Genesis’ flag
Among the thousand stories Hugo Chávez told us, perhaps the most touching was that of Genesis, the little sick girl who one day gave the president a flag and whom Chávez, in complicity with Fidel, sent to Cuba with the imperative task to be happy until the last day that a pitiless cerebral cancer might keep her alive.
What a peculiar “dictator” this one, who gave a girl an order to be happy! How ferocious he was by giving her and her family a free trip to Cuba, to a school with friends who encouraged her, while Cuban education opened life’s roads to her and the best specialists in a country that knows how to heal placed obstacles in the way of Death! Despite all that, some media continued to see a dictator where many people identified a great humanist.
In addition to being sensitive and brave, charismatic and original, the first in a long time who talked to his people in “Venezuelan” and rescued a dormant pride in symbols, the land and the skin, Chávez was renowned as the leader of transparency. The imperial spyglass spied on him simply because the gentleman in the striped hat didn’t like him, but no wiretappers or covert agents were needed to know what this man thought or did.
In 1998, shortly after he was elected president, he traveled the world and visited for the only time the White House, where he spoke to Clinton, in bursts as usual, about his idea for his country, about the Constituent Assembly, about social projects. The “yanqui” drank a soda and his face — a witness said later — was like a poem. The fact is that Chávez didn’t mince words. About his United Nations speech about the devil Bush (with Mister Danger in the audience) we need not talk because it’s a classic of anti-imperialist denunciation — among other things.
Rather than put people in his pocket, Hugo Chávez slipped into the pockets of people, he shared with them and walked into their homes and lives. Whoever listened to him made a note of the date. He led the masses and allowed himself to be led by the masses so as to achieve a personal goal achieved only by geniuses like him: to govern while remaining faithful to the people’s mandate.
The head of State recited poetry, sang, painted, wrote, kidded, laughed and opened himself to others with the certainty that he was an equal, a relative of everyone. As a result, there are very few in Cuba who don’t feel like relatives of his, like blood relatives.
In Sabaneta, he learned, from parents who were teachers, the honorable trade of loving. He was born in a palm-roofed house with earthen floors and walls and a backyard filled with orange, grapefruit, mandarin and avocado trees, roses and cornfields. It was not by happenstance that the Cháveses raised white doves.
His life was a constant gerund. He spent his life searching for anecdotes of rebellious grandparents, looking for stories about honor, reviving ancestries, ending old social feuds without issuing decrees, bringing souls together, giving of himself. When, as a young lieutenant in 1975, he swore an oath over his lieutenant’s sword, the volcano of his leadership began a perennial eruption.
The boy who sold fruit and candy from a cart grew into one of the presidents who did the most for the children of his country and the region. Chávez graduated as a father when, early in his life, realized that his children were not the only children in the world.
Many ties link him to Cuba: his love for Fidel, the pacts signed for a common good, the hugs sent from one country to the other, his dialogue as a compatriot with the people on the island, his love for baseball and his strong defense of Martí’s place in history as Bolívar’s first heir.
However, the story of Genesis can be read as a singular testimony of love between the two nations. The girl accomplished her mission. In Cuba, she became a pioneer, swore to be like Che and tried to be like him, laughed until her final day in the arms of her mother. She was happy — that was the order — much to the bewilderment of Death, which finally took the little rebel and made of her a star.
Also going through Cuba, beset with cancer, loving and laughing as she did, Chávez followed the girl to an untimely death on March 5, 2013, leaving us a standard so we may fight on for the children of America. It’s Genesis’ own flag.
(From the blog The Toothless Alligator)
