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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. The lector did

the same from his platform over the workers, except in his

hands he held not browned leaves but a folded newspaper.

“Gentlemen of the workshop,” he said, “we begin today

with a letter of great import from the esteemed editors of La

Aurora. These men of letters express a warm fondness for

workers whose aspirations to such knowledge—science,

literature, and moral principle—fuel Cuba’s progress.”

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. She placed the softened leaf on the layers

that preceded it, the long veins in a pile beside. Rollers,

allowed as many cigars as they liked, struck matches and took

fat puffs with hands tented over flames. The air thickened.

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. So she hid her cough. She was the only

woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak.

The factory wasn’t large, by Cuban standards: only a

hundred or so workers, enough to roll for one plantation a mile

away. A wooden silo at the center held its sun-dried leaves,

darkened, papery slivers the rollers would carry to their

stations. Next to the silo, a ladder flanked the chair where

Antonio, the lector, sat.

He cleared his throat as he raised the newspaper. “La

Aurora, Friday, first of June, 1866,” he began. “‘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?’”

María Isabel picked through her stack of leaves, setting

aside those of lesser quality for filler.

“‘... 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...’”

Already a prickling warmth spread across María Isabel’s

shoulders. 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. To fulfill their obligations, to fulfill their obligations.

Her hands moved of their own accord. The bell would ring and

she’d look at the pile of cigars, smooth as clay, surprised she’d

rolled them all. 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. Lunchtime. She was

tired.

A 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. María Isabel walked this path

home, one that snaked through the shadows and gave her brief

reprieves from the punishing sun. 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.

True that since La Aurora had expounded the uncivilized

nature of cock- and bullfighting, the number of participants

had diminished. But it wasn’t just the newspaper’s

recommendation that convinced them to give up blood sport.

There were also preoccupations. Other workers talked about

rebel groups rising up against Spanish loyalists. About men

training in groups to join others headed west toward La

Habana. 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. But then it was

all anyone would talk about.

Though by the time rumors of guerrilla fighting had spread

to their side of the island, so, too, had stories of infighting.

Generals of the militias came and went, supplanted when their

ideals became a liability. 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. For María

Isabel, a scorching anxiety had long replaced those lofty early

notions: freedom, liberty. She hated the unknowing. She hated

that her own survival depended on a shadowy political future

she could hardly envision.

Home. María Isabel’s mother sat on the ground, back

against the cool mud of the bohío. Aurelia had returned from

work herself, from the fields.

“Mamá?” María Isabel alarmed to find her in such a way,

an unusual blush spreading up Aurelia’s face to the tips of her

ears.

“Estoy bien,” she said. “Just faint from the walk. You

know I am less and less capable.”

“That isn’t true.”

María Isabel helped Aurelia steady herself with one hand

to the wall.

“Mamá.” María Isabel touched Aurelia’s forehead with the

back of her hand, which gave off such a stench of tobacco

juice that her mother winced. “Stay out in the breeze and rest

in the hamaca, won’t you? I’ll prepare lunch.”

Aurelia patted María Isabel’s arm. “You are a good

daughter,” she said.

They walked to a hammock knotted between palms.

María Isabel’s mother, worn down by decades of loss, hard

work, nonetheless retained a certain elegance. Her skin was

smooth, with hardly a line, her teeth neat rows unstained. After

her husband’s death, Aurelia had many callers, men with

missing teeth and sun-weathered, papery skin who presented

little in the way of wealth—a donkey, a small plot of mango

and plantain trees—but offered care that she brushed off. “A

woman does not abandon love of God, nor of country, nor of

family,” she’d said in those days, before the men stopped

seeking her out. “I will die a widow, such is my fate in life.”

But her mother grew weaker, María Isabel could see.

Finding her daughter a husband had become an aggressive

devotion. María Isabel protested: she was happiest in the

workshop, in the fields, sweating over fire, peeling yucas and

plantains and tossing them into a cast-iron cazuela of boiling

water with her sleeves bunched to her elbows, catching pig’s

blood in a steel bucket to make shiny-black sausage, hacking

open a water-pregnant coconut with a machete. True that cigar

rolling was a coveted, respectable job—she’d apprenticed for

nearly a year prior to working for a wage. Yet the factory paid

her by the piece, half of what the men earned, and she was the

only woman in the shop, knew the men resented her. They’d

heard about this new invention, in La Habana—a mold that

made it easy for almost anyone to roll a tight cigar—and

feared María Isabel a harbinger of what would come:

unskilled, loose women and grubby children taking their jobs

for almost nothing. Suggested she might earn better keep

“entertaining” the men herself. Took a greater share of her

wages to pay the lector.

There were moments, like now, watching her mother lie

red faced in the hammock through the window, when she

pictured a world in which Aurelia wouldn’t have to work, in

which she spent her time caring for her mother instead of

rolling tobacco with the men. And she knew with resignation

that she’d say yes to any man who offered easier days. Such

was her fate......