Today the grass woke up wet. Not because of night dew, but because of a different humidity.
The Facebook page will open and the news will be visible immediately. It’s not that it appears after you scroll through some comment or ad again and again. No, it’s there: planted first, full width: Chino is dead.
You see his photo, one of a thousand, and you wonder: why did you choose him?
It’s not that it’s bad. The fact is that this question arises alone because of some mystery of the mind.
Then, while in the intricacies of the Internet you choose your own in order to write something later, you ask yourself a question like this: why did you choose this one and not another?
In this movement and thinking, you become aware again that behind the image there is something very personal, very intimate, something that sometimes no one knows for sure why or what it is, but here it is: pushing you.
So, you press your finger on the image that appears on the screen, period.
Here is your image for you: the one that the heart pointed out from the deepest silence; ignoring the noise of the street, the parents hurrying their children to school, the comments of the neighbors, or the kitchen utensils while making morning coffee.
I am sure that many of your students today will be thinking about what the world would be like without Eduardo Heras León.
Not a cultured person. Not because of that literary and life wisdom that could crush you, but because of which he himself interfered with his mode of action. Not only for their occupations, which were already more than enough.
The issue was that Eduardo was ethical in his manner of writing and delving into reality with his mind and chest.
There was also loyalty to your friends, to your ideas. To defend the right to that intimate zone, in every respect conflicting, but very necessary, essential for literature, which is a constant doubt, because only from there can all possible certainties arise.
Then something else appears: his hardness. He was in Playa Giron, he risked his life during the bombing raids to pass on secret information to the militia advance, and he hardly spoke about it.
“I don’t have much to say,” he said when I asked him to talk about what he experienced in those days. A few minutes later, while the jokes were flowing, a strange density began to appear in the air.
Because while El Chino was talking and laughing at his past fears, the figure of an old man who was looking for a cigarette in the middle of a hectic night of war slowly appeared along with the figure of a young man who was facing the plane and who at the same time, like several people and facts, inspired several of his stories.
Hence the other part. His life cannot be told without mentioning the stupid misunderstandings of which he was the victim and which ostracized him for thinking that in his stories he was mocking the policemen, when in fact it was the other way around.
When he was awarded the National Literary Prize in 2015, we mentioned these ups and downs to him and finally asked: “Why did you never give up on the revolution?”
“Because I always felt deeply revolutionary,” he replied, “(didn’t I even sacrifice my life to protect him?) and because I knew that injustice was being committed that would have to be corrected someday. I had such confidence.”
He then mentioned the pain, the anguish, the moments when he thought he would never make it out of the void. And also what the revolution meant to him and his family.
“(…) the message of dignity,” he pointed out, “justice, honesty of the Revolution has penetrated us so deeply that we even sacrificed our lives to protect it. I will never regret what I did, and despite the fact that we make many mistakes and that sometimes it seems to us that the paths we have traveled are not correct and that everything can be better, I am here and will continue here.
And here you will be, Eduardo, forever. Thanks for all. We will miss you.
Source: Juventud Rebelde
