Felipe Blanco Hernández

He was born in Isla de Pinos, a figure closely linked to Pineran folklore and its history. According to accounts, he was an overseer of a farm near Nueva Gerona, who, during the uprising of July 26, 1896, after feeding some of the fleeing conspirators, denounced them to the Spanish authorities and from that moment on the sucu-sucu emerged: Now the majases have no cave Felipe Blanco sealed them up.

He grew up dealing with pigs on his father's farm La Cisterna. He became tall, thin. Showy. With blue eyes. Affable. Devoted to his friends. With a sense of humor. The women looked at him sideways, taking inventory. For all this. And because he had also expanded a large farm, scattered with cattle and pigs. By the strict calculation of the time, he was an ideal match, which he merited with doña Manuela González, and which she rewarded with her preference by giving him seven children. Although Felipe Blanco, as in a joke that for some was not one, would say when he saw a blue-eyed child pass by: "that one is also my son, and I say so." Because, in effect, he had the habit of appending his statements with that forceful, incontestable phrase. Doctor Waldo Medina, judge of Isla de Pinos, instrument of true justice and journalistic voice that spread many customs and facts of that Cuban portion, recounts that Felipe Blanco looked at his daughter Venturita with concern, grown up and without a boyfriend. And when the woman fell in love and exchanged her ordinary depression for displays of boisterous and jocular joy, the father, in a burst of expressivity, commented: "Goodness, Venturita smartened up, smartened up, and I say so." And that exclamation would later serve as a finale like a singsong to the sucu-sucu composed about his daughter and dedicated to him as well, but modified with the archaic "and I saw it."

He was a man manifestly loved, despite the fact that the chronicle that records the sucu-sucu with his name could defame him. Let us bear in mind that the Blancos were founders of Nueva Gerona, that is, of Isla de Pinos.

In the sucu-suco composed with his name and an episode of his life by Eliseo Grenet, Felipe Blanco is, at once, the target of saccharine popular criticism. Those who once saw in the majá and the caves an erotic metaphor, forget it. The majases were revolutionaries deported to the island that Luz y Caballero, in one of his aphorisms, called "the Siberia of Cuba." During the Ten Years' War (between 1868 and 1878), many mambises (insurgents) from the cities and countryside traveled in chains to that enormous prison. At the cost of their lives. With nothing assured. Neither roof. Nor bed. Nor food. Some, perhaps, could afford lodging, or receive favors. Others, the majority, inhabited caves and grottos, like Cro-Magnons of freedom. They obtained food at night, killing a young bull or a pig. And since the authorities did not want to facilitate even that precarious existence. And since the whip and confinement in barracks could not prevent the satisfaction of so much need, the commanders ordered the landowners to seal up the caves on their properties. And Felipe Blanco, friend of the governor and the magistrate and, also fearful—they say—of the brutality of authority, sealed up his cavities so that those majases, whom they called that by analogy with insurgents who avoided fighting and took refuge in the mountains, would be left without places to dwell alone or with their families. And that is the story. With more or with less. Because others point out—the historian Juan Colina, among them—that Felipe Blanco was merely a foreman. And the caves were part of a metaphor, as allusions to the hostility that pursued and watched over the infidels. And Mongo Rives, the master musician of the sucu-suco, angrily asserts that Felipe Blanco was an enemy of Cuba's freedom.

Whether good or bad, or a mixture of both substances, Felipe Blanco is the man to whom the anonymous art of the people settled accounts for his actions in a sucu-suco that accused him of persecuting those who fought for independence, paradoxically converting him into the first Pineran, according to very ancient judgments, who climbed onto the kite of fame, amidst music and corridors of bleary-eyed dancers.

He lived a dozen and some more years in Surgidero. And one day, smelling in his skin the nearness of death, he returned to Isla de Pinos. There he died on June 2, 1917, at five thirty in the afternoon, from the ailment of all those who live long: vital exhaustion. He was 87 years old. His funeral was massive. The coffin was borne over tears, on the shoulders and hands of family and friends.