He did not expect the memory of a one hundred and three-year-old man to be flawless but the impassioned and detailed conversations convinced Miguel that this was a story worth telling. That this was a life worth remembering. Here was a man, Miguel would write in the first edition of the book, who was “an authentic actor in the process of history in Cuba.” This was a man whose life story was like a living metaphor which captured the development of Cuban identity and the interminable struggle for freedom, whatever that means. At the time of its publication in 1966, Biografía de un Cimarrón (Biography of a Run Away Slave) was as much a political statement as an anthropological or literary one.  In literary circles, the work set the standard for the testimonial novel, a genre which empowers those whose stories had traditionally been told by others. As a work of ethnographic anthropology, the life of Esteban made clear how slavery and freedom from slavery presented equally challenging threats to survival for a Cuban of African descent. Politically, the book provided a narrative, in the voice of the previously powerless. Biografía de un Cimarrón is the most published Cuban book of all times. As Graham Greene said, “There has been no book like this before and it is unlikely that there ever will be another like it.”