This April 22 marks 205 years since the founding of the Fernandina de Jagua colony, now the city of Cienfuegos.
Parodying the famous poem by the Argentine César Fernández Moreno, I affirm that I am a Cienfuegos native until death.
I was born there on September 20, 1957, shortly after the heroic uprising against the Batista dictatorship.
In my childhood, I made my first friends, among whom I remember Pedro Álvarez Montecito and Pedrito “El Pimpe,” both Black and children of extraordinarily kind and decent parents. Montecito had a contagious laugh and unmatched elegance when fielding in the improvised ball games we organized at the sports field of the “Jorge Luis Estrada” Pre-university Institute. My friendship with Pimpe began with a fight in which I came out worse, so much so that later he taught me how to fight with punches because “Robertico,” he said, “you have to learn to defend yourself.”
In those unforgettable afternoons, in a baseball game or playing pranks in the “Callejón de los Mulos” – then a suburban area and today the location of the provincial hospital, the stadium, the TV center, and the School of Medicine – everything was happiness, for I was unaware that in Cuba there was much pain, repression, and death.
I haven’t forgotten the day my parents invited me to take a bus ride on one of the seven routes the city had. Now I don’t remember which one, although I do remember that we started the journey on La Mar Street, in one of the first Soviet buses to arrive in Cuba, a bus painted gray with violet windows on the roof and large windows, which according to the Internet seems to have been a Laz 695. That day I knew that Cienfuegos was much more than Gloria Street – where Ms. Nilsa and Mr. Benigno lived -, Zaldo Street, where I walked to “Félix Varela” primary school; the hill of the Pre-university Institute with its girls descending from it with their blue skirts and white ribbons sewn at the bottom to indicate what year of study they were in; the “Callejón de Los Mulos” and Alejo’s grocery store, where I often bought some small round multicolored candies enclosed in a glass jar, a delight for the neighborhood kids.
Youth arrived, and I learned that not everything was joy, like when Obdulio, a high school classmate, drowned at the “Julio Antonio Mella” Social Club.
From that time, I remember my swims and boat rides in the bay, the carnival parties on Prado and Zaldo or on the raft located on the Malecon, always with extraordinary friends, some of them becoming brothers. And also my visits to the municipal library, where I met Ileana and María Victoria, librarians from the youth department, and Juan René Cabrera and Florentino Morales, poets of extraordinary decency and culture.
It was on a night on the Malecon where I hugged a woman for the first time and gave her a kiss. Many times I walked there alone for the pleasure of looking at the landscape up to the Jagua hotel, the Valle Palace, or the Covadonga restaurant, where I enjoyed a delicious paella at a table by the sea, while looking at the Escambray mountains mentioned by Benny Moré in his extraordinary song dedicated to Cienfuegos.
Then I stood on the porches of the Luisa cinema-theater to look at the photos of the upcoming releases and longed to be 16 to see those forbidden movies.
On Saturdays, after listening to the weekly hit list on the “Nocturno” program, I went out for a walk on the Prado – the longest promenade in Cuba – or sat on one of its benches, if I found an empty spot, to watch the Cienfuegos women walk by or chat with my friends.
One of those nights, someone asked what Cienfuegos would be like in 2019, the year of its bicentennial, and we speculated about how we would be, also about our city, although we imagined that date as something very distant. In my naivety, I thought that Cienfuegos would be a great metropolis by then, with the bay surrounded by skyscrapers. To me, it deserved to be like that, not only for its geographical conditions but also for being the magical place where I was born because one always wants the best for their homeland.
Due to those mysterious twists of life, none of my Cienfuegos girlfriends “tied me to their yoke” – as Serrat says in his beautiful song – but a Guantanamera did. Contrary to what many Cubans then – and still do – in the west, I went to Guantanamo and reinvented my life in circumstances that marked what was undoubtedly my first uprooting.
From there, I waited for the bicentennial of my hometown and dreamed of it, although every time I visited, I sadly found that there were more losses than gains.
On April 18, 2019, accompanied by my friend Regino Rodríguez Boti, I took a bus to Cienfuegos, but at the police checkpoint, State Security stopped the vehicle and forced me to get off. That night I had a strong altercation with the coward “Víctor Víctor,” an officer in charge of repressing me, who illegally detained us for more than three hours.
Four days later, on Monday, April 22, the bicentennial day, I was with Regino at a restaurant celebrating the date when Tomás Cardoso from Radio Martí called me to ask me to get some news about the trial of the evangelical pastors Ramón Rigal and Ayda Expósito because the person in charge of doing it had backed down due to the strong police presence in the courthouse area. There I was detained and brutally beaten by a henchman of the dictatorship and ended the day in a cell, where I remained until Saturday, April 27.
Today Cienfuegos celebrates its 205th anniversary. I don’t know when I can visit it again, although, to be honest, almost every day I walk its streets and hug the friends who never abandoned me because life has taught me that the homeland is in the heart. Against that, the dictatorship and its henchmen can do nothing.
I am absolutely convinced that, God willing, someday I will celebrate the date of its founding there. Then, as I like, I will step away from the happy and bustling crowd and silently make my toast to it. Roberto Jesús Quiñones Haces