I met Camilo Cienfuegos in the school where I learned to write love, verse and Homeland, where I was told about a special man with a clean smile, long beard and crystalline eyes.
In the classroom they taught me that the Hero of Yaguajay came on the Granma, fought in the Sierra and went down to the plains to make Cuba free, of that man who earned the affection and admiration of the Island that today reveres his birth.
His imprint stands out in different generations, in the homage that the people pay daily, in the history that teaches about a Camilo child, teenager, young Havana man, whose simple and common life, plus his exploits make him a legend.
The cry of the newborn in his cramped quarters in Lawton announced the arrival of the fine air rider, who had to overcome the rigors of poverty without abandoning his family commitment and solid revolutionary principles.
Learning in school to become a good man was the purpose of the Spartan-faced warrior, whose dream of becoming an architect was cut short by the economic vicissitudes of his offspring that forced him to change the pencil for useful work.
It was the tailor’s shop “El Arte” that offered him his first jobs as a cleaner and messenger until he became a clerk; but the financial precariousness of his family led him to the United States, in the hope of a better progress.
In 1958, his homeland welcomed him and a man inspired him: Fidel. Meeting that giant who proposed a free country, where all its people had the same rights, was the reason to return again to the northern nation and make money in search of the Granma, in search of the combats and battles in the Sierra and the plain for the rescue of freedom, respect, dignity and manhood.
Ninety-two years have passed since Emilia and Ramon brought to the world that iconic dove glow so that the love, the verse and the homeland learned in that school remain intact, unique, deep, sincere, to embrace forever the loyalty of a Hero who loved a country from the truths, who defying a hundred or more fires became the throat and vein of a whole people.
