Voices are very low. A book of condolences collects a good number of signatures, as those who have come to the Fernando Ortiz House of Higher Studies want to write the feeling that stirs their chest on this afternoon of September 1, in which a major intellectual, the historian and teacher Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, an exemplary Cuban, died last Sunday, about to turn 83 years old.
Many floral offerings, arriving from the institutions in which the distinguished Martiano left his mark, overflow the enclosure, including those of Army General Raul Castro Ruz and Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic. There are members of the Political Bureau of the Party Esteban Lazo Hernández, President of the National Assembly of People's Power; Manuel Marrero Cruz, Prime Minister; Roberto Morales Ojeda, Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee; Salvador Valdés Mesa, Vice President of the Republic; Teresa Amarelle Boué, Secretary General of the Federation of Cuban Women, and José Amado Ricardo Guerra, Secretary of the Council of Ministers, together with other leaders of the Party and the Government.
People talk about him, tell anecdotes and shed tears. Respect and pain are breathed in an environment where intellectuals, relatives and friends have arrived, but also people of the people who are grateful for the wise and guiding word of Torres-Cuevas, who could not be listened to without admiring him, without recognizing, along with his extraordinary knowledge, his vocation as a man of good, as a full patriot.
At the mourning farewell, in charge of Abel Prieto Jimenez, president of Casa de las Americas, friend and brother in cause of Torres-Cuevas, we learned that "in his Testament before a notary he left fixed in the Thirteenth clause, that he loved Cuba above all things, that he gave it the best of himself, and that he only regretted abandoning it in such difficult circumstances".
To him, to whom far from reproaching him for anything, we will abide by each one of his recommendations, we say that he does not abandon us, that those who have a virtue like his never do. To defend Cuba and to do for her is one of those utilities that her great sons bequeath to us, among which his name is counted.
