Church of the Holy Guardian Angel

This guide to the Church of the Holy Guardian Angel in Havana opens on a night sometime in the nineteen eighties, when thieves pulled three colonial-era paintings by Nicolas de la Escalera off these walls and rolled them into a barrel to smuggle them out. It then reaches back further, to a baptismal ledger where a page once recorded a boy christened here on the twelfth of February, eighteen fifty-three, who grew up to be Jose Marti, and who tore that page out was never identified. A few pages over, the entry for another son of this parish, the priest Felix Varela, still survives, faded but legible.