"Blame me for what happens / cover your back with my pain..." If the story began like this, with a skinny and long-haired boy playing, perhaps, the maracas, in the middle of a mountain, it would be difficult to take immediately that the protagonist is a Cuban guerrilla commander, on the verge of the “prodigious” decade of the 1960s.

However, among Cubans, everyone would know that it is Camilo. Capable of cheering up the troops on nights of mosquitoes and hunger in the Sierra Maestra, capable of dragging at least one patriot with them, capable of turning on the chest of an entire town with his voice.

Camilo remains, with the addition of mystery and unfinished mourning left by his physical disappearance, almost intact in the collective memory. He is always evoked smiling, always noble, always "at the foot of the canyon".

That mixture of nostalgia and admiration is powerful. It wets the eyes of the grandmothers who lived through the first and fervent years of the Revolution. The ritual of throwing flowers into the sea fills with feeling, even for children born almost a hundred years after him.

No one was so close to the affections of the people, and to this day anecdotes have come down to attest to his respect for the men in his charge, his determination to experience the same harshness of war, his morality against any privilege, his sensitivity.

Camilo does not need to be cloistered in the marble of a hero because his whole being was already romantic enough for the story. That's how we keep it, and the exercise of memory returns it to us every October: jovial, dedicated, human.