Defending our culture

Cuba in Viznar

By: Pedro de la Hoz
September 01, 2006

Havana, (Granma).- To the many tributes who brought Federico to us, alive, essential and necessary, there was another one added which because of its importance, even after days have gone by that mark a distance from the immediacy of the news, it is not possible to overlook: the voice of Cuba, of our poetry, was felt in Granada, on the same Viznar ravine, the site of the crime, after exactly seventy years of the felony being committed.
This is seen on a message sent to the female poet, essayist and promoter Aitiana Alberti, the daughter of Don Rafael and Doña Teresa, Cuban in her second nature, from Juan Francisco Delgado, the direcor of Social Welfare and Citizenship from the Provincial Council of Málaga, in which it says: “You were present on the tribute. It was to name Cuba and the more than 2 500 participants to the event began an immense applause to your adhesion. It was a memorable night, in which silence, cypress and black poplars from the site gave more life, if possible, to Federico and everybody else.”
There was read the text sent to the organizers of the event by the Organizing Committee from the International Poetry Festival of Havana, in which Pablo Armando Fernández, César López, Nancy Morejón, Miguel Barnet, Francisco López Sacha, Alex Pausides, Edel Morales, Virgilio López Lemus, Pierre Bernet, Andrés Mir, José Oriol, Vicente Feliz, Antonio Armenteros, Ángel Zuazo, Rito Ramón Aroche, and Aitiana herself, left their proof of the fervent loyalty to the memory of the murdered poet and dedicated “out cry and our anger, and an immortal wreath, to every martyr of that terrible war, symbolized by their passion and death.”
That text found, also, an echo on poets from other latitudes who have made a cultural resistance and humanist irradiation niche out of the Havana forum. Such are the cases of the Serb Svetlana Kalezic, International Nosside Award, the Canadian with a Chilean origin Tito Alvarado, the director of the International South Project, the Venezuelan Edmundo Aray and the Puerto Rican Etnairis Rivera.
As the Spanish writer Luis García Montero has remembered, who is also, by the way, one of the signers of the declaration Cuban sovereignty should be respected, “the poet was one of the more than 5 000 people fro Granada who were executed, by virtue of the war councils or the walks of the Black Squad. Among others, there were executed the general Miguel Campins, the chief of the Military Comandancy and loyal to the Republic, the mayor, the president of the Council, the rector of the University, the director of the most important newspaper in the city, El Defensor de Granada (The Defender of Granada) and many representatives, councilmen, professors, syndicalists. How could they not execute a republican poet, follower of the Popular Front and an example of pure freedom on the most sordid environments of a provincialism which he had characterized himself as the worst middle class in Spain”?

posted by Lilith @ 6:31 AM