NASHVILLE, United States. – On September 15, 1959, at the age of 23, Fernando de Jesús Ponceano Manuel Pruna Bertot assumed the name of war Colonel Ponce. From one of the many caverns of the Sierra de los Órganos, near La Herradura, a small town in the municipality of Consolación del Sur, this was his proclamation:
“I am Colonel Ponce, war chief. My tactic of placing my group of combatants in the province of Pinar del Río has been put into action. From our bases in Havana we will reach the approaches to the western mountains. I am ready to take up arms. I declare the first armed uprising against the communist revolution and against Fidel Castro”.
Just a week earlier, the young rebel had made a spectacular escape from the Castillo del Príncipe, where he had been confined after an earlier escape attempt at the infamous La Cabaña fortress. From this last prison I would never forget the commanding voice of Che Guevara or the cries of “Long live Christ the King!” of the comrades killed him.
Last Friday, from Miami, his brother Andy, a surviving hero of Bay of Pigs, told me that Fernando Pruna Bertot had passed away. I still can not believe it; I remember him from our meeting during the 2018 Book Fair, after discovering his precious autobiography Havana 505now reissued as a bilingual trilogy, under the title Before the After either Before After.
Going back to 1959, not even the experienced US Vice President, Richard Nixon, after meeting with the new revolutionary Prime Minister, was clear about the true intentions of the charismatic olive-green guerrilla fighter.
Only God has the explanation of how a playboy Cuban, graduated from NY Columbia University, who rubbed shoulders with Denise Darcel from Western Veracruz and with Santos Traficante from Havana Sans Souci, ended up furiously kicking the floor of his apartment while violating the classic education of his adolescence in New England and he shouted to the other conspirators:
“A communist revolution is like a plague that kills the individual freedom of man. Of all our misfortune to come this is the greatest. A totalitarian government that will abolish freedom in Cuba. Castro, you are going to pay us. Neither your revolution nor the communists are going to deprive me of my freedom! No, Castro. You won’t take this from me! There is no other path than the path of arms! Let’s fight!”
However, the Pinar del Rio peasants had believed the story of the Agrarian Reform, the land titles and the history of bandits attributed without exception to those who rose up against the new revolutionary government.
On September 22, the victim of a denunciation, Fernando Pruna was captured along with a dozen combatants – including two Americans – and his dear and brave Nena (Eudelia Cabrera Menéndez), girlfriend and wife of all his life.
Thus, Case No. 1 of 1959 was constituted, in which more than 100 opponents of the Castro dictatorship, still in the making, were sentenced. The leaders, Fernando Pruna Bertot and the American Austin Young, received the prosecutor’s request for the death penalty by firing squad. That some US citizens were involved served anti-imperialist propaganda and made it possible to accuse the CIA of organizing and financing the new growing rebellion, whose real cause was the frustration of those who trusted in the democratic oath of History will absolve me.
However, it was not yet time for a definitive break between the revolutionary leader and the United States. Death did seem imminent for the former playboy Cuban, because Castro dealt with internal affairs according to the clause imposed without plausible justification of “square besieged by the enemy.”
A miracle happened: from New York some students sent the following cablegram to Havana:
“Doctor Fidel Castro, when you came to deliver your speech at Columbia University last April, we the undersigned students admired you. In one of your prisons is a friend of ours, a former Columbia student, Fernando Pruna Bertot. He is sentenced to death. We beg you to spare his life, as well as his fiancée’s. Doesn’t he see inside him that by executing it he also executes the hope of humanity? God bless him if he sets him free! God forgive him if he doesn’t! Paul Robinson. Peter Roome. William Frye. Paul Hammafstrom. Rudolf Wurlitzer. James Cahouett. William Lane”.
For her part, the mother of the condemned man moved sentimental relations, appealing to an uncle, a dental surgeon, who during the repression of the previous dictator, had hidden Celia Sánchez, the eternal female figure next to the omnipotent bearded man, in his house in Manzanillo.
Finally, Fernando Pruna Bertot’s maximum sentence was commuted to 30 years in prison and the Americans were expelled from the country.
On January 18, 1980, whoever was Colonel Ponce for a Cuba free of communism, along with his beloved Nena, definitively left his homeland after 17 years behind bars.
The couple had previously sent, under the protection of a diplomatic bag and circumventing State Security, dozens of tiny paper pellets, wrapped in nylon, entrusted to them by an illustrious fellow prisoner, Armando Valladares (who was able to pick them up in Miami to write his denunciation of the new Cuban political prison, an exceptional book entitled Against all hope).
Fernando would write his extraordinary autobiography, in digital format and on paper, with English, French and Spanish translations.
I agree with the last words of the original edition of Havana 505:
“I arrive in this wonderful free land of the United States of America at the age of 44, with total optimism and the strength, health, vigor and courage necessary to succeed in whatever I set my mind to. I am alive, I am strong, I am healthy and God has blessed me.”
OPINION ARTICLE
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