This newspaper cover is thinking of specific names that could well represent many people.
Think, for example, of Ramón, a bald guy, with the voice and manners of a "country boy", retired from the Armed Forces, who solves any “electrical problem" for the whole neighborhood: from the short circuit to the new lamp, from the old appliance that needs to be turned back again, to the solar panels that have just arrived on the block.
Ramón goes into every house, with his eyes, his gaze somewhere between affectionate and sharp. "Electricity is only one thing," he will say to the engineer who contradicts him, because if anything competes against a university degree, since the world has had universities, it is experience.
Think also of Ronaldo, an electrical engineer already in his 50s, who resembles Juan Carlos, a guy who runs hospitals in storm and calm. But Ronaldo, the engineer, does not manage hospitals, he manages "high tension" people.
We saw him one day after Rafael, thinking about how to raise huge metal towers 45 meters high, and he told us about Ian, or rather about the days that came later, when his wife was in the hospital and his son was about to be born, and someone threatened to sanction him in the company if he did not leave the post-cyclonic disaster of Pinar del Río for Havana, to meet the child.
-Don't people give you a bad look when you go into neighborhoods because of the power outages?
-No, because people know that we are the ones who restore the electricity.
Think of Yunier, who never got a hundred points in any Math test, nor in The World We Live In, nor in Spanish, nor in History, who was always called not intelligent, but who at the age of ten already knew how to do the electrical installation of a house or things that nobody knows or imagines, like that sometimes the lights don't go on because there are "termites in the box".
Yunier, who made his wife fall in love with him after he fixed a pressure cooker for which nobody would have given a penny; who, when pesetas were no longer good for anything, repaired rice cookers with pesetas; who once taught a younger cousin what a "single pole-double throw" switch was so that he could impress the physics teacher, even though he had never managed to learn a single formula.
Think of Quintín, the lineman of Majagua, and of Bola, who invents the probable arrangements for a micro-hydroelectric plant that feeds the houses of more than 500 people lost on the banks of a river, in the depths of the Guantánamo mountains.
Think of those who know the difference between generation and generation capacity, of those who, like Lídice, bet their days in this country to invent another megawatt, at least one more, even if they have to take it out of anything, even the sun.
This newspaper cover is thinking of the popular "electrician", who suffers every day in front of the television cameras and whom the Cuban people have already learned to call by his nickname.
But this cover goes, above all, to the "unknown electrician", the one we remember when the cyclone comes and then, when the collective "fury" is over, continues to work, tied to a pole; the one who solves the daily storm that resembles the municipal light bulb or the "¡the switch is off!", and even the old man next door, who always has a cable ready for any day, and probably when you need it yourself, it saves you from the night.
It turns out that this January 14 is the day for all of them.
