Two extraordinary persons, both born on June 14 in different epochs.
One was Cuban and stood up to the treason of a few –the mambises[1] were disheartened then– and held his unyielding attitude up high in Baraguá[2], proclaiming that there would never be peace in Cuba without total independence and social justice.
The other was Argentinean, and saw his homeland in all of America. He sailed on the Granma[3] together with Fidel to conquer the total independence and social justice denied to us by decades of imperialist interference. And following the path of [Generals Máximo] Gómez and [Antonio] Maceo, he invaded Las Villas province (1958) and achieved a victory in Santa Clara (the provincial capital) which helped topple Batista’s dictatorship sooner than expected.
ANTONIO
He was born in Santiago de Cuba (1845), in a hut at 90 Providencia Street. After his parents Marcos Maceo and Mariana Grajales became the owners of that lot they built a tiled brick house, often remodeled later on and currently located at 16 Los Maceo Street.
In his certificate of baptism he was registered as José Antonio de la Caridad. At a very early age he left with his family for Majaguabo, where his father had rented a small farm of four hectares.
At first, besides his parents, there were Felipe, Fermín and Manuel Regueiferos (Mariana’s children from a previous marriage), Justo Germán and Antonio. Then came Baldomera, José, Rafael, Miguel…
In the year when the latter was born (1852), after a great deal of work, Marcos and Mariana had bought the farm and extended by purchasing a number of neighboring ranches. By the time Julio, Tomás, Dominga, Marquitos and María Dolores (who only survived a few months) had been born, they already had over four caballerías.
The whole progeny (their own and those born of Mariana’s first marriage whom Marcos raised as his) took part in agricultural work.
Marcos educated them in their daily tasks and, as a former soldier of the Spanish Army (he’d been discharged as a result of his progressive ideas) he taught them to fence and to use the machete as a weapon as well as to be good riders and perfect shots with rifles and revolvers.
It is said that at dusk, after dinner, one of the daughters would light an oil lamp and read aloud the books that Marcos ordered from Santiago: novels by Alexander Dumas, the biographies of Bolivar and Toussaint Louverture, the History of the French Revolution…
Two days after [Carlos Manuel de] Céspedes[4] rose up in arms at his sugar mill La Demajagua, the Maceo family joined up the Revolution. Mariana is said to have taken a crucifix and, getting her husband and children on their knees, told them: “Before Christ, the first liberal man to arrive in the world, we will swear to free our Homeland or die in the attempt.”
LITTLE ERNESTO
Soon after he was born (in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928), his parents took him to a maté[5] plantation in the middle of the jungle of Misiones, a province located between Paraguay and Brazil.
From the house, built atop a high elevation, he could see the six-hundred-meter wide Paraná river and, beyond, the thick lianas and climbing plants of the dense Paraguayan jungle.
What he most enjoyed was riding a horse with his father, who used to seat him on the saddle before him. Little Ernesto’s eyes never missed a thing around him: multicolored butterflies, birds flying deep into the foliage, rodents running to hide away, a lizard trying to dodge the horse’s hooves…
As a teenager he liked to visit his paternal grandmother at her small farm in Baradero municipality, Buenos Aires province. There he learned calf-tossing, colt-lassoing and horse-saddling, and became steeped in life in the countryside.
And the boy wanted to be a doctor to serve mankind even better. Yet, during a trip he started with his friend Alberto Granado a few days shy of 1952, when he still had to pass a few subjects to graduate, he knew the other side of Latin America.
He saw how poor the Chilean saltworks employees and the Argentinean and Bolivian peasants were. He knew of the bitterness among the indians, disregarded and despised by the Southern Cone pseudo-governments. And he understood that the health problems could only be solved by a social revolution, so in the last days of 1956 he left for Cuba, a member of the Granma yacht expedition.
LATIN AMERICANISM
Antonio Maceo y Grajales used to say that, even after independence was achieved in Cuba, he would keep his sword unsheathed for as long as a portion of Latin America remained to be freed, a specific reference to Puerto Rico, like Cuba a Spanish colony in the late 19th century.
His fall in San Pedro (1896) kept him from fulfilling his twofold dream: independence for Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna refused to sheathe his own sword once the revolutionary power was consolidated in Cuba. He went first to Congo when the liberation movement in that country made a call for help against foreign aggression.
Afterward he left for Bolivia and fell in combat (1967) as he fought for the emancipation of our American peoples.
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[1] Cuban independence fighters in the war against Spain. (T.N.).
[2] Venue of a meeting between General Maceo and the Spanish command, where the Cuban hero made it clear to the Spaniards that he didn’t accept the terms of the so-called Pact of El Zanjón (a peace treaty previously signed by some Cuban army commanders who decided to surrender) and would therefore continue the fight for independence. The event, known as the Protest of Baraguá, became –and remains– a symbol of Cuban bravery and rebelliousness. (T.N.).
[3] A total of 82 revolutionaries led by Fidel –who was in exile following the attack on the Moncada garrison– sailed to the eastern shores of Cuba from Mexico in 1956 to start the fight against Batista’s dictatorship from the Sierra Maestra Mountains. (T.N.).
[4] A Cuban landowner who started the fight against Spain in 1868 by freeing his slaves and urging them to join the fight for independence, a deed for which he’s referred to as the Father of the Homeland. (T.N.).
[5] A South American evergreen tree widely cultivated for its leaves, which are used to prepare a tealike beverage very popular in the region. Also called Paraguay tea and yerba maté. (T.N.).