Nom de Guerre: Upon Visiting the Che Memorial in Santa Clara, Cuba
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How could he not smile dead from four bullets and broken leg bones a soldier added as ordered?
How could he not laugh out loud at Bolivian anacondas sliding in the jungle under everyone’s field blanket?
Their names were just too silly to be taken as seriously as the weight of an M-2 or grey pineapple hand grenade.
Chino. Moro. Negro.1 And another guerrillero someone named Pedro Pan Divino2 as a joke that stuck even after death.
Every nom de guerre a secret and punchline among friends who saw something unique in compañeros whose real names they never knew.
Some serious: Tanya, the guerrilla saint. Or a simple descriptor like Ernesto Médico, named before the other one
who had been given a name in the Sierra Maestra that meant Hey you!Anyone. Everyone. [End Page 219]
His brown eyes wide, lips parted as if pronouncing the one syllable word that brought thirty nine faces from all over the world together again forever.
B. V. Olguí;n, an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas (San Antonio), is author of two collections of poems, Red Leather Gloves and At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Poems from Cuba Libre. In 2007, Arte Público Press published his co-translation (with Omar Vasquez Barbosa) Cantos de Adolescencia / Songs of Youth by Américo Peredes. Olguín’s La Pinta: Chicana and Chicano Prisoner Culture and Politics will be published by the University of Texas Press in 2009.
Footnotes
1. Chinese. Moor. Black.
2. Peter Holy Bread [End Page 220]
