STAGE
Who wants to know another country, without going abroad, to go to the East; that you go to the mountains of the East where Realengo 18 is and where others extend, such as Macurijes, Caujerí, El V Enlace, Bacuney, Zarza, Picada, Palmiján and some more. Let him go to the East, to the mountains of the East. Who wants to know another country. Ride a small mule and firm hulls and enter the mountains where the light is low at three o'clock in the afternoon and the rivers, of precipitous running, glide clear through the bottom of the ravines, with cold waters like If they came from the mountain.

There you will find not only a different nature, but also different customs and even men with a different sense of life.
And, although a Westerner may not like it, he will also find the pride of a story considered his own; the satisfaction that there is no river through which no Mambi blood had flowed, nor a mountain where the skeleton of a hero could not be found. (...)

EARTH OR BLOOD
The Realengo 18 peasants who have so much name have deserved to achieve with their resounding and virile protest before the geophasic anxieties of companies of natives and foreigners, they have celebrated for three days, with an endless are, a few bottles of rum and a few "males" and roasted goats, the one-year truce offered by the Government and Colonel Fulgencio Batista, through the mouth of the governor of the East, Dr. Ángel Pérez André at the Assembly held in Lima, next to the Jaimo River, of cold waters as if leaving a refrigerator. Nearly one thousand agrarian descended from the mountains to participate in the Assembly and there early, awaited the arrival of the Governor, who had to delay because of the funeral of Major General Capote, verified in Bayamo on the same day.

Before the Assembly, Dr. Pérez André celebrated a change of impressions with the Directive of the «Association of Agricultural Producers of Realengo 18 and adjacent» and in it he addressed the word Lino Álvarez, the President, a man of singular personality, of whom I will speak later carefully. He spoke to him with the energy that the royal leadership of Realengo has earned him. And about what he said, as with the things of personality individuals, there is already legend and history (...). Suffice it to say now, that Lino Álvarez assured the Governor that they did not want any war; that what they wanted was the land, only the land, that was theirs because they had conquered it for the Republic and the Republic owed it (...).

With that hope, the men of the Realengo, who are men of work and not of war, and who had been unemployed for several months, set off to the mountains between songs, tenths and strokes of "three" and blows of bongo, to have fun for a while. After much waiting. (...)

From the lips of Lino Álvarez himself, I gathered the full history of the struggles for the possession of Realengo 18; your personal contribution to them; the account of the bullies they have given him; the whole process of leguleyerías to which they have been lent from the Court of Guantánamo until the Supreme Court; their fervent desire to avail themselves of justice and the final decision to do justice themselves, because as he himself says, with marvelous certainty, they owe that land only to the State and the State they are (... ).

From his lips I also collected concrete accusations against the imperialist companies that have surrounded them and against the individuals - not so foreign - who have served as backsliders to these hoaxes. (...)

TO THE ORDERS OF JOSÉ MACEO
Today Lino Álvarez is 57 years old, and he is a very black black, of small stature, but well muscled, strong; and has silent and deeply dark eyes. He speaks slowly, like the man who does not like to rectify. And he has never studied. His signature, which he learned to draw not long ago, is entangled as a bush vine. (...)

When Lino Álvarez was 18 years old, the revolution came and went to it, joining Morón de Oriente on May 13, 1895, to the Moncada Regiment that was then sent by the Colonel Do not scrub me ... He soon passed under the orders of José Maceo and he fought in El Triunfo, Sabana, Hato del Medio, Dos Caminos de San Luis, Jiguaní, Cascorro and other combats until that lion died, in love with the machete, and then he placed under the orders of Calixto García, fighting in the Yerbas de Guinea. And in all three years of war he did not receive a single wound, ending the campaign with the rank of lieutenant.

From these memories of "three years making homeland," Lino has drawn these conclusions: "They have done nothing but politics with us (...) And we no longer have faith in the offerings of the rulers, because even these lands that we conquer , foreigners want to snatch us in complicity with governments (...) But here we will have to come and look for us in the Sierra (...) ».

After the fight for freedom, Lino Álvarez only fought in La Chambelona (...).

THE QUIMBUELERO DE ALMEYDA

When peace came, Lino, who was a country man, returned to the field. He got some oxen, some great-grandparents and some carts and began to throw cane for the mills in the harvest and wood for the lines in the dead time. And as the times were good and he worked from sun to sun, he gathered oxen and carts and quimbuelos and money and came to have several magnificent yuntas and a few thousand pesos. By this time it was that Lino Álvarez became quimbuelero of Almeyda, Federico Almeyda, the greedy islander who gathered land and piled millions in the province of Oriente.

But there, by the year 1920 or so, Federico Almeyda, who had extended his tentacles to the lands of the Realengo and adjoining, through one of his senior employees, Manuel Delgado, transmitted the order to notify the neighbors that they were evicting those mountains (...).

Then Lino Álvarez left for the Realengo and began the fight that cost him his money, his oxen, his carts and his quimbuelos, apart from three bullets, but that has given him the opportunity to appear perhaps with unusual brilliance, in the pages of the history of Cuba. Because in the struggles of Realengo 18, of which he is the maximum supporter, there is nothing other than the peasant rebellion, the agrarian revolution that begins to germinate and that one day the "owners" will have to take away the lands obtained "legally" », For the exploitation of men.

MEN OF LAW AND WAR MEN

Lino Álvarez, in the struggles to obtain free possession of the Realengo 18 lands and adjacent to the peasants who work and live on them, has proved to be, at the same time, a "man of laws and a man of war." Instinctive connoisseur of all the triquiñuelas of the law and - above all - of the leguleyos, he did not hesitate to start the battle by legal means. (...) On the other hand, Luis Echeverría, President of the Audience of the East, whom they call "the good man of Almeyda", only speak contemptuously, considering him the best servant of the landowners in the province. (...)

One year, he and José Pradas received 244 citations to testify! (...) In just one year! But since the legal struggles were broken through the violent incursions of the companies, then the "man of war" appeared in Lino and it was he who, under the command of the realenguists, appeared in the trails begun, to face the engineers and the soldiers to prevent them, by force if necessary, the continuation of the work. These are the dramatic moments of the struggle for land. It was on August 3 when in the Puddle of the Sticks, on the edge of Macurijes, 160 men with their machetes notified the engineer Felix Barrera that he could not continue the trail of demarcations.

And on October 20 in El Saíto came the first clash with the forces of Corporal Danger, which prevented the montunos from continuing the march; and three days later came the crash, which did not end bloody, because the soldiers understood that they were going to be crushed. This is the climax of the fight that I will continue to realize as accurately as possible. From the fight that since that day has the motto Earth or blood.

The author of this text was a Cuban journalist, writer and revolutionary (Puerto Rico, 1901-Spain, 1936)