By Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez on August 3, 2023
photo: Bill Hackwell
It was too expensive, for my monetary resources at the age of 16, to send a telegram to Cuba from Mexico. However, I did “the thousand and one” and was able to put in the telegraph office a message: “Comandante Fidel Castro: happy 26th of July anniversary”. To what address are you sending it,” the telegraph operator asked me, and I did not know what to say. You put “Palacio de Gobierno de Cuba”. I paid for my telegram and left. With the passing of the years I remember my audacity (and my ignorance) not without perplexity: how did I come up with such an idea, where did I get the folly of believing that, “just like that”, one could send Fidel anniversary messages that would reach his hands without obstacles? Evidently it did not seem impossible to me.
A number of memories help me explain why, for my generation, Cuba and Fidel always seemed very close and friendly. I was born in 1956, I grew up with the Cuban Revolution installed in my house. At the age of 16, an uncle had already given me La Historia me Absolverá (1953) and my grandmother had given me El Diario del Che en Bolivia (Che’s Diary in Bolivia). At UNAM there were posters with Fidel’s image, Carlos Puebla’s music came to us in “singles” and “long play” records. Between “secundaria” and “prepa” (national preparatory school) I already listened to Oscar Chavez singing to Che and Camilo. My grandmother used to say that she loved “los barbudos” (the bearded ones) because they did good things for their people. Cuba, Fidel and the Revolution were part of my family since I was a teenager and before. Very quickly I realized that such familiarity ran through homes, schools and workplaces all over the country. I am not exaggerating, Cuba struck a chord in Mexico.
I have heard very similar stories over the years, stories of love and commitment engendered by a small Caribbean island that knew how to become a giant in the hearts of the people. This is not just a metaphor for a rhetorical exercise. It is a confession of part. Women and men of the intelligentsia, academia, the arts and popular struggles grew up impregnated with Cuba. Of its struggles and its examples. It stayed in our heads and in our hearts to flourish in ideas and debates about the Revolution and its class engines; about the Cuban method to transform the world; about socialism argued with a Caribbean accent, with the rebellious and geographical proximity framed by the Gulf of Mexico. We can still see the wake of the Granma sailing the waters towards a history that became a teacher of life from the Sierra.
Bohemia magazine reached my house, my parents’ house, because I signed up on a list that circulated in high school. It was a delight to leaf through it on homework afternoons. My father would frown, somewhere between concerned and curious. Soon his misgivings were over because he read, by Rius, his Cuba for Beginners (1966) and also read Marx for Beginners (1972), from the brilliant pen of a lover of Cuba like few others: Eduardo del Rio, who is missed. By the way, books read by millions of Mexicans who also learned, with drawings of a singular comic, the basics of a revolutionary experience that connected Zapata, Villa and Flores Magón with Fidel, Camilo, Raúl and Che in the same path that follows the “spirit that travels the world”.
At night, late at night, on my father’s radio -which had short wave- my brother and I would listen to Radio Habana, Radio Reloj and Cuban music, constantly jammed by that noise of crisscrossing frequencies. It was a sonorous delicacy from Cuba that satiated the hunger for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist sounds. A few times we were able to listen to Fidel without fully understanding what he was saying, but we were delighted by the dignity of his words in combat. A night political school with our ears glued to the radio. Revolutionary delights. Why, what was happening that so many of us young people felt attracted to Cuba and the Revolution that we made our own in our own peculiar way? What strange love, of a new genre, was growing in our heads and hearts? We were not few.
If only it were possible to tell the Cuban people how much we have been educated by their titanic example of resistance and fortitude. I wish it were possible for a few lines to summarize and express the accumulation of fraternal emotions that nestle in our lives thanks to Cuba’s example of solidarity with all brotherly peoples, in Angola as well as in Venezuela, just to mention a geopolitical and historical axis of a new kind in time and space.
I write in the first person with the assumption that this is the best way to explain the intimate love that many Mexicans feel for the Cuban Revolution and, also, the immense debt we owe to its example of struggle and dignity in every way. Thus, in the first person, I suppose I can leave in view the many hours of readings and debates, the many hours of music, cinema, poetry and philosophy collected from so many extraordinary Cuban talents. Casa de las Americas… Prensa Latina, Pablo, Silvio. I write in the first person indebted with the good hours of the best scientific and cultural production of Cuba and indebted with the solidarity (never enough) in the bitter hours of harassment, blockade and humiliation against an exemplary and unbreakable people such as the Cuban. At my age, I know that I will never be able to repay all that I have received. However, I will stick to the words of Martí, which I understand as a warrior’s chant in an ever-humanist struggle: “Love is repaid with love”. I hope to be up to the task every July 26th, in the first person.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English