At
the 50th Birthday of Cuban
Revolution
Time out after the Harvest
December
19,
2008, 3:00 pm
By Juan Morales Aguero
morales@enet.cu
Translation: Ernesto Gutierrez Pino
Las Tunas.- "Good morning, Mrs., does Domingo Urrutia live here?",
I asked a woman at the portal of her house. “Yes, but he is not here. If
you wants to see him, you must go to the smallholding. He is working
over there. You just have to cross". And she points out toward the
place.
There are hardly 50 meters. I walked to meet him. This Cuban legend
of the cane fields was hoeing on a furrow. “I am sowing tomatoes", he
tells me after the greeting. And with one of his rough and trained hands
he wiped the sweat on his forehead.
He has not been healthy lately. His son Jose, a doctor, has told him
more than once: "Dad, forget all this, it is time for you to take a rest".
And Domingo has answered: "Well, if you want to see me in a wheeling
chair, I will do it..." And his son, Ermidelio, also lectures him on
this. “But, how can you pull out of the land to a 75 year-old oak with
strong roots in it?
I tell him about my intention of having an interview with him. And I
make him to know which my purpose is. He doesn't say his opinion, but he
invited me, almost in a whisper, to go to his house. I follow him and in
a couple of minutes I am sitting in front of the man that made of the
cane cut a daily prowess.
- Domingo, what do you think if we begin talking about your childhood?
- What childhood? I never had a childhood! Listen man, before the
arrival of Fidel Castro (to the power), the children of the black poor
people were born adults. And to make matters worse we live in the
countryside. We cannot have (presents) on Day of the Three Magician
kings. We didn't celebrate birthday. We didn't have candies for
Christmas as the rich people. I neither frolicked with a ball nor rode
on a bicycle. Since my family settled down in the area of Jobabo in
1941, my toys were always a machete and a hoe. I was an old man of eight
years of age. And I couldn't go to school. There were not teachers and
nobody worried if you studied or not. But that is not all. I was only 13
years old when my father died. I really began to work hard, because, I
was the oldest of my five siblings, and my mother was pregnant. Tell me
if you think I could have a childhood this way!
- And how did you face that complex situation with only 14 years old?
- The first thing was to move with all my kin to Macagua 8, a colony
where my uncle lived. He helped me in what he could and one week later I
began in the cane cuts with the Haitians. But it was not a permanent
employment. The owner of the farm make the contracts if he needed
cutters. And we were a crowd of applicants!
- It is difficult to imagine a boy of that age in a job...
- Imagine, those times were as I am telling you. And like me, there
were many children that had to work like adults. The Haitians in Macagua
8 trained me to cut the sugar cane. They were like harvesters! At the
age of 15 I cut 7500, 10,000 and up to 12,500 pounds in 4 or 5 hours.
The Haitians told me that I had chamico that means witchcraft in their
Creole language. I never had an accident and cut cane in the sugar mills
Francisco, in Elia, in Manat, and in Jobabo.
- Domingo, and during that whole time, what did your family do?
- To survive! My siblings were extremely young. Mom had to take care
of them and I had to find money to buy the food. The salary was very bad.
I received one peso for each 2,500 pounds of sugar cane. With that
misery I must feed six mouths. Notice, the money was so scare that in
harvest the colonist killed a heifer and he had to salt the meat for
lack of buyers. No poor person had own land. The Haitians taught us to
prepare a dish they called it calalu. It was made of yucca, quimbombo
and pumpkin. Everything was boiled and then it was mashed.
- Where did you acquire the supplies, the clothes, the footwear...?
- The food, like the rice, in the store of the colony, if you had
money or if you were reliable person so that the owner sell the items to
pay later. The unknown people bought with vouchers and when they got
paid they received the discount. The foreman took an exact control of
what each one won. We lost our life in that store and after the harvest
we did not have work. Most of the poor people wore sacks of flour like
clothes. In other stores there were the finest things. But a pair of
cheap shoes cost two pesos and 50 cents. And up to five in the furriery
La Española, the best in Victoria of Las Tunas. In the countryside
almost all the men wore espadrille. The houses? They were made of leaves
of palm tree, and the floor was the soil. The seats were small sticks
buried and with a couple of planks of palm. And the mattresses were made
of banana leaves. Blankets and sheets? Jute sacks...
- What happens after the harvest? What did you do?
- Well, that was a big problem. That time was savage. My whole family
and I went to Sierra Maestra mountain to harvest coffee more than once.
And to look for any job. One day I took a sack with a hammock and other
belongings. I traveled on foot to Bartle, I pass by Villanueva and
almost at night I arrived to Catalina. There I recognized some Haitians
that I had met in the mountain. I ate something with them. But there was
not job. Then I kept on the road and in a near colony I got an
occupation for one day. They paid me two or three pesos, I don't
remember well. After that, I joined with two men that were coming from
Holguin with the same purpose. We knew that in Montes Grandes a new
colony needed forces. And we went there. We sowed canes during three
days for seven or eight pesos. Until the colonist told us that the work
was over. And I returned to my house with that money for my family.
- And what else did you do to survive after the harvest?
- To play dice and to fight cocks, for instance. I lost my money in
that silly thing. One day in 1958 my godfather who was paralyzed told me
to organize a party in his house to see if he could win some money. We
brought until a record player with a generator and I spoke with the
Rural Police so that they authorized some games. But around eleven at
night, amid the orgy, some rebels appeared. They came from Sierra
Maestra with the current General of Division Jesus Bermudez Cutino who
was from that zone and he knew me because we cut cane together. He told
me: "Domingo, in Cuba there are many mothers with mourning while you are
having a party and in the games". I explained him the causes. Then, he
gave me ten pesos to my godfather. And the party finished. I never
played again since that day.
- Well, talk about the Revolution. What did you do when it triumphed?
- To give jumps of happiness and to help it. As the only thing I had
done in the life was to work inside the cane fields, I made the first
harvest in 1960 loading carts. Then, when the boxcars came, I passed to
the cuts, my specialty. I remember that the lands belonged to the INRA
and they chose to the most outstanding cutters. At the end I was among
the 10 best and as prize I received order to build a house there in the
farm of the village. It was mine and without risks that the Rural Police
came to evict me, like they use to do with the poor people. Workers
began to be selected to occupy State positions. They called me and I
responded that it was illiterate. But they told me that they would help
me. This way I began to work in a store when the harvest ended and to
make my first scrabbles. I learned how to read, to write, to weigh...
until I reached the ninth grade.
- Can we say that your cutter fame began since then?
- Yes, from that time. I cut cane in many places. Even outside of
Cuba, like in Jamaica. Carlos Vega - a cutter from Villa Clara - and I
we went to compete there in 1974. We were 24 couples, 23 of them
Jamaicans. The competion was established by points. Each duet must cut
cane in a distance of more than 160 meters. Averything was very well
organized. They noticed that if somebody gets sick, his couple was
disqualified. We began to cut quickly at a surprising rhythm. The
elevision was there. But the night before, during the welcome, I had
drunk two or three beers. And unexpectedly I had some diarrheassssss...
I had to abandon the cut several times and we were disqualified in the
competition.
- But that was not the only time I traveled abroad, I make a mistake?
- I also traveled to study. It was in 1971 and I went for 15 days to
the former USSR and other socialist countries (in East Europe). I was
frightened by the airplane. I was the last one to board that big
Britannia that produces fear to a black and humble peasant like me. But
two drinks of gin gave me trust. We made stopover in Prague and continue
trip to Moscow in a much smaller airplane. The temperature was very
cold, nine cecius degre. I had a very good experience there. I repeated
it years later when I went to Germany with my wife.
- How many pounds of sugar cane have Domingo cut?
- Statisticians have calculated me some 100,000,000. It was the only
thing I made since I grew up. It seems I didn't do it very bad, because
in my 45 revolutionary harvests I received the distinctions of
Outstanding at national level during 24 consecutive years, National Hero
during other eight, seven times Hero of the Harvest and until Labor Hero
of the Republic of Cuba, which I obtained in 1994, when I was already
retired. I have also received numerous material stimuli that I thank a
lot. But the biggest of all has been to meet Fidel, to shake his hand,
and to sit down beside him in several ceremonies. And in a Congress of
the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution to give him a check of
one million pesos that the mass organization had collected among its
members like contribution to the Territorial Militias. Those moments are
lasting. They somehow make me forget the bad time of my life after the
sugar harvest (during the capitalism in Cuba). And to think of this, my
alive time.
