Who were you? Who was Alicia, Deborah, Monica, Mariela? You who spoke little and talked so much and embraced with your voice. You: the one with only one love, the one with all loves.
On what floor do they say she sat sewing a torn uniform for a militiawoman who had no shoes? Who heard her say, "I'm tired"?
How can one measure the stature of a woman who could have remained in her engineering career, in her Santiago of well-to-do families, and instead chose the mountains, the rifle, the eternal night of clandestinity? What scale weighs the courage of one who was a combatant in the Rebel Army and then, after victory, did not rest until women had their own voice?
Did exhaustion gnaw at her bones when she founded childcare centers so that working women wouldn't have to choose between bread and breastfeeding? Did she feel dizzy when speaking to the rural man who believed that women were property? Or did she learn, as rivers learn, that patience erodes even the hardest mountain?
Where did she keep the tenderness to be, at the same time, the stern boss who wouldn't allow any backtracking on the divorce law and the friend who arrived in the early hours to bring coffee to those keeping vigil over their dead? How did she reconcile in one body the guerrilla fighter who buried comrades in the Sierra and the mother who suffered for every Cuban child victim of the cruel blockade?
No rank or decoration can explain Vilma. She is not defined by positions: she was "president of women," yes, but she was also the one who demanded to be addressed without title, the one who got angry if flowers were placed on her table, the one who interrupted a meeting to ask a peasant woman what her daughter's name was.
What power does a law have if it isn't accompanied by a hand to sign it and then defend it tooth and nail in every neighborhood, in every factory, in every school? Vilma didn't legislate from behind a desk; she sat on the dirt floors of the bateyes, smelled the candle smoke in the wooden shacks, and wept with those who lost their children in the war...
Where do we, those who came after, place her example and her absence? We must continue weaving, as she did, without expecting applause. We must be as tough as she was on injustice, and gentle with those who suffer. We must learn this difficult craft: to be a revolutionary without ceasing to be human, to be a mother to all without forgetting the embrace of one.
What could time do against Vilma? If she wasn't time, she was roots. And roots don't die: they nourish.
