Its old name was due to the very Cuban custom of calling uncultivated land, covered with trees and bushes, and, by extension, a sparsely populated area, “monte”. It was, by decision of the Development Board, the first paved road in Havana starting in 1796, and began to receive the name of calzada, that is, path paved with stones. It was a section of the road that led to the towns of Santiago de las Vegas and Bejucal; the only road that led from the city and into the countryside.

Sugar, tobacco, yarey hats

In lands of the current municipality of Diez de Octubre there was a sugar mill. The origin of the parish of Jesús del Monte is lost in the mists of time, as its construction began in 1695 when the priest Cristóbal Bonifá de Rivera devised to build it in a space of his property so that it would serve the owners of the sugar mill. and their slaves and neighbors.

The tobacco plains, developed along the Agua Dulce and Maboa streams, gave relative prosperity to the town, which in 1765 was declared head of the district and its church ceased to be an auxiliary parish to become an independent parish. In 1820 Jesús del Monte was already a municipality, and it lost that status three years later.

At one end of the outer wall of the parish there is an inscription that no one stops to read. It is engraved in stone. It says: “A league to Havana”. For Havanans from the periphery, only the center and the old part of the city deserve to be recognized as Havana. Perhaps that is the meaning of the inscription, although it may well obey the belief, still in vogue in 1863, that towns such as Jesús del Monte and el Cerro could not join the body of Havana because, as stated on that date the historian Jacobo de la Pezuela, “they are still separated by large uninhabited spaces”.

In Jesús del Monte, the humblest residents earned their living thanks to the sale of guano and yarey hats that they wove themselves, while the transit of travelers, carts and muleteers contributed at the same time their due thanks to the toll that was collected in the toll established in the area. The establishment of the Habana-Bejucal railway compromised and delayed the development of the town.

In 1846, more than 2,000 people lived in Jesús del Monte, and in 1858 there were 4,000 residents, and the villages of La Víbora, Arroyo Apolo, Arroyo Naranjo and other hamlets were settled in its five square leagues. There was a stage in which Jesús del Monte came to dispute with Cerro and Puentes Grandes “the animation and the attendance in the summer seasons”. Those were times when people spoke of “the purity of its atmosphere and the amenity of its landscape”.

That boom, however, was short-lived. Jesús del Monte never supplanted these towns as an elegant neighborhood, a role that El Vedado was awarded, and lost in territorial extension when Arroyo Naranjo was divided, which then included the hamlets of Arroyo Naranjo and San Juan.

From the trees of the Calzada de Jesús del Monte, then called Camino de Santiago (de las Vegas), twelve of the vegueros who rebelled in 1723 were hanged, and for the third time, against the arbitrary and abusive tobacconist arranged by the government colonial. And Jesús del Monte was also the scene of the Creole resistance against the English invasion of 1762.

Due to its location, on a height facing the city, it was a strategic place for the defense of the town, and an almost unique route for its supply. In those days, there died a natural death, José Antonio Gómez y Bullones, mayor of Guanabacoa, hero of the popular resistance against the invader, whom he faced with the blow of a machete.Ssix kilometers

It is a road that must be six kilometers long. It starts at the corner of Tejas and ends at La Palma. There are no fewer than five bank branches along the entire route of this street, and the section that runs between Estrada Palma and Luis Estévez streets, and the one on the corner of Toyo, whose bakery has been serving since 1832, is very lively.

Six kilometers

The best Galician broth in Havana was offered at El Bodegón de Toyo. Also missing are Josefina Siré fritters, in the portals of the León café, reputed to be among the best in the city; Out of the hands of a woman who enjoyed a comfortable economic position – she was the owner of the cookie factory that bears her surname – hers and who clung to those fries as her only means of subsistence. The two Police Stations that were on the Calzada –the eleventh, Toyo, and the fourteenth, in Santa Amalia- are now schools. On the corner of Calle Carmen is the Alejandro de Humboldt bookstore, which we still call La Polilla.

The space that was later occupied by the Tosca cinema, in the section between Estrada Palma and Luis Estévez, was held until 1915 by the Gran Liceo de Jesús del Monte, adapted for a movie theater. On the corner of Agua Dulce, the Gran Cine was demolished to build, in 1945, the Florida cinema, with its 1,200 seats. Other cinemas on the road were Apolo, Moderno, Gran Cinema and Martha. None works as such anymore.

On September 4, 1933, a sergeant named Batista left one of the apartments in the Toyo knife building to overthrow the constituted government and become the strong man of the Republic. Nearby was the Cooperativa Médica de La Habana clinic, -the old Casuso, as it was called when this chronicler was a child- converted his building into an apartment house, after he had installed a nursing home there .

And since we mentioned that nursing home, it is worth remembering that there were several along this Calzada, from Dependientes -current Hospital Diez de Octubre- at number 130 of the road, to the Santa Teresa de Jesús sanatorium -current Hogar Castellana. Between one and the other, some pocket clinics have few clients and few resources, such as Santa Gema, Santa Clara, El Sol and Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, installed in the ostentatious Párraga mansion, opposite what was the bus stop of the Víbora.

(By: Ciro Bianchi Ross/Cubadebate)

This development continued uninterruptedly towards the West and already in 1870 it surpassed the Calzada de Belascoaín, with an area of ​​seven square kilometers and some 170,000 inhabitants. The capital was then enclosed between the Chávez River, the sea and Belascoaín, and for a definitive Havanan like Manuel Sanguily, everything that was beyond that road was simply “the countryside”.

Belascoaín linked San Lázaro with Monte. As later, Infanta linked San Lázaro with Agua Dulce. In Monte and Belascoaín there was a marsh. It was filled and the Four Paths emerged. The path to the Cerro began there, which continued to Quemados de Marianao thanks to the Puentes Grandes. From the Esquina de Tejas started the Jesús del Monte road with its Agua Dulce bridge, which the chronicler always heard about, but never got to see.

The Jesús del Monte farmhouse already existed in the 18th century. He left behind the village of La Víbora and entered Arroyo Apolo where, in La Palma, it forked towards Santiago de las Vegas and Bejucal, and, if it turned to the left, towards El Calvario and Managua.

It was Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell, the so-called Leopard of Lucena, Governor General of the Island between 1843 and 1848, who gave this street its name in honor of his friend Diego de León, Count of Belascoaín, who tragically died in 1841. Until then it was called Calzada de la Beneficencia and ran between Calzada de San Luis Gonzaga —Reina— and Calle Ancha del Norte —San Lázaro—, that is, from the hermitage of San Luis Gonzaga to the House of Maternity and Charity. And in the opposite direction, he passed Reina and reached Monte. It would run from the sea to the Four Paths. Since 1911 his official name is Father Varela.

The hermitage was demolished in 1835 when the Paseo Militar or Tacón was built —later Carlos III and now Salvador Allende. The Charity suffered the same fate in the mid-1950s when the State acquired the old mansion and the land where it was located to build the building for the National Bank of Cuba, which after a meticulous process of remodeling and readaptation houses the Hospital Hermanos Ameijeiras, although the Treasury of the Nation is still kept in the vaults located in the basements of that nursing home.

Some of the curiosities of the Calzada de Belascoaín will be discussed shortly. In Belascoaín and Zanja, where the minimax La Mía is now located, there was at the beginning of the 17th century, a pipe for the manufacture of sugar that enriched its owner. To make this trapiche possible, the man cleared the grove and cultivated a cane field.

On the same corner, but on the opposite sidewalk, crossing Zanja, the OK cafe prided itself on making the best sandwiches in Havana, which was not far from the truth. A few blocks from there, at the Café Strand, on the corner of San José, Alejo Cossío del Pino, Minister of the Interior (Interior) under President Grau, was gunned down on the night of February 11, 1952. attack with which some tried to justify the coup d’état of March 10.

At the Hotel San Luis, at number 73 of Belascoaín, Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara and president of Venezuela, recently overthrown at the time, spent time. And beyond, in the Vista Alegre café, on the stretch of street that runs between San Lázaro and Malecón, Sindo Garay and his son Guarionex, Graciano Gómez, Chepín and Manuel Luna, among other composers and performers, established, in the first decades of the 20th century, a kind of general headquarters of the Cuban trova, and there emerged outlined, said Eduardo Robreño, no less than fifty of the most popular melodies of our popular songbook.

Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, a prominent Cuban musicographer based in Puerto Rico, was born 90 years ago in the small hotel or guest house that opened its doors on the upper reaches of Vista Alegre.

House of the three kilos
Movie theaters deserve a full stop on this road. The Cuatro Caminos cinema, in Belascoaín between Tenerife and Campanario, does not exist. There is also no Oriente cinema, on the corner of San José. The Belascoaín (Astor) cinema in Belascoaín between Peñalver and Concepción de la Valla, is closed. The Bayamo (formerly Miami) on the corner of San Rafael, is a store of the Fund for Cultural Assets. El Favorito, on the corner of Peñalver, is the headquarters of a choreographic company.

The Palace cinema, in Belascoaín between Virtudes and Concordia, is now a warehouse…

Although it is a street very populated with houses and residential buildings, Belascoaín is also an eminently commercial street, especially from Carlos III towards the sea.

In front of the Masonic National Temple, the House of 1, 2 and 3 cents, better known as House of Three Kilos, today Yumurí, opened its doors, a fabric, electrical effects and household goods store, which reopened with that name in the 1970s as part of a commercial chain called Amistad.

Before, passing the Troya fur shop, almost arriving in San Rafael, and using the facilities of the Le Grand Paris store, the Primor fur shop had opened its doors, which manufactured, exclusively, shoes for girls who would be fifteen or older. that they would marry. El Siglo XX was very famous, on the corner of Neptuno: candy store, cafeteria, confectionery and fine food trade, which had advanced with the century.

The Fifth Police Station, on the corner of Concepción de la Valla, was dark because of the crimes, abuses, and torture that took place there. In Machado’s time, he was commanded by the infamous Captain Constantino Albuerne, who narrowly escaped being lynched at the fall of the dictatorship, and in Batista’s day, his supervisor was none other than the bloodthirsty Lieutenant Colonel Estan Ventura Novo.

The National Police Investigations Bureau also operated there before it was transferred to 23rd Avenue, at the entrance to the Almendares Bridge. Today the old police unit is a basic secondary school, while the Higher Institute of Design is located in the so-called Casa de las Viudas, in Belascoaín and Maloja, so called because in the Colonia it served as a shelter for women whose spouses —all officers of the Spanish army—had died in their struggle against the independence of Cuba. The Ministry of Health worked there for years.

At the time, the crime that remained in the popular imagination aroused many comments, such as that of the beautiful Murcian, in Belascoaín and Nueva del Pilar. In Belascoaín and Virtudes, the car in which journalist Ramón Vasconcelos was travelling, who was then immersed in a campaign for the vindication of the Liberal Party, was shot at by Joven Cuba militants, who had been disqualified by President Grau because of his support for Machado. The so-called Golden Feather of Cuban journalism, the most widely read journalist on the island, was seriously injured in the attack.

It is not possible to talk about the Calzada de Belascoaín without referring to its warehouses and tobacco and cigarette factories. Competitor Gaditana, the so-called “unique cigar” in that company’s advertising, was, in its own way, the fifth Cuban producer, and the same place, but as regards the production of tobacco, it was the factory of the Romeo y Julieta brand. .

The woman who, for economic reasons or because of the “disgrace” of having taken a “bad step”, was unable to take care of her child, could deliver him to the Maternity Home without having to show her face or reveal her identity. identity. For that, on the side facade of the building that overlooked the Belascoaín road, there was a lathe.

The infant was placed in it and the tank rotated at the touch of a bell. On the other side, the abandoned child was received by a nun from the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, a congregation that attended that semi-private institution that tried to make up for official negligence in its attempt to redeem evils that the State did not suppress or remedy.

Upon entering, the children were given the surname Valdés in memory of Fray Jerónimo Valdés, a bishop who had the noble gesture of giving them his and who did much for the health and education of the most needy. They received education there and were trained for a trade. The most intellectually gifted were helped if they decided to pursue higher studies. A boy from that House, Juan Bautista Valdés, became a doctor and became director of the institution. The poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, who would make the pseudonym Placido famous, was also a foundling.

(By: Ciro Bianchi Ross)

By: Ciro Bianchi Ross

The year is 1932 and Agustín Lara begins a frantic race towards fame. He makes his first international tour on that date. In Paris he snatches the French and one of his compositions, Farolito, becomes a fashionable tune there.

It is around that time that he makes his first trip to the Cuban capital, in the company of Pedro Vargas and Ana María Fernández. He returns in May 1939 and then makes a profession of love for Cuba. He declares: “I was returning from France… Havana opened its arms to me… and I was not ungrateful, there are that Sueño guajiro and those Coplas that were born in the immense Yumurí prairie”. He is here again in 1952. At La Bodeguita del Medio he meets Sindo Garay and at the Montmartre cabaret he plays the piano and leads a violin orchestra. He performs outdoors at the Saratoga hotel. Researcher Radamés Giro affirms: “His interest in Cuban music is reflected in La cumbancha -tribute to Cuban percussion recorded by the Trio Matamoros, Antonio Machín and the Caney quartet-, Noche criolla and the danzonete Pobre de mi”.

a rising star
It is in the visit of 1939 when he is struck by a girl who had revealed herself as the Rising Star of the CMQ-Radio Circuit, and who at that time was doing a little of everything at said station: she sang, declaimed, took turns speaking. She is called Xiomara Fernández; she is 21 years old and is as beautiful as she is shy. Gaspar Pumarejo, who would be the pioneer of television in Cuba, presents them. They haven’t exchanged more than a few words when Lara expresses her desire to write a song for her to release. Xiomara doesn’t know what to answer, she is speechless. She feels small before a composer like the one she has in front of her, but, finally, with many doubts, she agrees. Lara writes for her When you looked at me, which Xiomara premieres at the Gran Teatro de La Habana –today, Alicia Alonso- accompanied on the piano by the composer himself. He will sing it later in Matanzas and in Pinar del Rio.

“All the glory was mine / when you looked at me, / all the glory was mine / when you looked at me, / the day was without light, / everything was without light / and my life began / when you looked at me… ”.

Xiomara Fernández would remember many years later that she was always fascinated by Agustín; he was very fine and delicate, she said. Every day she sent a bouquet of flowers to the CMQ. She was afraid that such kindness would draw her attention and she would arouse suspicion among her classmates and she let him know. He then began to send you a single flower every day with a card that read “Thinking of you”.

They met several times in one of the bars of the Sevilla hotel. Lara told her about taking her to Mexico for work plans, and she specified that she could go in the company of a relative. Xiomara was not interested in the trip. Lara then went deep and proposed to her. She rejected it.

She continued Xiomara an ascending career and did not take long to start a courtship with José Antonio Alonso, the disputed host of the Supreme Court, the man of a thousand brides, as the press of the time called him. The wedding was quite an event. They got married on December 1, 1940, in the Great Theater of Havana, with the room full of radio listeners and people from the show business. Hundreds of admirers waited outside to see and acclaim the couple, including a pilot who landed his plane on the Paseo del Prado, in front of the theater building, to release pigeons and deliver a bouquet of flowers to the bride.

Lara’s music remains in the repertoire of Cuban singers of all times, inside and outside the Island.

The album Only once from Cuba to Lara collects the interpretations of great voices that sing it Cuban style. Pablo Milanés performs Noche de ronda, and Omara Portuondo, Only once, while the Aragón orchestra performs Lamento jorocho, and Francisco Céspedes vocalizes Travel Gift, at the express request of one of the composer’s ex-wives. Also on the plate are Van Van, Miriam Ramos, Kelvis Ochoa, Carlos Varela, Santiago Feliú and David Torrens, among others.

“Lara has been part of his lives, some grew up with him and everyone has adopted him as if he were Cuban,” said the Mexican producer of that album.

At the time, the interpretations made separately by Arráncame la vida, Orlando Contreras and Abelardo Barroso, who sang better as he got older, were highly celebrated. Memorable are those of Pecado, by Blanca Rosa Gil and the one made by Barbarito Diez de Palmeras. They like El organillero, by the Aragón orchestra, Rival, by the América orchestra, and Amor de mis amores, by Elena Burke. The interpretation that Roberto Sánchez and the Gloria Matancera orchestra made of Santa, the melody that Lara preferred among the more than 700 that she created, is kept alive in the memory.

He said of himself: “I’m ridiculously cheesy, and I love it. Because mine is a sincerity that others shy away from… ridiculously.”

Agustín Lara Aguirre y Pino, “El Flaco de Oro”, has his monument on Avenida del Puerto, on the shore of Havana Bay. A bronze statue, the work of the Yucatecan sculptor Humberto Peraza, which evokes the presence of the composer among us. The image highlights the extreme thinness of the artist who wears a jacket and tie. His left hand rests on his right arm while his right hand is raised to his face to hint at the presence of a cigarette that he will bring to his lips.

And it is that the author of the operetta The Golden Bird and of so much music for the cinema, incessant smoker in life, now smokes in eternity.

She wears the same eyes and sometimes the smile gives her away more than the surnames, although Guevara is Guevara and comes from the very southern cone, from the roots of a continent.

At sixty years of age, Aleida – Che’s doctor, pediatrician and daughter – says that she inherited a love for photography from the guerrilla commander and clarifies, raising her index finger, that her brother Camilo is a better photographer than she. As her father called her, Aliucha is proud of her insularity, of a country that Ernesto Guevara loved like her own, where she made a Revolution and a family. From here the commander would have to leave, leaving her loved ones, because “other lands of the world demanded the assistance of her modest efforts.”

- This October 3 marks the 55th anniversary of Che’s farewell letter . How did you feel the first time you read it, especially when he says “I don’t leave my children and my wife anything material and it doesn’t make me sad: I’m glad it is so”?

The first time I heard it, it was very small and it struck me because I also saw my mother on television with my uncle Fidel who was reading that letter. I didn’t quite understand what it was about, but my mom was crying. She always educated us in the idea that we could be children of a very special man, but for that reason we should not receive anything special. The Revolution would give us what we need to develop as human beings, period. They have asked me in Argentina and various places “what my dad left me” and they give me fits of laughter because he had nothing material to leave behind, only his example.

- At one point in the farewell letter to Fidel, Che states: “I am also proud to have followed you without hesitation, identified with your way of thinking and seeing and appreciating the dangers and principles. How similar and, at the same time, different, were Ernesto Guevara and the Commander in Chief?

From a human point of view they are very similar. Che learns to respect Fidel as a true military leader, especially during his time in prison in Mexico. They all got freedom except for my father and another colleague because they are branded as communists and pro-Soviet. Fidel told me that anecdote years later: “I went to discuss with your father in jail because I had warned them not to say their political condition, but there I realized that Che did not know how to lie, not even if his life depended on him. that”. The Commander could have left on the Granma yacht without him, and he didn’t. He managed to get Daddy released and they left together for Cuba.

Che and Fidel, together with little Aleida. Photo: Courtesy of the interviewee.

–The letter is written as if Che knew that it was probable that he would never return …

All the guerrillas have to prepare this terrain and create awareness that it can happen. The bullets have no name. He says it in the letter: that the truth hit them all because in a true Revolution, either you win or you die. There is no other. His dream was a free, independent, united America, as one nation.

- When Che left Cuba, you were barely 4 and a half years old. What image with your father do you remember, do you have intact in your memory?

Two images. One is in my mom’s room. She has my brother Ernesto, a newborn, leaning on her shoulder and my dad is behind him, dressed in military clothing, with a very large hand touching the baby’s head. She is doing it with such tenderness that that moment is forever engraved on me. At that moment he had to have thought many things: “Will this little boy recognize me one day? Will he understand why I will not be by his side when he grows up? …” Perhaps in those thoughts lies the greatness of my father. Not all human beings have that strength and it must always be respected.

“And the other image is when he transforms into Ramón and welcomes us. My mother takes us to see a friend of my father, “old Ramón”, in a safe house in Pinar del Río. When we go to dinner he serves red wine on its own, but Daddy usually drank it with water. There I jumped like a spring and said: ‘you are not my father’s friend’ and I explained that Daddy drank red wine with water. I went to the end of the table where he was sitting and poured the water into his glass because ‘that’s how he was rich.’ Mommy says the man was excited about it.

“Afterwards, the four brothers continued playing and I slipped and hit my head on a marble table. Then ‘old Ramón’ took me in his arms, he felt me ​​immediately, and I felt something that was not normal for me: a strange man, who would protect me like this? Then I spoke to my mother because I had to tell her a secret and I told her in full voice: ‘Mom, I think this man is in love with me.

“A long time later my mother told me that this man was my father, but it still had to be kept a secret. I grew up with the feeling that my dad loved me, they weren’t just papers, letters, they were gestures, feelings, because a child doesn’t lie. When a child feels these things it is for real ”.

–You tell in the documentary Absence Present that Che kissed her very hard …

Daddy squeezed me while he kissed me and that made me wake up. I got a little scared of the dark because I was looking at a guy I hardly saw, at night and giving me those squeezes … On one of her trips, Mommy tells her that in a book there is a story about a little lion that accompanies a child with fear until the little one gains strength and the lion leaves because the child loses his fear. She explains to him that I have received that reading very well. So one of my dad’s few expenses is buying me a stuffed lion.

-He was an austere man …

My father? Tremendously. And with good reason. He was leaving in the name of a people that did not have, as we say, where to tie the goat. How was he going to spend money on us? That was not logical, but also, he did not have time either. He traveled with the minutes counted and participated in one activity after another. Going to a store to buy something from us was impossible. However, Daddy buys me the little lion and it was extraordinary for me because my stuffed animal always accompanied me and I gradually lost my fear of the dark. And already in her last trips she brings me a doll.

–In his farewell letter to his children, Che tells them: “Always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary ”. Has Aleida Guevara taken it with her?

Most of us Cubans have taken it with one. At this point it pains me a little that our doctors do not talk about him because generations of Cuban doctors have been educated with the example of Che. He is the first revolutionary doctor. When I was studying the last year of Medicine, Fidel brought us together and suggested that Nicaragua needed doctors, the Sandinista Revolution had just triumphed, and he asked us how many of us wanted to do the internationalist internship. A lot of boys between 22 and 23 years old went there.

“Then the threat against that country begins and Fidel decides to get all the women out of there. We discussed that at one point because I felt I was failing my teammates. We were all together. Why are we leaving? It didn’t seem fair to me. I remember saying, ‘Man, don’t hurt me. I consider myself your daughter, and when the generals send their troops the first must be their children. ‘ Then, in the few things that Fidel wrote to me, he said: ‘I can never hurt you. Do not think that. It’s just to protect them. ‘ Then I go to Moa, in Holguín ”.

-From Managua to Moa …

Tremendous change. At that time, Moa was one of the richest cities in Cuba from an industrial point of view, but poorer in terms of social structure. This looked like an American West. I had several confrontations in Moa because, unfortunately, we as human beings tend to settle, sometimes in a certain position, to only receive the benefits, but not to give the sacrifices that a public position in this country entails. And I lived those things there, and they cost me my tears. But it is my country, and I am not silent about anything.

“After a year I return to Havana and the request for missions arrives again. I went to the Ministry of Public Health, I introduced myself as a doctor at the ‘Pedro Borrás’ hospital and they told me that Angola was where I should go. There I said: ‘No, I just left Nicaragua at war and Angola is my turn, at war!’ But I accepted. I remember I was leaving on October 6th, hear this: October 6th! When I got home my mom almost had seizures that day. She shut herself up to cry. But she had taught me to be socially useful.
Angola: “The two hardest years of my life”

“I have been working with children with tuberculosis. I remember Celson. I will never forget. He was waiting for me at the door of the tuberculosis ward and I tied the cloth around my back and gave him a walk around the perimeter of the hospital. Celson was happy with that. I remember that the director of the center, a Portuguese pichon, told me insulted that I was making fun. I replied: ‘You are wrong. Look at that kid’s face. Don’t you see her happy? For me that is the most important thing and what I need to face one day in this hospital: Celson’s smile. You can’t take it from me. ‘

“I remember another boy who slept in a naked doorway under some newspapers with which he covered himself. That day I was the guard in the building, and our boss kicked a bundle of papers and from there the boy came out. He got up, folded the newspapers, and tucked them under his arm. Look, boy, I still can’t talk about it. It was such a pain that I went upstairs and took off the olive green sweater I was wearing and it was hot. I went downstairs, called him and put it on him. That little boy looked at me and said ‘dad’.

“I tried to help him, I took him to the shelters, but he ran away again. Until he didn’t come back anymore. That is why I think that it is not possible that some people do not feel the enormous privilege we have of being Cubans and maintaining a society where the life of the human being is more important than any money in the world. That is the most beautiful thing that men like Che have left us ”.

- What would Che love today? What would make you angry?

I would be very proud of the Cuban doctors. Despite all the economic problems we have had, we have not lost the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary as he said in the letter: “to feel the injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world.” Our doctors do it every day with the Henry Reeve brigade , for example, or with the Latin American School of Medicine ( ELAM ).

“On the other hand, Che was always a very critical man, therefore, he would make us many remarks about today’s Cuba, especially regarding the self-employed. He would never understand. No way. That, in the long run, is a small cancer in our society, because people start to think only in their pockets. But sometimes you have to make decisions that, although they are not always the right ones, are the ones that are within our reach. And you have to learn to walk with them ”.

- And to you, does it not bother you that sometimes Che’s ideas are used opportunistically?

- That they put them as a slogan and don’t feel them, and don’t live them, of course it bothers me. The good thing is that at least they say them.

-But sometimes they say them without consciousness…

But he who has it listens to it. Perhaps whoever uses it did it to finish a beautiful speech, but the one who does have a conscience hears it and knows that it is not being practiced as it should be. Opportunists we can have everywhere and we must rescue many values ​​that have been lost in the special periods lived.

- At what times have you said to yourself “if my father were here”?

A lot of times! When I brought my oldest daughter into the world and she was opening her eyes after the anesthesia for the cesarean section, I saw two men next to me: they were Ramiro Valdés and Oscar Fernández Mel. “What are you doing here?” I say to them, and they reply: “Since your father is not here, we are here.” Only! And of course I miss it. I wish I could have seen Daddy with his grandchildren on his knees, talking to them and teaching them much more than I can teach my daughters. Those things happen to you like a flash to your head.

Moments of the birth of Aleida Guevara’s eldest daughter. Photo: Courtesy of the interviewee.

- In one of his speeches, Che states that the goal of the new generations is that they forget him and the Commander in Chief. But perhaps in that he was wrong. What do you think?

That was in one of the last speeches he made to the young people of the Ministry of Industries, in which he told them that their goal one day is to forget Fidel, him … At first when I read it I said “but is my dad crazy? ” But he said it in the sense that, when we surpassed everything that they preached to us with their example, then it would not be necessary to have them so present. And that’s what he’s telling us: the goal is to overcome them and be better human beings than they are. But we have not yet been able.

- What has been the greatest affront that you have experienced from the people towards Che?

When you see people who are not able to move for a child who is dying, for example. My dad said that the life of a single child was worth more than all the gold on earth. And it is what I also feel as a doctor and a human being. To see someone who does not show indignation at seeing a child die hits me a lot.

- And the greatest gratitude?

I work with the Landless Movement in Brazil. And they practice Che every day. When you see men and women, sometimes with a cultural level that is not high, but capable of feeling that man and putting it into practice, then you say “he is multiplying”. Che returns again, with the shield over his arm. What to tell you about the Cuban doctors who went to fight Ebola without really knowing what they were going to face, risking their lives… Che is there. As a daughter, I really appreciate it. It’s seeing your dad again. In combat.

(By: Andy Jorge Blanco/Cubadebate)