In Caletones my grandfather Bartolomé built a house in front of the sea in 1948. A cyclone took that little house away and he came back at the end of the fifties. When the cement on the floor had not yet dried, he left written on the entrance of what would become his room: "1959, year of liberation". Later, fascinated by the place that owes its name to the number of caleta grape plants that grow in the area, film director Humberto Solás would arrive to immortalize the site in the third story of the film Lucía, a classic of Cuban cinema. And one of the main locations chosen was my grandfather's house. That's why the old man called Villa Lucia to the house where until the year 2000 my large family used to gather every summer for vacation.
Today my grandfather's house is no longer there and the architectural landscape is different from my memories of yesteryear. But the essential, what always made this place a kind of orchard (without running water, with dirt roads and electricity only a couple of hours a day) remains intact: the humility and solidarity of its few inhabitants, the breeze, the mixture of the smell of the countryside and saltpeter, the fine sand and the parsimony of its small beaches and natural pools such as the cold pool or the blue tanks (the deepest underwater caverns of the island).
Allow me the insolence then to disagree for a second with my dear and beloved poet from Holguín, Delfín Prats, nominated at present for the National Literature Award, when he wrote the verse "Do not return to the places where you were happy".
Caletones was where I had my fill of mamoncillos, mangos, melons and pineapples; it was where I learned to swim, to fish, to ride a horse... to ride loose and unvaccinated, as the saying goes. There, too, our neighbors became family.
Caletones is one of those particular places that everyone treasures in the essential and happy history of childhood and adolescence, when you begin to feel free and full.