Rosa is a slave until the day in her young womanhood when her owner frees her so that he, too, can fight for Cuba’s independence from Spain. “Should I fight with weapons / or flowers and leaves?” asks Rosa the healer. She chooses flowers, and with her husband José and others she sets up hospitals in the jungle to treat the sick and the wounded. Across three wars in the struggle for a free land, Rosa sees slavery abolished in Cuba, and then concentration camps established by the Spanish government. Through it all she treats the hurt and heartache of war. When Spain finally surrenders, it is not to the Cuban fighters but to the Americans: “as the Spanish flag is lowered . . . the American flag glides upward. / Our Cuban flag is still forbidden.” Cuban American poet Margarita Engle spans almost fifty years as she transforms nineteenth-century Cuban history into a vivid story. Almost all of the speakers in Engle’s multiple-voice narrative are based on the lives of real individuals—characters who speak to the arrogance and cruelty of conquest and the yearning desire to be free. At the center is a woman who was named Rosario Castellanos Castellanos, or Rosa la Bayamesa . Facts about her life and other individuals who voice the poems, as well as additional information about Cuba’s quest for independence, are detailed in the author’s note and timeline concluding this stirring account. (Age 12 and older)

It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.

Black, white, Cuban, Spanish—Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Acclaimed poet Margarita Engle has created another breathtaking portrait of Cuba.

The Surrender Tree is a 2009 Newbery Honor Book, the winner of the 2009 Pura Belpre Medal for Narrative and the 2009 Bank Street - Claudia Lewis Award, and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.