Haydée del Moncada a Casa
(Haydée from the Moncada to Casa de las Américas)


BACK COVER:

When this book was first published in Argentina, editor Mirta Muñiz pointed out that Haydée Santamaría “was not a woman of letters but took Latin American literature to heights never before envisioned; she was no painter, but the plastic arts owe her their uncontainable progress; she was no musician, but perhaps the Cuban New Song Movement would have never existed without her involvement; she was no soldier, but knew how to use a gun both in the plains and in the mountains against one of the Continent’s most ferocious dictatorships”.

A result of her daughter Celia’s love and loyalty, this volume that we edited in Cuba with many additions presents us with a most intimate testimony about Haydée and makes further contributions to the golden age that this incomparable woman lived through since the Moncada attack to the raising of Casa de las Américas as an icon of hope for all Latin Americans.

At times it seems as if Celia is leading Haydée by the hand, now slowly, now faster, coming in and out of distant places with her. From time to time, a domestic detail, an unforeseen event or the sudden revelation of a rare attitude taken by Haydée become the finishing brushstroke of the great fresco painting where we find her playing the flawless role ever dreamed.



PROLOGUE:

Editing can be quite a party, except that now and then the circumstances keep you from having a real ball. The sad news of the accident that took the lives of Celia Hart and her brother Abel came out on September 7, 2008, right in the middle of the gray, hectic days when the Island was in Hurricane Ike’s grips.

Not long before, Celia had arranged with Editorial Capiro in the city of Santa Clara the Cuban edition of her book Haydée del Moncada a Casa (Haydée from the Moncada to Casa de las Américas) that the Buenos Aires-based Editorial Nuestra América had published three years earlier. Intent though she was on adding new texts to this second edition, which she only mentioned, she had time to submit to the publishing house neither a second original nor a memoir or index that they could use as a guide. The situation called for hands-on editorial work.

Upon reviewing the originals, I realized that the hybrid nature of the volume made it impossible to clearly define a final distribution of the texts. It was plain to me that I could not apply absolute criteria to the themes or their chronology… much as the fact that the texts in the original edition had not been correctly studied, revised, or completed; hence the survival of some historic inaccuracies and the absence of many indispensable explanatory notes that we had to draft after consulting countless sources.

I must commend here the help I had from historian Aremis Hurtado and Sadiel Mederos, my Text Edition assistant student at the university, as well as remark how lucky I was to count on the diligence shown and heartfelt effort put by Chela Rodríguez and her aides from the office where Celia’s father Armando Hart works in Havana, as they were always ready to move heaven and earth to clear up my endless queries and provide me with whatever I needed to do my editing work.

In order to bring this Cuban edition of Haydée del Moncada a Casa to a successful conclusion I had to deal with two versions –very different in length– of the chapter “Simón Bolívar Award”, and since there was no way of giving a definite date to both documents or proving whether the author’s intention had been to reduce or extend her original idea, I chose to “construct” a new version that goes halfway between one and the other and called for a great deal of patient comparison, appraisal and wording tests.

We had to publish a text with a transcript of one of Haydée’s recorded talks and a famous letter she wrote and signed and then tailor the license she permitted herself given where she wrote it (in jail) and whom she wrote it for (her family) to a new and more updated version from the viewpoint of punctuation. It was even advisable to come up with new titles for a couple of texts to make them more meaningful within the whole, as well as to divide the volume’s main body into three new sections, which I named “books”.

I know that the best literature lives on precisely by constantly adapting itself to the various historic epochs, but I feel sad nevertheless when I remember why I had to enhance my skills and enrich my professional experience.

What has drawn me is the purpose of making sure that this work is up to the standard of its nostalgic, albeit vibrant, historic and transcendental content. As to me, editing this testimony has been, in the final analysis, a chance to not only learn a lot more about the history of the Cuban Revolution and the matchless figure that Haydée Santamaría always was, but also to compose and orchestrate a requiem in memory of Celia Hart.

Misael, EDITOR