Pig's Foot Read Free Page A

streets of Santiago.
    When word finally reached Oscar that José, whom he thought of as his only surviving family, was now a vagrant and set out in search of him, scouring the streets, the taverns and the dive bars. Finally, among the ruins of the sugar plantation where both boys had been born, he stumbled upon a bundle of foul-smelling rags.
    Oscar asked what had happened and José told him about the Slaughter of the Santistebans. Most of the slaves, he told Oscar, had been caught and hanged. He told his friend how his own family had died of a strange sickness that had turned their bodies into human furnaces. The Kortico shook his friend by the shoulder and said: ‘You should join the mambí army. Killing those bastards is the only way we will ever be free.’ José spat on the red earth and turned back to sleep.
    â€˜Damn it, José, these white men are the ones who brought the sickness to Cuba.’
    Hearing this, José suddenly sat up and stared hard into Oscar’s eyes. His friend explained that many times he had seen the Spanish spreading disease through the swamplands, that this was why runaway slaves were always found stiff-legged long before they reached the refuge of the caves.
    â€˜I’m telling you, they are the ones who brought the sickness,’ Oscar said. ‘Now is the time to avenge your family for all the pain they suffered.’
    The Mandinga spat on the ground again, but this time to let the Kortico know that he was prepared to fight. José extricated himself from the pile of putrid rags and climbed up behind Oscar on his horse and together they rode back to the mambí camp.
    During the ambush on the Palma Sopriano convoy in Victoria, José slew fifteen Spaniards with a machete and returned to camp with two horses and eight rifles. In the Battle of Juan Mulato, Oscar and José killed forty-two Spaniards. When, during the fighting at Tibisí, Oscar and José each slew thirty enemy soldiers, the mambí soldiers christened them ‘The Duo of Death’, and General Maceo personally decided to take them with him to the rally at Mangos de Baraguá in March 1878. Lounging in their hammocks after the battle, Oscar confessed to his friend that he loved war, because ‘you get to go to so many different places, places you’ve never been’.
    â€˜I know,’ said José, looking at him askance, ‘but right now, just get some rest, and don’t go dozing off. You might dream I’m a Spaniard and hack me to pieces with that machete.’

Betina and Malena
    The day following the Battle of Tibisí, José strolled through the morning mist down towards the river to wash the blood and filth off himself. In the distance, he heard a deep, rasping sound and realised he was not alone. He could make out the figure of a woman scrubbing clothes against the stones by the riverbank and carefully crept towards her. Seeing how beautiful she was, he stood, transfixed.
    Betina and her younger sister Malena lived alone in a little shack on the outskirts of Manzanillo. Her father had been the sort of man who, in a cheerful mood, would hit her and call her a stupid, ugly whore; in a black mood or in drink, he would lock her in the chicken coop and beat her until she howled in terror. Only then would he release her, telling her she was as dumb as her mother. He died in 1877, a year after General Martinez Campos marched into Havana. Betina’s mother was to die many years later in Weyler concentration camp.
    It was Betina’s dream to find a kind and decent man, someone who would give her a family. Now twenty-five and no longer a virgin, her chances were slight. She had had lovers who beat her, stole the pittance she earned washing laundry at the creek, and then abandoned her. Whenever this happened, she would hole up for days, sometimes weeks, crying an ocean of tears and vowing to take her own life by eating raw earth like the Indians.
    Time passed and she put