So much of it was a blur, the false alarms that the mine was under attack and they would all have to relocate, followed by announcements that they were to remain where they were. In the early morning, a ship’s horn sounded over and over, a U.S. Navy vessel taking them to safety.

“Only Americans,” a plant security officer announced. “Solo Americanos.”

They needed to get from the mine to the dock, but the Cubans panicked and tried to prevent them from leaving. Pushed and shoved them and blocked the road. “What about us!?” they shouted. Everly knew so many of them—the women who worked in the bakery, and the men from the ice factory near the bay, Lumling, who came by with his cart every afternoon selling little pineapples. One of the gardeners from the club slashed the tires of Mr. Carrington’s Cadillac as they tried to get in it.

“If you leave they’ll bomb us!” a woman cried, grabbing Everly by the shoulders. “There’s nothing here for them to protect if you go. You can’t go.”

The navy ship moved out toward sea slowly, waiting for mines to be removed from the mouth of the harbor. It was morning now, but the fog on the bay was so thick it sopped up the rays of the rising sun and cast a gloomy, opaque white light. As the ship moved out of the harbor, the mountains above Nicaro began to fade, purplish-gray apparitions dissolving in a sea of milk.

There was no red haze of nickel oxide, Everly realized, as she watched Nicaro recede. The chimneys were cold, the plant shut down. The town was clean of its usual coating of dust. The clouds weren’t stained and dirty. There was no fine silt on the surface of the water. It’s so nice, she thought sadly, without us.

Marjorie Lederer sat at the motel room desk, itemizing their belongings from memory, every last appliance and piece of furniture, for which she expected, she said, full compensation.

“From whom?” George Lederer asked her.

“Your employers. The U.S. government. Lito Gonzalez. National Lead.”

“Dear, my employers stand to lose a hundred million dollars on their investment. And Lito Gonzalez ran us out of town, if you believe Hubert Mackey.”

This town, Castro said, was the location of his own childhood dreams, this very place where they were gathered. Off-limits and American, it was the site where his imagination had been ignited, and roamed. Freely, he said, but in the freedom of dreams. The town of Preston was make-believe in its distance from his life just a few kilometers away, in Birán, make-believe in its luminosity, its impossibility. But real in its control, its ownership of everything and everyone.

“Off-limits and American,” he repeated. “But of course, as many of you know, we Cubans were invited to cut the cane.”

There was laughter.

“Invited to lose an arm feeding the crushers at the mill. Invited, most graciously, to be fleeced by the company store, whose prices were unspeakable exploitation, invited into a modern and more efficient version of slave labor. But you and I were not allowed beyond those gates over there,” he pointed, “where the managers lived. ‘La Avenida,’ with, take note, the definite article. The avenue, but, of course, only for some. You could not walk down it. You were not allowed to swim in the company pool, go to the company club, use the company’s beaches. You could not fish in their bay, Saetía, or go to school with their children, or date their daughters, or God forbid, should you get sick, be treated at their hospital. You could not own your home, which you yourself had built, own your own plot of land, which you worked with your own shovel, your pick, your hoe.”

The rebels were the state, and overnight. A transition that was not unlike a man waking up to discover he’d somehow married his mistress. A gesture that would surely kill the allure of romance, of luminous desire, in the very fact of its guarantee. Like killing the allure of a new government, a new power structure, in the very fact of its installment. He gazed at the watery horizon, indulging in a childlike wonder at the simple fact that there were unseen worlds beyond the blue. “The sea! The sea!” the soldiers cried out. He felt an old familiar hunger beginning to announce itself, the desire to dissolve back into civilian life and witness the rest of this thing, the completion of revolution’s arc, from a cozily anonymous vantage.

Feelings run high. Just sit at the Teresita for one lunch rush and you’ll get the drift. People who feel that everything was stolen from them, and just because it’s been almost fifty years now doesn’t mean they have forgotten. They haven’t. Nor have the companies. A company is like a person in that it has a memory, its own institutional memory. A company can wait and anticipate with more patience than a person. There are pending claims against the Cuban government that the Cubans ignore. Mining concerns like the old Nicaro Nickel Company keep meticulous account of what they lost. United Fruit became United Brands became Chiquita. CEOs came and went. The claim lives on, in a black binder somewhere at the Justice Department—$350 million at this point, with inflation. After every last person who worked for United Fruit is long dead and gone, still, the company will fight to get its assets back.

Del once said that Mother’s sympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, was not real sympathy but sentimentality.

Perhaps it’s true. The fact is we went down there and we took. But I don’t think it was Mother’s responsibility to change that fact, or anything else. I don’t think her sentimentality was any kind of crime.