The Surrender Tree by Margarita Engle Read Free Book Online Page A

liberties in imagining their actions, feelings, and thoughts.
    Like many traditional Latin American healers, Rosa regarded healing as a gift from God and never accepted payment for her work as a nurse. Her medicines were made from wild plants. Many of these herbal remedies are still used in Cuba, where they are called
la medicina verde
(the green medicine).
    Various accounts show Rosa’s birth year as either 1834 or 1840. When she died on September 25, 1907, she was buried with full military honors. Her funeral was attended by a colonel of the U.S. Infantry’s 17th Regiment.
    There really was a slavehunter known as Lieutenant Death, but there is no evidence that he was the key figure in Spanish military operations designed to pursue and kill Rosa.
    Other characters, such as
El Grillo
(The Cricket),
El Jóven
(The Young One),and
Las Hermanas de la Sombra

    (The Sisters of Shade), are based on descriptions in the diaries of soldiers and war correspondents. The first modern, systematic use of concentration camps as a way of controlling rural civilian populations was ordered by Imperial Spain’s Captain-General Weyler in Cuba in 1896.No provisions were made for shelter, food, medicine, or sanitation. Estimates of the number of Cuban
guajiros
(peasants) who died in Weyler’s “reconcentration camps” range from 170,000 to half a million, or approximately 10 to 30 percent of the island’s total population. In some areas, up to 96 percent of the farms were destroyed.
    After Spain ceded Cuba to the United States, Captain-General Weyler was promoted to Minister of War.
    Within a few years, the ruthless military use of concentration camps was repeated during South Africa’s Boer Wars. Adolf Hitler carried the genocidal concept to its extreme during World War II, when millions of European Jews, Catholics, gypsies, pacifists, and other minority groups were killed in Nazi Germany’s extermination camps. Since then, armed powers all over the world have herded huge numbers of civilians into prison camps on the basis of religion, race, national origin, ideology, sexual orientation, style of dress, listening to rock music (Cuba’s
roqueros
),or simply to seize territory, preventing farmers from growing crops that might strengthen an opposing army.

    Cuba’s third War of Independence from Spain is known in the United States as the Spanish-American War, and in Spain as
El Desastre
(The Disaster). Historians generally regard it as the first jungle guerrilla war, the first modern trench warfare, and the first time women were formally recognized as military nurses, both in the Cuban Army of Liberation and in the U.S. Army.
    It is also known as the “journalist’s war,” because reporters working for American newspapers wrote stories promoting U.S. intervention. In 1897, when the renowned artist Frederic Remington requested permission to leave Cuba because he found the situation nearHavana reasonably quiet and unworthy of constant news coverage, his employer, William Randolph Hearst, owner of the
New York Morning Journal,
sent him an urgent telegram: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

 
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    Chronology

    EARLY INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS
    1810. Cuba’s first separatist movement is suppressed by colonial Spain.
    1812. A slave rebellion is suppressed.
    1823. Soles y Rayos de Bolívar (Suns and Rays of Bolívar) movement is suppressed, during a time when most other Spanish colonies have recently gained independence under the leadership of Simón Bolívar and other freedom fighters.
    1836-55. Various separatist movements are suppressed.
    1858-59. U.S.President James Buchanan makes offers to buy Cuba. Spain refuses.
    1868. On October 10, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and other landowners near the city of Bayamo in eastern Cuba burn their plantations and free their slaves, launching the first of three wars for independence from