2023-08-31 17:03:11
Alamar, a neighborhood in eastern Havana, became a commuter town for the Cuban capital starting in 1971 when dozens of five-story buildings diluted the few small houses that occupied the original subdivision. In that year, Latin America gave signs of what would be unleashed with the succession of military dictatorships: parties and organizations were outlawed, hundreds of thousands of people went into exile, and aberrational practices were unleashed that would later be normalized with summary executions. , torture, forced disappearances and kidnapping of children.
True to the context, the micro-brigade movement that was born to create thousands of popular houses in Cuba, was initially called “Tupamaros”, in honor of the urban guerrilla in Uruguay. Later, Alamar would honor the current of sympathy of the Cubans towards those who faced the dictatorships and, in popular assemblies, it was decided to allocate the exiles, mainly women and children from South and Central America who arrived by waves to the island, the first houses built in that portion of territory facing the Atlantic, which became the most multicultural neighborhood in Cuba.
It is not known for sure exactly how many refugees flocked to the island in those years, but it is known that Alamar, which now has about 100,000 inhabitants, was known as the city of Chileans.
According to official sources, between 200,000 and 500,000 Chileans left their country after the military coup against President Salvador Allende, equivalent to 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively, of the total population of Chile in those years. Thousands were destined for Cuba. Many were children who lived through the middle of the 70s and practically the entire decade of the 80s, playing baseball more than soccer and studying in Cuban schools, where they were as “pioneers” as the others, they wore blue and red scarves, they knew each other by heart. the poems of José Martí, they spoke loudly, they preferred the conga to the cueca and they called beans beans and avocados.
Most of the Chilean exiles who arrived in Cuba in the first hour left the country after being sheltered in embassies or in dangerous semi-clandestine or clandestine operations through the mountains. An international campaign rescued Manuel Cabieses Donoso, director of the legendary magazine, from a concentration camp Final point that the coup leaders closed hours after the assault on the La Moneda Palace and the death of Salvador Allende. After two years in prison in Chacabuco and Los Álamos, Manuel would arrive with his wife and his three children to live in apartment 11, third floor, in the D-2 building, zone 7 of Alamar.
A decade ago he spoke to me nostalgically about Alamar and refused to accept that the town was reduced to the presence of Chileans, even though “the solidarity that Cuba gave Chile is impossible to measure in material terms.” Alamar was also a refuge for Argentines, Uruguayans, Bolivians, Peruvians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Haitians, Colombians, and Hondurans, who were fleeing terror, prison, and death in their countries. After that conversation we had in 2009, Manuel published his memories of exile in the magazine House of the Americas.
“We were thousands of Latin American refugees on the island while Cuba faced the rigors of the US blockade. But also in those years there were African scholarship holders who were preparing as teachers, doctors and engineers. And very close to Alamar, on Tarará beach, were the children of Chernobyl recovering from the horrible burns of the nuclear accident. And the wounded and mutilated Angolans, South Africans and Congolese rehabilitating themselves in Cuban hospitals and sanatoriums. Giap’s comrades, Mandela’s companions, Lumumba’s heirs, followers of That from all over the world,” Cabieses wrote.
Several of the 24 ministers in Boric’s cabinet were born, raised, or studied in Pinochet’s exile. Maya Fernández, Minister of Defense of Chile and the youngest granddaughter of Salvador Allende, lived almost 20 years in Cuba.
The 50 years of the military coup against President Allende are justly remembered, but the media give special importance and congratulate some events over others. For example, the gesture of the Department of State in declassifying, half a century later, reports sent to Richard Nixon in the hours before the coup d’état in Chile, which in reality hide more than teach. Anyone who has followed the investigations of Peter Kornbluh, an analyst at the US National Security Archive, will find evidence that Nixon was not only aware of events since Allende arrived at the La Moneda Palace, but that Washington was complicit in the violence with that the Popular Unity government was overthrown and the brutality of the repression against its supporters and its presumed social base.
Selective forgetting, as always, does injustice to the past. Hopefully the tributes will remember that Chile, between the nightmare and the terror, among the many proofs of heroism, resistance and solidarity, also had a Cuban Alamar.
#Chilean #Alamar #Cubaperiodistas