CAMAGÜEY.- In the distance, the farm Palmira simulates an oasis. It is a copious point of green real palms in the middle of extensive and desolate pastures. They say that it is near the San Rafael batey (small rural town), at eight kilometers of the Magarabomba community and at 11km of Florida, but nothing more is glimpsed in all the surroundings, for what it is possible to infer that that "surrounds" is a peasant version of “to the song of the rooster”, that never comes.
There lives alone Maritza Lezcano González, a short woman, of whitest skin and green-yellowish eyes, like the color of the grassland when the drought begins to do ravages.
She is “born and raised” literally in those places, since her mother was milking a cow when she felt the childbearing pains. From that moment, 48 years have already passed. To the return of almost five decades, Maritza manages to make produce 15.97 hectares of ground that she inherited from her mother.
The cattle is the biggest of her determinations. She has in her herd 125 bovine animals and approximately 150 ovine - goat, in addition to horses, pigs and hens. She sows everything she can, for the self-sufficiency, to contribute to the credit and services cooperative José Martí, to which she is associated, and to assure the food of the animals. Right now her main crops are pineapples, bananas, canes and king grass.
To be a peasant for her turns out to be the maximum thing. She takes it in the blood, she assures. Perhaps there is the (genetic) secret so that it could do so much in every day.
-Is the task long?
- I get up at 4:30 a.m. - when there are no many cows in milking - I prepare for myself the sip of coffee, which cannot be missing; I go for the corral to milk (under the moonlight) and order them then for ttheir pasture; I come and give them milk to the rams that I raise with baby´s bottle; I milk the kid and feed to the pigs; here each one has his shift.
“After the lunch I mount on horseback and adornment the cattle to one kilometer more or less from here, up to the well, so that they take water. Two hours or so I spend giving bomb so that they drink all (275 approximately), since the lagoon is dry. I return the animals and I am going to look for cane for the pigs, cut it and bring it to mount peak because I have no wagon, I do not like it. Later, I put the cows and the beasts away, and I count them and put the goats and rams in their space. The last thing are the dogs, now only six, but I have had 19. I end at about 11:00 p.m., I eat, take a bath... and until the following dawn. When the thing is very, very complicated I pay someone so that he helps me”.
-Don´t you feel that you demand too much to your body physically?
- I am used to it. I do not get tired and sit down a moment if I need it. What I can assure you is that I do not know what is the boredom. If there is need to cut the grass I do it, I sting marabou posts, I throw and arrange fences, and milk; I love that, milking is the very same life.
- Have you felt alone?
- Never, I do not know what is the solitude. I live like this alone since 2000. I have two children, but each one attends to his farm. I am well like that, I have not thought of looking for company. I feel that it would be an obstacle because I could not attend to the farm as I owe. I am not afraid at any hour, I even like mounting on horseback at dawn and covering the pasture.
“I enjoy to wake up before the dawn and to feel the roosters singing. To be in the corral and to see the dawn is the richest thing that exists”, she says in a tone of unquestionable plenitude.”
Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez