Mural in San José, Costa Rica honoring the stories of three prisoners and former political prisoners in the region: Mailene Noguera (Cuba), Emirlendris Benítez (Venezuela) and Samantha Jirón (Nicaragua). Carlos Herrera
A few days ago, my colleague Lorena Arroyo, one of the protagonists of the American edition of this newspaper, had the tact to send me a voice message from Samantha Jirón, 23, the youngest of the political prisoners and already released by the Nicaraguan dictator regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Samantha tells La Prensa newspaper of her adventures in a report titled “Read to Resist in Hope,” getting her to let her read a book, the only chance to ease her torment behind bars.
In her voice message, the young fighter against the barbarism of the dictatorship thanks me for the chance she had to read my book “La Magdalena, el último tabúo del cristianidad” from the Aguilar publishing house, perhaps because her prison guards believed that it was about one went book only religiously and not also politically.
Hearing Samantha’s cheerful voice on my phone, not without a certain emotion, brought to mind the last words my father said to me and my two brothers, still children, 83 years ago before he died. Like my mother, my father was a teacher in the rural village of Arcos de Valdeorras in the Galician province of Orense. We lived under the horrors of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship and you could go to jail or be shot for your ideas.
At school we had a single book that was euphemistically called the Encyclopedia for All Primary Education. No more book.
My father compensated for the lack of books with examples from nature observation. Many courses took place in the middle of an orchard or on the banks of a stream. With him we already knew at the age of seven what a “metamorphosis” was. As? He brought us to class a shoe box filled with silkworms that would eventually turn into butterflies. A metamorphosis had taken place, he told us. I already knew from afar how to distinguish a chickpea plant from a bean plant. All without books.
When my father was about to die at the age of just 43 due to a lack of antibiotics, he called the three brothers into his bedroom and gave us some advice. He explained to us that as adults we already had books and that thanks to them we “would be less unhappy even in prison”.
This phrase has haunted me bittersweetly throughout my life and was certainly the reason why I devoted my 91 years to the study of writing. And today, from Brazil, I want to thank the young and courageous Nicaraguan fighter Samantha Jirón for confirming to me that it is true that even in the harshest and most violent prison, as my father used to say, one can be less unhappy than if you can read.
Just a few days ago, I had read that while he was still President of Brazil, right-wing and anti-culture Jair Bolsonaro had ridiculed and ridiculed the fact that if Lula won the election, “the tide would turn”. Rifle Clubs in Libraries. It’s in these places that you learn to kill, and Bolsonaro even trained minors, carried away by his morbid obsession with guns and violence.
Now back in power, Lula could make true his predecessor’s mockery and turn not only the rifle clubs, but also all the prisons, which, with almost a million prisoners, are among the most overcrowded in the world, into libraries and centers of culture. Prisoners left to their fate, imprisoned there and sometimes forgotten just because they were poor and black.
Lula, who, due to his poverty background, had managed the feat of being three times president of the country without being able to study, should today fulfill Bolsonaro’s mocking prophecy and make Brazil a great library at a time when books are disappearing.
During the presidency of Fernando Enrique Cardoso, a social democrat, Lula was able to reinvigorate the brilliant idea of donating a collection of books to families of poor children each year, to set up a library in their homes. At that time, many older people rediscovered their love of reading.
It occurs to me that in his frenetic foreign policy and his countless trips outside of Brazil, Lula might meet his friend Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, not to discuss his unfortunate phrase that democracy is something “relative,” but to improve it, you see, that imprisoning a 23-year-old girl like Samantha just for fighting a dictatorship is the best way to arm this hurricane of the new far right that is contagious and eclipses the ideals of those who dream and fight for one World where gun clubs and prisons can become smiling and liberating libraries.
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