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The shower was six feet from the floor of the bathtub, but he – “Uncle Angelito” – was that tall and a little more, which is why he had to pull his legs up to be able to drop abruptly. He must have felt a strong blow to the neck, urinated, defecated uncontrollably, and after finishing kicking, found death.
Not fifteen minutes had passed when his family discovered him hanged in the main bathroom of his home in our hometown of Cienfuegos, Cuba. He had tied his neck with a necktie and the other end wrapped it as he could, hastily, to the shower. When they took him down, he was still warm.
Like every day from Monday to Friday, today I fulfilled my rigorous morning ritual in front of my small television where I usually devour the program “Primera Página.” “Mingo” (its excellent host) was interviewing the Attorney General of the Bolivarian Republic and asked her if she considered it a good idea for the Castro-communist Cubans to come to Venezuela to do literacy work. She reluctantly answered yes. What a question? What will she know about life…?
Fortunately, while we lived in Cuba, neither my brother nor I had the statutory 15 years to be part of the “literacy brigades“, which did not help us not to learn by heart – and forever – the anthem of what our brigade would have been. , “The Conrado Benitez Brigade“. We learned it at school… it was compulsory to learn it. We will never forget it, my brother and I. It went like this:
“We are the Conrado Benítez Brigade, we are the vanguard of the Revolution, with the book held high we achieve a goal: to bring literacy to all of Cuba. Cuba, Cuba… study, work, rifle; pencil, primer, manual, to alphabetize… to alphabetize: We will win!”
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I was 11 years old when that literacy hymn was drilled into my soul; my brother a little older: thirteen.
Our cousin, Marianita, was fifteen when she was recruited by the “Conrado Benítez Brigade”. She was cute, our cousin. She had curly golden hair; her hips were already accusing her of becoming a woman and her white skin – loaded with a penetrating aroma of maiden perfume – matched her green-emerald eyes. She was entering that age where girls play at being seductive females without anyone noticing it, at least not us children who saw her as a goddess as distant and unattainable as the dreams of freedom that flooded that Cuba that was inaugurating a revolution that promised to be as green as our palms and ended up stained with a dark communist red that blended with the clotted blood shed by hundreds of Cubans who had already given up their lives in front of the firing squad wall.
Marianita had studied since kindergarten in the French Dominican, she was – by then – “communicated and confirmed”, as our grandmother used to say. May she rest in peace. The prestigious college of nuns no longer existed.
That afternoon we saw her leave happy as Easter, full of the emotion that the beginning of an adventure produces. It would be the first time she had walked away from her very-conservative home. Although it was obligatory to comply with the “sacred and revolutionary” duty of making the peasants of Escambray Mountain literate, her independent spirit found in the mission an excuse to play at being older.
After a fortnight adrift in the mountains, once the regulatory time was up, she returned to her home in Punta Gorda riding on a dump truck. Her father could have gone looking for her in the Cienfuegos mountains in his “duck-tail” Cadillac, but he would have “scratched” her with her fellow revolutionaries.
A month passed and Marianita missed her menstrual period. When it was evident that she was pregnant she spoke with her parents, but she was unable to ascertain who was the father of the child she had fathered. Upon hearing that, “Uncle Angelito” excused himself for a moment and went to the main bathroom of the house. He could not bear the embarrassment and misfortune.
That’s how revolutions are… I say. Marianita got lost in the tangle of the new Cuba and we never heard from her. According to unreliable sources, she ended up with a Russian man and now lives somewhere near Odessa, but this version could not be confirmed by a cousin who came out of the “sea of happiness” a couple of years ago. Her mother ended up deranged in Mazorra, the Havana mental hospital, always waiting to prepare lunch for our “uncle.” Marianita was an only child.
Our cousin was not an isolated case. The literacy brigades – many of us think – fulfilled the additional purpose of destroying who-knows-how-many-families like our relatives. In each “operation“, in each “mission” that communism has programmed in Cuba or outside of it, one and a thousand misfortunes are hidden, some sadder than others. Perhaps Ms. Colomina will come to understand our drama as a nation and take pity on the soul of Cubans like “Uncle Angelito”… perhaps.
