Many towns on the southern coast, left without so much as a garrison for defense, fell quickly to the rebel army's rear guard. The Havana government was quick to condemn what they claimed were 'barbaric pillagings' of loyalist towns. Captain Armando Amorin, then a lieutenant in command of two insurgent divisions, recalled in a 1967 interview with Prensa Latina that the town of Tiburon fell in one night and without a single life being lost on either side.

-- from Nicolas Sifuentes'
A Critical History of the Cuban Revolution, 1971
      

The blonde-haired woman awakens to the dawn, to the strands of light that cling like cobwebs to the dry air, and the tightly wound ball, expanding and contracting, pressing inside her abdomen. She feels it first as small as a mosquito prick or a single red coffee bean. It grows in her belly while she sleeps, a condensed and bitter cud that sours her mouth and which she calls the taste of her dreams. She rolls over on her side, hoping the pain, like gasses, will belch away. Noticing, first-thing, her husband’s side of the bed, empty, away from the window, the coldest part of the house in the morning; maybe something she’s known all along, from the moment her eyes open, and her mind after imagining itself in her childhood, between four gray walls, a palm frond roof and a lamp made out of corn husks places her into this particular room and this particular life. 
      It’s worse today, she thinks. Worse today than yesterday, but not entirely new. When it died inside of me, when it came out of me dead, all skin and sinew, blue and black. And he never said a word to me. 
     The woman rolls out of the bed, tossing blankets away behind her, ripping through the fine mesh of the mosquito netting which holds fast to a corner of the mattress. She pulls her thin nightgown around her thick hips and waist, grabs a housecoat from a peg on the bathroom door and drapes it over her shoulders, covering her bruised breasts. She opens the bedroom door, deliberately, letting it creak open on uneven hinges. The living room is empty and she sees out to the porch where a black mongrel lies, chewing on its matted tail. She finds a half cup of coffee on the kitchen table. It’s cold and black and slides thickly down her throat. 
     The woman rises slowly from the chair. Her knees jerk beneath her as she tries to walk, her mouth fills again with tepid coffee and the bitter brew which has grown more violent on the way up from her stomach. She clasps both hands over her mouth, doubles over, twice, runs around the door which appears as a rectangular light, dull and yellow. She reaches the porch without a drop spilling, thrusts herself over the rickety porch railing and opens her mouth, as if to breathe again, or spit, but later she won’t remember what happens, or even the sound the ball in her stomach makes when it hits the red clay. The mongrel waits until the woman goes inside to lap up the milky puddle.

They had informed him two weeks ago that the town would have to be left undefended. 
     “You must recognize our priorities,” said the young lieutenant of the national guard while he chewed the end of a short cigar. His division had been assigned to the forty mile stretch between Ranchuelo and Tiburon, but his new orders had placed him at the head of what was being called a strategic withdrawal. “We are prepared to give up the interior, for now. But if Havana falls, they’ll have won the war.” 
     “If you leave, what chance do we have.” The doctor held up a hand-drawn petition, six pages of appended signatures and his own. “Here, a list of those who stand behind the government, behind you. We are willing to fight, but without you, we don’t stand a chance.” 
     “We can use all the hands we can get,” said the lieutenant, grimly. “How many of these men can go with us?” 
     “Our families, our homes are here. We cannot leave.” 
     “You are the mayor of this town. Your loyalties to it are understood. But we have a greater responsibility. We can leave you a few rifles, some men.” With his thumb he jabbed at a spot on the chart, spread out over the table. “We lost two thousand men outside of Santa Clara last week. I tell you, that Guevara is the devil.” The lieutenant clenched his teeth to keep from spitting. 
     “He’s not the devil,” said the doctor. “He’s a son of a bitch.”

I see him from behind the fence, through the stalks which poke out from he sticky dirt and grow over my head. I hear him call me, like the wind, only not so sad as the wind sounds. Peeking in at me when I climb the mango tree and eat the mangos with the red, ripe skin. I feel him, beside the stream, warm like the morning, and soft. Then papi calls me. Lupe! Lupe! I am running. Beside the fence, the yellow haired corn. It burns with a blue fire now. No smoke. Papi waves his arm, he sees the corn on fire. Lupe! Lupe! He watches me run, follows me into the house, through the door, like a smell.

The doctor knew the time had come when he saw the corn field ablaze. He felt no fear, though he had feared nothing else in his life so much as the prospect of giving this one up. What he felt now was more properly relief, relief that if his world should end, had to end, it should happen now and in this way. 
     He barred the front door to his house with two sofas and the kitchen table, turned out all the lights in the house with the exception of a single kerosene lantern which he placed on a stool, in the center of the living room. He sat behind it, stiffly, in a kitchen chair, a rusty double barreled shotgun grasped tightly in his bleached fists. 
     The doctor’s wife looked out at him from the gap of the bedroom door. Their daughter Lupe, whom people said possessed the best of both of her parents’ bad traits, crept out from behind her mother’s shadow and skirt. The doctor saw the little girl’s stare, assumed she was fixed on him, but had he been more careful would have noticed the black pupils enchanted by the curving smoke from the lantern and the shapes it drew, like a magic finger, in soot on the white ceiling. His wife’s face reflected the darkness of the house; he couldn’t tell if she were scared or in pain, or like him felt nothing at all, or worse, an emptiness which clung to your insides like a bad cold and fought you to get out. The doctor reached for a tall, clear bottle beneath the chair, took a long swig and swallowed hard to keep the emptiness in. 
     The rebels had not planned on fighting. They had been content to wait him out, sprawled in tired heaps on his lawn, or the porch, their ponchos and packs put to use as pillows. After two hours, according to the clock in the doctor’s kitchen, the youngest member of the band which had surrounded the doctor’s house banged on the front door with the butt of his carbine. The shotgun rocked in the old man’s hand, as if awake, his finger tight on the trigger. 
     The young man spoke as if the door wasn’t there. His voice cut through the house’s dark silence. “Companero, we need your to take a look. We have a man here, hurt, shot in the arm a week ago. We’re thinking it’s infected.” 
     The old doctor said nothing, raised the shotgun to chest level, estimated the height of his adversary on the other side of the green door, a man he’d never seen and didn’t plan on seeing. His skin was as hot and tight as the lantern’s wick. He wiped his upper lip with his tongue. 
     “We’re not here to hurt you, doctor. We only need your help. And maybe a few things, too. Some bread or crackers, maybe some ham. Any water we can use, doctor.” The voice on the outside of the door never lost its steadiness or warmth. 
     The doctor’s wife walked up behind him. She placed her hand on his shoulder first, her skin smooth next to his, more white and new. The old doctor’s hands shook and he tightened his fists around the gun’s stock to stop them. 
     “Our shelves are full, Pepe. Anything they want, they’ll just take it.” 
     The doctor laid the shotgun on the floor, as one would lay a dead body in a coffin. He did not look back, just trudged to the door with heavy feet and pressed the right side of his face against it. He saw his enemy for the first time through a widening crack in the soft wood: a boy, he thought, in a green shirt and pants too big for his belt to hold up. 
     The young man noticed him immediately, slouched so their eyes could meet. 
     “That’s the man there,” he said and pointed to a mulatto on the porch, his arm wrapped in a bloody swaddle. “He needs a doctor. It’s urgent.” 
     “Yes, urgent,” said the doctor. “Just one moment.” He looked behind him. His wife had disappeared into their bedroom, not bothering with the lights. He saw his daughter, peeking out from behind the door frame. Wisps of sunny hair gave away her location. 
     “Lupe, go with your mother. Go to sleep.” The doctor’s voice was loud, but not fierce and had the girl been older, perhaps she would have recognized this. She curled the ends of her lips into a smile, a small one, then closed the door behind her.

I hear mami breathing, I hear her heart in bed. It’s cold tonight with mami. Voices in the other room, voices I never hear, loud laughing, or crying. Sometimes mami cries at night when I fall asleep on her belly. I can’t sleep with the noise. I close my eyes and press against them to see the shapes, like mami taught them. First green, then blue, then white. It is white, but not white like the flowers. It is white and not white, like the sun. I can hear them, all night, in the kitchen. Then I am moving, beneath me, I can smell the horses and the men. He holds me, rough hands and hot, like the sun in the morning. I am moving. I see the stars. They are crying.

The blonde-haired woman knows it before she gets up in the morning, before the ball swells up inside her, before she has to throw up the poison that makes her sick every day. And then it happens anyway. She finishes before her husband returns, from where she doesn’t know. And now her mouth tastes like bitterness, as if bitterness were a flavor poured out of a little brown bottle.       They are both silent at the breakfast table. Her husband does not look up from his eggs. The phone rings and surprises them both. Her husband answers it, then after a minute, slams it down and walks back to his breakfast. He finishes it in two bites, then drains two fingers of can liquor from a worn pewter cup. 
     “That was Francisco,” he says. His voice startles her, she rarely hears it. “Last night, they were over at his house. Said they needed medical help. All they needed was two bottles of cane liquor. 
     “He can’t remember after that, until his wife woke him up, sobbing. They took Lupe, can you believe it? It’s what they wanted all along. Those bastards should burn in hell. And then they talk about the war being over. . . .” 
     She closes her eyes and pretends he is gone. Then he is gone. She walks through the empty house, like a sleeper would do in a dream, dragging her fingers over the cracks in the walls, feeling the emptiness of the house. She thinks, it hurts the same, to lose this one. This one is in heaven, but it hurts the same. She was alive and they took her, and it hurts the same. 
      The mongrel trots in, a torn rag doll in his mouth. The woman takes it form him, cradles it against her chest, wipes thick clots of mud from the cornsilk hair.