Photo: Estudios Revolució

I missed it. I missed the ceremony of the Honoris Causa of the University of Havana to Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez. I don't think there is a higher prize in Cuban academia. That is why I equate him with a Nobel, the Nobel that Cuba could give to the man who equally deserves the one from the Swedish academy.

And the truth is that when I found out, late and sideways, it did not even occur to me to sneak into the university celebration.

I believed that there would be no room for an uninvited one, that there would be students even hanging from the balconies and that a crowd outside would wait for her to leave the Aula Magna. That's how it would have been in my years at the University, when his music overflowed squares and stadiums. And so it would have been this Friday, surely, if it had been announced as it goes.

But, alas, the Communication, which not even with a new law we solve. The fact was not announced as it should have. Or did I also miss the ad?

I have seen more than once the report of my colleague Wilmer Rodríguez, in the news and in the networks. I don't think I'm the only one who was moved to tears by the images and speeches.

"The lullaby songs of mine were Silvio's. It gives me a lot of feeling to be here," Leticia Martínez wrote in a collective chat, in the middle of the ceremony. And it extended: "I still remember my mom singing 'you lost her but here she stays.'" 😢

His emotion sneaks into my nostalgia. Silvio was put in my house, my younger sister. I had grown up with ballads of the prodigious decade, the kind they played all day on the radio. Silvio and the Nueva Trova were for historic days or national duels. Until the cassette recorders came to us. Normita brought them from the scholarship and the weekend was with Silvio at all times.

Already in Havana it was something else. And in the 90s even more. Silvio, Pablo, Amaury, Vicente... All of them, not only heard on cassettes. They were there, within reach of a theater, a gathering, an event, a tour of the Homeland and concert in the Plaza.

And "The Fool" arrived in the most uncertain hours. I remember that Magda Resik, Rosa Miriam Elizalde and Amado del Pino —all fans of Silvio— threw pebbles at the door of his house by the Biltmore, to beg for an interview. And they won it. I was lucky enough a couple of times, too.

From the hand of Amaury Pérez and his wife Petí, friends or family, it is no longer known, I entered the home of Silvio, Niurka and Malva, in days of personal sadness that they alleviated with their songs and their stories.

I never was, and I will no longer logically be, a forester of the stature of Iroel Sánchez, the person who knew the most Silvio songs. I am rather of that majority group of my generation and newer ones, whose songs come out of our lips every time the mood gets musical.

This is what he usually does with his friends and his children, Miguel Díaz Canel, who presided over the ceremony but did not get to embrace the poet at the end of the act, as if he was still contained by the natural shyness of the boy who traveled from Santa Clara to Havana, just to go to his concerts.

All of that must have made me emotional watching the news. At last what are we, but memories, as Amaury just said, another poet pending tribute.

I have finally been so moved by what they told me and what I saw, that I could no longer say if I missed or not the Cuban Nobel to Silvio, the ceremony that further exalted the Aula Magna of the University of Havana, this Friday, June 2, inconsequential date until that delivery, that has just turned it into an important anniversary of Cuban culture.

See also:

University of Havana awards Doctor Honoris Causa in Social Sciences and Humanities to Silvio Rodríguez