Year after year, a multitude of flowers have colored this sea of the Antilles since his physical disappearance in 1959, but his perpetual smile continues on solid ground, together with this Cuban people who do not forget him and pay special tribute to him this February 6 when he would be 90 years old.
It happens that “Men like Camilo Cienfuegos emerged from the people and lived for the people”, as Commander in Chief Fidel Castro stated.
Simple, reveler and always happy, he wrote to his family in 1954, regarding his 22nd birthday: “On my birthday I will tell you that I had someone to give me my little gifts, because Rafael gave me a tie, the Téllez family a shirt and some underpants and on the other hand a barrette and yokes. ‘The Cuban is lucky’”.
We were all Cubans on this Island who were lucky enough to have a figure like the “Lord of the Vanguard” in our country’s history.
He was only 26 years old and already around his figure there was a popular myth created from the combat in Monte la Estrella, from where he emerged unscathed despite the numerical inferiority of his troops and weapons, and which allowed him to reach the ranks of commander, as recalled by Major Sonia Regla Pérez Sola, in his article Ninety years of his eternal smile.
His courage and skills as a military strategist earned him in 1958 the appointment by Fidel to lead Column No. 2 Antonio Maceo, which successfully resisted 48 days of siege and persecution by the Batista army.
Hand in hand with courage, he participated from the first combat, in Alegría de Pío, and later in others such as La Plata and Uvero. It was in Pino del Agua where his comrade-in-arms, Luis Olazábal Cepeda, whom Camilo nicknamed El Dynamite dancer, was injured. recounted in a journalistic interview how Cienfuegos demanded that a soldier also hit by enemy shots be treated first, “or else he would do it.”
“He wouldn’t leave a comrade behind even when the enemy was on him, which shows he loved his men, and we adored him; he never went back, always ahead, Camilo and Che (Guevara) fought up front, standing up, that’s why in Pino del Agua they wounded him (Camilo) in the thighs. He was very handsome, but level-headed.
“He was also a reveler, a nobleman, but if he had to, he would punish anyone. I remember that a colleague was punished once and another colleague and I who were cooks, we brought him, hidden, food and in one of those Camilo surprised us, but he didn’t say anything to us. The next day we surprised him doing the same thing, hiding from us”, recalled Olazábal.
There are numerous anecdotes and testimonies that attest to the human caliber of that Cuban born in a humble home in Lawton, who was a worker in a tailor shop and whose emancipatory ideals led him to make the voyage on the Granma yacht and to gain the complete trust of Fidel and of Che Guevara, who sentenced him: “There has not been a soldier in this war of liberation comparable to Camilo.”
