The Feisty Side of Cuba
Whereas Occidente (Western Cuba) was the economic and cultural powerhouse of the island - the domain of the great sugar planters and the cosmopolitan merchants of Havana - Oriente (Eastern Cuba) was a relative backwater, downright barbaric in the eyes of occidentales, with its petty landowners, its indecorous mixing of the races, and its annoying revolutionary fervor.
Why the 1890s?
I was moved by the palpable sense of hope, the grand vision for the future Cuban republic with the new century on the horizon, and the sudden and anticlimactic way it came to an end with the intervention and occupation of the United States.