General Maceo’s imprisonment
By Dalia Céspedes
“Here you go again, lady, with General Maceo?” Yes, dear reader, and I see you look not only reluctant but also suspicious for you know that he, 27 wounds and all, was never captured, much less incarcerated, even if he was several times about to suffer such fate. We remember him badly hurt after the Bajaragua combat, and protected by his brother José amidst a herd of Spanish soldiers sniffing the titan’s blood close by when he, just at the point of being caught, jumps from stretcher to horse and vanishes in a storm of bullets. Or, when after the landing in Duaba, followed by a series of misfortunes, such as the wreckage of the schooner Honor, and a foreboding ambush at “La Alegría” coffee plantation, he wanders through the Guantánamo sierras along with two comrades, feeding on sour oranges and cañandonga* seeds, until they ran into General Periquito Pérez’s friendly troops.
Or, in a much less known anecdote, Maceo decides, both sagacious and impatient, to check, first person singular, on the progress of readying the insurrection. He travels in disguise to Santiago de Cuba, from there to the capital, takes refuge in the San Isidro neighborhood, where he is recognized, denounced and persecuted, and saves his bronzy peel thanks to a Havana kid’s warning.
I won’t talk now about such adventures and happenings, but about how that feat which thousands of soldiers and counter-guerrillas, generals and traitors failed to attain, has been achieved and blessed by the Havana Historian’s Office: who has filled with fences Maceo Park in the city’s center and surrounded the hero with custodians and norms.
“A specially curious case, as far as Havana gardens are concerned, is the one offered, since its reopening, by the Maceo Park in front of the city’s Malecón. After some necessary works of refurbishing, including demolitions and new constructions, a garden has been planted in its grassy plots, and ever since, has been fenced in as, perhaps, the only way to preserve them. Access to the park is now a lot more complicated and the solution of keeping trespassers out with a fence does not seem to be the most agreeable though it might be the only feasible one in the face of social discipline…”
Thus was, ten years ago, the fencing described by Leonardo Padura in one of the timely chronicles collected in the book Entre dos siglos (Between two centuries). The fact that Cuban society, after several centuries of contemplating, war making and revolution, has failed to solve the dichotomy between social indiscipline and iron-clad control – for it is iron that the park’s fences are made of – which shows proof of how much is left to do in the field of collective behavior as well as it is a challenge for educators and philosophers.
We are hardly enlightened indeed if the candid garden must necessarily be protected by the flaming sword of prohibitions and demolitions, because what Padura does not say is that the Historian’s Office destroyed the only amphitheatre in that area, maybe because, as was then stated by one of the explosive overseers, the building did not go with the surroundings. How careful and detailed of them! And I refuse to discuss here what usually happens when public amphitheaters are replaced by fenced gardens.
The only subterranean pedestrian passage in that segment of Havana’s north coast was also closed (with fences). Who knows if, due to continuous and varied biological uses, which has caused, after the demolition of those public toilets as the amphitheatre used to shelter, that beer drinkers are seen everywhere around the park’s corner urinating, because it’s a fact that fences do not generate discipline, they only deviate the gush of misdemeanors anywhere else.
Is it that the metallic enclosure fits the surroundings it so offends? NO way, the urban flux is interrupted by the monumental fences, and that is the point: the whole place ceased to be a park to become a monument, the arterial crossroad turns into a clog and the warrior’s bronze spirit is getting bored, protected by an “iron will” which, in front of the sea, inevitably gets rusty.
* Cañandonga is a type of large tree.
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