Free Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez

counseled. “If it’s premeditated, if he left you for dead, then the state will do that.”
    She drew in a breath through clenched teeth. I could tell from the angle of her head, the flick of her good hand, that she was done. What did she want from me? How could this be business of mine? She stepped back and turned to cross the street, walking toward two buildings and a path between them that led to a trailer house.
    I whiffed the match out. I watched her enter, halt but straight, the building’s shadows. I loped the opposite way, across the street toward her house. Maybe someone there would help. I couldn’t; nor could I help the boy. She was out there somewhere, way past where I had gone. She was walking in from some distant place, and I knew I had to get there.

Rubén Mendoza Vega, Suzuki Professor of Early Caribbean History, University of Florida at Gainesville, Offers a History of the United States Based on Personal Experience
    In 1524, 1 an ancestor of my father 2 named Bernardo Marín 3 received a land grant 4 from Hernán Cortés. 5 He expanded these holdings until in the seventh generation 6 the family controlled 7 an extent of tobacco 8 fields unexcelled in the New World. 9 My son, with no grasp of history, 10 no sense of proportion about the broad effects of tobacco, 11 and a Romanticist’s infatuation with the Indian, 12 repudiated his heritage in an act of suicide. When Communism fails in Cuba, as it must, and Castro 13 flees, our family will again take up its place on the island. 14 We will once again make the finest cigars in the world. And I will resist feelings of bitterness toward a middle son 15 who could not wait. His grandfather told him as I did: patience. In this neglected virtue 16 is the story of America.
    NOTES
    1. As a historian I have an obligation in my short paper to the exigencies and dictates of my profession, as well as a duty of courtesy toward the reader. I must, therefore, make clear at the outset that even though I am dealing for the most part with primary materials in the archives of my own family, I have after many years of meticulous research and also careful comparison with contemporaneous histories developed the confidence to let my family stand, like Everyman, for all families. (And I now provide access to these documents, formally, to my fellow historians.) I must state, too, that in my paper, which deals with incidents familiar even in their detail to amateur historians, I have deliberately chosen to consult not just lesser-known works, or works not as yet translated into the major research languages, but works that are at odds with contemporary historical thought. In doing so, I realize I open myself to criticism and invite contempt for the foundation of my ideas. But how else a fresh wind?
    2. Julio Cartena Mejordigas. My family dropped in 1912 the Spanish practice of a doubled surname, commemorating the lineages of both parents. Wilford F. Grace, in the closing years of a brilliant career at the University of Witwatersrand, devoted himself to the study of my father’s correspondence with relatives in Asturias. My father, a manic-depressive personality, wrote obsessively to even remote relatives in a kind of pathetic (though to me quite noble) attempt to clarify his place in history. It was he, for all his good points, who first gave my middle son, Petrero, whose life I take up at the end of my essay, doubts about his lineage. See “Julio Cartena Mejordigas: The Early Correspondence (1936–43)” by W. F. Grace in
South African Review of Colonial History
18, no. 4 (1967): 54–78; and
The Asturian Temperament
by Nolan I. Benito.
    3. In addition to material in the family archives at the Universityof Texas at Austin, the reader is directed to the Marín Collection at the municipal library in Santander and to the Cormuello Collection of Cuban Historical Documents at the University of Oviedo. Marín was a sailmaker and an innovator of stitching techniques as well as the