I didn't meet him. When he was an inhabitant of the city (Las Tunas) I lived about 400 kilometers away, in Sancti-Spíritus. But I remember him with crystalline accuracy and it is not only because of that photo of him that the whole world has seen in newspapers, social networks, murals or in the memorial erected to the victims of terrorist sabotage against that Cubana plane, full of dreams and all the medals recently won by the Cuban youth fencing team, in Caracas, during the IV Central American and Caribbean Championship.

In truth, the face and a thousand other beautiful features of Carlitos (Leyva González) came to me one warm afternoon, crystal clear, through the cloudy pupil of his sister Marisela. Sitting on a wooden sofa with a straw bottom, it seems that the long-suffering woman told me: "Look, this is my brother, hug him like you only hug a son or a hero."

Then, between evocations more similar to real time than to past memories, "the three of us" got lost in a labyrinth of moments, where Carlitos himself emerged hugging his beloved Papa Carlos, helping Mama Gudila inside the home, hurrying not to being late for fencing training, smiling like the child who never ceased to be or pensive, with the seriousness of the adult that he was inside since childhood...

Carlitos, one of the 73 that terrorism killed that October 6 in full flight

Corrugated by Marisela's tears, images of Carlos sending letters to his son -while he was preparing like a champion in the Cuban capital- would come to my eyes more than once, in whose envelope he always placed a peso and a kiss. Both had no other name. Nobody waste time looking for it. It was simply and divinely worship.

That is why, before Carlitos left for the championship, his father, submerged in a strange feeling of melancholy, perhaps deep fear, perhaps a bad feeling, stressed to him: "Be careful, Chicho, with those planes..."

It was her pupil (Marisela's) more than her voice, who showed me how, days later, part of the inconsolable father's hair turned gray in the short time that elapsed between the fateful news and the transfer to his home, from the sawmill Where he worked.

No. I did not know Carlitos personally, but I think I see him throwing himself fully into each of those lunges that, in silence, made his coach smile proudly. Carlos dad died some time later, he was wasting away in life, denied or unable to eat food no matter how much his relatives insisted, no matter how hard he himself tried. The pain killed him. Suffering killed him. Posada Carriles, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo, perpetrators of the attack on the plane, killed him.

With no less anguish, Mama Gudila also died. "Her nervous system never functioned like before, says Marisela; it was weakening. The hustle and bustle of daily work comforted her a little, but the grief was great and she suffered a stroke that kept her in a wheelchair for 15 years, until we lost it too, in 1995."

All Cuba cries. Carlitos, from the bottom observes (it is the fourth portrait from left toright).

46 calendars have passed since the terrorist act. In Cuba as a whole, the pain has not diminished. It is there, in children, parents, siblings, grandchildren, neighbors... it is in the veins of the national sport and it is in many pupils, like those of Marisela, where one day the charming countenance of Carlitos and a thousand lovable traits more than his immortality.