On again reaching Matanzas, I ascertained that a slave-ship had just entered the port from the African coast, with 250 slaves on board. … On preceding to the quarter where these wretched beings were confined, I found them all huddled together in a large room, in which they were all exposed to sale like some drove of pigs, in a complete state of nudity, with the exception of a bandage tied round their loins. They … were seated on the floor in groups of eight and ten, feeding out of a parcel of buckets. … Three of these miserable outcasts were extremely ill, from the effects of close confinement during a long voyage.

After only five days she felt like a different person, so much unpicked and resown and made over to a different pattern…. Catholicism isn’t a religion, it’s a nationality. In her four years at [school], it [religion] had grown into every fiber of her nature; she could not eat or sleep or read or play without relating every action to her secret life as a Christian and a Catholic. She rejoiced in it and rebelled against it. She tried to imagine what life would be like without it; how she would feel if she were a savage blessedly ignorant of the very existence of god. But it was as impossible as imagining death or madness or blindness. Wherever she looked, it loomed in the background … the fortress of God, the house on the rock.

… And tell me, which President looked to the future? It was, believe it or not, [Sánchez] Cerro. I fully recognize that he was able to look to the future and … he grabbed the rich [by the neck] and took part of their wealth, you there [he said], you’re going to give me potatoes, you’re going to give me yucca, you’re going to give me sweet potatoes, he told them, to feed the poor neighborhoods, you bring me rice, meat, you tell me you have five hundred cows, well then, kill only five cows, otherwise, slash-slash, I’m going to snuff you too, and then, no!, you have to do what Nine-Fingers [Sánchez Cerro—who lost one of his fingers during a military uprising] says. He was a strange president. What did he do? He’d bring out the military officers, the soldiers, [and he would say] you here, you’re going to cook, and he’d go off with the trucks to the poor neighborhoods with the food, all ready to eat, the people should not be dying of hunger he would say, but he saw that that too was indecent, so he built the comedores populares [sic]. Who inaugurated them? One-eyed Oscar R. Benavides, but who started them? [Sánchez] Cerro [my emphasis].