Granma joins the celebration for the Day of Love and Friendship, in which many men and women of this land defend the love of their hearts and that of their country
Author: Madeleine Sautié : madeleine@granma.cu
13 February 2020 23:02:05
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
How do you write about love without the spirit of the poet being stamped on the white page? How do you touch it and say: “Hey, look, I’m writing, and you’ve crossed my mind, so you don’t leave me, so you’ve said everything.
“As if one could choose in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that breaks your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard,” says the Cronopio major, preventing the advancement of the very letters that now seek to move aside that great of the Golden Age, which defined the greatest of feelings as “a carelessness that gives us care, / a coward with a brave name, / a lonely walk among people, / a love only to be loved.
The bard of swallows arrives at the round that is already forming: “The words of love will come back in your ears, / the burning words will sound, (…) as I have loved you…, disengage yourself, like this… they will not love you,” and the one who wrote the lyrical hexahedron sings: “Your love burst into my life like a gust through an open window.
“To suddenly know / that I was going to see her again, that I would have her / close, tangible, real, as in dreams. / What a contained explosion! / What a deaf thunder / rolling in my veins,” says the National Poet, just after the greatest of Cubans, in perfect rhyme, said: “I thought of you, and of your hair / that the world of the shadow would envy, / and I put a point of my life in them / and I wanted to dream that you were mine.
***
It is not always a peaceful stage where love verses nestle. Beyond their natural agitation, in very raw circumstances poems have been conceived, which as hymns deserve eternal deference.
Far from home and from his beloved, the Shepherd of Orihuela wrote, fighting Spanish fascism, his Song of the Soldier Husband:
“When I think of you on the battlefield, / my forehead that does not cool or appease your figure, / you approach me like a huge mouth / of hungry teeth. / Write me to the fight, feel me in the trench: / here with the rifle I evoke and fix your name, / and I defend your poor womb that awaits me, / and I defend your son.”
Like him, like the Salvadoran guerrilla who asked his beloved not to say her name when she knew of his death, many men and women today defend their love, that of their heart and that of their country, which is the greatest affection, in the most hostile environments. A world plagued by imbalance, subjugated by unreason, attempts against the happy destiny of men. May this day when love speak louder leave us for a few moments, not only to invoke peace, but to do what we must, in the name of love, for it.
Posted: Wednesday 12 February 2020 | 10:37:56 pm
By Marina Menéndez Quintero
marina@juventudrebelde.cu
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The disqualification, on Tuesday, of 365 candidates for the seats in Congress – which will also be held in Bolivia on May 3rd – shows just the tip of a campaign against MAS that has already been launched from the violent, from the “legal”, and now muddies, as expected, the electoral panorama.
The lack of transparency and credibility will affect many. It is true that most of the candidates eliminated from the race did not belong to the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). Most (205) are from the right-wing Front for Victory, which in October nominated Chi Hyung Chu – a Bolivian of Korean origin who, although distant from Evo Morales and coup leader Carlos Mesa, came as a surprise when he came in third place… (Let’s not forget that usurper Jeanine Añez is now also running, and has aspirations).
But the MAS has 57 people who have been disqualified. And although the impossibility of going on the ballot also extended to members of the very group that represents Añez (the Juntos alliance, with only nine ruled out). So it is obvious that the fundamental blow is against Evo’s party, which was first in the polls since the beginning of the polls and when Luis Arce had not yet been chosen as its candidate for president.
This is the political grouping that has had the greatest impact in deep Bolivia after 14 years of refoundation, and in spite of the misunderstandings of certain neglected sectors that today are allied with the oligarchy, or are victims of its manipulations the crowds that came to receive Arce and his running mate, David Choquehuanca, when they returned to Bolivia a few days ago, showed that support.
The vulgar “cut” of MAS candidates for senator and congress is being justified by the supposed absence of certain documents and other bureaucratic requirements. It’s an argument as little credible as it is scarce the confidence in a Supreme Electoral Tribunal replaced without reason by the coup plotters, and headed by a headline that was slected “by hand”.
First, they persecuted and imprisoned the best leaders of the Movement Toward Socialism; then they confronted them with false accusations, and now they are preventing them from running.
It is hard to believe that officials as lowly as those who seized power would allow a return of the MAS to the House of the People or the Palace of Quemado. In order to wipe out their management, they are dismantling the fruits of the model.
The “hunt” goes on for more. Luis Arce has been linked to an alleged embezzlement in the Indigenous Fund. It could be used to get him out of the game at the right time. All that would be needed is to make the charges official (everything about it is false!) and call him to trial, or lock him up?
Meanwhile, the campaign against Evo is spreading. Not only has he been charged with terrorism and sedition, charges sent to Interpol to circulate an arrest warrant, which that agency rejected.
The alleged request by social and popular organizations to prevent Evo from running for the Senate has become a recurring theme in the official media. The argument is that he does not meet the requirements either because “he lacks papers”. This is the same sword wielded against Arce so that he does not seek the presidency either, and against Diego Pary, the former foreign minister, so that he is not allowed to run for the upper house.
This Wednesday, the former candidate and coup leader Carlos Mesa – Evo’s contender in October and the one who proclaimed the false fraud that opened the door to the coup -, asked the Prosecutor’s Office to extend the investigation against Evo, and to include the former vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, and the former ministers Juan Ramon Quintana (a refugee at the Mexican Embassy), Carlos Romero and Hector Arce.
His ploy is to link them to alleged “electoral frauds” in light of the frustrated October elections.
There is everything in the vineyards of this Bolivia of falsified institutions. There may be even more if, as some fear, the worst machinations are yet to come.
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