This is the opening to Chapter 1...
Ybor City, 1897
Salvador had been in Ybor City less than one day when he saw a man bite the head off a live rooster. He had lost hundreds of dollars betting on cockfights in Havana, but after the factory cut hours and pay, no cigar maker could justify or even afford a rambunctious night of gambling and sport. It was not until he made it across the Straits to Tampa’s Ybor City that Salvador realized what had devoured all those lost wages and hours. This young town was prospering while old Havana slowly died before his eyes. When Salvador arrived in the Cigar City and saw factories filled with workers and a rowdy nightlife colored by green American dollar bills, he knew he had found a town that would one day be famous.
Ybor was a man’s city, clamoring with busy saloons, girls-for-hire, boxing matches, unending games of dominoes, and most of all: hard work. Ybor was a town whose cigar workers were in demand, and everything seemed to be surrounded by rows and rows of shiny white tenement houses and the brick-oven smell of fresh baked bread. One thing was certain; this was no land of ancient sugar plantations and wealthy Spaniards. It was a cigar city ready for the Twentieth Century, and Salvador could smell them everywhere he went: in bars, on the street, in factories and restaurants, and on every neighbor’s porch. Cuba was a land in disarray, but here was a place where Salvador and his entire family could prosper for a very long time. This was a town where he could happily lose a lot of money on cockfights.
“I have found my place,” Juan Carlos told him. Friends since before they joined El Matón’s crew, Juan Carlos was Salvador’s oldest acquaintance. “I will die in this town,” he told Salvador.
Salvador knew that a town filled with rugged, drunken cockfights and dime store prostitutes was a place that Juan Carlos would be delighted to call his home. During the first war, when they were a couple of penniless teenagers struggling to outlast the poverty of Cuba, Juan Carlos summarized their options. “We can engage in petty larceny in the city, rob people at knifepoint, and walk away with pesos and stale bread,” Carlito said. “Or we can join the rebels and steal from rich sugar planters who live in cathedrals and pay hefty ransoms for the return of their kidnapped wives and daughters!”
Back in those days, before Salvador had a family or a future, these were his assets: a rusty old knife that had belonged to his father, a small box of matches, three cheap cigars, and a canvas backpack with a second pair of pants and a couple of worn out shirts. An orphan with little knowledge of even his relatives, it was odd that young Salvador, a man who valued honest hard work, would follow Juan Carlos into El Matón’s rambunctious crew.
Years later, after El Matón and most of his men were decimated by Spanish soldiers, Salvador fled to Havana and learned the tobacco trade, while Juan Carlos lingered in town before he returned to the rebel lifestyle, fought the Spanish, and was eventually captured trying to rob a train. Juan Carlos was convicted and offered a choice by the declining Spanish government of Cuba: prison on the Isle of Pines or permanent relocation to Florida. Juan Carlos chose the place where so many Cuban men had already gone: Ybor City in Tampa.
It was there that Juan Carlos started serious work as a cigar maker, for it was customary for Ybor City tabaqueros to donate a portion of their wages to fund the rebels’ efforts in Cuba. Juan Carlos continued to support the war from afar while he never tired of coaxing his friend to abandon the island and join thousands of Cuban and Spanish workers in relocating to the Cigar City. He paid the factory lector to write letters to Salvador and eventually his friend agreed to visit.
“Employment is sporadic in Havana,” Salvador told Olympia, who hoped Salvador’s trip to Florida would be more than a juvenile escape with his old friend. “With the war and all these cigar factories closing down and moving to Tampa, all the men are finding steady work in Ybor City. Maybe I should go there and see for myself?”
“I don’t know what you’re waiting for.” Olympia said. “The Fuentes and Negro families have already moved to Florida, and Anna Fuentes wrote me and said they never plan to come back. And if there is steady employment there, like everyone says, then you will be able to work during your visit with Carlito, and can send money home each week. We have four children to feed and I do not have any more time to sweep floors in the factory while you are on vacation.”
Salvador chuckled, knowing his wife was only half-serious. He held her and kissed her forehead. “It’s not a vacation. But of course, I will send money each and every week.” He wondered if she would make him promise not to gamble or attend any cockfights, but Olympia knew better than to try and keep a Cuban man away from his nightlife.
Salvador gathered his three boys, Javier, Lázaro and E.J. and knelt before them. “Papa has got to go away, boys, because there are no jobs here. I’ve got to travel up to Florida to see how we can do up there. With luck on our side, if we can make enough money, maybe I’ll bring you up there too.” He kissed each boy on the forehead; Javier, sixteen and an accomplished cigar maker, then fourteen-year-old Lázaro and finally young E.J. Then he held his oldest child, his eighteen-year-old daughter Josefina, who tried to smile while fighting her tears.
And so in the winter of 1897, Salvador Ortiz left Cuba for the first time in his life and took a boat to Port Tampa. Juan Carlos greeted him on the dock with a bear hug, a deep, mischievous laugh and his familiar odor of burnt tobacco and rum.
“Come!” Carlito grinned as he slapped Salvador’s back, showing his crooked yellow teeth. For as long as Salvador could remember, Juan Carlos had a single tooth on the upper right side that was darker and more crooked than the rest, a single rotten fruit among a row of already stale teeth. “Let me show you my town!”
And here is an excerpt from Chapter 2...
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.
