The Rum Chronicles

There were four narrow beds in Luisa's five-room house, two light blankets and a few sheets, no defense from the unusual cold that had moved into the area. But that first night hardly anyone but the children slept. Benjamin, the patriarch, had his guitar with him, and after some of us ate (goat, rice, red beans, and ñame, a potato relative), he began playing and singing. One year older than Fidel Castro, Benjamin can make music longer than Fidel can make speeches. His iron-black skin is weathered from a life of field labor; every ounce of fat on his body has been worked off, leaving round biceps built up on his skinny arms like two mangos cleaving to bare branches. He was wearing one pair of thick-framed glasses atop another, explaining he couldn't see much through either pair alone. Well into the morning, as people dozed off in their chairs, Benjamin and a group of his children and grandchildren sang old songs about bony women, sex organs, licentious men, dancing, and the Virgin of Charity.

Just a rough plank wall away, the pigs awoke in their pen, grunting and squealing in their eagerness to trot out and eat before rolling in the mud under a stand of banana trees. To guard against animal rustlers, rampant throughout the countryside, Luisa hid all of her goats, pigs, and chickens behind a tall split-log fence, virtually inside the house, every night.

By midday I was desperate to bathe and wash my hair, so Luisa scooped a pan of water from the barrel behind the house. She heated the pan over a gas burner and then poured the hot water in with cold in a bucket. It made precious little bath water and did nothing to abate the grossness of standing shivering on a dirt floor in a cramped wooden stall redolent with barnyard stink and filled with insects dangling from spiders' webs.

Nevertheless I realized that I, the pampered American, was being allowed to use more water than anyone else -- and it wasn't me making the mile-long trek to the nearest creek to fill two wooden buckets. The middle brother, Francisco, who spends most of his time at his mother's house, has that onerous job. He trudges back to the house with a branch-yoke across his shoulders and the buckets hanging from either end. It used to be he could transport water and anything else in a little cart pulled by his horse Letty, his pride and joy. But Letty was stolen from this house two years ago while Francisco and Luisa were ten miles down the mountainside at Rita's house, lost in revelry at her daughter's quinceanera. Luisa had sought help from a nearby babalao, who "saw" Letty not far from where she was taken. The babalao urged Francisco to get to the horse quickly, before she would be killed and eaten. Francisco was pretty sure who had Letty, but he never found her.

Almost everyone from Julián's past came up the mountain the second night of our stay. A DJ arrived, too, a friend of the teenagers in the family, with a playlist of about two reggaeton albums. This was disappointing, since I'd been looking forward to hearing the latest Cuban hip-hop and maybe even some oldies, like my favorite rap song, the famous tirade against racism in Cuba, "Quién tiró la tiza." All the DJ had was some Don Omar material heard even in Communist Party members' houses these days.

That night was also bad for conversation, because everyone except the Jehovah's Witnesses (principally Julián's middle sister, Elena, and several of her in-laws) was very drunk. One of Elena's daughters-in-law did ask me how she could contact church members in Miami, and Elena requested a Spanish-language Bible. I can't say I encouraged them to discuss their religion, but they showed no inclination to do so anyway. Elena doesn't join in many family gatherings, and not only because her husband has been incapacitated since suffering a stroke three years ago. I would later learn that this church, which recognizes Jehovah and not Fidel Castro (or any other earthly leader) as the ultimate social and political authority, is frequently persecuted or ostracized, so members stay to themselves.

Julián is glad his sister has found religion, despite the gulf between her and the rest of the family, even if it hasn't meant the healing of her husband or the paving of the muddy, mosquito-infested dirt trail outside her house, or any material improvement in her life. "She has peace," Julián says. "She thinks her religion gives her strength."