Pigeon’s Nest
A lifetime flying over or perched in the countryside…like a true Heroine.
Pastor Batista Valdés | internet@granma.cu
October, 2025
Friendly reader, do you have an idea about the many Cubans who could occupy a modest, but much deserved space in this newspaper, today October 15 the day the world has dedicated to rural women?
You are not wrong if you answer or imagine thousands and thousands.
There can be many stories (of love to the land, of hard work demanded, of family, of plants, of animals and streams…) as much as human sensibility and sight would allow us to appreciate.
The limited space forces us to be -I do not know if justly or unjustly- very selective, I decide in favor of the imaginary alternative of moving closer to the area of Guayos, a village located about 11 kilometers from Sancti Spiritus, where a woman lives that difficulty there is any natural of this province who do not know.
Juana María Blanco Santo told me that morning, when, without prior notice, we arrived at a farm which could not have but the most apt name The Victory (La Victoria) nor a manager more loved than Juana herself.
I remember that without stopping picking up her wild rice from the top of her table, she continued talking naturally, as many farmers do, her doors wide open to us, her visitors.
The sight she let go had nothing to do with the male seeds, the small seeds or any other grains that her hands of queen were separating with the virtuosity of a pianist on the keyboard. She was no longer sitting on the bench but walking over the steps of her father since she was a child: the man she has to thank for her never ending love of earth.
«Difficult times, she said: at age eleven I did not know what a school desk was».
The reasons are well known by those born prior to 1959, or they would have read about them. No need to talk about her adult labor, which occupied her years of childhood and adolescence, or where Juana was forced to set roots like an oak with three children to feed with her honest sweat. Nor when a well to do family paid with a fistful of flowers for her hard work, her hands red from washing mountains of dirty clothes.
Like a Rabiche pigeon
Juan always had lots of intelligence, hard work, capacity, tenderness, energy and heart, to later remove herself from her roots in the land and perched herself, like an orchid or a butterfly, wherever she wanted in the city. A bird, however, can also be limited, enclosed. This is maybe the reason why the sugar industry surprised her with a new home made specially for her. She did not know whether to cry from happiness or jump like the girl she never stopped being.
«My life on the farm. With these hands I have not only cooked, washed, ironed, sew and embroidered…I have also do everything a rural woman does: plant sugarcane, vegetables, fruits, clean the land with a machete, prepare paddocks, work with oxen, raise birds, pigs, goats, rams and cows…Well, everything less one thing: lock little birds in cages. »
Maybe because of that (and I speak not just of labors in terms of the material side of them but in terms of the sentiments they arouse) in one of these conversations that humans do not forget even when memory is going, Juana remembers that Fidel told her that in her last stage of life she did not want to abandon the land she could ask for a chair and remain there all day sitting under the trees.
Fidel seemed to have known that, even though he was talking with an extraordinarily simple woman, he had in front of him at the same time a Heroine of Work of the Cuban Republic... The same one who while receiving from his hands this high recognition, said, with farmer naturality: «No Comandante, the true hero here is you, for all that you have done and continue doing for us Cubans».
Translation NSCUBA (Nova Scotia)
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