Chapter 10: Letters Never Sent

The days after the explosion blurred together—funerals, riots, whispers of war. Havana was a city with a wound that would not close. Lucía moved through the house in a daze, helping her mother comfort neighbors, delivering bread to families who’d lost fathers and sons to the Maine or to the Spanish prisons.

One morning, a thick envelope arrived, addressed in her brother’s hurried hand. Inside was a page smuggled from a reconcentration camp outside the city—a hastily written plea from a childhood friend, begging for news, for medicines, for hope. The Spanish had forced thousands of Cuban peasants into these camps, promising protection but delivering instead disease, starvation, and death. Lucía’s hands shook as she read: the friend’s children were sick, her husband was gone, and no one was allowed to leave.