By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on October 16, 2021
Marta Rojas
Some thirty years ago, when I was starting my journalism classes in Havana, she told the students who listened to her talk about the profession: Journalists are people who tell people what happens to people. That woman was Marta Rojas, legendary for having been the chronicler of the Moncada, the one who would tell what really happened on July 26, 1953 in the fortress of Santiago de Cuba that Fidel Castro and his comrades assaulted.
A few died in the unequal exchange with the soldiers of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, but more than 70 were killed by the army after a week of torments.
Marta kept in the folds of her flared skirt the photographs that proved the crime and she attended the trial where Fidel made his own defense and accused his accusers. Censorship prevented her from publishing her reports of those days, but she testified as best she could and, unbeknownst to her at the time, saved the women who participated in the heroic adventure: Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández.
The henchmen believed that the photographer Marta was accompanying had taken pictures of the two girls shortly after the assault on the Moncada Barracks and, therefore, if they killed them, they would have been forced to admit that they had not died in combat but after like so many.
Marta, who at the age of 93 was still doing journalism and literature, died in Havana on October 4 of a heart attack. In September she had finished her last novel, Espejo de tres lunas, and when death surprised her, she was leading a full and independent life as a lady who goes to the hairdresser’s, does her housework, visits friends regularly and drives her old blue Fiat when she goes shopping at the market.
We all believed she was immortal and so did she, because she passed into the afterlife with notebooks and newspaper clippings on her pillow, perhaps dreaming of her next book.
Wherever she was, history was happening. She was special envoy of the 26th of July Movement in the first years of the 1959 revolution, and later for Granma newspaper. As a war correspondent she was in Vietnam in the hardest moments, where the tape recorder and even the notebooks were useless objects that did not survive the humidity of the swamps and the predation of insects, which were about to eat her alive.
Her lectures at the university were epic. If we did an interview, she would give her full attention to the seemingly trivial details and stories told by others of the central character. In her interview with Ho Chi Minh for example, the freshly cut lily as the only luxury of his bamboo cottage was as preeminent as the Vietnamese leader’s words or the memories she got from his collaborators. The ensemble told us that Uncle Ho, as his comrades called him, bore little resemblance to the leaders of other revolutions.
I remember Marta laughing at the anecdote of the comrade who was unable to organize the militants in his village because they were backward Buddhists who spent the day meditating. Well, go back and meditate, Ho Chi Minh recommended.
Marta’s pedagogy was that of knowing how to look. Routine taught me to fixate on details as if I were looking at them, she said. Not so long ago, while doing research for an article on Fidel Castro’s first forays into computers, I ended up at Marta’s house digging out from the attic of her fabulous memory an anecdote that no expert had ever recorded.
In the first days of October 1963, the Cuban leader toured the areas affected by Cyclone Flora, which had devastated the eastern part of the island. Marta accompanied him as an envoy of the newspaper Revolución. I felt like I was again in the university classroom when she began to recall the mountain that had slid spectacularly by the force of the rains and buried a hamlet in the hills of Pinalito, in Guisa, Granma province.
In spite of the danger, the Haitians and Jamaicans were reluctant to get out of the houses that had been left standing. Some peeked their heads out, but did not pay attention to the continuous calls. They were more afraid of the authorities than of the storms. At the edge of a cliff, Fidel took from his olive green jeep the portable phone that was activated with a handle inside, and gave instructions for those families to benefit from social security and put an end to their pariah status. Use the Ramac, and the word, Marta said, sounded like a squawk.
The Ramac 305 was one of the first computers manufactured in the world with magnetic disks and had been bought by the dictator Batista. It immediately began to process data from the checkbook of the poorest of the poor, the scattered and forgotten Antilleans on the Caribbean coast of the island.
Local color, we journalists are not stenographers, Marta insisted. She took us into the picturesque as in a world where describing people and places only operates on what is truly significant. The natural landscape is always linked to the human landscape, she added. In the Moncada Barracks, in Vietnam and in the mountains of Pinalito, with Fidel or Ho Chi Minh, where there is a report there is also a story. In other words, journalism as a possible celebration of truth, beauty and ethics, and as a profession that can continue to draw resources from fiction, which is not synonymous with lies.
Thank you for this fiesta, dear Marta.
Source: Cubaperiodistas