Before We Were Free

Anita’s family is Catholic. She prays, as does her family, including her parents, her sister, and her aunts and uncles. But it does not always feel that faith guides their lives. For instance, when Anita contemplates her own misdeeds, or even the killing of El Jefe, she does not think in terms of sin. Though she initially contemplates the morality of killing another person, after hearing all the horrible things that El Jefe has done to others, Anita becomes convinced that El Jefe is a bad person. This shocks her even more, as she used to pray to El Jefe in the same way that she prayed to God. This underscores one of the ways that El Jefe ensured his hold over people: He convinced the country to place their faith in him, but he maintained this faith through fear, violence, and outright lies.

At times, Anita doubts the rewards of faith. Most notably, she doesn’t always think of the good things in her life as blessings. She puts more emphasis on Joan of Arc’s bravery—attributable to Joan’s faith in God—than on her own faith. She constantly wants to be as brave and faithful to a cause as Joan of Arc, but the fear of SIM and Trujillo cause her at times to doubt how much power she can have over her circumstances. When Chucha and Mami eventually tell her the truth of their situation, Anita determines to try and have enough faith to believe that they will be victorious in surviving whatever may come. When Papi and Toni assassinate Trujillo and are captured, however, Anita’s faith once again wanes—especially when she flees to New York and must wait for word on Papi’s fate. When she first learns that he and Toni were executed, her faith plummets.

At some places in the narrative, it seems that Anita (and others) places more emphasis on Chucha’s riddles, parables, and omens than on Biblical teachings about faith. Instead of believing in faith that Lorena will leave he household and not inform on the family, the family uses Lorena’s superstitious fear of Chucha (Lorena’s Catholic fear of Chucha’s “witchcraft”) to scare Lorena into leaving the family. Lorena already distrusts the fact that Chucha wears dark purple clothing and sleeps in a casket, but the bloody sheets she finds in her room send Lorena over the edge. Interestingly, this also shows a limit to Lorena’s faith in that she could be shaken from what should have been a steadfast belief system into fearing omens and superstitious beliefs.

While faith is an occasional comfort to the characters, misplaced faith is also shown to be disastrous. The butterflies have faith that Pupo will stick to his word and give them the support of the army once Trujillo is assassinated, but he deserts them at the crucial moment. Their faith in Pupo becomes their downfall, and Trujillo’s son assumes power and becomes an even more brutal dictator than his father. Their initial faith in Pupo also leads to their capture and eventual execution.