July, 2022.- As a child, I used to be enthralled by my grandmother's stories. And although she did not understand anything about capitalism and private property, she understood in the sadness of his eyes the essence of need and poverty. But how his eyes shone when she talked about 1959. It seemed that this date marked a different pattern in her life.
Over the years and through study, I was able to understand their stories, the fruit of the experience of a life subjected to the regime of terror, where the helmets, as they then called the repressive body of the Batista tyranny, gave away blows and bullets to the first to get in his way.
Today, when I look at her wrinkled hands, I discover in them the endless piles of clothes she washed and ironed when she was only 14 years old to help support a family of nine siblings.
But her memories are not all sad in those special moments as a granddaughter and grandmother, she enthusiastically revealed to me how she learned to read and write, a dream that she thought she would never see come true and which she practices every day in a notebook where she hides her vices as a septuagenarian.
Satisfaction overwhelmed her when she told me about when she climbed on a truck to do volunteer work in schools or harvest crops. Those were times of youth and commitment, times of Revolution.
She had a school for her six children, at last, a firm roof over their heads, and a hospital for when they got sick, she told me all of this from a wheelbarrow, proud, so that nothing escaped her.
When I remember her stories, I can only be happy, for her and the millions of Cubans who have enjoyed these privileges for more than 60 years.
In Cuba, the Revolution is here to stay as the illustrious Camagüeyan poet Nicolás Guillén said, I finally have what I had to have.
