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La Habana, with its manor after manor of Spanish families, looked toward the revolt with indifference, and it appeared more and more likely that the Queen would come down hard on any rebellion. Generals of the militias came and went, supplanted when their ideals became a liability. Though by the time rumors of guerrilla fighting had spread to their side of the island, so, too, had stories of infighting. But then it was all anyone would talk about. María Isabel had been too hardened by her father’s recent death, from a demonic yellow fever that consumed him within weeks, to notice at first, to care much. About men training in groups to join others headed west toward La Habana. Other workers talked about rebel groups rising up against Spanish loyalists.
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But it wasn’t just the newspaper’s recommendation that convinced them to give up blood sport. True that since La Aurora had expounded the uncivilized nature of cock- and bullfighting, the number of participants had diminished. She thought of Antonio’s words: Study has become a habit among them today they leave behind the cockfight in order to read a newspaper or book now they scorn the bullring today it is the theater, the library, and the centers of good association where they are seen in constant attendance. María Isabel walked this path home, one that snaked through the shadows and gave her brief reprieves from the punishing sun. She was tired.Ī single dirt road in this town led past the factory’s gate and continued on to the sugar plantation a mile down, both owned by a creole family, the Porteños. She imagined the layers of brown melding into one another endlessly-desks becoming walls, leaves becoming eyes, and sprouting arms moving in succession until everything and everyone were part of the same physical poetry, the same song made of sweat.
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The bell would ring and she’d look at the pile of cigars, smooth as clay, surprised she’d rolled them all. To fulfill their obligations, to fulfill their obligations. The ache would grow into a throb as the hours passed so that, by the end of the workday, she could barely lift her head. “‘… Just go into a workshop that employs two hundred, and you will be astonished to observe the utmost order, you see that all are encouraged by a common goal: to fulfill their obligations…’”Īlready a prickling warmth spread across María Isabel’s shoulders. María Isabel picked through her stack of leaves, setting aside those of lesser quality for filler. “‘The order and good morals observed by our cigar makers in the workshops, and the enthusiasm for learning-are these not obvious proof that we are advancing?’” “ La Aurora, Friday, first of June, 1866,” he began. He cleared his throat as he raised the newspaper. Next to the silo, a ladder flanked the chair where Antonio, the lector, sat. A wooden silo at the center held its sun-dried leaves, darkened, papery slivers the rollers would carry to their stations. The factory wasn’t large, by Cuban standards: only a hundred or so workers, enough to roll for one plantation a mile away. María Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dust she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver-sunlight would dry the cigars. Rollers, allowed as many cigars as they liked, struck matches and took fat puffs with hands tented over flames. She placed the softened leaf on the layers that preceded it, the long veins in a pile beside. María Isabel ran her tongue along another leaf’s gummy underside, the earthy bitterness as familiar a taste by now as if it were born of her. These men of letters express a warm fondness for workers whose aspirations to such knowledge-science, literature, and moral principle-fuel Cuba’s progress.” “Gentlemen of the workshop,” he said, “we begin today with a letter of great import from the esteemed editors of La Aurora. The lector did the same from his platform over the workers, except in his hands he held not browned leaves but a folded newspaper. At six thirty, when all the cigar rollers sat at their desks before their piles of leaves and the foreman rang the bell, María Isabel bent her head, traced a sign of the cross over her shoulders, and took the first leaf in her hands.