Guantánamo.- The sun is slow to break through the peaks of San Fernando. There, where the road ceases to be a road and becomes a wound of earth and stones, Antonio Vega Bidaña begins his day with the same routine he has followed for half a century: traversing the coffee plantation, walking among the cattle, and listening to the murmur of the water that faithfully powers his inventions.
At 74, this farmer transforms necessity into a workshop and the mountain into a laboratory.
“It’s all made possible by pressure,” he says, pointing to a device that seems to have come from another century.
He’s not exaggerating. With ingenuity and calloused hands, Antonio has designed more than seven pieces of equipment that run solely on water. Among them is a biogas system that fuels the cooking in three family homes. “My gas stove is a blessing,” confesses Nancy Rodríguez Marrero, his wife of 51 years, “I don’t have to look for firewood or fill myself with smoke.”
But his ingenuity doesn’t end there: a sugarcane mill, a corn sheller, and even a dynamo that generates electricity are part of his artisanal legacy. All this in a community of just over 1,200 inhabitants located in the far northwest of Guantánamo province, in the municipality of El Salvador.
Together with Nancy, they cultivate cucumbers, peppers, leeks, and spices. At 73, she moves among the rows with the joy of someone who has found in the land a reason to stay. They have two sons. And although the mountain is harsh, the couple has built a life that others would call epic: 51 years of marriage, a rebuilt house, and a garden where they await the sunset each evening amidst flowers, history, and coffee.
But Antonio’s memory also holds shadows. On June 3, 1958, when he was just six years old, two planes from Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship dropped bombs on his house. The reason: the Vega family was harboring rebels.
“My mother, neighbors, my six siblings, and I took refuge in the pulping machine’s tank,” Antonio recalls, his voice breaking. “That saved our lives.”
The house was destroyed. But not the spirit of a family that today, from the same spot, looks up at the sky without fear, though with another concern:
“Many farmers have left the area because of the poor condition of the road,” Antonio explains. And it’s not a whim. San Fernando is cut off when it rains.
Meanwhile, Antonio and Nancy remain there. In the garden of their rebuilt home. Watching the afternoon fade among the same mountains that witnessed their birthplace, their resistance, and their creation.
“This is beautiful,” Nancy says, her gaze fixed on the horizon. But if things continue this way, this beautiful place will be left without people.
