Beyond the Ties of Blood by Florencia Mallon

write letters to the government, asking for land, for jobs. He helped organize unions and traveled to tiny villages to help the Indians fight the big landowners who moved the fences on them and took away their homes. He got in trouble, too, like he did back in Odessa when he and his papa organized the workers. But no matter how much I begged him, he didn’t stop. Those old men, they remember the meetings every Sunday night in the sewing room.”
    Temuco, 1967
    Manuel entered high school a few months after his grandpa died. The times were beginning to change, and he often wondered what Grandpa David would have thought about the Cuban Revolution, the young guerrillas in Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the student demonstrations in Mexico, or even in the United States against the Vietnam War. Would he have remembered Odessa? Or the Sunday night meetings in the sewing room? It seemed there’d always been landless people, poor or homeless families, unemployed or dispossessed like the frayed and mud-spattered old codgers who had stood by his side and shoveled earth into his grandpa’s grave. But now, somehow, it seemed different. It was the young who were in the lead, marching, mobilizing, standing up for everyone’s rights. And it was happening all over the world. The young Cubans—Fidel, Che, Camilo—they hadn’t looked that much older than he was now when they’d marched into Havana less than a decade before. And then there were the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, not even to mention the struggles for independence in other parts of Africa or Asia. He looked carefully at the grainy pictures of the young, bearded Cuban revolutionaries in the radical newspapers and leftist magazines his older classmates were passing around in school. “Young idealists cheered by the masses,” read one caption. “When the young barbudos entered Havana, they changed the world,” proclaimed another. And Manuel saw the truth of these statements reflected all around him. Why, even in his school, some of the students in the higher grades were singing new songs on their guitars, sitting in the plazas on weekends and debating the future.
    One Sunday, when his mama was out somewhere and he was alone in the house, he took a walk in the warm afternoon sunlight. Without really thinking about it, he ended up at the plaza next to his school. As he drew close to the statue in the garden near the middle of the park, he heard someone calling his name.
    â€œHey, Manuel! Compañero !”
    It was one of the guys from the twelfth-grade class, tall and gangly, with a German last name and a long blond mane. He was sitting on a bench next to a bed of petunias, smoking a cigarette, a black beret perched rakishly on the side of his head. Manuel could see he was trying to look like Che Guevara, but the peach fuzz along his chin that was imitating a beard only made him look younger, and vaguely clownish. Still, Manuel knew him as the leader of the most radical student faction, a charismatic speaker who’d earned the admiration of most leftists at the school. The classmates Manuel envied most, the ones who never tripped over chair legs or bumped into desks, spoke admiringly, almost in hushed tones, about this guy. Once, when he’d been walking unnoticed behind a group of popular twelfth-grade girls, he’d heard this guy’s name come up in conversation. The girls had giggled, breathless, as if they were talking about a movie star.
    Manuel approached the bench and sat down on the other side.
    â€œHey, Ricardo. How come you’re by yourself? Where are the rest of the compañeros ?”
    â€œThey’re on their way. We have important plans for this afternoon. Wanna join us?”
    â€œWhat’s up?”
    Ricardo leaned back on the bench, letting the cigarette smoke out through his nose.
    â€œWe’re starting a student group affiliated with the Socialist Party. This guy who’s