The text “My Good Times” was published in 1891 by Raimundo Cabrera, which relates his youth and his attempt to join the Ten Years’ War, which he attributes to the status of legend. It also refers to the 10 months he spent deported to the Isle of Pines, from which he returned sick and eventually settled in Spain.

The title itself alludes to a particular worldview of the war period, distinct from that of Ramón Roa and others who recounted their memoirs from a hopeless perspective. The author was able to capture a collective spirit that transcended the precariousness of the situation in the jungle, from which the impulse to reenact past exploits could emerge.

Although he was a member of the Autonomist Party at the time of the work’s conception and had not always maintained the same position, having considered the epic struggle a mistake in previous texts, his temperament had evidently evolved and was once again sympathetic to the insurrectionary struggle. In this sense, his reflections constituted a fairly direct reflection of the contradictions Cuban society was grappling with regarding the independence revolution.

Although the text is autobiographical, it interweaves disparate experiences and sensations that were not always his own, but also contain other people’s experiences and figurative traits. The episodes narrated are chronologically located between 1868 and 1869, the year in which he was captured. This constitutes the earliest stage of the revolutionary dawn, so logically his impressions do not coincide with those of those who spent 10 consecutive years in the jungle and suffered the aftermath of the Zanjón.

With the publication of this work, the author definitively breaks with autonomist ideas and returns to what had been the starting point of his involvement in the Great War: separatist thinking. The text is also significant in terms of the awakening of nationalist social consciousness, in whose imagination independence was beginning to occupy a privileged place, especially among the popular strata who had not had a broad participation in the previous conflict.

Reading the text is a pleasurable experience, both for the author’s evocative ability and the successful use of narrative and lyrical resources – Raimundo Cabrera was also a poet – and it is also a valuable testimony of the way life was in Guines, the characteristics of its people and how the possibility of obtaining independence impacted the community.