CAMAGÜEY.- (I) Lorenzo lived his childhood and adolescence in dim light until that electric blackout when he discovered that he could only see the lit candle with one eye. Since very little he had the urge to seat in the front row of the classroom to better see the board.
Later, when he took the medical exams of the then League Against Blindness, today Hospital Pando Ferrer, in Havana, he learned that he had born with an acute myopia, that he had a retinal detachment in one of his eyes and was about to lose the sight in the other one.
With the help of his desk colleague, Roberto Pareta Beltrán, who he considers as his best friend and part of his family, he was able to willfully overcome the short sight and continued studying.
This writer acquainted Lorenzo Armando Boudet briefly during his first life of lights: I only knew about him that he was the brother of the journalist director of the newspaper Adelante and that he had sight limitations, however, I found out later that he was a veterinary technician, he worked in a sanitary slab in the provincial market and that with a lot of perseverance, sacrifice, he got a degree in Veterinary Medicine.
(II) Before me, Lorenzo in his second life of lights, funny and hardworking. He is a Piflo-informatics Instructor and secretary of the nucleus of the Cuban People’s Party, in the provincial seat of the National Association of Blind and Visually Impaired People (ANCI).
“After several surgical interventions I was definitely blind and I thought I would live forever in an isolated darkness; however, I joined the ANCI, which I help found. I started preparing for my other new life, that was full of lights because of the love of so many people that helped me, especially my current wife, Digna Rojas Tito, visually impaired, with whom I share today a happy life”.
Lorenzo tells that he met Digna, a Guantánamo´s girl, willing and understanding in the training that she developed in Havana and as soon as she talked to him, he was shot by Cupid, the little angel of love.
He smiles while retelling the affair, but he also reflects about how before having liquefied gas and other home improvements received by the Cuban Government, he cooked with a Pike cooker that used kerosene and alcohol, that, in order to know if it was ready to cook, he had to expose his hands to the heat of the flame and had to learn a few tricks to be able to provide for himself alone or in the company of his couple.
One day in front of my workplace, I saw him moving on the sidewalk so fast. He was walking wearing black sunglasses and with the help of a cane. I went closer to talk to him, it was enough to tell him who I was once for remembering my voice forever. Back then he lived far away, in the west side of the city, and every day, early in the morning, he would cross the main streets in Camagüey until Popular street, the seat of his workplace when he is not working for the ANCI or the Party.
“I wake up every day at 5:30 in the morning, I do calisthenics exercises, push-ups… otherwise the arthrosis will kill me and I walk a lot”.
If you had not studied veterinary medicine and informatics, what would you want to be?
“Chemical Engineer or shopkeeper”
What else do you like to do?
I like to listen to music. I am not a very good dancer, the audiovisual movies they play for us amuse me and I learn from them, and I like reading, learn always learn, that is why thanks to the opportunity given to me by the Youth Computer Clubs and the invaluable help of Mariela Jiménez Alcorta, specialist instructor in computerization, I was able to learn computer science for blind people.
Fidel and the Revolution, What do they mean for you?
My life, the guarantee of subsistence of many, of most of the Cuban people, if it was not for our human socialist system of government, in another time like thousands of other Cubans, I would be cursing the physical impairment that I suffer and I would live poorly of the public charity, and I would not feel useful or able to live the way I feel today.
And full of lights that can see a secure present and future, I leave before the computer a whole man, which teaches us to see life with the broad spectrum of vision of the Cuban truth that other ungrateful “seers” pretend to darken.
- Translated by Elianna Díaz Mendieta
- Corrected by Linet Acuña Quilez