I got my job at the port via family connections within the movement. I started as an errand boy and runner. Oddly enough, it was very similar to how my father started with my great-uncle when he went to Havana as an errand boy and reed cutter. The significant difference being that my father was entering a family business- it was small. People were looking after him. They expected he’d continue within the artisan laborer tradition and still also offered him a chance to acquire valuable business skills.
I, on the other hand, had been shunted into an institutional system that felt like a free-for-all. But like my father who’d raised himself up to bookkeeper, I was going to keep an eye out for opportunities to move up as soon as I possibly could.
Two years after I started working my port job, I was married. My bride was a girl I knew through the movement. It wasn’t an arranged marriage, although our families knew each other well and favored the alignment our union brought about.
I was very much in love with her and I knew that she liked me well enough. Back then, respectable people got married young. I let my feelings be known and she agreed. We had a formal period of engagement. I even bought her a diamond solitaire on a thin, gold band.
Our marriage, though brief, was pleasant enough. We were compatible. But when I was sent to prison, she refused to wait for me, even though it was only two years. The shame of my sentence, combined with the fact that we were still childless, made her think that maybe she could do better elsewhere. Her parents paid for a court-ordered divorce, and I never saw her again.
