Cuba, 1880
The seeds of Cuba Libre were sprouted by men like Olympia’s father, Testifonte Cancio, who transplanted his Spanish empire to Cuban soil and built a booming sugar market on the back of slave labor. Testifonte moved his family to the plantation in Pinar del Río when Olympia was only three, just two years before a long revolution erupted and brought social and financial disarray to the island. The Ten Years’ War ended with a treaty between Cubans and Spaniards but some who continued to fight threatened Testifonte’s sugar estate. He fortified his property with armed guards, but not enough to protect Olympia from every danger presented by unstable, post-war Cuba. In 1880, soon after she turned seventeen, Olympia was kidnapped by the bandit group headed by the charismatic Victoriano Machín, known among the peasants as El Matón.
A son of plantation slaves and the oldest of six children, Machín saw himself as the charitable benefactor of his peasant siblings. War meant the Machín family was homeless and unemployed as business owners hired only Spanish workers. Victoriano was forced to slip into town to pick pockets and rob Spanish bakeries in order to feed his starving brothers and sisters. He was a charitable brother who blamed the Spanish for sinking Cuba into a dreadful depression.
Machín’s deeds were not limited to his family, and he generously shared the fruit of his exploits with neighbors and fellow peasants. As the rural proletariat starved and vagrancy became a permanent feature of the landscape, Machín became a feared thief of Spanish aristocracy who supervised a redistribution of wealth in the province. He was no longer just a nice-looking low-class teenage hood but a benevolent outlaw who looked after his people. His popularity grew. He attracted recruits and built a small army, outfitted first with machetes and then guns. They saw themselves not as bandits but young rebels in the mold of Cuban generals like Calixto García and Antonio Maceo.
Machín stood among his men like a young captain wearing black pants with a black vest over a half buttoned white shirt. With a red kerchief tied around his neck, a belt of bullets slung over each shoulder and a pistol holstered on each hip, he stood confident and ready to announce their most daring raid yet. His long black hair seemed to shine in the morning sun, but when the wind blew wisps of dirt and dust from his locks it became obvious that Machín had shunned the luxury of a bath for many days.
He said to his men, “We will go in the dead of night, after the house and surrounding quarters have fallen asleep.” His army of twenty sat around a campfire and listened to their leader. Machín’s magnetic nature impressed young rebels like the peasant boy Salvador Ortiz, who was nervous to hear the details of the raid but anxious to collect the payoff that Machín had promised.
Now the bandit leader picked up a small log and held it before him like a club. He wrapped an old tattered rag around the end and showed it to his men. “What is this?”
The wily Juan Carlos answered, “It looks like a stick with a towel wrapped around it.”
“Wrong.” Machín grinned; in another life he could have been a stage actor or an entertainer. He took his club and held it into the fire, and when he pulled it out, the tattered rag was balled in flames. “This is our weapon. We will descend on the plantation like thunder and leave the sugar fields burning.”
Storming a giant sugar plantation was a greater crime than any of them had ever committed, but the rebels thought of their families and the starving people of Piro. The Spanish had given these men no other choice.
The revolution was underway.
Machín’s men gathered on a hill to the south of the plantation overlooking Testifonte’s forty acres of sugar cane. North of the cane field, standing like a stone fortress and dwarfing the plantation buildings, was the immaculate mansion of the Cancio family.
The gray and white manor was surrounded by brick storage huts and wooden worker’s dwellings. Dozens of tiny figures were speckled across the plantation, chopping cane in the field and hauling it to the mill on horse-drawn carts.
“Let’s move around to the north,” Machín instructed. “I want to get a closer look at the mansion and try for a headcount on the workers and guards.”
The group moved into the forest and positioned themselves on the north side of the plantation. Here they had a close up view of the small village within the estate. Two of Testifonte’s men patrolled the perimeter with rifles and both were so far away that the bandits had little reason for concern.
Machín actually snickered. “Two guards? That’s all he has? This won’t even be a challenge.” He pointed towards the mansion. “See that stone building there? That’s the mill which houses a press for extracting sugar and a boiling room where the sugar is heated into molasses. If it is destroyed then the whole plantation will shutdown. That must happen only as a last resort. If this plantation is making no money, then we will be unable to take our share of the wealth.”
Salvador pointed to a pair of brick buildings beside the mill. “What’s in those two buildings over there?”
“Storage,” said Machín as his eyes moved across the entire plantation. “Cancio will be hindered but not out of business and more important, we will have the attention of the entire province.”
Which included the Spanish army. None of the men fooled themselves into thinking their task was without risk. Even if they did make it back to their village of Piro, under a banner of victory, they were at the mercy of the peasants. Betrayal could be more disastrous than finding themselves face to face with Spanish soldiers.
“Yes, it is an act of war,” Machín explained. “But this is our country.”
They observed the plantation until it became as quiet as a lake in the dead of night. After the sun set, the sweet smell of caramelized sugar and dying coals lingered from the boiling room.
Lamps burned inside the mansion and illuminated the rooms for Machín and his men, who crouched in the weeds just outside. Testifonte could be seen in the dining area with his son and daughter while a plump mulatto housemaid circled the room and tended to the family dinner.
It was the first time any of the rebels and seen the wealthy sugar planter in person. Testifonte was dignified but informal, rarely wearing a suit and tie, and tonight he dined in a thin white shirt with an opened collar. Dark hair was lined with streaks of gray and he wore a small moustache like a man from a Greco painting. His skin was smooth and youthful, unblemished by hours in the sun like his workers and characteristic of a career spent almost entirely behind a desk.
Known as caciques in Spain, men like Testifonte held the power and ruled politics, agriculture and real estate. They considered themselves family people who prided themselves on the purity of their race. Testifonte often told Olympia and her older brother Hector of the myths of Don Pelayo, who lead Gothic nobles to victory against Moorish invaders at Covadonga. “Asturias is the only real Spain,” Testifonte would say. “The rest is conquered territory.”
While Testifonte’s father and brother were captains of finance and government, he’d made his fortune in sugar. And since he hired only Spaniards, as most peninsulares did, it meant thousands of Cubans remained unemployed. Testifonte tried to shield his children from the prostitution and robbery that resulted and even hired a bodyguard to accompany his daughter between the plantation and her school. Victims of poverty were attracted to crime and banditry and until now, Testifonte had been lucky to avoid confrontation with these clever and mischievous men.
As he inspected the family from afar, Machín said, “The son should be dealt with cautiously and appropriately.”
Beside the planter was Hector, a healthy young man in his early twenties who looked athletic and near his physical prime. He resembled his father in every way, including the moustache, open collar and flawless skin.
At the opposite end of the table was Testifonte’s seventeen-year-old daughter Olympia. The girl wound her black hair in braids and her olive skin was like the women of Southern Spain. Her appearance was pure and untarnished. Machín smiled when he saw the pretty, young girl. “A clear child of the indoors,” he remarked. “Her father will pay a fortune to have her returned safely from the cesspool of peasant society.” He laughed and imaged tens of thousands of pesos in ransom, enough to purchase a horse for every one of his men and feed all of Piro for a month.
The bandits returned to camp and the following morning the rebel leader gathered his men and reviewed the plan. “We’ll wait until dark. Once the guards are eliminated we’ll storm the mansion like a hurricane. For the rest of the day, we rest.”
And so they rested, until dusk when they formed a column and marched down the hill to the Cancio plantation. Once it was dark, they formed a perimeter around the north side of the property and on Machín’s signal, they lit their torches.
