"My Genealogical Tree"
by Alina Fernández
from Castro's Daughter: An Exile's Memoir of Cuba

Once upon a time in western England, there was a young lad who lived in the town of Newcastle-under-Lyme. His name was Herbert Acton Clews.

Once upon a time in Galicia, Spain, there was a boy named Angel Castro, who lived in a coastal town in Lugo. And once again, there was a boy in Istanbul, who had ancestral memories of a greater empire, when his family of Jewish renegades probably dropped a letter from their last name, shortening it to Ruz.

All three boys were restless with yearnings for a new life.

This was also true in the north of Spain, in the city of Santander, for a youth named Agustín Revuelta y San Román. He was a descendant of a Caballero Cubierto ante Ia Reina in the Spanish court. In some Spanish-speaking countries a Caballero "Cubierto," or "covered" no bleman, was one who had the right to keep his prepuce intact. In the case of Agustín's ancestor, the term only meant that he could keep his head covered in the presence of Her Majesty.

For various reasons, these real machos all decided to venture into a faraway world. They were all adventurers who did not care much about their roots. They cared about power. Power has always been seen as good fortune, and good fortune has always meant one thing: money.

Almost in concert, with each following in the other's wake as if retracing a well-marked trail in the waters, they all arrived at the capital port of Havana. This was the location that Morgan the pirate, centuries earlier, had avoided when burying his treasure, in preference for the fleshier, more flamboyant beaches of María IA Gorda, a tropical lady of joy who in the midst of her apoplectic, orgasmic panting had shown him the unique gift of a secret valley, yet to be discovered.

Though Herbert, the English lad, suffered from anosmia, an impaired sense of smell, he had a highly developed sense for the scent of money.

One of the Spaniards, the Galician named Ángel, arrived as a recruit of the Spanish army. He had been captured in a medieval-style levy that he had not been able to escape.

The Turk, who faced unexpected turns of events in the confusion of the colonizing wars, decided to adopt the Castilian first name of Francisco.

The other Spanish youth, the one from Santander, had brought with him a letter of recommendation. Upon arriving in Havana, he established himself in business as a haberdasher and married a local girl named María. They were soon blessed with a son, Manolo Revuelta.

The women with whom each of these men would one day start their families were already in Cuba, totally innocent of their future but waiting for the husbands destined to join them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were many beautiful women of mixed ancestry and social standing in Cuba: young mulattoes, the daughters of Spanish immigrants and statuesque black women; or those with proud noses and serene demeanor, whose Native American blood could be detected even centuries later; and the daughters of Chinese immigrants and mulatto women, or of French landowners and Haitian women. Over time, these racially mixed women grew lighter-skinned.

It did not take long for the Clews, Castro, Ruz, and Revuelta families to cross paths. Fate is promiscuous.

Only one of the men, Angel Castro, had to return in defeat to his homeland. He was shattered by Cuba's war of independence, a heroic war that lasted three years, from 1895 to 1898, freed the slaves, and ravaged the eastern provinces. During the uprisings in the struggle for freedom, the insurgents, called mambises, had burned the sugarcane fields, and their women had set their homes on fire.

When the Spanish government demobilized its colonial troops in Cuba, Ángel was granted a small pension, which he promptly used to return to the Island of his dreams. He had an unmatched shrewdness and a well-devised plan to put it to work.

After buying a meager piece of land somewhere in the easternmost provinces he began to create a country estate for himself in a place called Birán, gradually expanding his holdings, and thus his power He married María Luisa Argote, with whom he had two children, Pedro Emilio and Lidia.

The British lad, Clews, had nothing to do with the Cuban War of Independence, but ended up in it purely by chance. He was a naval engineer and, during his frequent voyages, he managed to learn the value of precious woods. He already owned a sawmill before he started a business of smuggling arms to sell to the insurgent Cubans, the mambises, in their struggle against Spain. When he was denounced to the Spanish authorities, who began looking for him, he fled deep into the countryside, and by the end of the war he had attained the rank of colonel in the insurgent Cuban army.

An old daguerreotype shows him, buck naked, bathing in a river.

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