and he speaks of the caves.³³ The largest is a good example of all the caves there, with its walls and ceiling of distilled stone dangling toward the earth like fine lace, or squeezing out, drop by drop, “a water that is hardening into stone.” It is very cool, and the floor is covered with fine white guano that is not displeasing to the mouth, and dissolves. In places, the passageway, which lacks elbow room, begets a vault, and in one of those—both in the same one—are two faces, part of designs painted on the wall a little above a man’s height, which are like imperfect circles whose center is a great human face at the vertex of a triangle with decorated edges and two lesser faces at the sides, surrounded by hieroglyphic drawings of homunculi with hoes in their hands, or without them, and horses or mules, and hens.—This may be the conquest, and the barbaric mines, offered up to the country’s religion on the altars of its caves of refuge.—There, César Salas has found innumerable seashells that the Indians must have lived off of, and some large flint axes with necks or shafts. There are mountains of seashells at the cave’s entrances. The cave can be entered through four mouths. The sea comes in through one of them, foaming and sonorous. Another leads up through lianas to a green clearing.

 

April 1

 

At an anxious pace, stabbed by thorns, we crossed marshes and sand in the midnight darkness. Hitting out with our elbows, we break through the tangles of mesquite. The sand is bald in stretches, but covered with patches of the prickly trees. The bare sand sends a light like a shroud’s into the starless sky, and all green is blackness. The waves of the sea can be heard exhaling on the beach, and there is a smell of salt. Suddenly we emerge from the last of the mesquite thickets onto the seashore, which is frothy and overcast—as if restless and trapped—with damp flurries of wind. Standing there, pants rolled to the knee, shirt flapping around his thighs and open at the chest, arms held out in a high cross, his aquiline head, with its mustache and goatee, topped with a yaray hat, is an impassive black Haitian, with the sea at the soles of his feet and the sky behind him. Man ascends to his full beauty in the silence of nature.

 

 

April 3³⁴

Ingratitude is a bottomless pit—and generous attempts to make amends for it are like the dribble of water that only revives a fire. There is no greater insult to a man than the virtue he himself does not possess. The pretentious ignoramus is like the coward who shouts out in the night to hide his fear. Indulgence is the most certain mark of superiority. Authority exercised without cause or object only betrays a lack of true authority.

 

April 3

 

Black-winged flamingos with rosy breasts fly overhead like great crosses high in the sky. They go in lines, at equal spaces from each other; the lines move apart toward the rear. A short row of them serves as the rudder. The squadron advances, rippling.

 

April 3

In the middle of the sea, I remember these lines:

Un rosal cria una rosa
Y una maceta un clavel,
Y un padre cria una hija
Sin saber para quien es.

 

A rosebush raises up a rose,
A flowerpot a carnation,
And a father raises up a daughter,
Not knowing who she’s for.

April 4

Stretched out on the deck of the schooner Brothers, I see, as the light opens out, a corner of Inagua, its bristling trees emerging tall and green from amid its ruins and salt marshes. Flamenco pink and blackish crimson are the colors of the clouds rising from the few houses into the pearly sky. I jump down to the beach, off to catch scoundrels, master them, and get their triumphal hats into their hands. I manage to do it. In the comings and goings, I have a look at the town: deserted, decapitated mansions, walls crumbling from abandonment and fire, white houses with green windows, small, thorny trees, and poisonous flowers. There are no buyers for the island’s abundant salt; the train never moves; anyone in possession of a boat sells it; the sisal industry is in dire straits; the reading room has fifteen members, at a cost of one real per month; the most glittering of the merchants enjoys a tender friendship with one of the leading smugglers; the captain of the port—a paunchy young fellow—has a noble soul, so he is polite, and wears white linen; the salty sunlight is blinding. Against a broken wall sleeps a pile of lignum vitae, the “wood of life,” which “burns like a torch” with its hard heart; two shaggy burros are pulling a wagon clumsily heaped with cracked, warping rosewood; next to a pillar is a sack of local potatoes; from a wretched store, an enfeebled old white woman comes out, in spectacles, a picture hat and apron, to offer us bread, fishhooks, eggs, chicken, thread; the Negress, her belly to her nose and coral earrings hanging down to her shoulders, leaning against the counter of her empty store, says that her “guesthouse is not here” where three scorched men are taking a moment’s repose to let their bloody sweat dry, sitting on the boxes that serve as chairs. In order to sit down, they buy from the shopkeeper, with her marble teeth and eyes, all the bread and sweets in the house—three shillings’ worth—and she covers the floor with her wide smiles. Hopkins comes by, a man in his forties with an English torso and copper-colored skin, selling “his great heart,” his valiant chest, “which is worth two chests,” his groveling half-boots, which he takes off his feet, a torn overcoat. He will go “anywhere, if I’m paid,” because he is “a family man with two wives”; he is “a loyal soul”; he glues himself to the other sailors and slowly poisons their will so they won’t accept the job that was not given to him; he resells a chicken that a policeman in a cork helmet, muttonchop whiskers, and blue cashmere with red buttonholes carries to him by its legs. The man from Guadeloupe comes by, with his chocolate-colored torso and the curly gray hair of his seventy-four years; he goes bare-chested and barefoot and his hat is woven of leaves; he neither drank nor smoked nor loved anywhere but at home and he doesn’t need glasses to read at night: he is a bricklayer and a contractor and a fisherman.—The boss of the smugglers comes by holding his stubby walking stick with its New York handle, a thick ring on his finger, an expensive panama hat on his well-respected head.—The blandishing skipper comes by, with his patriarchal speech and fox’s deeds—a man who at the death of his son “didn’t weep the pain, but sweated it”—and, stammering, gives back the money he robbed. But he is “a gentleman and knows gentlemen,” and, hat in hand, he gives me a jug of gin.

 

April 5

 

Beyond the beach’s cerulean sea, the cargo ship unloads its wood from Mobile, Alabama, onto the raft that floats beside it, from stem to stern, on the turquoise swell. The wood is lowered, and the workmen haul it and sing to it. The steamship pushes diagonally to move the raft toward the shore, and the towboats take it away, with the row of blacks above, hauling and singing.

 

April 5

 

David, from Turks and Caicos, attached himself to us the moment we pushed off from Montecristi. In half-words he said that he understood us, and without hope of any greater payment, or agreement upon it, or coddling from us, he grew larger and larger for us, after the others fled, and he alone was the schooner, with his pants in shreds, his worn-out feet, the greatcoat that hung around his flesh, his yaray with its brim to the sky. He would cook locrio of rice and salt pork, or sancocho of chicken and a few stewed vegetables, or white fish, good “mutton-fish,” with a sauce of butter and bitter orange juice: he brought and carried, by pure gudilla, the only boat—with an oar for a rudder; on the wretched deck, he spread out, as a pillow for us, his greatcoat, his overcoat, the garment that was his own pillow and mattress; lean and agile, he was already polishing up the pots at dawn. He never asked for anything and he gave himself entirely. His weathered head was supported by a slender, graceful neck; his eyes, large and sincere, were full of laughter, and his cheekbones opened out, jocular and strong ... two curls of mustache grew at the corners of his thin, toothless mouth, and on his honest, flat nose the light played. When he said good-bye to us, his face and chest fell and, weeping, he threw himself headlong against the sail tied to the boom.—David, from Turks and Caicos.

 

 

April 6

It has good mahogany posts, the captain’s bunk onboard the steamship,³⁵ the German cargo ship that is taking us to Cap-Haïtien. The bunk lies over drawers full of maps. On the shelf above the desk, amid gazetteers and navigators, is all of Goethe and a novel by Gaudy. Presiding over the bunk is a portrait of the captain’s candid, bony wife. In a corner is the arsenal: a fowling piece, two daggers, a small pistol fit for a dogcatcher, and two pairs of handcuffs, “which I occasionally use on the sailors.” And next to it is a framed piece of embroidery, “made from my wife’s yarn,” that says, in Gothic letters:

In allen Stürmen,
In alien Noth,
Mög er dich berschirmen
Der treue Gott.

 

 

In every storm,
In every tribulation,
May you be sheltered
By steadfast God.

April 7

A Cap-Haïtien Sunday reaches me through the shutters of my concealed room. The coffee was “clear, hot, and strong.” The sunlight is soft and fresh. The neighboring marketplace chatters and squabbles. From my writing chair, my back to the door, I hear a petticoat going by, the shuffle of slippered feet, the name of the Haitian poet Tertulien Guilbaud, the great and polished author of Patrie—and the cry of a fruit vendor hawking “Caïmite!” Drums and trumpets sound in the distance. Ponies stumble on the stones that yesterday’s rain dislodged from the street. I hear “le bon Dieu”—and the progress of a cane, pushing off from the sidewalk. At an intersection, an eloquent old man is preaching religion to the empty streetcorners. I hear him: “We must force out of this strong black nation those merchants of savage divinity who demand of the poor peasants, as the angel demanded of Abraham, the sacrifice of their children in exchange for God’s favor. The government of this black nation of hardworking women and virgin men must not put to death the wretched woman who killed her daughter yesterday, as Abraham was about to kill Isaac, without doing away, ‘like a bolt of lightning,’ with the papá-boco, the false priest who enters their hearts by the prestige of medicine and the sacred power of the language of their fathers. Until civilization has learned Creole, and speaks in Creole, it will not be civilized.” And the old man went on talking in proud French, punctuating his speech by hitting his cane against the rocks. Now they’re listening to him: a drummer, two laughing boys, a young man in a pink tie and pearl-gray pants, with a marble-topped cane. Through the shutters I see the old man in his dark suit, fluting and unctuous. At his feet run silent, muddy waters. A desiccated mulatta of about fifty fords them with a jump, wearing fine half-boots, a short cloak, and a hat, and carrying a book of hours and a parasol: her green eyes probe her surroundings. From the book on my writing desk, to which I return, two cards fall to the floor, tied together with a piece of white string: the smaller one, hers, says “M‘elle, Elise Etienne, Cap-Haïtien”; and his, the big one, says “Mr. Edmond Férëre:—Frenchman.” Today is Palm Sunday.

 

April 8

 

From the Indian’s power of resistance can be gauged his potential power of originality and therefore of initiation as soon as he is treated with affection and inspired with a valid faith, and his nature is emancipated and unfrozen.—I’m reading about Indians.

 

April 8

 

I’ve just been reading about irresolute Moctezuma, and the uselessness of timidity and intrigue. I read with great love about Cacama, and Cuitlahuac, who blocked the mouths of Cortés’s cannons with heroic corpses.³⁶ I read with anger about the infamous and unhappy Tecuichpo, who defended the Aztec eagle with Cuauhtémoc in the royal canoe and with feathers upon her breast threw herself against the Spaniards’ matchlock guns, but then—she who had slept beneath that martyr’s Indian kisses, lay down, a Spaniard’s woman, to sleep in the bed of Alonso de Grado, and Pedro Callejo, and Juan Cano.³⁷ Searing lines of poetry leap from my pen. The things I hold in are spilling out. Everything in me is speaking, all that I don’t want to say—about the patria or about womankind. For the patria, more than mere words! And for woman, either praise, or silence. The baseness of our woman hurts, and humiliates, and pierces, more than that of our man.³⁸—Tom enters my concealed room, Tom the loyal Negro from San Thomas, who with a century behind him serves and loves the house of Dellundé. I give him a folded note that asks the corner bookshop, the Haitian bookshop, for some books to choose among, and a two-peso bill along with it, as a hostage, while I choose.—And the bookseller, the black gentleman of Haiti, sends me the books—and the two pesos.

PART II

From Cap-Haitien to Dos Rios, April 9-May 17, 1895

April 9³⁹

Lola, jolongo, sobbing on the balcony. We’re off.

 

April 10-11⁴⁰

 

We leave Cabo. Greet the dawn at Inagua. Hoist the boat aboard. Leave at 11. Skirt past Maisí and see the beacon. I’m on the bridge. At 7:30, darkness. Activity onboard. Captain deeply moved. The boat is lowered. Hard rain as we push off. Wrong direction. Opinions on boat varied and turbulent. More squalls. Lose rudder. We set course. I take the forward oar. Salas rows next. Paquito Borrero and the General help out in the stern. We strap on our revolvers. Making for the cove. A red moon peers from under a cloud. We put in at a rocky beach, La Playita (at the foot of Cajobabo). I’m the last one in the boat, emptying it. Jump ashore. Great joy; We turn the boat over, and the water jug. Drink Málaga. Up through rocks, thorns, and marshland. Hear noise and get ready, near a fence. Bypassing a farm, we come to a house. We sleep close together, on the ground.

April 12

At 3 we make up our minds to call Bias, Gonzalo, and the “Nina.”⁴¹ José Gabriel, smart fellow, goes to call Silvestre. Silvestre ready. We set out over hills, loaded down, looking for Meson and the Tacre (Záguere) River. We wait in the bright forest from 9 to 2. I convince Silvestre to take us to Imía. We follow the course of the Tacre. The General decides to write Fernando Leyva, and Silvestre goes. We settle into a cave, an old campsite, under a crag to the right of the river. We sleep: dry leaves: Marcos knocks down: S. brings me leaves.

 

April 13

 

Abraham Leyva arrives, with Silvestre loaded down with pork, sugar cane, sweet potatoes, and chicken sent by the Niña. Fernando has gone for the guide. Abraham, rosary at his neck. Alarm, and we get ready, when Abraham comes striding up. Silvestre was following with his load, at 11. That morning we’d moved to the edge of the river—swollen during the night, with a clatter of stones that sounded like gunfire. Guide will come. Lunch. Silvestre leaves. José comes at one with his mare. We’ll go on with him. Whistles and whinnying: we jump: take aim: without Abraham. And Bias. From a conversation with Bias, Ruenes⁴² learned we’d arrived, and is sending to see, join up with us. We decide to meet up with Ruenes at Sao del Nejesial. We’ll leave in the morning. I gather dry leaves for my bed. We roast sweet potatoes.

 

 

April 14

 

A mambí day.⁴³ We leave at five. Up to our waists, we cross the river, then cross back again: high on the bank are clams. Then, in new shoes, with heavy loads, we climb the very steep hillside, through the delicate leaves of the yaya tree, the Cuban majagua, and the copey with its star-shaped cones. We see our first jutia, curled in a milkwood. Marcos takes off his shoes and goes up. Cuts its throat with the first swipe of his machete: “She’s stunned.” “Her throat’s cut.” We eat bitter oranges José gathers, twisting them off with a pole: “Such sweetness!” Uphill again. Subir lomas hermana hombres. Climbing hills together makes men brothers. Over the hills we reach Sao del Nejesial: a pretty spot, a clearing in the forest, with old palm, mango, and orange trees. José leaves. Marcos comes, his handkerchief full of coconuts. I’m given a rose apple. Guerra and P. stand guard. I rest in the camp. César sews my shoulder belt. The first step was to gather royal palms and lay them on the ground. With a machete, Gómez cuts and brings fronds, for him and for me. Guerra makes his hut; four forked stakes: hanging branches: royal palms on top. All of them: some are grating coconut; Marcos, helped by the General, skins the jutia. They bathe it in bitter orange and salt it. The pig gets the orange rinds and the jutia’s skin. Now the jutia is in the improvised frying pan over a wood fire. Suddenly, men: “Ah, brothers!” I leap toward the guard. It’s Ruenes’s guerrillas, Félix Ruenes, Galano, Rubio, all 10 of them. Resplendent eyes. Embraces. Each has a rifle, machete, revolver. They came straight over the hills. The sick men felt better. We load up. The jutia is wrapped in palm fronds. They argue with us over who’ll carry it. With my rifle and my 100 bullets I go on down the hill to Tibisial. A patrol. Another. Now we’re at Tavera’s ranch, where the guerrillas are encamped. They’re waiting for us all in a row. Their clothes vary, some are in undershirts, others in shirts and pants, others in loose jackets and rough trousers; peaked yaray palm hats; blacks, mulattoes, two Spaniards—Galano, white. Ruenes introduces us. The General speaks, standing very erect. I speak. March-past, joy, cooking, groups.—At the new outpost: we speak again. Night falls, wax candles, Lima cooks the jutia and roasts plantains, argument over guard duty, the General hangs my hammock under the entrance to Tavera’s palm frond hut. Ah! and before we fall asleep, J osé comes, a candle in his hand, carrying two yagua boxes, one of fresh meat, one of honey. Greedily, we set to work on the honey. Good honey, in combs. And all day long, what light, what air, how full the chest is, how light the anguished body! I look out from the hut and see, at the top of the peak that looms behind, a dove and a star. The place is called Vega de la ...

 

April 15

 

We awaken amid orders. One detachment will be sent to las Veguitas, to buy at the Spanish store. Another, to the supplies left along the way. Another, to find a guide. The detachment returns with salt, hemp sandals, a cone of sweets, three bottles of liquor, chocolate, rum, and honey. José comes with hogs. Lunch—stewed pork with plantains and malanga. In the morning, frangollo, the sweet made of plantains and cheese, and water with cinnamon and anise, hot. Chinito Colom bie arrives in Veguitas, a hunter, bad eyes: he tugs his yellow dog along behind him. In late afternoon, with the men lined up, the General goes off to a ravine with Paquito, Guerra, and Ruenes. Will you let the three of us go alone? I resign myself, peeved. Is there some danger? Angel Guerra comes up, calling me and Captain Cardoso. Gómez, splendid and tender, at the foot of the mountain, on a path shaded by banana trees, with the gully below, tells me that apart from recognizing me as the Delegate, the Army of Liberation, through him, its Commander, elected in a council of commanders, names me Major General. I embrace him. They all embrace me. At night: pork with coconut oil, and it is good.

 

April 16

 

Each one with his offering: sweet potatoes, sausages, rose-petal liqueur, plantain broth. At noon, uphill march, river to the thigh, beautiful dappled forest of rose apples, oranges, and caimitos. Through gorges, thickets, and mango groves without fruit we come to a place of palm trees in the depths of a basin of joyous mountains. There we encamp. The woman, a copper-colored Indian with burning eyes, surrounded by seven children, wearing a ragged black gown, her kerchief tied up by her braids for a headdress, is hulling coffee. People hang up their hammocks, run to the cane field, get a fire together, bring cane to the sugar mill to make cane juice for the coffee. She puts the cane in, barefoot. Earlier, at the first stop, in the house with the mother and the big, scared daughter, the General gave me honey to drink, to show me that drinking it staves off thirst. Rum is being made from rose apples. All the correspondence for New York is written, and all the correspondence for Baracoa.

 

April 17

 

Morning in the camp. Yesterday a cow was slaughtered and as the sun comes up, groups are already standing around the cauldrons. Domi tila, agile and good, in her Egyptian kerchief, springs up the mountain and brings back the kerchief full of tomatoes, cilantro, and oregano. Someone gives me a piece of malanga. Someone else, a cup of hot cane juice and leaves. A bundle of cane is milled. At the back of the house is the slope facing the river, with its houses and banana trees, cotton and wild tobacco; below, along the river, a cluster of palms; in the clearings, orange trees; and all around are mountains, rounded and peaceable; and the blue sky above, with its white clouds, and a palm tree, half in cloud—half in the blue.—Impatience makes me sad. We’ll leave tomorrow. I tuck the Life of Cicero into the same pocket where I’m carrying 50 bullets. I write letters. The General makes a sweet of coconut shavings with honey. Tomorrow’s departure is arranged. We buy honey from a rancher with a short beard and alarm in his eyes. At first it’s four reales a gallon, but then, after the sermon, he gives away two gallons. “Jaragüita” comes, Juan Telesforo Rodríguez, who doesn’t want to go by Rodríguez anymore because he used that name as a guide for the Spaniards, and now he’s leaving with us. He has a wife now. When he goes, he slips away. The villainous El Pájaro plays with the machete; his foot is tremendous; his eye shines like marble where the sun hits the ebony black spot. Tomorrow we leave the home of José Pineda: Goya, his wife. (Toward Jojó Arriba.)

 

April 18

 

At nine-thirty we leave. Farewell, the men lined up. G. reads the promotions. The sergeant, “Puerto Rico,” says: “I die where General Marti dies.” A rousing good-bye to all, Ruenes and Galano, Captain Cardoso, Rubio, Dannery, José Martínez, Ricardo Rodríguez. Over high hills we pass the Jobo [Jojó] River six times. We go up the steep hill of Pavano, with El Pomalito up above and a glimpse of Chinese orange trees on the summit. We mount along the crest, light air striped with manaca palms floating on all sides. High above, dense, and hanging from plant to plant like a drapery was a delicate vine with small, lance olate leaves. On the hills, cimarron coffee. A grove of rose apples. Around us, the river valley, and beyond, the blue mountains crested with clouds. On the road to Los Calderos—Angel Castro’s village—we decide to sleep on the hillside. With our machetes we make a clearing. We string up our hammocks from trunk to trunk: Guerra and Paquito on the ground. The night is too beautiful for sleep. A cricket chirps; a lizard says “quee-quee-quee-a” and is answered by its chorus; even in the darkness I can see that the mountain is covered with copeys and paguás-short, spiny palms—with lightning bugs hovering around them. Through the shrill noises I hear the music of the forest, soft and complex, as if made by the most delicate violins; the music undulates, entwines, and unravels, opens its wings and alights, flutters, and ascends, always subtle and faint, a myriad of fluid sounds. What wings are brushing past the leaves? What diminutive violin, and waves of violins, are extracting sound and soul from the leaves? What dance of the souls of leaves is this? We forgot about our meal, so we ate sausage and chocolate and a slice of roasted malanga.—Our clothes dried out by the fire.

 

April 19

 

Two in the morning. Ramón Rodríguez, the guide, arrives with Angel; they bring torches, and coffee. At five we set out over rugged slopes. To Los Calderos, high up. The ranch is new, and a mambisa’s voice comes from inside: “Come in without pain, you need feel no pain here.” Then coffee is sweetened with her own honey: she, serious, in her loose sandals, recounts her history of the great war, one hand on her waist and the other waving in the air: her husband died, he was skinning his hogs for the rebels one night when they came and took him away; and she wandered the mountainside dragging her three children behind her, “until this good Christian took me in, and even if I serve him on my knees I’ll never repay him.” She comes and goes lightly; her face sparkles; each time she brings something else, more coffee, Castilian coriander—“so that when you get a bellyache along those trails you can chew one of the seeds and take some water on top of It”—lemons. She is Caridad Pérez y Piño.—Her daughter Modesta, sixteen years old, puts on a new tunic and shoes in our honor, and sits with us, calmly conversing, on the palm benches in the little parlor. Ramón brings her a flor de muerto, a marigold, from near the garden wall, and she puts it in her hair. She sews for us. The General tells the story of “Caridad Estrada in Camagüey, hacked with a machete.”⁴⁴ Her husband killed the Chinamen who betrayed their ranch, and another; Caridad was wounded in the shoulder; the husband fell dead; the guerrillas fled. Caridad picked up her child in her arms and went after them, her blood gushing out: “if she’d had a rifle!” She comes back, calls her people, they bury the husband, and she sends for Boza: “Look what they’ve done to me!” The troop leaps up: “We want to go find this captain!” The camp couldn’t sit down. Caridad displayed her wound. And she went on living, preaching, and instilling the whole camp with her enthusiasm.—Pedro Gómez, a nervous neighbor, comes with coffee and a hen, as an offering.—We’re winning souls.—Valentin, the Spaniard who’s been assigned to be Gómez’s assistant, is busy in the kitchen. Ruenes’s six men make their sancocho in the open air. Isidro arrives, a hefty lad with azure eyes, all dressed up, in clown ish leather shoes: he was the one who showed up at Pineda’s place with his finger just severed. He can’t go to war: “he has to look after three first cousins.” At two-thirty, after the downpour, we’re off over hills and the Guayabo River to the mango grove a league from Imia. Felipe Dominguez is there; Imía’s mayor, Juan Rodríguez, takes us on a rough nighttime march, skirting the locals, to near the top of the Yaya, a march by candlelight at 3 in the morning of the 19th.

 

April 20

 

Teodoro Delgado leads us from there to El Palenque: a rocky mountain, palo amargo and bitter orange trees: the surrounding countryside is almost grandiose; as we go we’re encircled with mountains, jagged, bosomy, peaked: folds of mountain all around, and to the south, the sea. Up high, we stop beneath some palm trees. People arrive loaded with cane. The locals: Estévez, Fromita. Antonio Pérez, of noble bearing, leaves for San Antonio. From a house they send us coffee, then chicken with rice. Jaragüita deserts. Did they threaten him? Will he go looking for the [Spanish] troops? A hunter brings word from Imia that they’ve set off after us along the Jobo. We’ll wait here, as planned, for tomorrow’s guide. Jaragua: cone-shaped head; just a moment ago he was telling me he wanted to stay with us to the end. He went to do sentry duty and slipped away. Barefoot forest scoundrel, Spanish guide; his face full of anguish, his speech lisping and shrill, sparse mustache, dry lips, loose, wrinkled skin, glassy eyes, cone-shaped head. He hunts mockingbirds and young pigeons, with birdlime made from the sap of the lechugo. Now he has animals and a wife. He went down through the forest. They don’t find him; the locals fear him. In a group, they’re talking about remedies for cloudy eyesight: salt water, the milky juice of the spurge, “which once gave a rooster its sight back,” the spiny leaf of the rosetilla, thoroughly crushed, “a drop of blood from the first one that saw the cloud.” Then they talk about remedies for ulcers: the yellow pebbles of the Jojo River, ground to a fine powder, the white, furred dung of a dog, honey of lemon:—sifted dung and mallow. We sleep on the mountain under yagua palms. Jaragua, big stick.

April 21

 

At six we set out with Antonio, heading for San Antonio. Along the way we stop to watch a palm tree being cut down, hacked by a machete at the base, to get at a beehive, which is brought to us, dry, the cells full of white offspring. Gómez sends for honey, squeezes the larvae into it, and it makes a delicious milk. Soon after, Luis González, an old man, black and beautiful, comes down the path, with his brothers, his son Magdaleno, and his nephew Eufemio. He had already sent word to Perico Pérez, and we’ll wait with him, near San Antonio, for the troops. Luis picks me up in his embrace. But what sad news! Can it be true that Flor, daring Flor, has died? That Maceo was treacherously wounded by Garrido’s Indians? That José Maceo slashed Garrido with his machete?⁴⁵ We were having sweet potato and roast pork for lunch when Luis arrived; cassava from his house is set out on a white cloth on the ground. We go bucking through thickets of sea grape again, and from above we catch a glimpse of the wide river of Sa banalamar ; we wade across its stones, pass through its reeds, camp on the other side. Luis’s embrace was beautiful, his eyes smiling as much as his mouth, his beard close-cropped and gray, and his spacious, serene face a pure black color. He is the father of the whole area and wears good pepper-and-salt cloth; his free home is the one closest to the forest. The peace of his soul gives absolute beauty to his majestic, agile body. We ate his jerked beef and plantains while he went to town, and he came back through the forest at night, without light, loaded down with new provisions, his hammock on one side, and in his hand a yagua box of honey, full of larvae. Today I saw the yamagua, the carbolic leaf that stanches blood, and whose very shade is beneficial to the wounded: “mash up the leaves and put them in the wound to make the blood dry up.” Birds seek out its shade. Luis told me how to keep a wax candle from going out as you walk: wrap a piece of damp cloth around it, and with that the candle stays lit as it goes and uses up less wax. The doctor taken prisoner in the betrayal of Maceo, could it be poor Frank?⁴⁶ Ah, Flor!

 

April 22

Day of waiting impatiently. A bath in the river, with waterfalls, eddies, and boulders, and clusters of reeds along the bank. My blue clothes are washed for me, my jacket. At noon Luis’s brothers arrive, proud of the home-cooked lunch they bring us: fried eggs, fried pork, and a big loaf of corn bread. We eat beneath a downpour; after some work with the machetes a tent is put up, roofed with our rubber rain capes. Troubling news all afternoon: a deserter from the Escuadras de Guantánamo⁴⁷ arrives, a nephew of Luis, who’s gone off to get weapons, and he says that troops are coming down; someone else says that from Baitiquin—where lame Luis Bertot, traitor at Bayamo, is a lieutenant—two scouts have reached San Antonio to search the forest. The Escuadras, made up of paid criollos, with a ferocious rogue at headquarters, fight Spain’s battle, the only battle to fear in these regions. Luis, who came at sunset, received a letter from his wife: that the scouts—and her own brother is one of them—have been summoned by Garrido, the rogue lieutenant, to meet up with him at La Caridad and search all of Cajuerí; that at Vega Grande and Los Quemados and many other passes they’ve set up ambushes for us. We slept where we were, within sight of the path. Today we’re talking about Céspedes, and Gómez describes the house with the grand entryway where he met him in Las Tunas, when he went from Oriente, wearing his worst clothes, with fifteen riflemen, to tell him how the war was escalating dangerously. Immaculate aides, in gaiters. Céspedes: kepi and cigarette holder. The war, abandoned to the commanding officers who asked for guidance in vain, in contrast with the festivity of the retinue in Las Tunas. Soon the government had to flee to Oriente. “There was nothing, Martí”: no campaign plan, no set or constant objective. Someone says that creeping juniper, with a scent like cedar, gives flavor and medicinal value to aguardiente. That a tea made from trumpetwood, the large leaves of the trumpetwood tree, is good for asthma. Juan arrived, the one from the Escuadras, he saw Flor dead, dead, his beautiful head no longer warm, his lips torn and two gunshots in his chest; the 10 killed him. Patricio Corona, who wandered hungry for eleven days, turned himself in to the Voluntarios.⁴⁸ Maceo and two others met up with Moncada. Luis’s sons and nephews are coming home: Ramón, Eufemio’s son, with his smooth chocolaty skin, like rosy bronze, his elegant, perfect head, and agile pubescent body,—Magdaleno, magnificently made, firm-footed, with lean shanks, swelling calves, long thighs, full torso, graceful arms, and, on a slender neck, a pure head, with its downy upper lip and curling beard, a machete at his belt and his yaray hat wide-brimmed and pointed. Luis sleeps beside us.

April 23

Ready at dawn, but still no Eufemio, who was supposed to watch the scouts set out; and still no answer from the troops. Luis goes to see, and comes back with Eufemio. The scouts have left. We set out behind them. From our campsite of two days in El Monte de la Vieja we go down the mountain. From a hill in a clearing the palm grove of San Antonio is visible to the south, surrounded by jatia trees and sea grape in the fertile depths of the gulches, with mountains to one side and the other and the sea in between. The mountain on the right, with what looks like a bleeding gash near its peak, is Doña Mariana; that one, to the south, rising above many others, is the Sugar Loaf. From eight to two we walk through the thorny jatia trees, with good grass and the low, red flower of the guisaso de tres puyas; prickly pears, some free-ranging animals. We talk about Gómez’s squadrons during the other war. Gómez praised the bravery of Miguel Pérez: “He made a false step, he was forgiven, and he was always loyal to the government.” “His body was retrieved from a yagua palm; they just about made mincemeat out of him.” “Some Spaniard did that to Santos Pérez.” And, says Luis, Policarpo put the other Pérez’s balls on his face like a pair of glasses. “I’m going to cut your balls off,” he shouted at Policarpo in battle. “And I’m going to cut yours off.” And Policarpo made him wear them.⁴⁹ “But why do these Cubans fight against Cubans? I’ve seen that it isn’t a matter of opinion or some impossible affection for Spain.” “They fight, the pigs, they fight like that for the peso they’re paid, one peso a day, less the lodging that’s deducted. They’re the bad seed of the little villages, or men who have a crime to pay for, or tramps who don’t want to work, and a handful of Indians from Baitiquirí and Cajuerí.” We talked about coffee and the other grains that can be substituted for it: platanillo and boruca. Suddenly we go down into a tall, pleasant forest, fallen trees serve as a bridge over the first pool, and we walk over soft leaves and cool stones, in pleasant shade, to the place where we’ll rest: water runs by, the ground is white with trumpetwood leaves, enormous leaves are dragged from the creek, to protect us from rain, I go toward the sound and see pure water running among rocks and ferns, through pebbled pools and glad cascades. By night Luis’s 17 men arrive, and so does he, 63 years old, alone, an hour before them: all of them off to war: and with Luis goes his son.

April 24

Across the wide gulch, over the Monte de Acosta, across crumbling stone, with pools of clear water where the mockingbird drinks, and a bed of dry leaves, we haul ourselves along the exhausting path from sunup to sundown. The danger is palpable. Since El Palenque they’ve been following our tracks closely. Garrido’s Indians could fall on us here. We take shelter on the porch of Valentín, overseer of the Santa Cecilia sugar plantation. Strong Juan, with good teeth, comes out to give us his warm hand, and his uncle Luis calls him over: “And you, why aren’t you coming?” “But don’t you see how the bugs are eating me up?” The bugs, the family. Ah, rented men, corrupting salary! The man who is his own man, who belongs to himself, is different. And these people? What does he have to leave behind? The house of yagua palms, which the land gives them and they make with their own hands? The pigs, which they can raise on the mountainside? Food the earth gives; shoes, the yagua and the majagua; medicine, herbs, and bark; sweets, honey. Farther along, digging holes for fence posts, is an old man, bearded and big-bellied, in a dirty shirt and pants that reach his ankles, his skin earth-colored, his eyes viperish and shrunken: “And what are you men doing?” “Well, we’re here to build these fences.” Luis swears and raises his long arm into the air. He strides away, his chin quivering.

 

April 25

 

Day of war. Through virgin forest, we’re drawing closer—now in the very claws of Guantánamo, hostile during the first war—to Arroyo Hondo. We lost our way. Thorns slashed us. Reeds whipped and choked us. We passed through a forest of calabash trees, the green fruit sticking out from a bare trunk or a thin branch. The men clean out the calabashes as they go and smooth down the openings. At eleven, a round of gunfire. Running fire that booms out against a scatter of muffled shots. The combat seems to be at our feet: three heavy bullets come in and hit the tree trunks. “Distant gunfire—what a fine sound!” says the big handsome young fellow from San Antonio, just a boy. “It’s even better up close,” says the old man. Following the path we go up along the bank of a stream. The gunfire intensifies; Magdaleno, seated against a tree trunk, carves decorations into his new calabash. We lunch on raw eggs, a sip of honey, and chocolate from La Imperial in Santiago de Cuba. Soon, news reaches us from the town. They’ve seen a dead body come in, and 25 wounded. Maceo has come to find us, and is waiting nearby: away to Maceo, happily. I said in a letter to Carmita:⁵⁰ “Along the very road where the battle took place the triumphant Cubans were waiting for us; they threw themselves off their horses, the horses they took from the guardia civil, they embrace each other and cheer for us; bundle us onto the horses and put spurs on us.” How is it that the patch of blood I saw on the road doesn’t fill me with horror? Nor even the half-dried blood, from a head that is buried now, laid to rest in a satchel by one of our horsemen? In the afternoon sunlight we started on our victory march back to camp.

At midnight they went out, across rivers and cane fields and brier patches, to save us: they had just arrived, close now, when the Spaniards fell on them: with no breakfast they fought for two hours and staved off the hunger of their triumph with crackers: and then they set out on a journey of eight leagues, first through a glad, bright afternoon, and then under vaults of thorns in the dark of night. In single file the long column proceeded. The aides go past, running and shouting. On horseback and on foot, we wind through the giddy heights. We march through a cane field and every soldier emerges with his own piece of cane. (We cross the wide railway tracks: we hear the whistles that announce nightfall in the sugar mills: we see electric lights across the plain.) “Halt the column, there’s a wounded man back there.” A man drags along a leg with a bullet hole in it, and Gómez sets him on his horse’s croup. Another wounded man won’t have it: “No, friend: I’m not dead,” and keeps on walking with a bullet in his shoulder. The poor feet are so tired! They sit, rifles at their sides, at the edge of the path, and smile at us, glorious. An occasional “Ay!” is heard and then more laughter and contented chatting. “Make way!” and strong Carta gena, a lieutenant colonel who earned his rank in the Ten Years War, arrives on horseback with a burning torch of cardona cactus stuck like a lance into his leather stirrup. And other torches clustered here and there. Or they set fire to dead trees that sputter and shoot out sparks and send shafts of flame and plumes of smoke into the sky. The river cuts us off. We wait for the weary. Now they are all around us, their yaray hats in the darkness. This is the last water, and on the other side, sleep. Hammocks, candles, steaming pots, the camp is asleep now: later I’ll sleep at the foot of a tall tree with my rubber rain cape for a pillow and my machete and revolver beside me; now I rummage through my jolongo and take out medicine for the wounded. The stars look down fondly, at 3 in the morning. At 5, eyes open, Colt on hip, machete at belt, spurs on, and to horse!

Brave Alcil Duvergié died—every flash of gunpowder takes its man—death went in through his forehead; another man, a rifleman, had a whole volley fired into him; another fell as he was boldly crossing the bridge. And where, when we make camp, are the wounded? Laboriously I gathered them together at the foot of the worst case, who is believed to be shell-shocked, and was carried in on a hammock slung from a stick. The juice of the tobacco tucked into one corner of his mouth has made his teeth fall out. Unhappily he takes a sip of cordial. And the water, which doesn’t come, the water for the wounds, which is finally brought in a muddy bucket—? Fresh water is fetched by the obliging Evaristo Zayas from Ti Arriba. And the medic, where is the medic, why doesn’t he attend to his wounded? The other three are complaining, in their rubber rain capes. Finally he comes, huddled in a quilt, alleging fever. And between us all, with the gentle assistance of Paquito Borrero, we treat the wounded man in the hammock, a wound that goes through the shoulder. A thimble would fit into it on one side, and a chestnut on the other: we wash it, apply iodoform, phenolated cotton. On to the next, on the upper thigh: it went in and came out. On to the next, who turns over onto his stomach, the bullet didn’t come out of his back: there it is, it emerges from the patch of red, swollen skin: syphilis has eaten away at the man’s nose and mouth. The last one has both entry and exit wounds, also in the back: they were firing knee to the ground and the low shots went right through their muscular backs. Antonio Suárez, from Colombia, a cousin of Merchan’s wife, Lucia Cortés, has the same wound. And he lost his way, on foot, and found us later.

 

April 26

 

We form ranks at sunrise. To horse, still sleepy. The men are shaky, haven’t yet recovered. They barely ate last night. About 10, we rest along both sides of the path. From a small house they send a hen, as a gift to “General Matías,” and honey. In the afternoon and at night I write, to New York, to Antonio Maceo who is nearby and unaware of our arrival, and the letter for Manuel Fuentes, to the World,⁵¹ which I finished, pencil in hand, at dawn. Yesterday I cast an occasional glance over the calm, happy camp: the sound of a bugle; loads of plantains carried on shoulders; the bellow of the seized cattle when their throats are slit. From his hammock, Victoriano Garzón, a sensible black man with a mustache and goatee and fiery eyes, tells me, humble and fervent, about his triumphant attack on Ramón de las Yaguas: his words are restless and intense, his soul is generous, and he has a natural authority: he pampers his white aides, Mariano Sánchez and Rafael Portuondo, and if they err on a point of discipline, he lets them off. Stringy, sweetly smiling, in a blue shirt and black pants, he watches over each and every one of his soldiers. The formidable José Maceo parades his tall body past: his hands are still raw from the brambles in the pine forest and on the mountainside, when the expedition from Costa Rica was pursued and took flight, and Flor was killed, and Antonio took two men with him, and José was left all alone, sinking beneath his load, dying from cold amid the damp pines, his feet swollen and cracked: and he arrived, and now he triumphs.

 

April 27

Camp at last, at the Filipinas ranch. I attend at once to the duties under my jurisdiction; next to me, in his hammock, Gómez writes. In the afternoon, Pedro Perez, the leading insurgent of Guantánamo, who, after 18 months of hiding, finally came out, with 37 men, death following behind them, and today he has 200. His wife is out in the countryside, with the 17 members of the household, and she sends us the first flag. And he served Spain in the Escuadras, during the Ten Years War! Family loyalty to Miguel Perez.—Leaning on his cane, short in stature, with a silver watch fob, his wispy sideburns trailing along the sides of his thin, benevolent face, he and his brave men went searching for Maceo in vain across all Baracoa, in the teeth of the Indians. His jipijapa is dyed purple; its hatband, embroidered by a woman’s hand, is the same color, the ends trailing down his back.—He wants no mounted men and doesn’t ride himself, and has a low opinion of rubber capes, preferring the pure rain, suffered in silence.

 

April 28

Dawn finds me at work. At 9, the men form ranks, and Gómez, sincere and concise, exhorts them. I speak, beneath the sun. And back to work. To bind this force together in the spirit of union: to establish and organize an energetic, magnanimous war: to open up channels to the North, and supply lines: to check any spurious attempt to disrupt the war with promises. I write a circular to the commanders; they must punish any spurious attempt with the penalty for betrayal—another circular to the landowners—a note from Gómez to the plantations—letters to probable friends—letters to establish mail service and supply lines—letters to make an appointment with Brooks—a note to the British Government, for the consul at Guantánamo, including José Maceo’s declaration concerning the accidental death, from a shot unintentionally fired by Corona, of a sailor on the schooner Honour on board which the expedition came from Fortune Island—instructions to José Maceo, whom Gómez is promoting to Major General—a note to Ruenes, inviting him to send a representative from Baracoa to the Assembly of Delegates of the revolutionary Cuban people, to elect the government that the revolution must create for itself—letter to Masó. Luis Bonne came, so wise and benevolent that Gómez sent for him to create a guard for me. As his aide he brings Ramón Garriga y Cuevas, whom I used to make a fuss over when he was a little boy back in New York and I would see him acting mischievous or helpless; he is mild, affectionate, lucid, and brave.

 

April 29

 

Work. Ramón stays at my side. In the attack on Arroyo Hondo, a flank of ours, in which the brother of a criollo lieutenant was fighting, killed the criollo lieutenant, who was fighting on the other side. Luis González left me, with his goddaughter. “That face will stay engraved here.” He said that to me with a celestial face.

 

 

April 30

Work. Antonio Suárez, the Colombian, talks, unruly and full of complaints: what carelessness, what kind of colonel is that. Maceo, claiming an urgent operation, won’t wait for us. We leave tomorrow.

 

May 1

 

We leave the camp of Vuelta Corta. That was where Policarpo Pineda, alias the Rustan, or the Moth, had Francisco Pérez, the one from the Escuadras, hacked to pieces. One day the Moth executed Jesus Christ himself: he was wearing a big crucifix on his chest and a bullet sent an arm of the cross into his flesh, so later he fired four shots into the cross. We were talking about this during the morning, when the path, now in the blooming region of the coffee plantations, among plantains and cacao, emerged into a magical hollow called the Tontina; from the depths of the vast greenness its roof of palm trees can hardly be seen and on all sides are mahogany trees with their purple flowers. Not much farther was the Kentucky, Pezuela’s coffee farm, the large brick driers in front of the house, which is cheerful, spacious, and white, with balconies, and a low area nearby where the machines are. At the door is Nazario Son-court, a slender mulatto, with rum and a pitcher of water on a small table, and glasses. The Thoreau brothers come out to see us from their vivid coffee farm, with its little houses of brick and tile: the youngest one, red with effort, his eyes anxious and misty, stammers: “But we can work here, right? We can go on working.” And he says nothing but that, like a madman.—We reach the forest. Estanislao Cruzat, a good mountaineer, Gómez’s groom, cuts a slash near the base of two trees, pounds two forked sticks in front of each one, and others to support the trunk, and some crosspieces, and sticks laid lengthwise: and there’s a bench. After a short rest, we continue along an overgrown footpath in the fertile region of Ti Arriba. Sunlight glitters on the cool rain: oranges dangle from airy trees: high grass covers the wet ground. Slender white tree trunks weave through the green forest, from their roots to the blue sky; liana twists around delicate bushes in spirals of even rings that look man-made, and copey trees grow down into the earth from above, swaying in the air. I drank clear water from a bromeliad clinging to a hog plum tree: crickets were chirping in broad daylight.—To sleep, in the house of the “bad Spaniard”: he fled to Santiago de Cuba: the house has a zinc roof and a filthy floor: the men devour the bunches of plantains hanging from poles along the roof, two pigs, doves and ducks, a heap of cassava in a corner. This is La Demajagua.

 

May 2

 

Onward to J aragüeta. Among the sugar mills. Through the vast and abandoned cane field of Sabanilla: Rafael Portuondo goes home to bring back 5 head of cattle: they come yoked together. The poor men, out in the rain! We reach Leonor and, rejecting the thought of a late dinner, had already settled in our hammocks with bread and cheese, when, with cavalrymen sent by Zefí, George Eugene Bryson arrived, the correspondent from the Herald.⁵² I work with him until 3 in the morning.

May 3

 

At 5, we go with Colonel Perié, who came last night, to his coffee farm high up in Jaragüeta, with a parlor like a stage set, and below, as if in a vast painting, the lazy mill, for cacao and coffee. The vast landscape spreads out, descending, on both sides, and two nearby streams go flowing down over a deep bed of stones, with a scattering of palm trees, and a background of very distant mountains. I work all day on the manifesto for the Herald and other things for Bryson. At 1, when I go in search of my hammock, I see a number of them on the ground and think they’ve forgotten to put it up. I use my hat for a pillow and stretch out on a bench. Then the cold sends me into the lighted kitchen; they give me an empty hammock; a soldier throws an old cloak over me: and at 4, reveille.

 

May 4

Bryson leaves. Soon after that: the court-martial of Masabó. He raped and robbed. Rafael presides and Mariano reads the charges. Somber, Masabó denies them, his face brutal. His defender invokes our arrival and asks for mercy. Death. As the sentence was read out, a man was peeling a piece of sugarcane at the back of the crowd. Gómez holds forth: “This man is not our comrade: he is a vil gusano, a vile worm.” Masabó, who hasn’t sat down, lifts his eyes toward him with hatred. The troops, in great silence, hear and applaud: “¡Que viva!” And as the march gets in order, Masabó remains standing; his eyes do not fall nor can any fear be seen in his body: his pants, wide and light, flap constantly, as if in a fast wind. At last they go, the horses, the prisoner, the entire force, to a nearby hollow, in the sun. A weighty moment: the troops silent, standing on tiptoe. The shots ring out, and then one more, and another to finish him off. Masabó died a valiant man. “How do I stand, Colonel? Front or back?” “Front.” He was brave in battle.

 

May 5

 

Maceo had told us to meet him in Bocuey, which we cannot reach by 12, the hour when he was to meet us. Last night the messenger set out: he was to wait for us at his camp. We go, with the whole force. Suddenly, horsemen. Maceo, on a golden horse, in a gray cambric suit: his graceful saddle, with stars, has silver on it now. He came to find us because he has his men on a march. Maspon goes to Mejorana, the nearby mill, to have them start making lunch for a hundred. The mill greets us as if it were a holiday: the delight and admiration of the servants and workers is visible: the boss, a ruddy old man with sideburns, a jipijapa on his head, and small feet, brings vermouth, tobacco, rum, and malmsey wine. “Kill three, five, ten, fourteen hens.” A woman with bared breasts, wearing slippers, comes to offer us a green aguardiente made from herbs: another brings pure rum. People come and go. Castro Palomino, an adjutant to Maceo, fetches and carries, supple and verbose. Maceo and G. are speaking in low voices, near me: soon they call me over to them on the porch. Maceo has changed his thinking on the government: a junta of generals in command, through their representatives, and a Secretary-General: in other words, the patria and all its occupations, which creates and gives power to the army, as Secretary to the Army. We go to a room to talk. I cannot make heads or tails of Maceo’s conversation: “but are you staying with me or going with Gómez?” And he speaks to me, cutting off my words as if I were the continuation of the pettifogging government, its representative. I see that he is wounded: “I love you”—he tells me—“less than I used to” because Flor replaced him as the one in charge of the expedition and the handling of its money.⁵³ I insist on making a statement to the representatives who are meeting to elect a government. He does not want each chief of operations to have his own command, born from his own force: he will command the four in Oriente: “Within fifteen days they will be with you gentlemen, and these will be men that Doctor Martí won’t be able to confuse.” At dinner, opulent and awkward, with chicken and suckling pig, the matter comes up again: he wounds and repels me. I understand that I must shake off the role I am to be marked with, as the civilian defender of shackles hostile to the military movement. I hold out, roughly: the Army, free—and the country, as a country, with its full dignity represented.⁵⁴ I show my displeasure at so indiscreet and forced a conversation, before the whole table, and with Maceo’s haste to leave. For night is about to fall on Cuba and he has a six-hour journey ahead of him. His troops are nearby but he doesn’t take us to see them: the combined forces of Oriente: Rabí of Jiguaní, Busto of Santiago de Cuba, and José‘s, which we brought. In the saddle, a quick good-bye. “You leave by that way over there,” and we follow, our guards fretful, now late in the afternoon, without the aides, who stayed with José, uncertain of the way, to a slave hut along the path where we don’t unsaddle the horses. The aides are sent for: we go on to another muddy shack outside the encampments, open to attack. G. sends to José’s camp for meat: the aides bring it. And so, like outcasts, and with sad thoughts, we sleep.⁵⁵

 

May 7

 

We leave Jagua and its old and loyal mambises for the Mijial. At the Mijial, the horses eat wild piñon; lids for gallon jugs are made from it and cedar. César is given a tea of guanábana leaves, a good pectoral and a pleasant tisane. Along the way, Prudencio Bravo, guardian of the wounded, came out to tell us good-bye. We saw Nicolás Cedeño’s daughter, who speaks contentedly and is going with her five sons to her forest in Holguín. Along the road to Barajagua—“there was a lot of fighting here,” “all of this was ours in the end”—we talk about the last war. There, from the dense forest of the slopes, or from the heights and hillside bends of the road, they harassed the [Spanish] columns, which finally stopped coming: the road leads to Palma and Holguin. Zefi says he brought Martinez Campos⁵⁶ along here, when he went to his first meeting with Maceo. “The man came out of there red as a tomato, so enraged he threw his hat on the ground and went off to wait for me half a league away.” We’re close to Baraguá. We go off the road onto the brief flatlands of Pinalito, which descend to the stream of Las Piedras and, beyond it, the hill called La Risueña, its red, rocky soil curving like an egg against a background of graceful mountaintops in strange contours: a small woods, then a saddle-shaped hilltop, and a stairway of hills. We’re heading straight for the plain of Vio, a green shell with forest all around, and palm trees in it, and in the open areas, a couple of little islands of forest, like rosettes, and a lone hawthorne, which is good wood for burning. Black paths run across green grass, dotted with purple and white flowers. To the right, in the heights of the mountain range, a crest of pines. Hard rain. The advance guard moves forward, one with a yagua on his head, another with a piece of cane on his saddle, or a palm frond resting there, or his shotgun. A telegraph wire twists in the dirt. Pedro goes by, with a bare flagpole, made of .⁵⁷ Zefi, his lead spoon sticking out between his bandoliers, has a cockade sewn on to the back of his jacket. Chacón is barefoot, but the bluing on his rifle butt glitters from his waist to his knees. Zambrana plods along, a cooking pot dangling from his hip. Another man is wearing a black frock coat over his jacket. I look back to where the tail of the march is coming, the mules and oxen, and the short carbines of the rear guard, and against the gray sky I see, moving ponderously, three ,⁵⁸ and one has a yagua on its head, like a poncho. Across the next plain, Hato del Medio, famous during the war, we continue on, the grass drowning under the cloudburst, to the campsite, over there behind those few cows. “Here,” Gómez tells me, “is where the cholera broke out, when I came with two hundred weapons and 4,000 freed slaves, so that the Spaniards wouldn’t take them from us; all this was dark with cattle, and they killed so many that people began to die of the stench, and I was scattering corpses along our march: I left 500 corpses along the way to Tacajó.” And then he tells me about Tacajó, the agreement between Céspedes and Donato Marmol.⁵⁹ After Bayamo was taken, Céspedes disappeared. Eduardo Mármol, a cultured, baleful man, recommended dictatorship to Donato. Félix Figueredo asked Gómez to support Donato and join those who favored dictatorship, to which Gómez responded that he already had a mind to do so, and would do so not because Félix advised it, but in order to be on the inside and better able to prevent it from there: “Yes,” said Félix, “because the revolution has given birth to a viper.” “And he was the same thing,” G. told me. From Tacajó, Céspedes sent a message to Donato inviting him to a meeting, once G. was with him, and G. wanted to go first and then send a message. Upon reaching Céspedes, as G. was coming with the guard he met about a quarter of a league away, he thought he saw confusion and agitation in the camp, until Marcano came out to meet Gómez, who told him: “Come here and embrace me.” And when the Mármol brothers arrived, at the table set for fifty where the differences of opinion were discussed, it was clear from the start that, like Gómez, the rest were in favor of deferring to Céspedes’s authority. “Eduardo turned black.” “I’ll never forget Eduardo Arteaga’s speech: ‘The sun,’ he said, ‘in all its splendor, is sometimes darkened by a sudden eclipse; but then it shines again with renewed brilliance, all the brighter for its transitory darkness: that is what has happened to the Céspedes sun.”’ José Joaquín Palma spoke up. “Eduardo? He was having a siesta one day, and the blacks were making noise in the sugar mill. He called for silence, and they went on talking. ‘Ah, so they don’t want to listen?’ He took out his revolver—he was a very good shot—and a man went down with a bullet in his chest. Then he went back to sleep.” Now we’re arriving, to the sound of the bugle, among huts, and Quintín Banderas’s troops are standing in formation under the rain. Narciso Moncada,⁶⁰ Guillermo’s brother, very black, with a mustache and chin beard, wearing boots, a cape, and a jipijapa, embraces us. “Ah, but one number is missing!” Quintín, around sixty, his head sunk between his shoulders, a heavy torso, a low gaze and few words, greets us at the door of the hut, burning up with fever; he buries himself in his hammock; his small, yellow eyes look as if they came from deep inside him, and we have to stoop over him; at the head of his hammock is a small drum. Deodato Carvajal is his lieutenant, with a slim body and a mind bent on promotion, capable and orderly; his words grow muddled in their quest for refinement, but there is method and command in him, and he shows spirit on his own behalf and on behalf of others; he tells me he made sure Moncada received my letters. Narciso Moncada, verbose and robust, is a man of goodness and ostentation: “I spend nothing on liquor.” His brother is buried “lower than a man’s height, with engineer’s maps, in a place known only to a few of us, and if I die, another man knows, and if he dies, another man, and the grave will always be preserved.” “And our mother, who has treated us as if she were the mother of the patria?” Dominga Moncada has been in El Morro⁶¹ three times: and all because a certain general, who later died, sent for her to tell her she had to go recruit her sons, and she told him: Look, General, if I see my sons coming along a path and I see you coming the other way, I’ll shout: “Flee, my sons: that man is the Spanish general.”—We enter the hut on horseback, because of all the mud outside, so as to be able to dismount, and there is a stench in the earth and the air from the many cattle that have died nearby; the hut sags, dense with hammocks. Pots boil on a big stove in the corner. We’re served coffee, ginger, a tisane of guanábana leaves. Moncada, coming and going, alludes to Quintín’s abandonment of Guillermo. Quintín speaks to me like this: “And then there was the business that came up with Moncada, or that he had with me, when he wanted to send me off with Masó, and I asked to be discharged.” Carvajal had spoken of “the disappointments” Bandera suffered. From his hammock, Ricardo Sartorius speaks to me of Purnio, when the forged telegram from Cienfuegos arrived telling them to take up arms: he speaks to me of the perfidy toward his brother Manuel, whose forces Miró made off with and who was then “forced to present himself”: “this was at stake for him”—pointing to his throat. “Calunga” came from Masó, with letters for Maceo: he won’t reach his rendezvous with M. very soon because he is protecting an expedition from the south that has just arrived. There’s heavy fighting in Bayamo. Camagüey is up in arms. The Marqués has joined the uprising and so has Agramonte’s son. It stinks in here.

May 8

 

Off to work, on a nearby hilltop where the new encampment is being built: huts made of tree trunks tied together with reeds and roofed with palm fronds. They clean up a tree for us and we write at its foot. Letters to Miró: from G., addressing him as Colonel, certain he will help “Brigadier Angel Guerra, named Chief of Operations”—and mine, to make sure, though without exposing my thoughts, that he sees the advisability and justice of accepting and helping Guerra. Miró, as colonel, is in control of the region. Guerra fought in the Ten Years War, and would not obey him.⁶² Letters to prominent people in Holguín, and circulars: to Guadalupe Pérez, a rich man, Rafael Manduley, a solicitor, Francisco Freixas, a lawyer. At a table, the court-martial of Isidro Tejera and Onofre and José de la O. Rodríguez muddles along: some civilians attested to the terror into which they plunged the region: Captain Juan Peña y Jiménez-Juan the Lame, who served “in the three wars,”⁶³ has only a stump left of one leg, and mounts his horse with a bound—saw the abandoned houses and listened to the locals’ fear, and testifies that the three of them refused him their weapons and made death threats. The court, its confusion cleared up, sentences them to death. We go to the new hut, with low eaves and no walls.—Jose Gutierrez, the affable bugler that Paquito is taking with him, signals the men to fall in. The prisoners are brought up through the silent ranks; Ramón Garriga reads the sentence, and the pardon. Gómez speaks of a flag’s need for honor: “this criminal has stained our flag.” Isidro, who wept as he came, asks permission to speak: moaning, with no idea what to do, he says he will die innocent, that he can’t be allowed to die, that it’s impossible that all these brothers won’t ask for him to be pardoned. The bugler sounds the march. No one speaks. He moans and twists in his rope; he doesn’t want to walk. The march is sounded again, and the ranks move on, marching two abreast. With the imploring prisoner, Chacón and four riflemen bring up the rear. Behind, alone, in his gaiters, blue jacket, and small hat, Gómez. A few others after that, and Moncada, who doesn’t go to the prisoner, who is now at the place of death, crying out in desolation, taking off his watch which Chacón snatches from him and throws onto the grass. Gómez commands, clutching his revolver, his face contorted, a few steps from the prisoner. They set the terrified man on his knees, though for all their haste he still has time to turn his face back two or three times, hat in hand. A couple of yards from him, the lowered rifles. Aim! says Gómez: Fire! And he falls onto the grass, dead. Of the two who were pardoned—whose pardon I recommended and obtained—one, his mulatto color changing only slightly, evinces no dismay, only a cold sweat: the other, in ropes up to his elbows, stands as if he were still recoiling, as if his body were fleeing, turned aside like his face, twisted and emaciated. When the sentence was read to them, in the wind and clouds of the afternoon, the three of them seated on the ground, their feet in stocks made of branches, he pressed his fingers into his temples. The other man, Onofre, listened as if he didn’t understand and was only turning his head toward some noises. While he was waiting for the verdict, “El Brujito,” the dead man, would stoop down and scrabble in the dust, or suddenly raise his black face with small eyes and a sunken nose with a wide bridge. The stocks were made in an instant: a sturdy branch stuck in the earth with another, slenderer one beside it, tied together above and pounded in below, leaving a narrow space for the imprisoned foot. “El Brujito,” they said later, was a bandit from before the war: “I can swear to you,” said Moncada, “that he leaves fourteen thousand pesos buried somewhere.” —Sitting on a trunk in the hut, around a candle, Moncada recounts the dying Guillermo’s last march on his way to his appointed meeting with Masó. Guillermo went into prison healthy and came out thin and feeble, spitting up clots of blood at every cough. One day during the march he sat down on the path with his hand on his forehead—“ my brain hurts”—and gushed up blood, in red gobs. “These here are from the pneumonia,” Guillermo said, stirring them; “and these here, the black ones, are from the back.” Zefi speaks, and Gómez, too, of Moncada’s fortitude. “One day,” he says, “he was wounded in the knee, and one bone was on top of the other, like this” and he put one arm over the other on his chest: “the bones couldn’t be set right, and so we hung him up from under his arms, in that hut that was higher than this one, and I grabbed hold of his leg and pulled down on it with all my strength, and the bone went back into place, and the man did not utter a word.” Zefi is very tall and wiry: “and I’ll stay in the forest and be a bandit if they want to end this thing in infamy again.” “A thing as well launched as this one,” says Moncada, “and then go wheeling and dealing with it.” He complains bitterly of Urbano Sánchez’s abandonment and deception of Guillermo: Guillermo, always eager for white company; “I’m telling you, in Cuba today there is a horrible division.”⁶⁴ And the rancor of his memories is apparent in his violent condemnation of Mariano Sánchez and the time in Ramón de las Yaguas when he argued that the promise to respect the surrendered Lieutenant’s weapons should be kept, and M. and others, who had nothing but old hunting guns, wanted to seize the sixty rifles. “And who are you”—Narciso says Mariano Sánchez said to him—“to have a vote in this?” And G. expresses the thought that M. “doesn’t have the face of a Cuban, whatever you want to tell me, and forgive me for saying so.” And that the father is on the outside, and sends his son inside, to be in both camps at once. We talk a lot about the need to harass the bewildered enemy, and tirelessly force them out to battle, to harden the unoccupied revolutionary army with battle and transform camps like this one, with four hundred men, and more every day, who eat in peace and tend three hundred horses, into a more orderly and active force. “With my hunting gun and my two precision weapons, I know how to arm myself,” says Bandera: Bandera, who spent the day in his solitary hammock down there in the stinking hut.

 

May 9

 

Adiós to Bandera, to Moncada, to fine Carvajal who would like to go with us, and to the huts that the men lean out of waving their yaray hats at us. “May God guide you well, my brothers!” Not a single man turns his eyes toward it as we go past the grave. And shortly we emerge from the muddy cattle ranch out onto the plain and some mango trees in the distance. This is Baraguá, and the mango trees, two trunks with a single crown, are where Martínez Campos met with Maceo. A man from Mayarí who was there is acting as our guide: “Martínez Campos went to embrace him, and Maceo put his arm in front of him, like this: that was when he threw his hat on the ground. And when he told him that Garcia was with them already! You should have seen the man when Antonio told him: ‘Do you want me to introduce you to Garcia?’ Garcia was there, in that forest, the whole forest was only Cubans, no one else. And over there was another force, in case they tried any treachery.” From the plains of the Protest of Baraguá⁶⁵ we came out onto the high ridge of an abandoned ranch, from where we see an arm of the Cauto River, still dry now, the whole riverbed full of grass and fallen tree trunks, covered with reeds, and blue and yellow flowers, and beyond a bend, a sudden drop. “Ah, Cauto”—says Gomez—“it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen you!” The high and fertile gullies, broken up in places, thrust down toward the riverbed, still narrow here, through which the first rains flow, muddy and turbulent.

The chest swells with quiet reverence and powerful affection before the vast landscape of the beloved river. We go across it near a ceiba, and after greeting a mambí family who are overjoyed to see us, we enter the bright woods, with gentle sunlight, widely spaced trees, dripping leaves. The grass is so thick the horses move as if on a carpet. The bromeliads above us look up into the blue sky, and the young palm, and the dagame, which has the finest flowers, beloved of bees, and the gaucimo, and thejatia. All is festoon and frond and through the clearings to the right a pure green can be seen on the other side, sheltered and dense. Here I see the ateje, its high, sparse crown full of parasites and bromeliads, the courbaril, “the strongest wood in Cuba,” the stout júcaro, the gumbo-limbo with its silken skin, the broad-leafed geni pap, the sagging calabash tree, the hard sabicu, with its black core for making canes and its bark for tanning, the jubabán, or ax handle tree, with its light foliage whose leaves, layer upon layer, “make tobacco smooth,” the rough-barked mahogany, the break-ax, its striated trunk opening out into strong branches near the roots, and caimitillo, copey, canella, and the yamagua, which stanches blood. We found Cosme Pereira along the path, and with him one of Eusebio Venero’s sons, who turns back to announce our presence to Altagracia. Still to be found in Altagracia is Manuel Venero, progenitor of patriots, whose beautiful daughter Panchita was killed by the machete of Federicón, the Asturian, for refusing to yield to him. Gómez was very close to the Veneros; he made a fearsome guerrilla leader of their daring Manuel and had a deep friendship with Panchita, which rumor called love. The Asturian carried off the whole house one day and on the march he gradually made Panchita fall behind, propositioning her while she resisted. “You don’t want to because you’re Gómez’s querida?” She stood straight and proud, and with his own hand he finished her off. Her house welcomes us with joy and good coffee in today’s gloomy rain. Along with his men from Holguín, Miró is staying there, and came to meet us on the road: ahead of him he sent Pancho Diaz, a youth who, after causing a death, fled to take refuge in Montecristi, and is a river guide, who fords the highest waters, and a roper and slaughterer of hogs, which he kills with the machete. Miró arrives, polite on his fine horse: I see his affection when he greets me; his way of speaking is very Catalán; his looks are refined, a bald head and pointed beard, lively eyes. He sent his troops to Guerra, and came up to meet us with a retinue of brawny young men. “Rafael, come here.” And Rafael Manduley, the Holguín solicitor who has just come out to the countryside, walks over in his jacket of Manila hemp cloth and his white waistcoat, a narrow-brimmed jipijapa covering his ears. The men, all well mounted, are of very good stock: Jaime Muñoz, hair parted in the middle, who is a good administrator, José González, Bartolo Ro caval, Pablo García, the sagacious guide, Rafael Ramirez, the war’s first sergeant, a gaunt fellow with a small black mustache, Juan Oro, Augusto Feria, tall and good, from the town, a literate man, a typeset ter, Teodorico Torres, Nolasco Peña, Rafael Peña, Luis Pérez, Francisco Díaz, Inocencio Sosa, Rafael Rodríguez-and Plutarco Artigas, camp boss, blond and one-eyed, pure and obliging: he left his big house, his well-being, and “nine children of the ten I have, because I brought the oldest one with me.” His hammock is large, its pillow made by loving hands; his horse is solid, one of the best in the region; he is going somewhere far away, to another jurisdiction, so that he “won’t be tied down by his family” close by: “my little ones bunched together around me and went to sleep with me.” And here come Miró and Manduley, both bursting with local politics: “No one said anything about the war” to Manduley, who has a reputation as an insurgent and some moral authority; he has saddle sores; he went to see Masó: “and to think I was feeding my children a scientific diet; who knows what they must be eating now.” With animated gestures and overflowing speech, Miró describes his seven-year campaign in the Holguín paper La Doctrina, and then in Manzanillo’s El Liberal, funded by Calvar and Beattie, where he rooted out all the “oblongs,” the “Asturians,” the “fundamentalist armor.” He left his wife and daughter behind and has taken his good cavalrymen across the region without much fighting. He tells me about the efforts of Gálvez, in Havana, to subdue the revolution: of the great hatred with which Gálvez speaks of me and of Juan Gualberto: “you, you are the one they fear”: “they were muttering that you wouldn’t come, and that’s what’s going to confound them now.”—I’m surprised, here as everywhere, by the affection I’m treated with, and the unity of soul, which will be diluted and ignored and dispensed with only to the detriment of the revolution, at the very least the detriment of delay, in the momentum of its first year. The spirit I sowed is the spirit that has taken hold, the spirit of the Island, and with it, guided by it, we will triumph quickly, for a better victory, and for a better peace. I foresee that, for at least a certain time, the revolution will be divorced, by force, from this spirit, deprived of the charm, pleasure, and prevailing power of this natural consortium, robbed of the benefit of this conjunction between the activity of these revolutionary forces and the spirit that moves them.—One detail: Presidente, I’ve been called, from my first appearance in camp, by all the troops, despite my public rejection of the term, and in every camp I arrive at this mark of respect is reborn, along with the gentle enthusiasm of the general affection, and demonstrations of the men’s joy in my presence and simplicity. A man approached me today saying presidente, and then it was my turn to smile: “Don’t let me hear you calling Marti presidente: call him general. He is here as a general: don’t let me hear you call him president.” “And who can hold back the men’s impulse, General?” Miró says: “It springs straight from the hearts of all of them.” “Fine: but he is not yet president: he is the delegado.” I fell silent and noted embarrassment and displeasure in all of them, and some seemed offended. Miró is returning to Holguin as a colonel; he will not oppose Guerra; he will defer to him. We speak of the need for active pursuit, driving the enemy from the cities, harassing them across the countryside, cutting off their supply lines, following their convoys. Manduley is going back, as well, none too happily, to influence the region that knows him, to serve as a good adviser to Guerra, to unite the Holguin troops and prevent clashes among them, to maintain harmony between Guerra, Miró, and Feria.—We sleep crowded together, between curtains of rainwater. The dogs, sated from the afternoon’s massive slaughter, vomit up beef. That’s how we slept in Altagracia.—On the road, the only settlement was Arroyo-Blanco: the empty store, the cluster of shacks, the potbellied rancher, white and egotistical, the tip of his nose drooping over the wings of his skimpy black mustache; his black wife. An old blind woman stuck her head out the door, leaning to one side, her arm propped on her yellow walking stick, she’s clean, with a kerchief on her head: “So the pati-peludos are killing people now ?”⁶⁶ The Cubans never did a single thing to me, no, señor.

 

 

May 10

 

From Altagracia we go to La Travesia. Arriving there I suddenly caught sight of the Cauto again, swollen now, its wide bed deep underwater, and the steeply sloping ravines on both sides. In the face of such beauty I suddenly thought of the base, fierce passions of man. As we were arriving, Pablo chased after a young heifer, her horns just beginning to grow; she was thrown against a tree where, in slow turns, they shortened her rope. The horses snort, heads raised; their eyes gleam. Gómez takes a machete from a guardsman’s belt and opens a red slit in the heifer’s thigh. “You men: hamstring this heifer!” A man hamstrings her with a single blow and the animal kneels, bellowing; Pancho, hearing the order to kill, thrusts his machete awkwardly into her chest, again and again: another man, with a surer hand, pierces to the heart, and the cow totters and falls, blood gushing from her mouth. They drag her away. Francisco Pérez arrives, round-faced and energetic, with good bearing, a natural captain to his few good horsemen, a healthy, steadfast man. Captain Pacheco arrives; a small body and tenacious, encumbered speech, with his talent and decency beneath it: he took a drove of pack animals, his own Cuban men damaged his house and broke his comal, “I haven’t come for any purpose but to serve the patria!” but he talks without pause and as if by halves, of those who do things and those who do nothing and of how those who do less generally attain more than he who does more, “but he has come only to serve the patria!” “These are my gaiters!”: the calves bare; the pants to the knee, leather half-boots; the yellow and purple yaray hat. Bellito arrives, Colonel Bellito of Jiguani, who had stayed behind here because he was sick. I sense him to be loyal, his eye is clear and combative, he is brave in word and deed. He likes to speak a confused language of his own, in which his thoughts must be captured on the run among words of his own invention. “The revolution died for the infamy of overthrowing its caudillo.” “That filled the men’s hearts with sadness.” “From then on, the revolution began to turn back.” “They were the ones who gave us the example,” they, the men of the Chamber⁶⁷—at which point Gómez bitterly condemns the rebellions of García and his cohort of advisers: Belisario Peralta, Barreto the Venezuelan, Bravo y Senties, Fonseca, Limbano Sánchez, and then Collado. Bellito speaks, pacing back and forth like a man who’s looking out for the enemy, or catches sight of him, or falls on him, or leaps away from him. “That’s what the men want: good character in the command.” “No, señor, we shouldn’t be spoken to like that, because no man born can take that.” “I’ve suffered for my patria just as much as the best General would’ve suffered.” He faces off with Gómez who berates him because the officers allowed some cattle through to Jiguaní under a safe pass signed by Rabí. “What’s more, that’s the order of the commander and we have to obey our commander.” “I already know that it’s bad and the cattle shouldn’t come in; but the lesser has to obey the greater.” And at that point Gómez says, “Well, he’s certainly gotten to you with all this about being president. Martí will not be president as long as I am alive”—and then, “because I don’t know what happens to presidents: as soon as they get there they start going bad, except Juárez, and him, too, a little, and Washington.” Bellito, irate, stands up and gives two or three jumps and his machete dances at his waist: “That will be up to the will of the people,” and he goes on muttering. “Because we”—he told me another time, elbows on my table with Pacheco—“we’ve come to the revolution in order to be men, so that no one can offend us in our dignity as men.” Night falls amid rain, mugs of coffee, and talk about Holguín and Jiguaní. We’re waiting for news of Masó. Has he gone to the summit with Maceo? Miró, in the darkness, gnaws at the bones of a fantail dove. Tomorrow we’ll move to a different house.

 

 

May 11

 

Farther on, still in Travesia, to a less muddy house. Miró leaves with his men. We get there quickly. Gómez harshly berates Rosalío Pacheco, who served through the whole war and was deported to Spain in the Guerra Chiquita, and married an Andalusian woman there. Pacheco suffers, sitting on a cot at the foot of my hammock. Notes, continual conversation on the need to expedite the war and the blockade of the cities.

 

 

May 12

 

From La Travesia to La Jatía, through the pastures, still rich in cattle, of La Travesia, Guayacanes, and La Vuelta. The grass is thick now with the continual rain. Excellent grazing, and fields, for cavalry. The wire fences must come down to open the forest to the cattle or the Spaniards will take them when they make camp in La Vuelta, at the crossing of all these roads. The Contramaestre River emerges, with ravines like the Cauto, but narrower and clearer, and we cross it and drink. We speak of sons: Teodosio Rodríguez, of Holguin, is with his three; Artigas is bringing his; Bellito came with his two, aged 21 and 18. A cow goes past in a hurry, sorrowful and mooing, and jumps the fence: slowly the lost calf, who doesn’t seem to see much, goes to her; and suddenly, as if recognizing her, he arches his back, leans in close, tail in the air, and applies himself to the udder; the mother goes on mooing. La Jatía is a good house, made of cedar with a zinc gallery, abandoned by Agustín Maysana, a rich Spaniard; the floors are covered with letters and papers. Outdoors, I write, to Camagüey, all the letters Calunga will take, saying what I’ve seen, announcing the journey, to the Marqués, to Mola, to Montejo. I write the circular prohibiting all safe passes for cattle, and the letter to Rabi.⁶⁸ Masó is crossing the Sabana de Bio with Maceo, and we write him: we have to stay here a week, waiting for him. Three veterans of Las Villas arrive; one of them was shot three times during the imprudent attack on Ari mao, under Mariano Torres—and his brother, trying to save him, was shot once: they’re going to Jiguani for supplies and news: Jiguaní has a fort, a good one, outside the town, and in the town plaza two rubble-work tambours, and another two that are unfinished, because the carpenters disappeared; and so they say, “See what these countrymen of ours are like, they don’t want to be on our side even when they’re paid.” When we lie down after the plantains and cheese, all the writing done, from our hammocks we talk about Rosalío’s house where we went that morning for coffee and he was waiting for us, his arms on the fence. The man is large and virile, a hard worker and fine-looking, his white face now lined, his black beard flowing. “Here you have my señora,” says the faithful husband with pride: and there she is in a purple tunic, her feet in flowered slippers with no socks, the lovely Andalusian woman, hulling coffee on a stone bench. She wears her hair gathered up tightly in back, and from there it flows down like the train of a bishop’s robe: we see her smiling and in pain. She doesn’t want to go to Guantánamo with Rosalío’s brothers; she wants to be “wherever Rosalío is.” The oldest daughter, white, her face a pure oval, her luxuriant short hair parted and tangled, quiets down a bony little creature with a stringy neck, his drooping head in a little lace cap: the latest delivery. Rosalío built the finca; he has cows, presses cheese; we’re eating slices of his cheese that weigh a pound each, soaked in coffee. With a nursing bottle, Rosalío, on his stool, feeds milk to a big naked angel of a son who bites his brothers when they try to get close to their father. On tiptoe, Emilia takes a cup down from the cupboard she made out of boxes, against the wall of the shanty. She sits and listens to us with her sorrowful smile, her children hanging off of her on all sides.

 

May 13

 

We’ll wait for Masó in a less exposed place, near Rosalío, at his brother’s house. I’m calming Bellito and Pacheco down, while keeping them from showing me too much affection. We go back across yesterday’s pastures, follow the Cauto upstream, and Bellito digs in his spurs to show me the beautiful stirrup-shaped channel, with its lush greenery, where, with a wide bend in front, the two rivers meet: the Contramaestre enters the Cauto. There, within that stirrup, the lower part of which looks out on the pastures of La Travesia, Bellito once had a camp, a good camp: a dense grove of trees there, and a great ceiba. We cross the Contramaestre and soon we’re dismounting among Pacheco’s abandoned huts. Here, when all this was forest, was the camp of Los Rios, where O‘Kelly⁶⁹ first came upon the rebels, before going to Céspedes. And we speak of the three Altagracias: Altagracia la Cubana, where we were, Altagracia de Manduley, and Altagracia la Bayamesa. Of hats: “there are so many weavers in Holguín!” Of Holguin, where the earth is dry and drinks up the rain, with its houses and its ample courtyards, “there are a thousand cows in Holguin that just gave birth.” They gather false sandalwood and tomato leaves for me, to smear with grease and place over my boils. Artigas cuts a fringe on the halter Bellito brought me. And the hut is swept out: hammocks; writing; reading; rain; unquiet sleep.

 

May 14

 

A guerrilla band leaves for La Venta, the hamlet with Rebentosos’s store and the fort with 25 men. Hours later they send for the Mayor, José González, a Galician, married in this country, who says he was forced to be Mayor, and waits at the ranch owned by Miguel Pérez, the mulatto who is the healer and barber here. I write, little and badly, because my thoughts are uneasy and bitter. Up to what point will my stepping down be useful to my country? And I must step down, as soon as the right moment arrives, in order to have the freedom to advise, and the moral power to resist the danger I’ve foreseen for years, which, in the solitude I’m moving in now, may prevail, through the disorder and lack of communication that in my isolation I cannot overcome—though, free of constraint, the revolution would, by its own unity of soul, enter naturally into the forms that would assure and accelerate its triumph. Rosalío comes and goes, bringing messages, milk, silverware, plates: he is now the prefect of Dos Rios. His Andalusian wife prepares a castor-oil purge for a sick man, makes him a hammock from a camp bed, provides him with a suit of clothes; the sick man is José Gómez, from Granada, a cheerful man with honest teeth: “And you, Gómez, how did you come to us here? Tell me about what’s happened since you came to Cuba.” “Well, I came two years ago, and they discharged me, and I stayed on in Camagüey, working. They discharged all of us like that, in order to collect our salary themselves, and we lived off our work. I didn’t see anyone but criollos, who treated me very well: I always dressed well, and earned money, and had friends: in two years I collected only twelve pesos of my pay.—And now they called me to the barracks, and I didn’t suffer as much as others did because they put me in charge: but there was mistreatment of the men, which I couldn’t endure, and when an officer hit me twice in the head I held my peace and and told myself he wouldn’t hit me again and picked up my gun and bullets and here I am” on horseback, with his jipijapa and brown jacket, his rifle across the pommel of his filly’s saddle, always smiling.—The rafters, arriving from the Sabana and from Hato del Medio, who went to ask permission to transport wood, crowd into the ranch: they’re returning to Cauto del Embar cadero, but not to transport wood: whatever work might directly or indirectly benefit the enemy is prohibited. They don’t grumble: they wanted to know: they’re prepared to go with Commandante Coutiño. I see, riding calmly toward us under the rain, a magnificent man, black in color, wearing a big hat with an upturned brim, who stands behind the group, listening, with his head above it. He is Casiano Leyva, Rosalío’s neighbor and a guide around Guamo, first among woodcutters with his powerful ax: and when he takes his hat off I see the noble face, the forehead high and receding, bulging out in the middle, the eyes firm and gentle in their large sockets, the pure line of the nose between the wide cheekbones, and along the sharp chin the grizzled goatee. The trunk of the body is heroic, raised upon slender legs, a bullet in one of them; he has a permit to give meat to the surrounding area so they won’t kill too many head of cattle. He speaks gently and there is intelligence and majesty in all he does. Later, he’ll go back to Guamo. I write the general instructions to the commanders and officers.

 

May 15

 

Rain during the night, mud, a bath in the Contramaestre: caress of flowing water: silk of the water. In the afternoon the guerrilla band comes, saying Masó is on the Sabana and they’re going to find him for us: they bring a convoy, picked up in La Ratonera. They empty it at the door: Bellito distributes it. There are fabrics, which Bellito measures off with his arm; so much for the guardsmen, so much for Pacheco, captain of the convoy, and Bellito’s men, so much for the staff officers: candles, a piece of cloth for Rosalío’s wife, onions and garlic, potatoes and olives for Valentín.

When the convoy arrived, the first one there was Valentín, at its foot, as if he were sniffing, eager. Then the men were all around him. For them, a gallon of “blended wine for tobacco,” and also sweet wine. Let the convoy for Bayamo go peacefully on to Baire, distributing rations. It has eleven guides, Francisco Diéguez among them: “But he will come: he’s written me: what’s happening is that among our troops we had bandits that he had hunted, and so he doesn’t want to come—the bandits of El Brujito, the man put to death at Hato del Medio.” And there are no forces around with which to attack the convoy, which is accompanied by 500 men. Rabí, they say, attacked the train to Santiago de Cuba in San Luis, and stayed there. We speak of Limbano over our meal; and his death is remembered, as it was told by the guide from Mayarí who had hurried to save him and arrived too late. Limbano, already far gone, was with Mongo, and reached the home of Gabriel Reyes, who has a bad wife, and for whom Limbano had done many favors; he gave him all the coins he had: half for his son, Limbano‘s, and the other half for Gabriel, so that he would go to Santiago de Cuba to arrange a way out for him, and Gabriel came back with the promise of $2,000, which he earned by poisoning Limbano. Gabriel went to the post of the guardia civil who came and fired a shot into the corpse so it would look as if he had died from it. Gabriel lives on in Santiago de Cuba, accused by all of his own; his godson told him, “Godfather, I’m leaving your side because you are despicable.”⁷⁰ When we go to bed, Artigas puts unsalted lard on a tomato leaf and covers the mouth of my boil with it.

 

May 16

 

Gómez goes out to visit the surrounding area. First, a search of the bags of Lieutenant Chacón, Officer Díaz, and Sergeant P. Rico—who grumble—to find a stolen half-bottle of lard. Conversation with Pacheco, the captain: the Cuban people want affection and not despotism; because of despotism many Cubans went over to the government and they’ll do it again; what exists in the countryside is a people that has gone out in search of someone to treat it better than the Spaniard, and that thinks it only fair for its sacrifice to be acknowledged. I soothe—and deflect his demonstrations of affection toward me, as well as everyone else’s. Marcos, the Dominican: “Even your footprints!” Gómez returns from Rosalío’s house. The mayor of La Venta is going free: the soldiers in La Venta, Andalusians, want to come over to our side. Rain, writing, reading.

 

May 17

 

Gómez goes with 40 horsemen to give the Bayamo convoy some trouble .⁷¹ I stay behind, writing, with Garriga and Feria, who are copying the General Instructions to the commanders and officers, twelve men with me under Lieutenant Chacón, with three guards at the three roads, and next to me, Graciano Pérez. Rosalío, riding his lead pack mule, mud up to his knees, brings me, in his own basket, a fond lunch: “for you, I give my life.” The two Chacón brothers arrive, just come from Santiago, one of them the owner of the herd that was seized day before yesterday, and his blond brother, an educated, comical man, and José Cabrera, a shoemaker from Jiguaní, sturdy and frank, and Duane, a young Negro like a carving, in shirt, pants, and a wide belt, and ⁷² Avalos, shy, and Rafael Vasquez, and Desiderio Soler, 16 years old, whom Chacón brings along like a son. There’s another son here, Ezequiel Morales, 18 years old, his father dead in the wars. And those who arrive tell me about Rosa Moreno, the widowed campesina who sent her only son, Melesio, 16 years old, to Rabi: “Your father died in that: I can’t go now: you go.” They roast plantains and pound jerked beef with a stone for the newcomers. The rising waters of the Contramaestre are very murky, and Valentin brings me a jug, boiled and sweetened, with fig leaves in it.