A LEGEND

The man was a legend, in his own lifetime. Yet, it did not happen until after sixty years of work, and after retirement, he was encouraged back for one project. Only then did his name become known throughout the world. His slender build and very slight stoop, his white hair and moustache, tell the story of a young, and handsome, optimistic man.

I sat and listened to him, in reverence. The story he related was not that of his own but one of his ancestors and their trials and tribulations. It was a sad story, but his interpretation somehow brought warmth and joy to my heart…

It was the rainy season, a sweltering, hot and humid day in July. In the late afternoon the sky slowly turned from a sombre, overcast shadow to a heavy, lead coloured grey. Although it did not rain, the air was so moist it seemed to cover the barely clad bodies of the local village people with a shiny, wet coat, making their black skins shimmer. They were an attractive people but many of them showed the pock-marked, or walt like facial scars that had been inflicted by their parents when they were young, in order to make the children ugly, and undesirable as slaves. Today these facial patterns are traditional, and the techniques to create them have vastly improved but in the late eighteenth century some of the less fortunate youngsters had painfully disfigured cheeks and foreheads. The scarred faces no longer helped, now that all tribes had similar tricks.

And so it was that on this oppressive early evening it was more than just a storm that threatened.

The inside of the huts of the compound were always pitch black, and smoky due to the charcoal fires that burned inside without any outlet to clear the air. Now the compound itself, a small circle of fifteen dwellings was so dark, as if it were covered by an unnatural roof, that the people outside the adobes could barely see each other across the circle. The low, overbearing clouds had become as thick as the cowpea soup that formed the local, staple diet, and they were a dark, malignant, mauve-black, like a thrombosis about to kill.

Suddenly, without any pre-warning drizzle, the whole firmament opened up and a massive deluge gushed down upon the people, their chickens, and the straw roofs of the impervious clay huts.

For a few brief moments it was a relief, for it had to come. But what came next was neither expected nor deserved.

With a force just as powerful as the storm, and an evil far greater, a handful of white men, with a group of renegade natives, came rushing through the gates of the compound, throwing burning torches onto the tops of the huts. They came shouting and shooting. Soon the screams of the women and children of the village, the heavy downpour thrashing onto the rock-hard dusty floor, and the battle cries of the men who screamed out in an attempt to fight against the armed marauders, turned the peaceful village into bedlam and pandemonium.

In minutes the strongest of the village men were dead and the remainder captured. All but one or two babies, that were left to die in the storm, were taken away. They were marched, in single file, chained together with ropes around their necks, and hands tied behind their backs, the fifty miles down to the coast. There they were crammed into the cellars of colonial houses, and even churches, and left for days with little or no nourishment. Those that survived were separated from their loved ones and thrown into the holds of ships that would take them to their new lives as slaves in the New World…

The old man kept his poise, and his dignity, as he continued to recount his people’s history, through decades of squalid and inhumane conditions right through to the abolition of slavery in Cuba in eighteen eightysix, one hundred years after that tragic afternoon in the village of his forefathers. It had been a hard and appalling century. The Africans had been forced to learn English and French in their own homelands and now they spoke Spanish; survival through language. These intrepid people brought their children up in a totally foreign environment and continued to write their history by word of mouth. Rape, beatings and continual hardship and suffering were their daily fate, yet they remained a good and honest folk.

Now, the old man continued to narrate, those peoples were free. There was no more this tribe or that tribe, but a new Latino race made from all ethnic elements that had been gathered onto the islands. Spanish, Indian, Negroid and even Orientals all melted together into a new, sympathetic, and passionate folk. A race with honour, pride and a passionate ability to love and enjoy life through art, music, dance and just a plain simple life.

Their homes, in the narrow back streets of Havana, provided comfort and shelter, but were without any luxury. There were similarities with the original villages of western Africa when the men sat out, in the streets, in the late afternoon, talking to each other across the narrow roads and courtyards. These people with a spanish temperament and passion, with an african flair for rhythm and of Old World rituals and festivities, and the indian humility and peace. These were real people.

For what they lacked in material wealth they had in their history, in their genes, and in their natural born way of expressing themselves. They sung with velvet voices, crooning their love for each other. They played the guitar and mandolin with an andalusian passion and a moorish excitement. They could be sad because they knew how to love. They could be happy because they understood how to suffer. They could be stubborn and loud because they were proud of their past. They would suffer more storms, violent hurricanes, but never again would they be enslaved…

This is a remarkable race and the old man is an incredible person. He had told me this story without uttering a single word. He recalled all of this heartache, tyranny, and of this new folk’s compassion and passion for life, through the movement of his fingers. Ruebén González was a brilliant pianist, a poet of the keyboard, and a wonderful, gentle old man. He was a legend in his time.

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