2023-08-25 00:09:20
Nicolasito Guillén, my friend of many years, as was his family of mine, asked me to be present at this tribute to a close and common friend, the writer and professor Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, whose book would be presented: The racial problem in Cuba, in the first books of Nicolás Guillén, from UNION Editions. I am sick, unable to get out of bed; however, I cannot be absent from this act of affection for one of my great friends. Virgen Gutiérrez, who knows both of us well, will take charge of my presence.
To Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera
I met Guillermo, probably at the end of 1959, at a pool party at the Habana Riviera hotel given by the Student Association of the Vedado Institute. He played the Aragón orchestra and I attended with several colleagues from the Havana Institute. Guillermo was responsible for culture of the Student Association of the Vedado Institute and organizer of that party. I was a leader of the Confederation of Secondary Students, but I was still in college. basic secondary, the new name that the old Upper Primaries now had. That was our first meeting, then we saw each other many times in meetings at the Institute.
Years later, when I entered the School of Letters and Arts of the University of Havana, we met again and with him I was able to discuss the strategies to follow in the entrance exam, which was mandatory. I think that what united us the most, in addition to the Revolution, was our training in the ins and outs and details of popular culture, especially music.
Guillermo came from a solid institution, which was his family, the Rodríguez Rivera family. Santiago by idiosyncrasy, culture and that special way of seeing Cuba from the east of the country; his conception of the country. For those families, as for the aforementioned, life was not possible without freedom, independence and sovereignty. That’s him fate of Santiago de Cuba and the provinces that surround and shelter it.
Doctors all, Guillermo was an exception. His father, a forensic doctor, was an example of civic attitude in the difficult moments of the Moncada Assault. His brother Alipio, a psychiatrist, was in charge of that department at the Calixto García Hospital until his death. His brother Luis, an extraordinary professor, was one of the great scholars of epilepsy in Cuba, and René is an outstanding radiologist who is still with us. The mother and guide of all that troop of emeritus, is at work in the kitchen and her severe gaze still calls for order. Life gave me the opportunity to eat from that maternal hand, at a table set for her children. Fate allowed me to meet all of them. If something favored our friendship, it was the idea that knowledge is not a load, nor a mask, nor a coat of arms, but rather an instrument to live and solve life’s crossroads.
“Guillermo went through the university as one of its brightest students.”
In the days when we suffered, among other sufferings, the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, the so-called “dry law”, Guillermo organized “El Habana Rivera” in the garage and patio of his house. The cabarets were closed, but we danced there and drank the worst rum on the continent. However, the best moments in his crowded house in Vedado were when, all the brothers gathered, they sang and played the trova from Santiago.
Everyone played and sang the trova classics in different voices. From Sindo to Teofilito and Corona, and also unknown things from Almenares, Cucho the pollero and Manolo Castillo. Guillermo played the guitar badly, but he knew how to put the necessary chords on his brother’s guitar playing.
Many times I played the keys, timidly. Always looking at Luis, who was the best, and expecting his head approval and smile. They were masters of memory and they were very clear about the meaning of an entire era, which is why they could place music at that height. Many times I put “Años”, the album by Pablo Milanés, where Luis appears, with all rights, singing and playing what I always heard him sing and play.
Guillermo went through the university as one of its brightest students. One of Mirta Aguirre’s favorites, who allowed him to write a brochure and a book about her with her and in which he showed off her understanding of the Marxist theory of knowledge. He published the first book of poetry by him; He was then followed by his great friends Víctor Casaus and Wichy Nogueras, in the spontaneous conformation of what would later become “El grupo del Caimán” (bearded man), the largest generation of Coppelia, which was incorporated, among others, by Silvio Rodriguez; all manifestations of the literacy generation, in which one hundred thousand students participated in the first great cultural task of Cubans.
“He knew very well that reading for pleasure was not the same as reading for exams.”
in the nights of Coppelia many statements were made, none seriously. There was an organization of revolutionary youth that worked in the fields; it was called the Centennial Youth Column and its members were columnists. Guillermo declared that he was a columnist, because he had a spinal cord disease and that at the same time his illness did not allow him to be in the organization or in anything that he had to do with the green (green, agriculture). He declared himself exonerated from such labors and called for an increase in ours to pay for his. He was the co-author of a song by Wichy that had the refrain: “to the inn at dawn, pilot piqueras” and part of the group that composed “Don’t fall asleep in the rufa, because they lift your heels” (which was sung to the melody of “Don’t fall asleep on the subway”), regarding the theft of the only copy of his novel from our friend Manolo Casanovas The Dog Killers.
I met Guillermo’s two daughters in their mothers’ bellies; María Lilya in Mayra’s and Milena in Virgin’s. It was school times and in which I published Those who were born with mea book of poems for which Guillermo wrote the cover text and other texts in which he referred to my work, including his own poems.
In those days of youth none of this impressed me very much, today I am overwhelmed and I have to control the emotion. I think that one of our adventures at the University is that quintet made up of Fidelina, Alina Sánchez, Oscar de los Reyes, Guillermo and me. We performed at the Political Science Theatre, singing “Monday, Monday”, a piece that The Mama’s and the Papa’s had made fashionable. When we finished and got off the stage, the dean of the time told us: “Come here, don’t you know anything in Spanish?” And that was the end of the quartet that had debuted moments before.
Guillermo spent a lot of time training as a teacher. I lived the years in which he read me his reading plans that of course exceeded what is studied in class. it was not read Daddy Goriot but have knowledge of the human comedy. It was not reading for pleasure either. He knew very well that reading for pleasure was not the same as reading for examination. It is likely that he has never studied as much as in that time when he hardly left the house.
“Guillermo spent a lot of time training as a teacher.” Photo: Taken from the Internet
Time passed and little by little we stopped being young, in recent years we met in his new apartment in Vedado where he lived with Marlen, his wife, and received their care. The days of Habana Rivera had been left behind and now we dedicated ourselves to listening to the complete collection of Miguel Matamoros that he owned and the almost complete collection of Arsenio Rodríguez, the marvelous blind man, to which I added, because I had not listened to him, the album that Arsenio recorded in New York and that originated the anecdote of: “blind man, what music is that, you have gone a century ahead”. Over time he let me record all the records and today I keep them as a shared treasure; I feel that it belongs to both of us and that it is what unites us in his absence.
It seems to me that Guillermo did not have time and I think that the same is going to happen to many of us. He lacked perhaps ten more years to think and write. Life runs and time is not enough for us. The last times I saw him I realized that there was little left; also the things he told me helped me believe it.
Looking at him, I remembered that he had stolen a book by Vicente Aleixandre, which probably compensated for the poetic of Hegel that he never returned to me. Sitting in front of me was the fat man and he was dying. The day we honored his remains, in a wake that had nothing to do with the old tradition (of chocolate, cookies, churros, coffee, rum and endless conversations), he became my ghost. And I, who don’t believe in ghosts or spirits, know, however, that the fat man always walks ahead of me.
Taken from the blog Second date
#years #passed #Cubaperiodistas