That rare intellectual who gave away ideas

2023-06-26 22:26:14

He had blue eyes, very white skin, and a shaved head that once crowned with blond hair. In a corner of Berlin or Paris, any lost person would have chosen it to get their bearings. But on 23rd Street in Havana, which he retraced to the rhythm of his tired heart or that of his inseparable dog Igor, I don’t think anyone ever confused him with a foreigner.

“No, man, no,” he would have jokingly responded to anyone who dared to ignore his authentic mountain image at dawn and that extraordinary love for the streams of the Sierra, where its dust will furrow eternity, by his own decision and by the infinite family of friends that he founded after all his family left Cuba.

He had a certain predilection for F: people close and dear to him were called “skinny” or “ugly”, including females, to whom his “ugly” sounded like the most beautiful compliment in the world. His friend Celima, queen and mistress of the meaning of words, will be able to explain it better, but I have my own interpretation of that code: he looked at us from the inside, contrary to how ordinary people usually look, so he also called us the reverse of how we looked where others do not see.

As for the F, I said a certain predilection, because in the case of Fidel, even though he wrote it with all the letters, he called him the Giant. But there, yes, one could not think of the code backwards and not only because the one named is exactly the same on the inside as it is on the outside, but because the one who baptized it that way was Camilo Cienfuegos, that being from whom Guillermo inherited so much — without having blood relations. — by the line of the Cuban and who knows if also by the influence of his unforgettable talks with Ramón, the father of the hero.

According to the rigid rules of the calendar, he lived to be over 60 years old, but everyone knows that Guillermo was perpetual youth. That is why thousands of young people read him and followed him everywhere and he lived inventing adventures that involved them. “He was obsessed with making them fall in love with our history,” said his endearing Katiuska Blanco with eyes open with tears and fixed on an inaccurate point in the place where the numerous relatives he gave himself put up a flag, candles, medals, and banners with gifts from Thursday.

“What else did you do to be so loved?” asked a young man who only knew his columns of JR. “He did school,” I said, and I told him about his founding work from the Abril publisher, the journalistic expeditions along historical routes, the investigative reports, the war correspondents, the José Martí Institute, the Rocinante Ribs, the recovered books, the Hemingway and the Kapunchinskis who taught us to read without earmuffs, the thousand and one jokes and the thousand and one inventions to free us from routine and scheme, the tagline signed by William Tell.

And his section A return from the post office, surely the only corner of his journalism that was once bitter and stinging because of bureaucracy and other pains, but from which he did such memorable works as saving our beaches from a dangerous wave of prohibition of step that slipped into tourism with the crisis of the 90s.

A lot, Guillermo Cabrera Álvarez did a lot, so much so that if everyone who knew him could write his epitaph, even heaven would be filled with epigrams for him. That’s why there will be no tombstone.

But there are newspapers, where his relatives, due to the love of the trade, we can exercise the privilege of renaming him.

Mine would say that “Guillermo was that rare intellectual who gave away ideas.” I know it doesn’t sum it all up, but it says at least some of the best about him. Ideas are the most expensive property of an intellectual. Almost none give them without credit and almost all claim them at any risk. But Guillermo gave them as if for each one he gave away, hundreds were born. And when he didn’t give them, he lit the spark for them to be born.

Just yesterday someone asked me to borrow an idea for which I won applause several years ago at a women’s meeting: “the woman and the man of this time live in disagreement because they spend their lives looking for a woman who no longer exists, and they they spend their time looking for a man who doesn’t exist yet.”

The idea had actually been given to me by Guillermo, but he refused when I wanted to give him credit. According to what he told me, they had also given it to him. “Then tell me the name of the person who gave it to you, to quote him,” I told him. “Not ugly,” he replied, “it was a woman whose name I can’t give you.”

That man who lived alone most of the time, was mercilessly called and visited in his offices on G and 21 by people who always left full of ideas. The ones that he gave away in private are everywhere, the same in books as in newspapers and billboards, signed or not by names other than his own. The others were distributed collectively. And since he was a genius, he always had a lot of them for his Thursday gifts.