By José Alejandro Rodríguez on August 8, 2022
photo: Ricardo Lopez Heria
The beautiful Matanzas burns of pain before an excessive lightning, whim of the exalted Mother Nature that unleashed in persistent flames the oil that urges us. And Cuba, so promiscuous in sharing sorrows, shudders moved by the tongues of fire, the flesh and the cut dreams of so many children once again.
If the poet José Jacinto Milanés had been yesterday on his elbows on the bridge over the San Juan River in his beloved city, his tears would surely overflow the current.
A strange miracle unites Cubans in every tragedy, with the centripetal force of an island magnet. Daily hardships, wear and tear and shortages are forgotten. And a much stronger force is imposed to exorcise calamities and collapses, to the sound of a Failde danzón, or the leathers of the Muñequitos de Matanzas.
The advance guard of this army of saviors in the face of every bite are always the testicular rescuers who risk theirs to save other lives, the brave health missionaries, the workers and every compatriot who stops along the way to spread the gospel of solidarity. The spirit to be where you have to be and to face the difficult in extreme situations, which is not always reproduced in the boring day to day struggle.
What would have been the last dream of those firefighters who disappeared like an unclassifiable enigma between life and death? What impotence of so many Cuban gregarious people, who now would like to be there, defying the fire, regenerating the felled flesh!
The blasphemies and perversities that the everlasting haters weave in the social networks, like spider threads, this time also bring the flames of the oil tanks in Matanzas to their opportunistic frying pan. Always deluded, they foresee the end of this controversial human adventure called Cuba in the face of any cry or disengagement of the people, or in the face of the excesses of nature itself.
But always an unusual aché, a hard mortar beyond our cracks, cements us before the worst misfortunes with a strength that does not believe in hurricanes, lightning or threats of hot-headed minds. With that disposition is that they will never crackle or burn our excessive vocation to live and a rare hope that tomorrow we will dawn again. Matanzas will recover the placidity and the idyll of its poets.
Source: Juventud Rebelde, translation Resumen Latinoamericano- US