Lázaro Echemendía, Cuba Press
RANCHUELO, February - On my way over, I kept asking myself what I would do if Henry, as I feared, refused to be interviewed. I even came up with an ending for my piece, something like "Henry today is afraid."
On Saturday, May 10, 1980, the newspaper Vanguardia published: "They will not be blood tears. I told her clearly that I did not want to leave, that I wanted to be a Young Pioneer and I couldn't do that over there," said Henry Navarro Bermúdez, the 8-year-old who has caused a
conmotion in Ranchuelo by the unexpected way in which he refused to leave the country with his mother to go to the United States.
"Listen," he told me, and by the tone of voice I presumed I would have to find another ending for my piece, "all that is a lie."
"Under his clothes, the boy had concealed a Cuban flag. He planned to unfurl it when he reached the United States, thinking that way they would return him to Cuba," said the official paper in 1980.
"I had no flag to raise over there or anything of the kind. That was all invented by the journalist. If I refused to go, it was simply because my grandmother, my mother's mother, asked me to. She didn't want my mother to leave, and she told me that if I refused to go my mother wouldn't go.
Otherwise I would have gone. That is what happened. They might have written all that stuff, but remember that paper will take anything you want to put on it."
The official story in Vanguardia said: "His parents were divorced and his mother decided to go to the cruel North, which only has contempt for us. Since then, Henry could not read 'La Edad De Oro,' the treasure that Martí left for children..."
I put my questionnaire aside and listened.
"The only thing I got out of it all" -he went on- "was a little book, 'La Edad de Oro' that they gave me, a cake, the patriotic ceremonies at school and those photographs in the newspapers. By the way, take care of them, I'm saving them so that when my mother comes I can show them
to her, so she can see all the nonsense I went through, not that that's anything compared to the millions they're spending now."
"Listen, in the beginning they made me the center of everything, but very soon that all changed. If it hadn't been for my mother who sent me some help from over there I don't know what would have become of me. Then she was jailed in the United States, ten years ago and then I really hit
bottom. I've had a harder time than a hardware store mouse. But, thanks God, she will get out next month, I got her letter not long ago, and I expect to see her soon."
"My grandfather, the same one they talk about in that newspaper, came not long ago, and you know what? now he blames me for not having left and he says that my mother is in jail because of me, as if I were responsible for what she did. She is my mother and I will love her always, but as far
as I'm concerned he is dead and buried... write it just like that. I've had hard times, very hard, write that too, and no leader, not before, not now, ever came to see if I needed anything. Nobody ever gave a hoot about me. Look at my house, it's falling apart. I have spoken to everybody and nobody
helps me. People leave the country and instead of giving me a house, they give them to the leaders."
"I'm very sick. I suffer from asthma, severe obstruction of the airways and poor absorption syndrome. I have been critical twice and no one came asking about me. What's more, if I'm still getting attention in the hospitals, it's only thanks to friends of mine, because if I'm going to wait
for these guys..." he interrupts to recriminate his son, and continues more calmly.
He tells me he also has a daughter and that he hasn't worked for a year because of illness, that it was precisely working in the ice factory that finished his lungs, and that he now gets 170 pesos (8 dollars) a month on a medical disability.
"How do you think I manage to maintain my children? Sick as I am, I've had to make do, scrambling to look for money. And at that, I don't have anything, not even a TV for my children, so they have to go watch it somewhere in the neighborhood. My only hope is my mother. I haven't seen her in
so many years... I am her only child. That happened when I was 8 and I am now 29, figure it out. My mother's name is Dulce María Bermúdez González, write that too. Next month she gets out of jail and she has told me that she hopes to be able to help me even if she has to start
all over."
I'm tempted to take over the reins of the interview, but I put my impulses aside. I yield the floor to Henry:
"To the United States? No, I don't want to go. There you have to go when you are healthy. The way I am now I'm only going to be in the way... but then, you never know. With all this noise about the rafter boy, I thought they would come to see me again, the official press. But they didn't
and I'm just as glad, because I'm afraid that if I ever get better and decide to go, I could have problems with the United States Interests Section.
I ask and he answers:
"Yes, sure you can take my picture, and my house too... Say, is this going to be published in Miami?"
"Probably," I answer and he says:
"Perfect. I walk down the street and people tell me: 'Hey, Henry, you were the first!'" he comments smiling.
I ask him:
"Why do you think that 20 years later they would spend so many millions?" I get an answer that as a Cuban, living among Cubans, in Cuba, I find very eloquent.
"I don't know."
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