A memoir recounts a woman's transition from a prosperous Louisiana plantation through wartime upheaval — occupation, evacuation, and refugee travel across Texas to the Mexican border — into experiences in Mexico during foreign intervention and later life in Cuba, where she buys and manages a plantation. It combines eyewitness reportage of military occupation, displacement, and the hardships of flight with vivid scenes of Cuban urban and rural life, plantation labor systems, sugar and coffee production, local customs, religious practices, natural calamities, and the daily challenges of household and estate management.