Cutting “campo abierto” to Mariana, we can see three smokestacks emerging from old centrales. Only one billows smoke into the blue sky. We talk of the history of this area, its traditional dependence on sugar.
“Sugar is the tradition,” Maykel says, as he leads us through the field. “That is all this region is, really. Sugar. Take that away, and what do you have? I hope it comes back.”
“But it’s the 21st Century, Maykel,” I say. “It has been a long time since sugar could sustain an economy. You have to come up with something else or just settle into being a Third World, poor country.”
He thinks about what I have said, looking down at the path, walking.
“Maybe that’s what we are. But look around. All this land. Where are the people? At least with sugar entire towns knew what they were supposed to do. Now, no one knows how to make a living. There is nothing that makes this place, this place” he says, waving his arm across the horizon. We walk quietly for a while, each of us probably taking these words into different directions in our minds.
He is right about the land. It is an under used resource all over Cuba. I have seen it during other walks: land, which looked, to my untrained eye, perfectly suitable for farming, lying fallow, overrun by weeds or covered with cancerous marabou, the malevolent cousin of kudzu, that would cover the entire island if it had its way. The problem must be more difficult than it seems.
After an extended silence, I ask. “I wonder how many people from this region have emigrated.”
“Bastante,” understates Maykel. A lot. “Everyone has someone or knows someone in the United States or Spain or somewhere. In the United States specially. Everyone. Do you have family still here?”
“Cousins,” I said. “One close one. He lives right across the street from where I was raised in Cojimar.”
“So you left,” starts Maykel.
“No,” I interrupt, “My parents left and took me with them. There’s a difference.”
“De acuerdo.”
“How many Cubans live in the United States?” asks Carlos Alejandro.
“Over two million,” I say.
“Uff,” he puffs, trying hard to wrap his head around the number. “If they all decide to return, or even half! We are fucked!”
“These include the children of Cubans born in the United States too, though. But they won’t come back. Small numbers. Some old, some looking for business, some of the ones that left most recently. Many of those want to come back. But most won’t. They might live in both places; here and there.”
“It’s good that some come back. We need the push. We’re like a wagon stuck in a ditch. We need a strong push to get us back on the road” says Carlos Alexandro. “I’d love to go study in the U.S. Who knows? Someday.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I wouldn’t leave just to leave. But to go to school. That’s different.”
***
We keep the smokestack in sight as we walk and talk on our approach to the old Flor de Sagua (now Mariana Grajales). Back in Esteban’s time, all the sugar mills of the area belonged to the same clan: the Oña Ribalta and their relatives, the Amezagas. Esteban could not remember the name of the owners of the Flor the Sagua when he talked to Miguel. He did, however, remember that it was a strange name. Amezaga is certainly a strange name.
We stride into town from the grasslands through a rusty gate, moving between the small wooden houses that form the perimeters of small Cuban towns. Towns like this one started as bateys, company towns linked to a sugar mill. Only a few ruins remain of the Mariana Grajales mill, as is the case for most of the mills that roared during the heyday of sugar production. A park now stands where the heart of the old mill stood. The smokestack juts skyward, a white monolith that begs for some 2001: A Space Odyssey background music. To the east of the smokestack, in ruins, stands the barrancones, the long room, shot-gun structures with small dim window high up the walls and sparsely furnished with wooden chairs and tables, where over two hundred slaves at any one time spent what ironically and inaccurately would be called their “free” time alongside Esteban. Remnants of the walls stand like desiccated, sun-bleached skeletons left over from the lives grounded into ashes by slavery.
He ran from here. Where we are standing now. He was a “field negro” as Malcolm X would have said. He longed to escape his life. He was a work animal that could not be eaten if slaughtered so they would not kill him when caught. His value came from being alive. He was a productive resource, not a consumable resource. He would be tortured enough to encourage subservience but not to cripple or disable. Whipped tied to a ladder maybe. Head through pillory. Feet through stocks. Metal collar on a metal head frame chained to a wall. Or maybe shackles on the arms and feet and hanging from them in unnatural position. Just enough to make him wish for death.
Near the manor house stands an old whitewashed wooden chapel. I ask a passing güajiro how old it is but he’s not sure.
“Older than me,” he says, “and I’m an old man.”
In the shade of a ceiba tree, out in front of the chapel, a marble commemorative marker declares “Ingenio Flor de Sagua, acción combativa, 31 de Marzo, 1896.” A battle took place here; a clash between Spaniards and rebel forces. Esteban was a Mambí fighter by the time this skirmish took place. Maybe he took part in the assault on the sugar mill where he suffered, chained like an animal. Maybe he chopped off the head of the overseer who beat him like the slave he was; who dragged him by the neck to the torture chambers after his first attempt at freedom. That would have been satisfying, I’ll bet. There is justice in that. I look at the date, March 31. We are four days shy of the 120th anniversary of the event. Space and time converge for a split second and the ground trembles a faint memory.
***
Flor de Sagua lived vividly in Esteban’s memory. He “worked” a variety of jobs at the sugar mill before he escaped. It is unclear how old he was when he made it out. Miguel does not provide an exact age.
“He was under twenty by a good bit,” Miguel told me, probably remembering the hundreds of pages of notes which never made it into the book. Miguel adds, “Maybe early teens.”
Almost all his memories of life as a slave in the barrancones are rooted in his experiences at Flor de Sagua. Here he “worked” side by side with slaves from all over Africa, learning about the depth and breadth of Cuba's African roots.
In the plantations there were many blacks from different nations. Each one had its own traits. The Congos were dark, though you also had many lighter, fair-skinned mulattoes. They were short on the whole. The Mandingoes were slightly reddish colored. Tall and very strong. I swear on my mother’s grave they were crooks and a bad bunch. They always went their own way. The Gangas were good folks. Short and freckle faced. Many were cimarrones. The Carabalis were fierce like the Musongo Congos. They didn’t kill pigs except on Sunday and the days of Easter. They were very good at business. They ended up killing pigs to sell, and they didn’t even eat them. Because of that a song was made for them that went, “Carabali very needy, kills a pig every Sunday.” I got to know all these newly arrived Africans better after slavery ended. (24)
He smiled remembering the games that the slaves played in the taverns and barrancones. He recalled a game, “the cracker,” in which several probably not freshly baked salted crackers “were placed on the wooden counter or any board, and the men had to hit the crackers with their dicks to see who could break the crackers. The one who broke the crackers won.” (16) Now, I cannot say that I have ever tried to break a cracker with my dick but the task, with the modern saltines in mind, does not seem to require a particularly hardy member. The crackers at the Flor the Sagua must have been hell to chew.
Another game, the jug game, sounded like a follow up activity for those who had not mangled their dicks breaking crackers. “They would take a big jug with a hole in the top and stick their doohickey through it. The one who reached the bottom was the winner. The bottom was covered with a little layer of ash so that when the man took his dick out, it was easy to see if he had touched the bottom or not.” (17) It had to be a letdown, after wiping the ash off your doohickey to settle into the more mundane card games, like mico and monte, or tejo or mayombe, which were linked to the religions. He probably smiled at Miguel when he recounted that as “[s]trange as it may seem, blacks had fun in the barracoons.” (14)
***
By nine in the morning the sun approaches being merciless. We craved the taste of something cold and hope that the corner store in front of the park stocked any flavor of Ciego Montero or, at the very least, cold water. The store, with a sparse but steady stream of customers, and a café, where a dozen men playing dominos and mingling, were the only two points of activity in the center of town. I put my pack on the cement outside the store and Alejandro goes inside with the express mandate of obtaining the coldest drink possible.
After a few minutes, I walk into the store. He is taking too long. He turns to me and frowns. The clerk behind the counter moves her gaze from Alejandro to me and asks, “Frio? We don’t have anything cold.”
“Anything liquid, then,” I say to her.
She pulls three Ciego Montero orange flavor drinks from the wooden shelf behind her and I hand her some Cuban pesos. Back outside, I let my back slide down the side of the store wall until I am sitting, eventually cross-legged, next to my backpack. I cock my head back, letting the warm orange soft drink mix with the protein bar in my mouth, both exploding with contradictory tastes.
“Buenísimo,” I say out loud. Better to carry the weight in my stomach than on my back.
Maykel talks to a qüajiro in a straw hat straddling a bicycle just on the side of the short wall surrounding the store. His skin, the güajiro’s skin, looks as worn and rugged as my leather book satchel back home. I wanted to touch it. He points up the road that ran in front of the store.
“Follow the railroad line,” he says. “I’ve never been that way but I’m sure they’ll take you to Unidad and then ask there.”
After pondering for a few minutes, we walk over to a nearby domino table.
“Let’s get some other opinions,” says Maykel.
“We’re heading to El Purio. Calabazar. That area. How do we do it without touching la carretera?” asks Maykel to no one in particular but making sure that everyone playing at the table hears.
The question generates a flurry of discussion with a great deal of pointing and gesturing. Eventually, they all agree, roughly. We must head towards Unidad (Unidad Proletaria), another small nearly dismantled ex-sugar mill town not too far away. How far away, though, was not entirely clear. The nasal yet booming voice of one tall güajiro wearing a straw cowboy hat, dyed dark brown from years of absorbing salty sweat, summarized the wisdom of the crowd. We needed to go up the street. He points, stretching his arm as if it could reach all the way to Unidad. Past the front of the store, hang a right at the last house, and there, find a path heading parallel to the railroad tracks. Once on the path, we keep the tracks on the right. There is no way, he assures us, of losing the pista. The others nod slowly in agreement.
The path looks welcoming, shaded by a canopy of green tunneling into the distance. We are inching our way to enjoy this perfect shade, when suddenly a man working in the front yard of the very last house in the area calls out.
“Oye.” He walks towards us waving us off with both arms. “Don’t take the path. Take the línea. Too much mud up ahead. It’s been raining and it doesn’t drain well.” He waves for us to follow him, leading us through his vegetable garden, green and red with tomatoes, cucumbers, and what looks like potatoes or some other common Cuban tuber. The railroad line stretches from East to West no more than ten feet behind his wooden fence. He points.
“That way. The path will cross it in a kilometer or two. Take the path when it crosses and stay on it.”
When Esteban first tried to escape from Flor de Sagua, he did so in dramatic fashion. He threw a rock at the head of the overseer, dazed him, got a running start, and managed to avoid the crowd that responded to the screams as he frantically ran into the woods. But they found him “like a little lamb.” They tortured him with iron and leather, hoping to teach him a lesson. But he did try again and this time he left the overseer in a heap of his own blood.
He roamed for days without a sense of direction, he told Miguel. He remembers roaming up and down hills, probably the same hills that we see in the distance now. He walked nonstop, making sure he was in the clear of the stocks and shackles that awaited him if caught. But this time, he knew, he could not get caught. This time would be different.
***
About two kilometers after starting on the tracks, we veer left onto a dry red dirt path and, soon after, we see the smokestack of the old Unidad sugar mill and quicken our pace. Through a simple waist-high rusted gate, we leave the dirt path and enter Unidad. The wooden houses of the batey – some covered in flaking bright colors peeling like sunburns, others shining with new coats, like cabanas in some Bahamian village – line the street and lead to the center of town. There the old smokestack stands as the last remaining relic from the mill's glory days. These days, fewer than a thousand residents call it home; but in its heyday, it hummed with incessant activity, serving as the center of the universe for those who lived here. A recently refurbished Catholic church with a Protestant-looking steeple stands next to the tracks and gives the town an uncommon look. We ask two men walking alongside their bicycles about the route. Faces turn East and arms levitate with fingers extending like perfectly coordinated marionettes.
“Head to Vitoria on the tracks and ask there,” they advise. We follow their instructions, keeping close to the tracks, and head to Vitoria.
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