Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba, by Margarita Engle, read by Matt Green, Vane Millon, Ozzie Rodriguez and Roberto Santana. Unabridged, 1½ hours. Listening Library, $22.

The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, by Margarita Engle, read by Yesemia Cabrera, Vane Millon, Chris Nuñez, Ozzie Rodriguez and Roberto Santana. Unabridged, 2 hours. Listening Library, $22.

In this interesting pair of children’s books, Engle — a Cuban-American poet, novelist and journalist — paints a picture of two little-known moments in Cuban history. Each carries personal significance for her, but each can stand on its own as part of the jigsaw puzzle that is the past.

Tropical Secrets is the story of Daniel, a Jewish boy in 1939 Germany whose parents have placed him on a refugee ship headed toward America. Desperate to save their son, they’ve pledged to meet him soon in New York City. But the United States and Canada have both turned the ship away, and now Daniel’s only hope is to come ashore in Cuba.

Although Cuba also bans the ship’s desperate Jewish cargo, somehow Daniel winds up on land, befriended by an unlikely pairing: David, an elderly Jewish ice-cream seller, and Paloma, the teenage daughter of the Cuban official who decides whether people may enter the island nation. And as World War II wears on, there’s a bizarre twist — after Pearl Harbor, Cuba decides that German refugees who aren’t Jewish might be Nazi spies. Suddenly, in a strange but altered echo of events in Europe, German Christians are being rounded up and placed in Cuban camps, separated from their Jewish spouses and facing an uncertain future.

The Surrender Tree, meanwhile, tells of the mysterious Rosa, a real-life folk healer who uses wild plants to help cure rebels during three 19th-century wars in which Cuban rebels sought freedom from Spain. In one of the wars, in fact, Captain-General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the island’s Spanish-installed governor, invents the concentration camp, later perfected by Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust; Weyler uses it to force Cuban farmers away from the countryside, figuring –– erroneously — that without support from the people, the rebels will have to give up. Those who refuse to go to the camps will be shot on sight.

Though Spain ultimately is defeated, there’s no happy ending for Cuba’s rebels. They can only watch as the United States, with their help, wins the Spanish-American War of 1898, but instead of freeing Cuba replaces Spain as the island’s master. Still, for Rosa, who has spent a lifetime hiding in caves from Spanish soldiers and hoping for freedom, there is hope, as a young girl named Sylvia learns Rosa’s folk-medicine secrets and seems poised to carry on her work.

Each of these stories is episodic, almost dreamlike; in fact, they are written as brief snatches of non-rhyming poetry, each told from a character’s point of view. But the action is usually easy to follow, and Engle’s personal connection to her subjects — her parents were of mixed Jewish-Catholic Eastern European-Cuban origin, like the couples in Tropical Secrets; her Cuban grandmother, as a young girl, had to go with her family to one of Weyler’s concentration camps — gives her work a special sense of authenticity.

The books’ readers don’t bring anything special to their performances, but the multiple voices — and the fact that each poem begins with the name of the person telling that part of the story — mean it’s always clear who’s telling the complex tales.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s assistant managing editor for breaking news.