But he is still the father of Cuba, El Padre de la Patria, is he not? Was he a chosen figure or did he imagine himself into existence? My grandfather came to Cuba on a bizarre and solitary quest to interview him for a New York newspaper and confirm he was alive — and he later wrote a book about it—Going to See the Hero, have you read it? I’ll send you a copy.
El Quin and the ex-slave, his name was Nicodemo, were moving toward a mountain they could not avoid climbing without exposure to a Spanish fort below. The horse would probably not make it but Nicodemo said they could try and he led the horse upward as they chopped brush to clear their way. Fifty yards up the horse fell twenty feet, rolling, snapping trees, ripping off its harness, rising up, falling and rolling again, you don’t see that every day, scattering El Quin’s belongings and his second pistol and ammunition. The horse righted itself, pushed downhill through the trees and ran onto the guinea-grass plain, gone forever, so long horse.
Nicodemo retrieved pistol and ammo and they rolled up the strewn clothing and carried it on their backs — slipping, falling, slashed by briars, crawling over boulders on all fours — emerging onto a mesa that was a relief from incline but opened them to the punishment of a scorching Cuban sun that could quickly crisp El Quin. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put on his straw hat and they walked two more hours before seeing Mambí troops. The troops had halted next to a great brick tower, taller than any building Quinn had seen in Cuba outside of Havana and whose function he could not imagine; but he would learn that the tower was all that remained of a sugar mill burned by the rebels. It was topped off by the slaveholder’s crow’s nest where, from daybreak to nightfall, a lookout had watched 360 degrees of fields for trails being made in the high grass by runaway slaves who sometimes chanced death rather than live another day creating sugar for the Spanish swine.
Quinn and Nicodemo walked into the midst of twenty Mambí cavalry soldiers, horses tethered in a grove of trees. An officer with a full beard, wearing a hat, an open, high-collared linen jacket, leggings, and a pistol with belt and bandolier, greeted them.
“Capitán Díaz Rodón,” he said, “I welcome you to Cuba Libre.”
He released Nicodemo from duty and Quinn offered the ex-slave his gratitude, which he acknowledged with a brief nod. The Capitán said Quinn should rest, take water, eat something; my troops will protect you while we are in this territory where Spaniards have been seen. He would send a message to President Céspedes to say Quinn had arrived. Did the Capitán know a Lieutenant Castellón? He did. He is an aide to the president. Quinn had a message for him from his wife in New York who has raised much money for the Mambí cause. Capitán Díaz said they would not go directly to the presidential camp, near Contramestre, but would jog west to cut Spanish telegraph wires between Palma Soriano and Jiguaní. Later they would meet General Máximo Gómez’s battalion and move toward a town with entrenched Spanish troops and try to lure them out from their barricades. President Céspedes thought it might be bracing for Señor Quinn, and good for what he was writing, to see our troops in combat. You can watch from well behind the lines and be safe, if you keep your head down, but not too far down or you will miss the battle.
Natalia found her brother in the library with Quinn and Alfie, who had retreated there hours earlier to wait for Holtz to return. Alfie had been perusing topographical maps of Oriente Province, educating himself on the land, a modest preparation for flying guns into this territory, when Natalia said to her brother, you have a visitor in the casa del ingenio. And Holtz led the visiting pilgrims to the sugar mill where Arsenio Zamora, the charismatic bandit, was standing alone by the great gear of a grinder, a picture of anxiety in process, violating Fidel’s first commandment that thou shalt not stay anywhere that can be surrounded. But the public enemy was here on a mission Fidel had sanctioned. And he stared at Holtz and his entourage of three as they entered the mill.
Arsenio, an essential figure in the revolution’s strategic defense in the Sierra, had accumulated not five to ten wives but twenty, and at last count, seventy-five children. He was forty-one but from the rugged life in the Sierra he looked sixty to Quinn, a long, wrinkled face, a full head of hair whose blackness had survived climate and age, with eyebrows and mustache more gray than black, the tash not cultivated but under control, perhaps a vanity marker, or a less intrusive brush for his harem. He wore a battered black leather hat, not quite a fedora, and smoked a dark brown cigar.
He had been born on the seven-thousand-acre Holtz estate in a small village of Precarista squatters that two generations of Holtzes had never tried to remove. He began as a young cane-cutter and laborer for Holtz padre, became a cane truck driver, grew into a leader of his village by his late twenties. Smart and aggressive, revered and feared as he was, he evolved into an anti-poverty outlaw. Many of the Precaristas were illiterates who lived without electricity or running water, and their villages served as sanctuaries for outlaws. Quinn would hear the region compared to the wild west in America, which his grandfather had written about in the years after the Civil War.
Before Fidel arrived in Oriente with his eighty-two expeditionaries Arsenio was already an ally, and had hunkered down in Niquero for two days with a hundred men, and trucks loaded with guns and supplies for the invaders. But the fate of the invaders was not to land at Niquero but to sink into a swamp near Belic. Most of them were quickly shot on the run by Batista forces, but Fidel eluded the troops and made it to the Sierra with Che Guevara, then his brother Raúl, and in short order a dozen altogether, with Arsenio’s banditry and leadership at his disposal. Arsenio knew every peasant who had food, knew where to find water, knew every road, and roads that were not roads, every impasse and cliff. He offered Fidel a hundred men but without arms, and Fidel was grateful, but who needs the gunless in battle? He accepted a few helpers from Arsenio; and the outlaw chief also put three of his sons to work with shotguns as escopeteros, robbing travelers to feed the rebels.
When Holtz called Moncho to have someone meet his plane with the guns, Arsenio was the man, and he and three others were alongside when the plane stopped on the grass runway. In ten minutes they had offloaded guns and ammo onto an old Dodge truck. Within twelve minutes they were rattling over a narrow road through a cane field into the dense brush of the forest’s edge into a village where a dozen or, if necessary, two dozen human mules would backpack the weapons up to the lofty, new Cuba Libre.
In the sugar mill Holtz told the pilgrims to wait and he walked to Arsenio and asked did he want to talk to the visitors. Arsenio said no, who are they? I heard of a periodista who claimed to be married to my cousin but I have no such cousin.
Holtz, who knew nothing of what Quinn had set in motion in La Marea del Portillo, said no, she’s my cousin, Renata Suárez Otero, very close to the family for years. From Havana, and she worked with the Directorio. Those guns we just flew here, she sent. She had also negotiated with Alfie for guns for the Directorio but now most of her Directorio friends are dead. She wants to join the revolution here. She is a brave woman.
“Women can do some things,” Arsenio said, “but there are few here, very few. I will ask about this.”