Perhaps many of us have wondered what would have become of Fidel if he had not left behind the comforts that Biran was offering him on the horizon, to devote himself completely to cementing Cuba's libertarian bases, assaulting the Moncada, founding the 26th of July Movement, preparing the Granma expedition, disembarking, leading the guerrilla struggle in the middle of the mountains, triumphing and continuing, until the end of his life, without a moment's peace and quiet.
No one could answer this question, especially because I have not yet met anyone who could imagine him otherwise. He was born to be Him.
Lina Ruz knew it from the moment her eyes and lips betrayed her joy that early morning of August 13, 1926, when she saw the beautiful man she had just given to the world.
And probably history itself knew it too, in some anticipated way.
Perhaps many people have asked themselves another no less curious question: What would have become of Cuba without Fidel?
It is easy to imagine: the same as this country had been since the United States stuck more than just its nose into the war virtually won by our mambises against Spanish rule.
In other words: without him, Cuba would have continued to sink into the darkness of hell that still gladly reserves for us the other history: the one modeled from that Washington almost without history.
Where did Fidel get the antidote against viruses so common until the 1950s, such as political corruption, servility before the empire, the surrender of the nation without the slightest scruple?
By what intravenous "mystery" did honesty, spirit of sacrifice, attachment to the humble, perseverance, capacity of not declining weapons or principles before anything or anyone... flow in her blood?
Lina herself, Ángel Castro, Ramón (her brother), lots of books, José Martí, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, Carlos Baliño, Julio Antonio Mella... all of them had a balanced share of responsibility, without excluding even that daily and natural contact with families of dark complexion that planted in Birán roots originating from the distant and suffered Africa.
It was the love of a night, perhaps of a moonbeam filtered through the wood or of a window to the open sky, that one of the most transcendent beings of humanity came to the world. What a Cuban gratitude that mortifies ungrateful people.
That is why more than 600 attempts of physical elimination could do nothing against the light of that birth. That is why more than a hundred of high decorations and honorary distinctions in different latitudes. That is why his human imprint without frontiers in the health of millions of people. And for that reason, what Lina wrote to him in an early letter:
"...I have in you, more than my children, the indelible heroes of an entire youth and of a whole people who have their hopes and faith in those who came out of my womb and whom I saw grow up under the gaze that only mothers have..."
