Illustrations of San Antonio de Cabezas.

I want to imagine how you were before, when Don Silvestre de Armentero got the properties of La Merced, where later grew modest little houses of guano and boards, and you went on to become a town.

Little piece of heaven that shelters the story of the child I once was. I want to imagine how you were before, when Don Silvestre de Armentero got the properties of La Merced, where later grew modest little houses of guano and boards, and you became a town.

This June 13th, at the distance of 202 years of history, I return to your park, and from this solitary bench, where my ancestors will have rested, I go to the prologue of Memories of my town, San Antonio de Cabezas, the enigmatic work of Roberto Romeu García, which never saw the light of day.

I find myself resting in what was once the estate of Mr. Juan Fernández de la Concepción, first, and then of Mr. Don Juan de Dios Aguiar y Amís, that rich landowner who donated a large part of his land for the construction of a church, a cemetery, this park, and the little house of my ancestors. Bravo Don Juan, although almost nobody remembers you, although there is no monument for you, this place still breathes you.

I turn the page and let myself be seduced by Romeu’s descriptive ability, I can see Father José Antonio Rivera collecting weapons from the underground to support the Cuban mambises, in the fight against the Spanish colonial regime. There is Rivera, it is December 8, 1880, this time defying the ethnic stigmas of the time and blessing Paula Francisca and Benjamin, while making the first ever church wedding between people of different races in all of Latin America a reality.

What narrative force this man has, that without much effort erases my present and throws me to the past, this August the 29th, 1885, Father Herrera will be named the first adopted son of San Antonio de Cabezas. I invent a face, he has wrinkles, his eyes are gray and wet with emotion, his hands tremble when he receives, before the statue of San Antonio de Padua, the certificate that makes him forever an illustrious person of this town.

What a strange mystery hides behind the plaque that announces the name of a street. A name and a surname that enclose a life, a life that involved sacrifices for the sake of achieving something notorious, and that marked him as a worthy example to appear consecrated in a high place, so that, as time goes by, it remains as an unforgettable tribute, although the winter wind and the summer heat will bury it in the memory of those who erected it.

And when I say a plaque, the same happens with a park full of memories, both on sunny or gray days, and on dark or light nights; or with a house surrounded by a halo that makes it different from the others. I close the book, little by little the Eden of Cabezas, recovers its color, the present returns, full of humble men and women, who continue making history, about the Merced de Don Silvestre Armentero, and perhaps, they will never know it.

Taken from the author’s Facebook profile