2023-05-19 22:56:57
It’s my fault: I can’t grow. Every May, an inexplicable atavism forces me to review some passage from the battle of Dos Ríos and, regardless of the path I take on my expedition, I always end up believing that, perhaps —if Baconao sticks to Máximo’s “armored” horse Gómez, if the Boatswain slackens the current and thus speeds up the pace of our men, if a spring shower blots out the sun and cools the rifles or if some birds give away the ambushed Spaniards with their flight—, after half past one in the morning Later the end will be another, in which the Delegate leaves the fight intact, describes it like nobody else and then continues on his way to Camagüey and the other century.
Right now, 128 years after the holocaust on four shores, it is anguish to reread that with just three of the 10,075 cartridges that the Spanish troops spent in that action on May 19, the beacon of the uprising was broken while he — and here it is difficult to escape from that idea of his of war without hatred—he fell without firing a bullet from the Colt revolver that, to preserve him and us, Panchito Gómez Toro had given him as a gift.
Thus, José Martí launched his new rank of Major General in combat, nothing less than failing to comply with the first direct order —to stay behind, given by Gómez— and without shooting any of the enemies who killed him with heavy fire. The “lack” had, however, the best argument of the war: Martí knew that the most sacred mission of the one who illuminates a cause is to set an example. And in that he was superfluous.
So they killed him, they killed him even though a few dissatisfied mambises still dream of changing History so that the National Hero lasts twice as long as those 42 years that, despite being so profitable, seem nothing compared to what he deserved to live and what that Cuba needed to have it. They killed him in a fight of low military significance but of seismic political noise. Every day he weighs what happened there.
I guess every Cuban has his Two Rivers. After the fall of the one who should have fallen the least, what strikes me the most about those days is the almost mythological picture, flatly cinematographic, just thinking about it, of a black general biting again and again, with a small guerrilla with a big jaw, the rumps of the Spanish column of more than 600 troops that took to Santiago —a forced march, as who knows that the sun has kidnapped— the corpse of the man who, a few days ago, the old mambí with skin and fibers that seemed to be made of acana had known and called Apostle. In the rescue that he did not achieve, Quintín was Bandera taller than ever.
It has been proven: the same land of Cuba can grow palm and marabou. While the great Quentin immediately recognized the light of the star in that man, there was no shortage of doubtful compatriots who wanted to put it out. He still knows full well that, after the fall of Martí in Dos Ríos, Antonio (El Mulato…) Oliva, a Cuban who served as a pilot for the Spanish forces, boasted of having finished him off.
Apparently, the statement was no more than the bluff of someone seeking recognition and a pension from the colonial Army. Colonel Ximénez de Sandoval, head of the Hispanic forces in combat, included among the distinguished soldiers the aforementioned pilot, who would later receive the Cuban Military Merit Cross, a red badge, but no pension! It is that, in the long run, the traitors of peoples do not find the path to victory.
No, he does not come to victory who has lost himself. Whatever the precisions that, in this regard, the waters of that pair of eastern rivers will swallow forever, what cannot be doubted is that just that boast —finishing off José Martí!—, in a Cuban, is a crime as serious as the greatest massacre. How does a son kill (or not) his father and then fill his mouth with the ad so that it fills his belly?
Oliva’s apparent fate was lost among the sayings of the years: what if he was hacked to death —karma mambí?— in a cafe in San Luis, executed with a clean edge in a canteen in Palmarito, or if the war ended in 1898, he went to the peninsula, following the docked tail (in the jungle) of his masters.
Sown with facts, children of multiple signs germinate in this land. While History forgets that Oliva, it is inclined to respect his brother Pedro and his cousin Juan Eugenio, insurgents who with sheer charge defended the splendor of their own last name and the common adjective —Cubans, darling…!— On the side of the martians
The official Spanish party acknowledged having suffered in their ranks, in the fray in Dos Ríos, five dead and six wounded. Among the latter was the practical Cuban Francisco Diéguez, who ultimately took a life path opposite to that of El Mulato Oliva and ended the war as a mambí colonel.
Desperate to lose, right under his umbrella, the most valuable patriot, Máximo Gómez wrote a letter on May 20, 1895 to the colonel —he still did not know his identity— who commanded the Spanish column that he had faced the day before, asking him to let him know the situation of Martí.
In the Cuban camp, the Spanish soldiers Isidro Alfonso Galante and Emilio García Rozón, captured during the exchange of arms, did not know how to tell the old mambí the name of the chief who commanded the other side, but they gave him a better answer: when the General in Boss left them free to return with theirs, they both decided to stay with ours. They would end the war in the Liberation Army and their military files marked, as the date of entry, May 19, 1895: even falling, the Master recruited Spanish mambises for the cause!
It is still hard to believe: on the side of the liberators, only Martí perished in Dos Ríos —Colonel Bellito died later, due to a bullet received there—, but it is moving to know that he did so with the conviction, exposed a day before in a letter to Manuel Mercado, that he knew how to “disappear,” although his thought would not disappear.
Right there we were faced with a national dilemma. Just as he disobeyed Gómez’s order and did not step aside at the moment of greatest danger, since then we Cubans cannot accept his announced ability to disappear. Now that the hero and his people have so many powerful enemies, what Cuba needs is for José Martí to show daily that he knows how to appear.
To the mambises who persist in changing the fate of May 19, it is up to us to give body of work to a living thought as predicted one day, on the edge of death, the mind that continues to generate it.
Now that the blockade of the United States and the obstinacy of its springs seem to be leading to the collective martyrdom of all the people of Cuba, the Apostle cannot remain alone in the moved reading. Our route to Martí suffers the stalking of the Antonio Oliva who at this time continue to ambush symbols and illuminate, with the dark light of submission, the blows that another strange power inflicts on the land that has given birth to the “explorers” themselves.
There are not a few “practical” Creoles who, with the presumed credibility of the cradle, guide in raste(r) or walk, through trails of social networks —toward that Trojan door from which we have dispatched so many wooden horses—, at the same monster to whom the fall of Martí was so convenient and today persists in demolishing the spirit of a poor but independent nation.
Five years before he fell, the Master had portrayed such characters in a letter to Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui that could be dated today: «Some are sold, and many are venal, but with a snort of honor one can back down who, due to herd habits, or the appetite for lentils, leave the ranks as soon as they hear the whip that summons them, or see the plate set.
Even further back, on September 27, 1885, the chronicler José Martí had given the readers of the Argentine newspaper The nation this image: “Rivers are the veins of war.” Would his vital circulation, so tied to the hunch of the homeland, lead him, for this reason, to perpetuate his image of a fight at the crossroads of two of them?
It’s my fault: I can’t grow. Every May, an inexplicable atavism leads me to Dos Ríos with the idea of nothing less than inventing the time machine, changing destiny, returning to its human container the incoagulable blood that from that point, disguised as common water, moves all the desires of the nation.
I know that the task is daunting, because this José Martí is too scarlet spring, but it is more difficult for those who support traitors because the current quickly takes them away.
Cover photo: Work of the plastic artist Isis de Lázaro
#Honor #loyalties #side #Dos #Ríos