VERTIENTES, CAMAGÜEY. - She speaks little of herself. The history of her life, told by her, turns concerning more of the brothers who are not here anymore, her parents, the daughter who always accompanies her, and Jorge, the grandson away now by the obligations of the Military Service.

María Luisa Delgado does without the self-references, prefers to remember the happy life that, despite the humility, lived along with her mother and her father there in a few areas located between San Luis and Pinar del Río.

“There I was born and grew up, my mother: oh, my mother!, she exclaims and the look seems to move of place and epoch – woke me and one of my brothers up really early so that we helped dad in the farm. I was seven years old. He milked and I strained the milk, so since I was a little girl I was learning the farm work".

Judging by the clearness with which María Luisa remembers every detail, there seem slightly believable at her 89 years to which this she arrived July 2018. The certainty of which these days remain intact in her memory as they happened, is verified doubly when she describes her barefooted feet for the earth of the farm, the pieces of fabric that her mother was assembling to sew the simple pledges that they were dressing, and the cent that the paternal figure of that hearth was receiving for every liter of milk.

Then there came even more difficult times for the family, two brothers lost the life in deplorable accidents that Maria Luisa does not want to remember. “Not only it was the proper sadness what was consuming us, it was terrible to see the desperation of our parents”. But all that and much more that we do not count here happened to this good woman who had wanted, says, to be a professional.

Although she could not reach this, her sleep, difficult to satisfy for a female before 1959, proudly exhibits at home the title that credits her as graduated. That was only possible after the revolutionary victory, she clarifies after mentioning that of course her history is bored, but she tells this to the young people “so that they should see how we were living”.

Maria Luisa is, without doubts, a person of excellent communicative capacity to whom it is not necessary to rise questions, she is spinning her life - history with the clarity that her almost nine decades give her.

Obviously, she does not need a university title, she has already the most important of all: that of the experience that the white hairs accumulate; and if it was small, now she hoards the happiness of sharing with good friends in the grandparents' house Batalla de Las Guásimas.

  • Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez