With a newly made toy machete that his grandpa Tiki fashioned from some refuse wood, little Daniel pretends to be a mambí, one of the tens of thousands of nineteenth-century independence fighters drawn from the poorest ranks of peasants and enslaved of Cuba. His hobby horse is a hand-me-down, made in the United States and one of Tiki’s beloved treasures from his boyhood in the 1940s. July 2005.