The times I meet Rosa Castillo, whom we have always called "La Cuta", we begin to laugh at each other from the time we see each other from afar, she always full of joy and happiness, as if celebrating in advance some of the memories that unite us; and the day he came to my house the copy of his memoir "A life is a story to tell" the whole joy was mine: knowing that he had finally put in writing the vicissitudes of his splendid existence never wasted, something in that he had insisted for years; and that same night I began to read the book and I did not stop until at the first light of dawn I had finished it. Contemporary history, that of the struggle to overthrow Somoza, the history of the revolution, in the life of an indispensable woman.
I met her in León, Nicaragua at the beginning of the sixties, when her husband Tito Castillo, with whom he had been married since they were almost children, became a lawyer. A small woman, vivacious, witty, full of humor, but first of all a woman of "ñeque", that is, very well bragada. And to realize all that she has been and all that she has done, reading her book is not enough because she knows how to stretch the veil of modesty over what she had to see and experience, mainly about what she had to participate in. the revolution, a decisive presence of this mother Courage that always refused to put itself in the foreground and left the protagonism to others, many of which, we know, did not deserve it, or they squandered it.
La Cuta is a writer of natural abilities, because she tells things as true writers must do, without prosopopeas or boasts, or circumlocutions or banalities; and from the beginning of his book, if we want to get into the heart of a traditional family of the Granada of Nicaragua, there are the entertaining and instructive chapters dedicated to his family come to less, to his childhood, which are a true social picture seen from intimacy and from the eye of a girl who grows between hardships but surrounded by deep affection, the first that of her grandfather, a memorable character.
Later we heard her tell us how her life is changing, already married, to the extent that her Christian commitment is putting her on the side of the dispossessed, and from there on her way to a silent participant in the revolutionary struggle, and to her exile, which is when we met again in Costa Rica in 1976, when everything began to accelerate towards the insurrection that would end up overthrowing the tyranny of the Somozas in a short time, and their spacious ranch house on the outskirts of San José became the headquarters of the Group of Twelve, of which Tito her husband was a part, and in storage of medicines and victuals of war, instead of rest and transit of guerrillas, station of military transmissions, communal dining room with a kitchen that never went out, and also in the studios from where the clandestine Radio Sandino broadcast.
From that always embullada house his eldest son Ernesto left to never return, because he was killed in combat in the streets of León in September of 1978; Before, he had written a book of poems where, along with his adolescent loves, he recounts his guerrilla commitment. They buried him in a common grave, in the backyard of a hospital morgue, his bones scrambled with the other boys who had fallen with him, and the mother, years later, did not want to be removed from there; It was his place, among so many anonymous dead.
When they give him a morning at his house in San José the news that the boy who was the apple of his eye has fallen, he is surprised that everything is the same, the wind blowing, the birds chirping, the sun shining, voices, talks , daily noises, while his howl of pain dissolved in the silence locked in his shattered soul.
After the triumph of the revolution was where she was sent, a bureaucratic position as administrator of a state radio, when she had so badly done her good judgment, her sensitivity, her insight, her common sense and her moral integrity, in positions that others occupied. so bad; but in humility no one ever won him, and that is why I know that he will turn red with shame when he reads these lines of just praise. One of those women without whom the revolution would never have been possible, and who, after so many years in the past, has retained the authority to become the judge of so many ethical misappropriations and outrages as they did afterwards. A woman for history, to make it, and now to tell it.