My grandfather went to work in Cuba in the 1950s, at a nickel-ore processing plant on Nipe Bay, in northeastern Oriente province, where my mother and her three sisters spent part of their childhood. Their life, in a town called Nicaro, was meant to be culturally insular: American social clubs, American schools, middle-class homes in a gated town, with streets on which the mining company had even planted cottonwood trees. Outside the gates and across the river from Nicaro was Levisa, for miners and other laborers, handymen and “houseboys,” like Cleveland Manning, a Jamaican who worked for my grandparents. Cleveland Manning lived in typical Levisa housing, a shack of cardboard and corrugated tin, with a dirt floor, and no running water or electricity.
These conditions are what my mother and…
