CAMAGÜEY.- Jennifer had never seen a naked old lady. Degar was unaware of the world of a nursing home. Leinier did not imagine such a tragedy embedded in the memory of people. Only a poet like César Vallejo created the word that contains the saddest-sweetest experience of their lives.
They still feel that mixture of sad with sweet, the flavor fixed to the chest by the stay in the Manuel Ramón Silva home, where they helped yo take care for 15 days the 246 elderly people in Camagüey. In Cuba's sixth oldest province, one in five inhabitants is over 60 years old.
The young people arrived in full quarantine as part of the group of thirteen artists on behalf of Golpe a Golpe, the sociocultural project that in December will celebrate fourteen years of searching and embracing the soul of vulnerable communities. It will celebrate twenty if its history is counted as Pista Abierta, also conceived and directed by the cultural promoter Yunielkis Naranjo Guerra.
Photo: Courtesy of Golpe a Golpe
Jennifer Collymore Torres, the pop singer with eight months in the group, was in a trance when they told her "hey, come here, you must help dry them and dress them." The list was deep as the urgencies of those faces with lost and found looks.
Photo: Courtesy of Golpe a Golpe
Degar Humberto Puentes Hernández was struck from the first foot inside the large building of 1878. The scholarship for him was equivalent to the memory of military service. Once again he would stop seeing his family for a very finite time, but even today, already at home , he is still distressed. He imagined himself in the mirror of saxophone and percussion players he met: "No one wants to be away from family."
Photo: Courtesy of Golpe a Golpe
Leinier Paredes Rosales did carry keys against desolation in the luggage of a singer and humorist. For his eight years in Golpe a Golpe, he was able to collaborate for fifteen days in the Esmeralda devastated by Cyclone Irma in 2017. With his colleagues at the time, he cleaned the town in the sun and won applause on blackout nights. There was a remedy for everything there, but not for the stories encountered here of the death of children and abandoned parents.
Another script was built for the group dynamics: getting up early, loading the water for the bathroom, feeding, listening and understanding. In the afternoons, at around three, a room broke the routine as a stage for the art of the boys. They knew each other with a talent for magic, dance, humor and music. During the stay they proved their ability to be good people.
Dr. Yuri Emilio Copa Ruiz, director of the home, described the work of young artists as wonderful. Relief from entertaining the fit is inferred, as it identifies the old men who used to walk around the city and have been unable to go out for three months. On May 28, the second group of young people entered the Abriendo brechas project, an extension of Golpe a Golpe in the cell of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz in Florida. That group of fourteen persons added to the offer the projection of audiovisuals and a danzon show.
Photo: Courtesy of Aymée Amargós
As for the first, Jennifer even earned the name Agustina. That was the name of a lady with a thirst for permanent company. The nervous eighteen-year-old girl achieved a state of well-being. With Degar, three years older, she sang a duet to calm down those who began to cry for telling their sorrows. She said goodbye in pop style and he with his rap titled Love is strong.
At 29, Leinier has a breastplate with unshielded zones. He verified it with the avalanche of so many stories, although he found the cure in the poems, the jokes and the singing of the elderly themselves in a health facility where several are close to celebrating the centenary: "I miss those old ladies ..."
The image of lovable wrinkles strengthens the meaning of life for this group of young people. May meant an ever deeper immersion at the root of a creative project founded to walk from blow to verse.
- Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez