I
« Beyond the Adventure: A beautiful love»
A story within my family (This piece of writing is part of my memories)
Following the interest of Cuban millionaire Anibal de Mesa in developing his country on commercial aviation at the beginning of the XX e century, in 1919 some French nationals came to Cuba to create the Cuban Aviation Company using six French planes, two Farman F-60 planes, the “Goliath”, and four Farman F-40 planes. These latter F-40 planes had participated in the WWI, as these French nationals had too, who three of them, Lucien Coupet, Léon Coupet, and Camille Jousse, had even fought in the Battler of Verdun. They were the combatants who were members of the aerial unit “l'Escadrille F-25”. This French aerial escadrille played a great role from the beginning of WWI, mainly during the Battler of Verdun, and afterward.
Once WWI had ended, these French people, National Hero of the Republic of French, were part of a crew who had been considered dead, due to an aerial accident while they had been performing the first long distance flight of the Farman giant plane “Goliath” from Paris to Dakar. They spent two weeks lost in the Saharan desert without food and water.
In Cuba, they remained a little more than a year, and the most important location during their stay in the Cuban territory was the Aerodrome of Colombia of La Havana, which became a real aeronautic fair because of the presence of the French planes. For these French people, after the battlers of WWI and the testing flight of the “Goliath” to Dakar, all these events being done without any rest, their stay in Cuba was like an adventure which took place under relaxing and warming atmosphere plenty of affection and happiness.
A Cuban woman, who was the person charged to cook for these French pilots, was the most important woman in that aerodrome of Columbia. Her name was Genevieve. She was married to the owner of a little restaurant built within the aerodrome where the French pilots and other technicians used to eat. The owner of that littler restaurant was a black Cuban man, and his wife, Genevieve, a beautiful woman of mixed race. They had two sons, Gustavo and Amelia. They were black too. The name of Genevieve's husband was Gustavo, as well.
One of the French people, Leon Coupet, and Genevieve fell in love each other. As a result of this loving relation, a girl was born. She was not black. Unfortunately, she was born the 4th of September of 1921, after the French nationals had left from Cuba. She never met her father. Maybe, Léon never knew that he was the father of Rosa, Genevieve's daughter.
In 1990, Mayra, Rosa's daughter, thus granddaughter of Léon Coupet and Genevieve, gave me some photos which had been taken in 1920, illustrating the presence of French people and the Farman planes in Columbia. Out of these photos and some information I obtained from Genevieve in person, I started writing something, what would become the story: « Au-delà d’une Aventure: Un bel Amour » («Beyond the Adventure: A beautiful love»).
Mayra Colado was my first wife. When my son Delphos was born on September 28 1974, Genevieve, his great-grandmother, was the first person who took him in her arms.
Sadly, Genevieve had died before I finished the first version of my book written in Spanish « Más allá de una Aventura ». This version was written in Spanish so that Mayra and Rosa could read my book and know more about Léon and the other French people who had come to Cuba to create the Cuban Aviation Company. To do a good ethnographic research, I attended classes of Anthropology in Boston, Massachusetts.
When Mayra and I met in 1971, I had been already a French teacher. I did not know anything about her family's story during the five years we lived together. I knew about this story some ten years after we had divorced. The fact was that this story was a family secret they had always kept. They were ashamed about how Rosa had been conceived because they lived in a world of prejudices; moreover, Genevieve had loved a French man with passion and intimacy while she was married to another man.
Unfortunately, there have been evident aspects that have prevented me from writing my extended family's story without barriers, and from making this real story know as all my literary creation as well.
· The first time I showed the photos of my extended family's souvenir to the Linguistic representative of the French Embassy in Havana, Cuba, M. Bertolino, telling him some words about Genevieve, Léon and Rosa, he told me it was not a real story: “C'est une histoire à dormir debout”, he told me in French language.
· I was an open opponent to the current Cuban regime, and although I am actually an American citizen, these barriers do still exist. Just remember that any opponent to the current regime ruling Cuba is considered an enemy by such government.
· The birth of the girl Rosa was the result of an undue relation implicating a French National, a former combatant of WWI, Hero of France.
· A copy of my first creation of the literary work “Amen” disappeared within the Cuban Catholic Archdiocese of Havana and another was destroyed in the Church Saint Vincent of Paul in Paris, in 1993, due to a flow of water leaking from the roof of a room in this church according to Priest Roberto Gomez. I knew about what happened to my book in Paris in a letter that Priest Roberto had sent to me. At that time, being a Confirmed Catholic, I was teaching French language to some young people within the Church “The Merced” in Old Havana where I was moreover taking classes of Catholic dogma. Dealing with my first book Amen's issue, I wrote an epistle to Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino in 1994.
· Being all my literary work written in French language by a Cuban person might make people think I am not the author of such magnificent literary creation. Others might take advantage to usurp my authentic right on this exquisite French literary creation written just by a Spanish-speaking person. Undoubtedly, It is rather mystic than mysterious that a person who has never been to a French-speaking country writes literary works in French language while he's unable to do so in his own language, as French language flows from my mind through my mouth, but mainly through my fingers, so easily. For me, writing in French language rather than in Spanish is not a sort of exquisiteness, but a spiritual expression out of an innate faculty inherited from the past. Might it be spiritual resurrection?
II
My proficiency in French language, is it genetic or mystic? Is it rather both?
The fact that I've been writing in French language as any French writer, despite the fact that I has received a strong genetic influence from one of my close ancestors who was a French national, my great-grandfather from my maternal side, it is a mystery or mystique, as I write in French language so well, even when I have never been to any French-speaking country.
To make this writing more plausible, I would like to add some anecdotes concerning my French literary creation, what is important to understand how mystic my French orderly writing is:
· According to my mother, when I was a toddler, an old white man approached her and told her to take care of me for him. When I was an adult and I saw the picture of French writer Victor Hugo, the image of that man came to my mind for the first time.
· In 1964, being a 20-year old young adult, I was a soldier responsible for the culture of a military unit. I taught mathematics, grammar and elementary biology to soldiers of that unit. That military unit was located in an agricultural zone of peasants, where most of its adult residents were illiterate.
· Once, I found a didactic book to learn French language within the military unit. I wondered how this book came to this unit where English and French languages were part of aspects that stood under ideological scrutiny. When I started the reading of the book, a strange desire to learn French language invited me all of a sudden. During my free time in the unit, I learned French. From the beginning, I was familiar to this foreign language. It was a didactic French language book without translation in Spanish; however, I understood its content easily. Some months later, the day I had decided to enroll in the language school to learn French language, I was sent to a military prison for ideological reasons. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the current Cuban regime, a remarkable amount of military chiefs were somehow illiterate. During the time I was imprisoned, I kept studying French language by myself.
· In 1965, when I was released from the military prison, I enrolled in the language school. From the beginning, people thought I was Haitian due to the way I speak in French. I attended French lessons dressed in military uniform as I continued being an internal military soldier and a teacher for illiterate soldiers.
· As a French student, from the very beginning, I was the professor's assistant in every French level. The French studies had seven levels. When I finished the first level, I could only attend the second level for the first week, because I was sent to a sugar cane plantation to cut sugar canes. It was prerequisite to be released from the army. When I finished my military activity, I came back to the language school as a civilian. The office of registration of the language school did not want me to incorporate to my classroom because the period of classes had already finished as the students were in the period of examination. I asked to have the opportunity to do a special examination to join my classmates. I was told that it could be hard for me, as a special examination had more difficulties, and having attended French classes only for a week, I would be unable to make it.
· I prepared myself to go through that examination. I was great. I got 98 points out of 100. I could not have 100 points because I had scarcely attended classes for some days. So, I joined my classmates at the third level of French language studies. I continued being the teacher's assistant. Furthermore, although I was a third-level student in a French study of seven levels, I was the main guide and interpret in the international cultural event “Le Salon de Mai”, held in Cuba in 1967.
· During that event, as I was taking some drinking in a bar within the Cuban National Hotel with Pierre Golendorf's wife, a French woman with beautiful blue eyes, she told me that she had the impression I was better understood when I spoke in French than in Spanish. That's something that affected me in my own country. It means I was more expressive through French language than through Spanish one. That linguistic phenomenon came to light when I entered in contact with French language.
· I started writing in French language in 1968. I was already at the fifth level. Every day, when I arrived to the classroom, I wrote a small poem in French on the board. The professor, Jean-Jacques, a Swiss person, read it, he said: “Pas mal!”
· Furthermore, a woman from Czechoslovakia, working as French teacher at Havana Language School in 1968, thought I was from Morocco when she listened to me speaking in French language.
· That Czech woman was teaching French language at the sixth level. Suddenly, she left Cuba unexpectedly, leaving the sixth-level students without teacher. Any other graduate professor of the language school felt capable enough to replace the Czech woman professor. The teachers were all Cubans, except the teacher of the seventh level who was a French woman of Spanish origin. She was my professor at that time as I was attending the seventh level. She told the head of the faculty of the French Department I was the only person capable to replace the Czech woman French professor. I did. So, while I was attending the seventh level of French classes, I was the professor of the previous sixth level, even without being a graduate teacher.
· A French woman, who was working also at Havana Language School as a French professor, and where I had started working as such in 1969, asked the head of faculty if I was originally from Paris. She was unclear about in which part of France I was born. As she had never listened to me speaking in Spanish, but in a good and fluency French language, she might have thought I was from a French-speaking country but from Cuba. (I was born in Cuba and I have never been to any French-speaking country).
· It was in 1988 when I decided to keep my writings for a book. The fact was that, when one of my university colleagues had seen one of my poems, she thought it had been written by Victor Hugo. When I told her it was me who had written it, she told me not to throw away any of my poems, to keep them.
· In 1989, I wrote my first publishable literary work as we celebrated the Bicentennial Anniversary of the French Revolution. It is a poem written in Alexandrine syllabic verse
· In this same year, Jacques Fontanille, a French semiotic scholar, one of the main exponents of the Paris School of Semiotics, told me that the literary style of my poetic writings belonged to the French poetry of XVI Century. He told me such comments when he had read some poems of my book “Femme”, registered some years later at the US Copyright Office, once I had left Cuba due to ideological reasons and to lack of opportunities to develop and enhance my poetry.
· Several times, some people from French-speaking countries, when they listen to me speaking in French language, and they know I am from Cuba, they ask me if French language is spoken in Cuba. Many French-speaking people do not think I am from Cuba, due to my French intonation and the amount of books I have written in French language. There has been the case that some of them have tried to usurp my ownership on my literary creation when they learn I am not francophone.
· Many people think I am Haitian
· I have still a lot of anecdotes regarding my French spiritual influence; however, there is one I have to mention in this writing: When I was living in Massachusetts, working and attending some college classes in Boston, I was receiving some psychological therapies from Dr. Michael A. Grodin, Professor of Psychiatry of Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He took one of my books to one of his colleagues. When that Professor Grodin's colleague had read my book of poems, he told professor Grodin I might have born in a French-speaking country in another time the past. Metaphysically speaking, my soul might have come from the past, but scientifically speaking from a genetic point of view, I've inherited a great amount of genes whose roots came from a person born in France or in another European francophone country. I think I did not forget to mention above that one of my closer ancestors was born in France, a slave owner, the father of my maternal grandmother, a white-like woman. My maternal grandfather was a son of a Cuban slave.
According to some assertions from my family, my mother's slave owner grandfather had given a nice fortune to my maternal family. It was impossible for a family of black people of slavery origin to claim for that fortune. It was called the “Fortune of Campoalegre”. Campoalegre is my mother's last name. Unfortunately, my country of origin, Cuba, it's been ruled by a diabolic and despotic regime; otherwise my literary work would be more immense and richer, and it would be easier for me to have it know, as my life itself.
I would say that I had been under scrutiny for many times since 1967 by Cuban secret service due to my French proficiency, mainly in writing poetry. At that time, inexplicably, I was twice too close to Fidel Castro, himself.
ü On April 29, 1967, working as guide-interpret for a couple of French-speaking people from Africa, invited for the celebration of the May First Working Day, I was sat in a tribune just five meters behind Fidel Castro while he was delivering a speech to the people in Pinar del Rio, the western province of Cuba.
Ø Towards the end of 1966, I had finished the military. I had applied to work at ICAP (Cuban Institute of Friendship with Countries). At that time, I was jobless. In the mornings, I used to go a sportive center to practice track and field; in the afternoon, I studied French language. Once, arriving home the sportive center, my mother happily had told me that some people had come in American car to pick me up as they needed me to be guide to some French-speaking people. They had told my mother I had to go the ICAP dressed in a suit.
My mother was happy knowing that I could have a job. Every night, when I did not have dance activity, as I was part of an amateur dance group, I sat with some friends in a bench in a corner of the Buttary Park. We used to play lottery with car plaque. Each of us chose a car passing by. The person that chose a car whose plaque had the highest number won.
I had arrived to the ICAP, and some minutes later we had gone to the airport to receive some people coming from Africa. We had had lunch at the airport with the African delegates. The lunch finished, we had descended to the airport landing track through a lateral door where we had taken a plane to fly towards Pinar del Rio. We had landed in a military base where we had been received by the main commandant of it. We had taken the African delegates to some centers of agricultural production while we had been waiting to go to mass concentration to listen Fidel Castro's speech.
I was supposed to translate Fidel Castro's speech. I could scarcely do it. I was deeply concerned for being sat to close to Fidel Castro who was very concerned himself due to my presence so close to him: during his speech of about two hours, he turned to look behind him. After the speech, we returned to Havana the following day as we had to participate in the celebration of the May First Working Day at the Revolution Square. We were installed at “Havana Libre Hotel”. In the morning of Mai First, everybody received his credentials to be in the tribune of the Revolution Square, in front of the status of Jose Marti. Nobody knew where my credentials were. That day, it was Juan Almeida, the third leader of the Revolution. It was the first time Fidel Castro did not deliver a speech in May First. Was the Cuban secret service concerned about my presence? An hour later after the celebration for May First, my credentials were found.
ü Three months later, I approached too much Fidel Castro during a reception at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana, Cuba. I was accompanying some French people to the reception. Fidel Castro might have been very concerned about my approaching to him so close. I am widely certain that he recognized me! At that time, I was a student of French language, but my French language was so good that I was the second responsible of French interprets during the cultural event “Le Salon de Mai”. During that cultural event, I met some painters, writers and intellectuals French like Gaston Diehl, Marguerite Duras, Wilfredo Lam (Cuban), Jacqueline Selz, Ivon Taillandier, Lou Laurin, César, Pierre Golendorf, and others. All these French people helped me a lot spiritually in the creation of my own Poetry. The scrutiny on me which has lasted for a long time has been evident since 1968 as I was not allowed to work in the “Cultural Congress of Havana that year of 1968. My close working relation with French people during the event “Le Salon de Mai” might be the reason why I could not work as a guide-interpret in the “Cultural Congress of Havana, mainly my working relation with the French Pierre Golendorf. I had worked very hard with Golendorf. He was the official photograph who took pictures of every painting to be displayed during the “Salon de Mai”.
ü Some years later, Pierre Golendorf was sent to a Cuban prison and Carlos Franqui, who had been the responsible of the Salon de Mai in Cuba, exiled abroad. One friend of mines, Oscar, escaped swimming through Guantanamo Bay.
Ø Once the cultural event « Le Salon de Mai » had ended, and before the departure of Golendorf to France, we had taken him and his wife to Cienfuegos for some days. In Cienfuegos, we had gone fishing in the harbor of this southern province of Cuba, 256 kilometers from Havana City. We had been fishing from a beautiful white yacht. We hadn't caught any fish. The fact was that this harbor was a maritime zone with a considerable amount of sharks. It had been really boring fishing for hours unsuccessfully. All of a sudden, I had taken my cloth off, under which I had wearing a bathing suit and I dived to the water. I had swum towards the opposite shore. When I had arrived to the shore, I had noticed that Pierre Golendorf had dived to the water, as well. The shore where we had arrived was isolated. Pierre and I had talked about sport and dance. We had remained half an hour at shore. Somebody of Cuban security might have thought that Pierre and I had dived in dangerous water and swum towards the shore in a specific purpose as anybody might be unable to listen to us.
ü I began working as French professor at the Language School of Havana in 1969. I was never allowed to work in any international event.
ü In 1978, “the World Congress of Youth and Students”, an event that took lieu only in socialist countries, was held in Cuba. Along with official interprets of foreign languages, mainly in English and French languages, all professors and university students of foreign languages worked as interprets and guides at that event. I was a professor of French and I have just graduated at the University of Havana in French Linguistics. Nevertheless, I was prevented from working at that event, even when I had been selected as a best adult professor in the municipality of East Havana. I was the only French professor who was prevented from working at the World Congress of Youth and Students
ü In 1988, working at the Agrarian University of Havana as a French professor, I was selected by the Department of Languages of the University to fly to the former Soviet Union where I was chosen to be a representative professor of the Cuban students who were attending studies in that country. For that new job, I was sent to Havana University to study Russian language for a year. I finished the intensive study of Russian language. Then, I bought the clothing for the trip to Europe and obtained all the required documents for my stay at the Soviet Union where, in addition, I would carry out Graduate study. In 1989, I was denied to fly to the Soviet Union. In 1990, I was denied again to fly to the Soviet Union once.
ü In 1992 and 1993, having worked in a project to teach French language to students of secondary schools and technological institutes, sponsored by the Cuban Ministry of Education, The French Embassy and the Higher Pedagogical Institute of Havana, The French Embassy awarded each of the six participants of the project to fly to the Island of Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France, located in the Caribbean Sea. Everybody but me could fly to Guadeloupe, although I was the French professor who worked the most in the project.
· I created a didactic method to improve French language using my own poetry and my own music.
· I created a sort of new orderly versification (the “angelus”) whose prosody is used as a didactic means to improve French intonation and pronunciation in my book “Le Français par la Poésie et la Musique”. La versification and prosody used in the didactic method are found within my literary creation “Le Rêve du Papillon” (The dream of the Butterfly). The poems of the book “Le Rêve du Papillon” have their own music.
· Le literary work “Le Rêve du Papillon” appeared in the first version AMEN destroyed in 1993. It was a poem having only twenty two verses. This poem has become a piece of literature of two books with 7 800 verses and 26 000 words. And all the verses of this literary work are conceived to be sung as part of its structure. Its content is rather proverbial persuading people for good social and moral behavior, and dissuading them for bad and immoral social behavior.
III
About my creation
To try to save us from sinuous behavior, according to the Holy Scriptures, God sacrificed His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. And God, to fulfill this sacred task, made people kill Him, just to demonstrate that He was His Son, given that only a few people believed on Him as the Son of God.
People had been expecting for the Messiah, but not the son of a common person, a carpenter, a Semite, as such. He was so discriminated that even nowadays we find pictures of Christ's face seem more European Japhetic than Jewish*. Inevitably, white people have so far seemed to be created for great inventions and achievements! When Indian people were encountered by white people in their own “American” land, where they had been living for centuries since their arrival from Asia, it seems as if they had never existed in this land. It seems as if they were a discovery of white people.
So far, we are the most who has believed Jesus, the Jewish, as the Messiah, unless it shall be attested otherwise!
The great musicians, dancers, scholars, writers and poets, professors, etc., have been so far, for the most, from the universal point of view, Japhetic descendants (white people). Yet, now-a-days, we can see Semites (Jews, Muslims, Arabs) and descendants from Can (Black people*) able to be as outstanding and accurate as white people had been supposed to be, although professional and racial discrimination, including other sorts of discrimination as ethnocentrism, this latter meaning cultural and ethnic discrimination, continue to exist on these days.
How I have suffered from the fact that there have been so many people either discriminating me professionally or ethnocentrically, trying to usurp the authorship of my poetic creation! They can't assume that, being a Cuban person who has never been to any French-speaking country, I have been able to write poetry in French language as any of francophone poets. Either that I've been able to write a story based on real facts, “Au-delà d'une Aventure: Un bel Amour”, as any great writer has written.
We all know that once, Jesus spoke to His disciples in different languages. Being the Son of God, genetically speaking, as genetically any person might inherit spiritual features from close or far ancestors, any culture or language is accessible to Him.
Through blood vessels, genes, borne in sex cells or gametes, either in sperm or ovum, both fusing during conception to become a zygote, the first single cell of a new creature, are travelling from generations through generations carrying genetic information from the past. Hence, there are people attesting that sex cells are the ones to keep the eternity from the past through the future of humanity. From this biological standpoint, I stand alongside of these people considering the womb the most important organ in humankind, the fountain of procreation, and these humans and animals bearing it, masters of life.
Once a zygote had installed inside Mary's womb after conception, it developed to become an embryo, and then a fetus, all this during prenatal period. And a new genuine and singular individual suffered a nine-month-prenatal growth. At birth, he was named Jesus. And exceptionally, He was born bearing the whole features of God Himself and the knowledge of the Greatest on everything and on every culture, including languages. He might be able to speak in any language and to have knowledge on any subject. May God keep blessing the woman whose womb received and sheltered our Lord!
To my concern, having been ma mother's grand-father of French origin, also genetically speaking, and under a phenomenon of, let say, genetic transference, causality or possibility, why may I not be capable to use the French language as a means of communication as I've been doing when writing poetry? Otherwise, how could it be explained about a person who is able to write poetry using a language that is not his, mainly when we are dealing with good poetry like the one found in my poetic work? This linguistic phenomenon, from the communication point of view, is really amazing, furthermore when the person alluded has so far written more than five poetic books in French language without having never been to any French-speaking country, ever; and mostly, when this person is giving us a message from the past and a renovation in poetry, meaning the poetry as a means of communication, information and didactics.
Nevertheless, and without renouncing to the theory of genetic heritage, we may analyze this human phenomenon not only from a linguist and stylistic viewpoint, but spiritual, as well. I do believe I was doubtless chosen to give information poetically through French language; unfortunately, this spiritual purpose has been prevented from lighting by Marxist materialism, false idealism and philosophic tendencies, which don't believe on the eternity of the spirit, based on genetic information through biological and spiritual transference and evolution, including mutation.
Born in Cuba, on August the 2nd, at the first half of the XX Century, and where I lived until January 11th, 2001, when I could travel out of my country for the first time in my life, I've not been able to have my poetic message known, because of the Marxist regime ruling my country and false catholic priests within the Holy Church, who tried to destroy my poetic creation. Thanks God, I could flee my country to reach the United States and to let people know about this “spiritual news”. May be having read poems such as “Va-t'en, guerre”, and “Ville Jaunie”, this latter known also as “Ville Fanée”, written more than twenty years ago, and that can be found in “AMEN I”, people could either be more prepared to face terrorism and maybe to avoid the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in this country, and from that day on around the world, or consider such poems and my whole poetic creation as a foreteller plenty of prophesies, because it's just time to believe on real poets as spiritual messengers, through whom it could be known that our world actually needs renovation.
It's already time that real poets should be considered as chosen people, like popular prophets, because by their imaginations they are sometimes capable to predict events.
(*) _I don't know where to list Indians and Yellow people, though they rather seem to be descendants from Sem.
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