Puerto Padre, Cuba.- “Does anyone know who was QUALINO SANDALIO DE NODA? ”Asked a speaker, and from the public only one voice said:” Of course. ” That question and the lonely answer occurred on February 1, in Miami, Florida, during the conference Intellectuals and Castroismwhich was an academic event of historical root, but above all, it was an exchange of political, cultural, sociological ideas, in which, by humanistic, the didactic, the pedagogical was privileged in what to the immediate future of Cuba concerns. Because if we do not know where we come from, it would not be uncommon for us to miss our way in search of freedom, as in so many other occasions it has happened to us in this dilated birth of the Cuban nation.
Of the conference, convened by the Institute of Cuban Historical Memory against Totalitarianism, its director Pedro Corzo, historian, writer and friend, had the kindness of sending me the videos with the presentations of the participants. The speakers were Cuban intellectuals arrived from different places in the United States where they reside today, after more than sixty years of dictatorship, get out of castrocommunist prisons or to leave their chairs or diplomatic positions in regime institutions, multicultural background that A lot says of the ecumenical sense of the conference. I have pending with readers, then, an aim to develop in the next article, concerning the nation and their intellectuals.
I postpone the issue of the nation and the thinkers of how the nation, then, when the speakers in Intellectuals and Castroism They said that Castrocommunist totalitarianism in their eagerness to perpetuate themselves in power had erased, misrepresented or thrown into oblivion not only to intellectuals who openly opposed the regime, but also those scholars in our origins, is that that awkward question arises: ” Does anyone know who tranquilo sandal of Noda was? ”, And as only one voice said:“ Of course ”, it is worth saying that this one, Quera’s, is a good example of our orphanhood as a nation.
He was Calm Sandal of Noda and Martínez, an eminent Cuban, a surveyor, writer and polyglot, born in 1808, not far from the Waterloo coffee plantation, in Pinar del Río, and died in San Antonio de los Baños, on May 23, 1866. With Self -taught instruction, studied several crops, pests in cultivated plants, and about relevance in the rationality of crops such as coffee, where he developed ideas in written articles and published in 1829, for example that concerning the economy of production costs, This, during the global crisis of coffee production, as decreasing costs, he said, was equal to increasing the amount of products; Likewise, Noda and Martínez spoke several languages, even some Africans.
In 1829 the Economic Society of Friends of the Country elected him as a merit partner and rewarded his monograph Memory about the causes that produce alteration of coffee cropswhat much says about the depth of his thinking and intellectual projection in such an early era.
Unfortunately, the calm intellectual Sandal of Noda and Martínez, a man who thought of his country and the prosperity of the Cuban nation and the whole world, died at 58 years of age in the most absolute solitude. Lighting his body on the ground, the story tells that four humble peasants were his last candle; His remains joined the land he loved and studied so much. Today on the ashes of their bones there is no tombstone. It is, as if it were the sign of insumism intellectuals in Cuba, a nation given to pleites.
