In the summer of 2001, my students and I stopped near the town of Cruces to tour the ruins of El Ingenio Santa Catalina, a nineteenth-century sugar plantation. At the height of slavery, its managers famously used homing pigeons to direct the work of slaves and send messages to the fields. Because the Special Period’s lack of transportation rendered Santa Catalina extremely isolated, we were delightfully surprised to encounter a large number of peasants living there. All of them knew the history of the pigeons but the story of one, a lady whom neighbors called La Halconera [the falconer] fascinated us far more: she had rescued this little hawk as a baby, she told us, when it suffered a broken wing. A Cuban subspecies of the Broad-winged hawk that has long been endangered, the bird was not a pet and never slept in a cage. Truly free, the hawk was a companion who visited her every day, usually after hunting and loved sitting on her head, shoulder or lap while she relaxed, read a book or (if there was electricity) listened to the news. “I did not choose to be the mother of this creature,” said La Halconera. “Its love chose me.” Las Cruces, July 2001.