My business partner Fidel Castro: Cuba: from the dream to reality by Matéo Francis & Villand Michel

Author:Matéo, Francis & Villand, Michel [Matéo, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Putting on a happy face on stormy days

During my most difficult moments in Cuba, the only thing I could count on was the support of my French partners – but they were nearly five thousand miles away and the distance seemed as immense as the Atlantic. For their part, they never experienced the extremely uneasy sensation that grinds you down day after day in a country where both foreigners and Cubans are forced to stay on their toes for their own safety, in a permanent state of alertness, not able to talk about the crippling anxiety and knowing that even your own family cannot help you. Europ Assistance [56] is a good thing, but it is not enough when you are missing the affection of your loved ones. At those times, I thought about certain friends who exemplified courage, tenacity, strength and energy, and that encouraged me.

Among those friends were three exceptional men whose names alone spurred me on: Hubert Viret, Georges Collet and Géray Ripari. Thinking about them helped me to bear anything, to see things through and never lower my head when facing the many obstacles placed in my way by the Cubans. A mal tiempo, buena car a , [57] as they say in Havana. So I counted on those three fine examples. Without a doubt, Géray was my strongest role model, the lighthouse that a sailor fixes his gaze on when being tossed around in a storm .

Some people you can interact with for a long time without feeling the slightest bit of affinity. And then there are others with whom you feel an immediate and unfailing connection. That was the case with Géray: a true friendship arose from the very start. The only thing we had in common was the fact that we had both fought in the Algerian War. Nevertheless, in him I found a brother, and that was thanks to a mutual friend, Jacques Grima, who introduced us.

I could see Géray approaching from quite a distance, thanks to his six-foot-two stature and, most of all, the way he walked. He had become a bit bow-legged as a result of leaping around landmines in Indochina. He reminded me of the main character in the film Roman Holida y . He was the same kind of man, but with the face of Gary Cooper. He had a strong and chiseled profile that no woman could resist. No doubt he had a different face as a child growing up in a wealthy family in Rome. His father, a friend of Pope Pius XII, taught his sons to fly small planes in 1936 and 1937. Therefore, when war broke out, they enlisted in Mussolini’s air force. At that time, Italian aviators were given the mission to accompany German bombers on their incursions over London, protect them from British antiaircraft artillery and return to base alive.

The Ripari brothers flew mission after mission. Géray was twenty years old and felt he was wasting away his youth; he had the impression that the hands of the clock were moving all too quickly.

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