When I was 11, I remember being surprised to see a girl that looked almost as young as me but with a big pregnant belly. She was a pretty 16 year old relative of papito who was pregnant with her 3rd child and ill due to her youth and assembly-line pregnancies. She had married at 13 or 14 and that - papito said sadly - was common for girls in rural Oriente, papito's home province.
Tia also married for the first time when she was 14 years old. A pretty brunette (I've seen the photos), tia lived in a very isolated, rugged mountainous region in Cuba's south with 7 other siblings and her mom and dad. One day, a man who had a finca a distance away showed up and asked for her hand in marriage. Tia's mom and dad approved of the match and left it to the 14 year old to decide. As tia tells it, this man was not only refreshingly new to look at, but good looking to boot and she readily agreed to marry him.
Once back at his finca, though, the bloom of the marriage withered in the pigsty (I have no idea if you've ever been near a pigsty but it is the foulest smell imaginable; it has a pungency all its own). It was there, among the pigs, in the mud and stench and oinking of the pigs, that tia's new husband wanted to make love to her. For 2-3 months, she endured sex in the company of pigs then tia ran away; she ran away alone, at 14, as far away as she could. Not home to her parents for he would have come for her but to ... but that's a whole different story.
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