Heirs, that is, heretics
By Jesús Arencibia Lorenzo
digital@jrebelde.cip.cu
From Juventud Rebelde, May 31, 2009
An elderly friend, whom I much esteem, firmly believes that the country’s insufficiencies would be solved if young people would perform the tasks they’ve been assigned and not argue so much.
“They spend their lives complaining,” he tells me, “and they don’t worry about protecting what we accomplished.” During our meetings, at which I prefer to listen and learn from his experiences, he always ends up by talking to me about discipline. “That’s the way I was brought up. And my generation. You should learn it.”
I keep silent. Sometimes. At other times, I tell him, with much respect, three or four ideas that keep coming back to me, precisely because I listen to him. They are not new at all, but, re-reading Che’s writings, they seem to me to have constant validity — because there are guidelines to creation that we should never lose.
“Youth must create,” the Guerrilla cautioned. “A youth that doesn’t create is an anomaly.” And then he focused on the need for younger people to be less docile, less dependent.
Guevara was only being consistent with the wave of “juvenilia” that in 1953 seized the reins of history in Cuba. Years later, he would write in his Bolivian jungle diary that the Moncada raid of July 26 was an attack both against the ruling oligarchies and “against the revolutionary dogmas.”
I remind my friend that young Martí did not hesitate to disagree with his admired Máximo Gómez in 1884, when the latter led an insurgent plan that, in the Apostle’s opinion, could derail the island’s movement toward independence. “I believe I like you, a man filled with merit. I do not like the war that at this moment you represent, by an error of form, it seems to me,” Martí wrote to the illustrious Dominican.
With the same respect and increased affection, eight years later, the delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party asked the mambí master to return to the leadership of the armed forces of the newborn Revolution. “I shall enjoy no greater pride than the company and the advice of a man who has not tired of the noble quest,” Martí conceded.
Didn’t Julio Antonio Mella go against all “established rebel logic” when he used the hunger strike as a technique for struggle? How did the most rigid revolutionaries feel about Pablo de la Torriente Brau, who walked stark naked in prison, as a sign of protest, and described the most transcendental problems of national politics as a “terrible burden”?
Didn’t Alfredo Guevara sound irreverent when, in his noted debate with the venerable Blas Roca, he referred to the “Marxism of fears” and stated that “it’s not the ideology of the revolution; it may be its death shroud”? Both the old communist fighter and the young cultural leader argued out of genuine compromise. The sparks of forward motion leaped precisely out of the confrontation.
My friend smiles. Perhaps he remembers that — between the tasks, missions, assignments that he and his contemporaries had to carry out — they also left some space for originality, even for insolence.
The flow of new blood is always restless, defiant, cyclonic. Each generation picks up the flags of those who preceded it, but it brandishes them in its own style and adds to them a new arsenal of sharpened hopes.
I know my friend understands this. Because while I sometimes contradict his words, I proudly follow them. Heirs. That’s what they call us — and we call ourselves — because we continue the grand task. Heirs, a word that also must mean heretics.
