Once, as a child, María Isabel had accompanied her father to the city center of Camagüey to deliver baskets of a plantation owner’s coffee yield to a market vendor. She watched wonderstruck as wealthy Spanish families paced the city’s promenade, the women with their parasols and flouncing petticoats of fine linen, the children playing with hoops and sticks, and carrying schoolbook bundles. At the market, she watched enslaved women trail white women and gather their purchases, how the Spanish women would point and the Black women would gather, their dresses more like the countryside smocks she was used to.

She’d asked her father then, pointing to her skin, “Where are the people like me?” He’d hushed her with a smack. Children did not speak their minds, he reminded her. Children did not ask, children answered. Children did as they were told.

Now she knew the answer. The women were here, in these fields, some free and some not, some passing as creole. The not-so-whispered dictate of enslavers: mix to mejorar la raza. Spanish men, your violence is a favor, your violence is bettering the race of this colony. So that someone like her could be told, you are not Black. You are mulata and mulata is mejor, and maybe your future generations will blanquear, closer and closer to white, take on the dictate as their own. Some plantations kept enslaved people, and peasants who earned their keep on small plots of land tended others. For their own reasons, the peasants and enslaved people, the guajiro farmers and criollo landowners, they all hated Queen Isabel II.

In the final days of war, the reports through the provinces grew more and more dire: public executions, entire villages burned to the ground, formerly free Black farmers forced into slavery. People were hungry, famished. Disease spread and wiped out whole families, whole prisons filled with mambises fighters. Their heroes were dying.

And still each day during lunch, for an hour, Antonio and María Isabel sat beneath the shade of banana leaves for reading lessons. Antonio read her poetry from Cuba’s orators and political theory from European philosophers. Karl Marx, other men. They often debated. He taught her to spell her name, held a quill in her shaking hand as she formed loops and curves over a small scroll, and though she could not decipher the letters, she saw in the marks a kind of art, a kind of beauty.

“I have a special reading,” he said one day. “Today, in the afternoon. A treat for the workshop.”

“You’ll not read from Les Misérables?” They were on the last volume, and its reading seemed the only event worth anticipating in those dark days when every sound of hooves brought fear of more loss.

“Yes, but first, a special reading.”