Harnecker / Isabel Pereira Pizani

Harnecker

Seeing your editor's script on the Fuerte Tiuna Document and remembering were the same thing. Those afternoons of concentration with Magaly and Luis Ignacio absorbing your laws of historical materialism. I still feel the aroma of coffee, the only petit bourgeois pleasure allowed in those spartan sessions. It is impossible not to evoke those moments of dreams, before the death of friends and brothers, fallen in the Bachiller mountains, almost all of them with your book beneath their arms. Afterwards, it was sitting in the classrooms of the Sorbonne beside companions arrived from actual socialism, who would make terrible and uncomfortable confessions to us: "In our countries only the State and the Party exist, there is nothing else. That is for life. If you're not in one, nor in the other, you either don't exist or you're dead."

Later, attending the lectures of the teachers of Marxism: Poulantzas and Althusser. Reading Capital was the Rayuela of Marxism. The discussions in their classes were completely irreverent. Young people arriving from all over defied them. Our beloved Theory of Value, the cornerstone of the Marxist building, seemed as precarious as a cardboard shack. One day we heard that both teachers had disappeared, one the victim of an attack of murderous insanity, the other sacrificing himself.

It was rumored that both incidents were related to their inability to accept that they had always been wrong. But, as they say, life goes on and from the Parisian classrooms, going to the Maurice Thorez library, we saw the socialism we wanted so much for our country fall to pieces. People fled. The Gulag was the source of insomniac nights. And always, like a litany, my Polish companion Sofie would say: "Imagine a country were only the State and the Party exist."

Martha, how much anxiety, and forgive me for writing to you in such a personal manner, but it's what we do with those who, at one moment, have been our heroes and you were one to me. I'll tell you that one of my best friends invested his entire inheritance in setting up a publishing venture in order to produce affordable editions of your book, for 1 bolívar each. I handed out hundreds of them in the ghettos of La Vega.

In the end, a brave comrade's dare: And if socialism is only another utopia created by the human mind in order to tyrannize us in the name of the poor, the weak and the workers? At that point I stopped, Martha. By the way, Harnecker, where were you when Fidel put to death those men who only wanted to leave Cuba?


Fundación Principia


{ Isabel Pereira Pizani, El Universal, 5 March 2005 }