In the kitchen, we sit and wait for the hours to pass. Maydelis joins when she’s finished smoking. The goats are bleating outside, and I can hear two people shouting in the distance. I can’t tell if they are fighting, or joking and laughing. The kitchen smells like cumin and something else, something I can’t identify, something ancient.

10

THAT BOMBS WOULD RAIN

Dolores

Camagüey, 1959

The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, his two-year-old daughter learned to say coffee. She sat in the wooden high chair that he built himself, and Dolores had just placed the cafetera on the stove and turned up the gas. Little Elena wiggled her hands in the air. She said, “Mamá, café!” except she couldn’t pronounce her f’s yet, so it sounded more like cah-weh.

Dolores laughed. Daniel laughed. He readied for work cutting caña as Dolores served three little cups of espresso: for her, Daniel, and their older daughter, seven-year-old Carmen. Dolores dipped her pinky into her cup and placed it in Elena’s mouth. The toddler latched on to the tip of her mother’s finger—Dolores had weaned her last year, but the little mouth didn’t forget how to suckle with abandon. Elena, true Cuban, loved coffee at two years old.

Daniel’s political convictions had emerged only a couple of years before. At first, Dolores feared the outcome. But as Daniel grew angrier in those years, she longed for those moments he’d sit on a stool in one corner of their two-room house, too busy fiddling with the radio dials to pay much attention to her. Radio Rebelde, the underground channel, consumed him. It originally broadcast out of Oriente, hours from Camagüey, but the rebels had set up satellite stations. Daniel kept the volume low, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, but Dolores caught snippets as she toiled around the house. Rebels and resistance, Cuba awakening, the people joining the movement.

Maybe in the Sierra Maestra. In her town in Camagüey, things were quieter. Rural Camagüey’s news: that Carmen had slashed her finger with a scissor while cutting paper dolls out of newspaper, that Elena spilled black beans and rice all over the floor. Exhausted. Dolores feared what everyone feared—President Batista’s men coming in the night, knocking down their door. President Batista’s men with hands over her girls’ mouths, President Batista’s men demanding she dig her own grave. She knew the stories. She knew how fast an entire family disappeared in the night, dissipated like vapor. She knew how easily someone could erase her, knew she barely existed at all.