Ramondo Cardoso’s mysterious burning death in Cárdenas transforms a family reunion into a public supernatural crisis: a man is reduced to ashes in a fire that does not consume the house, while the cameo he carried glows beside his remains. The scene makes the stone, previously a valuable object he hoped to sell, impossible to treat as merely a commodity. His mother names it the devil’s eye, the priest responds with the crucifix, and Rodrigo Lerbier recognizes a possible danger whose nature remains unexplained.

Return to Cárdenas

The episode is dated August 18, 2002, in Cárdenas. Ana Maria Gomez Cardoso has returned from Mass for the Assumption and is going about her ordinary routine at home when a man appears in the doorway she habitually leaves unlocked. Her shock gives way to recognition: the visitor is Ramondo, her son, returning to his birthplace. The domestic setting matters to the event’s reversal. His arrival initially promises reunion and refuge, but the home that receives him will soon become the site of his inexplicable death.

Ramondo has taken considerable pains to get out of the United States and back to Cuba. Rather than risk selling the cameo hastily or at a ruinous price before leaving, he first flees to Mexico. He considers selling it there, but fears being cheated or killed by the criminal underworld. Returning home seems the less dangerous course and offers the possibility of finding people in Havana, perhaps in embassies or elsewhere, who might recognize the rare jewel’s value. His return is therefore tied directly to the object: the cameo shapes both his escape and his hope for a more secure sale.

The crossing depends on clandestine connections. In Mexico, Ramondo finds a smuggler who regularly carries supplies under cover of night from the Yucatán tip to Cayo Largo, on Cuba. A cousin serving in Securidad helps him evade the scrutiny of Cuban customs and police. The route brings him back to familiar ground, but does not deliver the safety he sought. The narrative places the cameo at the center of this movement from the United States, through Mexico, and back to Cuba, then abruptly turns the planned return into catastrophe.

The fire and its remains

A few days after Ramondo’s arrival, a vivid red light cuts through the darkness behind the cathedral in Cárdenas. Cats scatter and dogs bark. Residents come out onto their balconies; some think they smell something burning, but, seeing nothing obviously wrong, they go back inside. The disturbance initially registers as an uncertain sign rather than a visible disaster. Then a piercing scream brings them out again, and Ana Maria rushes from the house to the church, pressing repeatedly on a bell concealed behind the cathedral’s apse.

The priest follows her home and enters Ramondo’s room. At the foot of the bed, the armchair has been reduced to its wooden frame, blackened by fire, with only scraps of stuffing and its springs remaining. On the floor lie ashes, from which protrude part of a leg with its foot intact and part of a head with one eye open. A broad soot mark crosses the ceiling above the chair, like the trace of a flame. These remnants make the death both horribly concrete and difficult to account for: a body has burned, yet the room and house have not been consumed.

Beside the charred chair, the cameo bought in Kansas City casts a sinister glow. The priest repeatedly makes the sign of the cross and raises the small crucifix he wears. The narration emphasizes the disparity between the concentrated destruction and its limited reach: the fire is intense enough to reduce a person to ashes but brief enough not to set the house ablaze, like a miniature nuclear explosion. That comparison conveys the scene’s impossible scale without supplying a natural explanation. The cameo is not just found among the remains; its light makes it the striking surviving object in the room.

Witnesses and competing explanations

Ana Maria identifies the stone as the devil’s eye and cries out the accusation in Spanish. Her cry spreads through the street and neighborhood like an alarm. The reaction gives the death a life beyond the locked room: people have already gathered, the priest is guarding the entrance, and the mother’s explanation circulates before the authorities have established what happened. Her words express a fearful interpretation, not a confirmed cause. The scene leaves the reader with the same visible evidence that confronts the witnesses, but no ordinary account that resolves it.

Rodrigo Lerbier hears the commotion. A babalao and Yoruba officiant who makes predictions each December 31 about the coming year in Cuba and the wider world, he is introduced here through his response to the cry. He recognizes in the invoked devil’s eye something that suggests black magic, and the fact that the death has occurred in the home of people he has known since childhood gives the disturbance a personal dimension. He hurries into the street, where Ana Maria is surrounded by frightened, lamenting women, and tries to make his way toward the house. The priest bars entry to everyone while awaiting the police, leaving Rodrigo outside the room and unable to inspect the evidence himself.

Significance of the death

The event’s central reversal is stark: Ramondo returns carrying a jewel he hopes to turn into money, but the cameo becomes inseparable from his death. Its apparent value as a rare object is displaced by its ominous presence beside the ashes; the stone is now the focus of accusation, religious alarm, and Rodrigo’s suspicion. The unexplained fire does not establish that the cameo caused the death, but its placement and glow make that possibility difficult for the characters—and the reader—to ignore.

The scene also moves between different kinds of witnessing. Ana Maria sees enough to flee in terror and names the object; the priest encounters the physical remains and answers with Christian signs of protection; Rodrigo hears the alarm and interprets it through his knowledge of black magic, but is stopped from entering. None can turn the evidence into a settled explanation. The death thus becomes not only a private loss but a contested event: a return home ends in inexplicable violence, and the cameo survives as the question left burning in the room.