—Don‘t give her any ideas. She‘s already mad at me because I don‘t let her get her way. That‘s what happens to girls at her age, they turn against their parents. We might not share blood, but she knows that I love her like she was one of my own.

—So she‘s not your daughter?

—She‘s more my daughter than the two I left behind in El Salvador. After all the stinky diapers I had to buy for her.

Oswaldo pinched the young girl‘s cheek with his short stubby fingers and turned back to attend the early morning crowd.

It didn‘t take long before Don Chan claimed the head of the dinner table and torched cigars in front of Santo in temptation. To smell one brought back the dick-whipping, loud-talking, and backyard spitting of the men-only circles in the fields of Los Llanos; they sat around campfires, not shaving for days to show their solidarity to los barbudos, those bearded men, who seemed to have done the impossible by overthrowing Batista and pushing out the Americans from Cuban soil. Los barbudos, who in 1959 organized a group of Dominican exiles and Cubans and landed in D.R., to find that peasants turned them in; rural farmers decapitated los barbudos, handing over the heads in burlap bags to Trujillo in exchange for a bounty of a thousand dollars.

—It‘s a scar on my heart, Don Chan told Santo as they sat at the kitchen table waiting for Esperanza to return from the bodega so she could serve them dinner. —A hungry man will sell his mother if you give him the right price for her. —We Live in Happiness Thanks to Trujillo? You think people believed that bullshit?

—Remember God Is in Heaven—Trujillo Is on Earth? Santo added.

—Be careful. You say it too much, even you‘ll start believing it.

—Don‘t worry, Papà, he‘s been dead for over thirty years. The worms got him now.

—You ever wonder, what if? Don Chan asked Santo.

—What if what?

—What if that group of Cubans would‘ve succeeded in overthrowing Trujillo in forty-seven? Castro was part of that group. What if Castro met us in Los Llanos before he had met Che, then maybe Cuba‘s history would‘ve been ours.

—I wasn‘t even born then, Santo said, and leaned his chair back to check the clock. He was late for work. He was hungry.

—What if those men would‘ve come to us in Los Llanos, for help. We would‘ve protected los barbudos from all those crazy farmers who were ready to chop their heads off. Wouldn‘t we?

—Yeah, and then years later, we‘d have Castro running our shit. Big improvement for sure.

—I‘m serious, Santo. Try and imagine for a minute, us with Castro, working together. We‘d have taken Trujillo‘s fortune and given it back to the people. Just like in Cuba—we‘d have access to doctors, to the university, to the beaches.

—Oh yeah, public beaches in Cuba. Great idea. Makes it easier for Cubans to escape by swimming to Miami. You can‘t change history, Papà.