Many cargo trucks, large eighteen-wheelers with containers, some military jeeps and Suzuki motorcycles in and out from La Campana. They are seen by the narrow road always doing the same route. They enter the village, in silent, and then leave it the same way. Nobody there notices that. People in La Campana in and out of town, quietly, like the trucks. You do not know what they carry, you can only infer that they always carry something inside, but you fail to define exactly what it is.
In la Campana people are serious, very serious and concentrated. That is why, not everyone can live in La Campana. You must have at least the requirement of discretion. The chatty or talkative person can not live there, nor careless people. Those who do not keep secrets or uncompromising persons can live elsewhere in El Escambray, but not exactly in La Campana.
So I was recommended there that if my thesis is on theater, I would limit myself to talk about theater, an interesting and beautiful art form, and not to find out anything else. It is not advisable.
– And why not?
-Because it’s better. But you have a good topic, the Escambray Group came to make theater when that was not known here, they performed outdoor, spoke of peasant life …
– – And in what year did you come to live here?
– -In 1962, when these buildings were made for people who went to work in the factory. And let me tell you, they had to have done a bust to Sergio Corrieri there in La Macagua.
-Well, he wanted his remains were thrown into the sea, on Jaimanita beach, where he lived. And what was your position in the factory?
-I was a mechanic. Now if you tell me you were in the group I even believe it, because I do not remember the artists, there is no such relationship with the community today, but previously they were known throughout the Escambray.
– Up to what year did you work in the factory?
-Until 2003. Hey, really, that group is not like before. People in this town live better now, because when I arrived for the first time to the Escambray, there were no roads, no hospitals, no schools, no electricity, and this has been the place of the mountain with more changes, but there are communities upper that need the theater to go there. They did it anciently, but not now.
– And what exactly does that factory produce?
-Oh, no, I can not give details. If you have to put something in the thesis, write down this is the Ernesto Che Guevara Military Company.
‘But everyone here knows it’s an arms factory.
– Yes? Oh, I do not know. Everyone who works in the factory has to keep the secret. The factory produces everything.
-Now, what is your name?
Alberto Pérez-López.
– And were you involved in the war against bandits in the Escambray?
-Sure, when I was 16, I was in the battalion 302.
– How old were you when started working in the factory?
-I was 18. Hey, is your thesis finally on theater, bandits, or the factory? I advise you to speak too much about theater, but on the factory you must put that it is the Ernesto Che Guevara Company, and do not get into anything else.
I do not know how to use the Nikon’s flash indoors. Alberto has spent 47 years married to his wife, he is thin and wears glasses and looks like a reliable guy. The photo of Alberto Pérez is dark. Despite the lack of quality, you can at least note that Alberto looks like a reliable guy, and he must has something inside him, like the people of La Campana and the cargo trucks. Either way, it is a bad shot.
********
The sun is very strong at La Campana. It touches the skin, gently penetrates, one hardly notices it, then burns in the shoulders and chest, and then your cheeks turn into a horrible red. I neither know how to handle my borrowed Nikon under the sun of the afternoon. I do not know graduating the lens, opening diaphragm, adjusting temperature. The best I can tell Chicho, the guard, is to go under a ladder to take a picture of him and please to relax his shoulders and mouth and not to get so stiff.
‘But I’m this way, I’m not tense, I am just like that.
It could have been a good photo but it is really bad. It is white, opaque, poorly framed. The only thing good of it is the stiff image of Chicho, the guard. He has his shoulders straight, his sight is paralyzed somewhere, his face is severe and expressionless, as if he was facing a firing squad.
Chicho, the guard
– How old are you?
-83.
– What’s your name?
-Chicho the guard.
-Yes, but the name, your name.
-Rafael Antonio Del Sol Leyva, but tell me Chicho the Guard.
Chicho the Guard lives in La Campana since 1960 and walks very straight and leisurely. I see him and tell him I want to talk to people who were in the fight against bandits and he asks me what I want to know. Anything, I say. For example, the place in La Campana where the first caught bandits in the Escambray were shot; the exact place, because now I’m observing, and see that La Campana does not seem the right place to kill anyone. It has a large primary school, a child care center near the school, parks where to sit, too many buildings, motorcycles, eighteen-wheelers, jeeps and trucks. There is no way to kill anyone there. The places to kill are, or should be, desolate and remote, of a convinced solemnity. Places related to an act that always demands the greatest submission. Anyone sentenced to death deserves, minutes before shooting, to be venerated. The condemned to death looks, at that moment, a respectable person, and suddenly innocence appears, the last face of any convicted.
********
By September 8, 1960, the day of La Caridad del Cobre, the Escambray was an extremely dangerous place and people lived in fear. Fear because you can be hung from a tree. Fear because your food can be stolen. Fear because people could get inside your house at bath time. It is not easy to live well in the countryside. Any place is conducive to live in fear behind closed doors unless countryside, but there were, for that time, many bandits in the Escambray and they were extremely cautious. The bandits knew, for example, that on the mountain they had to fight the urge to smoke. They could not take a cigarette to the mouth because the smoke, smell or butt of a cigarette inevitably indicate that someone was or is smoking, and it is easy to locate a bandit who smokes. It was also necessary that bandits to be preferably alone in the mountains of Escambray. Walking in groups left traces; too many footprints were ominous tracks, so a bandit must be a circumstantially lonely person. And bandits primarily learned in those years that when raining, they could not walk straight ahead. At the moment when the sky begins to put in bright blue, almost gray, and the air smells to damp earth, you must immediately change the step and walk backwards not to look that you went to where you were indeed, but in the opposite direction. Excessive caution
A year earlier, i.e. 1959, the revolutionary government had taken power in Cuba and this constituted, to some Cubans, a highly frustrating phenomenon. Something like 1918 for many Europeans, like 1970 for The Beatles and the world, like 1984 to Ethel Merman and Broadway. 1959 came and Cubans could not have the figure of, let’s say, ten thousand acres of land, because if you had that number, you were part of landowning bourgeois oligarchy, and if there was a place where you could not belong to the landowning bourgeois oligarchy, was this, because Revolution had triumphed for something. Some of those people that lost lands due to the new government’s rules, along with other who belonged to the very revolutionary militias of Fidel Castro in the years almost about to triumph, and with collaborators of CIA, sent by Eisenhower, who after the deployment of cunning and military talent in Normandy, thought it would easy to take any place he want, if he had done it in France, he could easily do it in Cuba, it would not matter if it was in Trinidad-Casilda or in the Zapata Swamp- they became the bandits in the Escambray in 1959.
The bandits in the Escambray were, what is called, adventurers. They were outlaws perhaps as talented and committed as Bonnie and Clyde. They were empty stomach men. They used to go to the farmers´ houses and required meal in exchange for avoiding hanging, and then they raided the village’s shops, and set them fire. They did this in the towns of Veguita, Guanayara and Charco Azul. They ate, had fun for a while scaring peasants, and incidentally waited to see if the revolutionary government finally fell down or not.
There were many bandits in the municipality of Manicaragua, the largest of Villa Clara province, and the highest concentration was in the region of Güinía of Miranda. They preferred these places so wooded and full of caves to hide themselves.
But the day of La Caridad del Cobre, date of excitement and offerings, people climbed to Escambray to fight against bandits. Hundreds of young men that were around 15 or 16 got there, who had just learned to handle guns and rifles R-52, along with the revolutionary guerrillas, totaling approximately 70,000 men. The fight against bandits in the Escambray lasted until March 1965, when they captured the last band, known as Blas Tardio´s band.
There were famous bandits in those five years. People remember bandits in the Escambray, they remember their names as if great protagonists of horror movies come to their minds. Charro Placetas is an outlaw, but his name seems to be the one of a protagonist of a horror movie. And so it is with Joaquin Bembibre, and with Tartabull, whose band killed the peasant Ricardo Diaz in front of his children. They do not retain their faces, or the tone of their voices, but they do not forget their names. There are, however, two exceptions. They remember, at least, the composure of two famous bandits of Escambray: Plinio Prieto, a skinny and the fat Sinecio Walsh.
********
It is about half past eleven, almost twelve in the morning. It can not start earlier. It can begin at ten a.m. It is too early too; neither at five p.m., nor at eight in the evening, because it is still too early. They wait for the cows to graze, the birds to fall silent, the kids to eat, and that the last peasant from the last hill to turn off the oil lamp and get into bed. After the trial in La Libertad theater-hall, in the city of Santa Clara, five men have been sentenced to death.
They leave the theater; take the backside of a truck, and departure to La Campana. There are five, the first five bandits who will be executed in the Escambray Mountains, which terrifies at least to Sinecio Walsh. It did not happen the same with the others. Plinio Prieto seems calmed; he barely says a word, and shows himself docile, resigned. The three other behave obedient; they are less noticeable, less famous bandits than Plinio Prieto and Sinecio Walsh.
Plinio is tall, and quite thin, and is also the oldest of the group. Sinecio must be around forty, is fat and strong, and is also the leader of the gang.
There is a military regiment in La Campana and also a military school named Camilo Cienfuegos, where men were trained in the Czech weapons handling. They taught the message dissemination techniques as “human telephone”, used to transmit orders by word of mouth; imparted practical knowledge on how to carry out an ambush, making sieges, semi-sieges, and combs in circular or spiral shape, and clearly, they trained the militia in the arming, disarming and cleaning of the weapon. They learned everything in 60 days.
It was not easy to catch these first bandits. They were caught by surprise in a cave on the Cariblanca hill, from which they would not come out, and it was necessary to throw a grenade for them to surrender.
They are now in the military regiment of La Campana, and Sinecio wants to urinate. That is fatal at the time of execution. The accused person can not get hungry, sleepy, nor can have the desire of going to the bathroom, none of the basic needs. And even more if he is a gang leader. So Sinecio must contain himself, not letting nerves to betray him and behave as a boss.
Plinio remains silent. Such power is provided by the years. Plinio is the oldest of the group and therefore the quiet one, he has a sinister discipline, as who knows that there is nothing quite extraordinary there, that bandit is an outlaw today, and tomorrow can be a defendant.
And at about twelve in the morning, and the last peasant turn off the oil lamp, Chicho the guard witnesses the execution of the first five bandits caught in the Escambray. He does not feel sorry and he says it proudly. He would have felt sorry for everyone else but not for bandits. After the shots, four of them fell to the floor dead, however one called Palomino was still alive, and he had to be finished off. All this happened on October 13, 1960 in La Campana, when there was not an elementary school yet, neither parks to sit, nor so many buildings, only a regiment and a military school.
After Chicho the guard had witnessed that firing squad, he had to carry Sinecio´s body and put him into a box. Sinecio was strong and fat, so I think that Chicho probably had a hard time when moving the body, but it was not. Chicho the guard does not feel sorry for villains and he had enough forces to put them into the box. In addition, dead bodies always lose conditions, something suddenly escapes from them.
********
Since I entered La Campana in a truck, I knew that people there was serious and very discreet. I knew it through the truck driver who gave me a ride to the town, when he suggested me it was impossible going to the factory because there were places that neither them themselves had ever entered.
La Campana looks like an ordinary village, like any other, but it is only appearance. If a village has a site with restricted entrance, and if there are people in the town that keep many secrets, it is no longer an ordinary town.
I came here to ask what I’ve been asking in other towns of Escambray. But things are little predicted in these hills, and you can start talking with Alberto Lopez about theater, and suddenly you are speaking on the factory and then you find someone who carried, with no shame at all, Sinecio Walsh’s body. You may want to talk about a tree and finish speaking of the sparrow that is on the branch. I want to tell you I’m telling lies, I knew from the beginning that I would find something similar in La Campana and that’s why I came here.
I’m definitely not good at using professional cameras. I left the village and wanted to take a panoramic picture, a perfect framing including the buildings at the entrance, the sign that has inscribed the name Jose Centeno, because the town is actually called José Centeno and not La Campana; two or three people talking in a corner, and the Escambray Mountains silhouetted in the background. But it was not possible. It was almost five in the afternoon, and there was too much sun, so, at that time, you need to hold on tightly the lens of a professional camera, and also have to know to increase shutter speed or closing diaphragm a bit, and then shoot. If you do not do that, you’ll get a bad photo, too white for the amount of light. No photo in La Campana had quality. Everything there is very discrete. As if there was a surreptitious law that reads: in La Campana you do not ask much, do not go where you should not, and do not take photos. If you insist on doing it, you will surely get a bad one.
Author
Carla Gloria Colomé
