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Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can’t always do it while it’s happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by American…

The company never had operations in Haiti. Daddy said it wasn’t the right political climate for business. In Cuba, we Americans had our traditions, our own world. The company had a set of arrangements with Batista, annual payments, and in return there were no taxes, no tariffs, and we didn’t have t…

Months before the fire started, Daddy had begun to suspect that some of the cane cutters were rebel sympathizers. He had Rev. Crim reporting on the workers. And you might call it racist, especially nowadays, but it was reasonable to assume that anybody black—whether they were Cuban, Haitian, Jamaic…

The cane cutters were always paid their wages at the end of the season. Before the terrible thing that happened to him, Mr. Flamm, the paymaster, calculated their earnings in a giant ledger book. The workers lined up along the road, and Mr. Flamm unzipped a green leather moneybag and doled out peso…

In Daddy’s office at company headquarters there was a big map of Oriente. Oriente was where we lived, and it was Cuba’s largest, poorest, blackest province. It has the best climate and most fertile land for growing sugarcane. Castro has it all divided up now, I don’t know why; another cockeyed thin…