Hermenegildo’s Silence

By Erasmo Calzadilla

Around the time around my firing from the university, there appeared a sort of “commentator” on my diary entries on this website; it was a person who called themself Hermenegildo.

By the manner in which that person wrote, they seemed to be someone connected to the school – a student or a teacher – who scribbled their offensive comments so full of bile.  Notwithstanding, there’s no one with that name in the university where I worked.

Either Hermenegildo was not from the school but tried to pass him/herself off as being with the university, or he/she actually was from there and wrote their courageous digs hidden behind the mask of a pseudonym.

Hermenegildo was a slanderer not especially disposed to reflection; he/she was someone who made doltish comments, like “everyone in the school is happy with your expulsion.”

It was then that I invited Hermenegildo to participate in a kind of a public debate here on the pages of Havana Times.  I proposed this – since he/she had “stooped” to writing in this online publication – to take advantage of it and detail the reasons that led the institution and him/her to despise and expel me in the way that they did.

Yet never again did we hear from this being.

I won by default; Hermenegildo never reappeared. Readers must think that my accusers are losers who are good for making cowardly stabs, but not for much else.

I have come to even believe that this could have been a diversionist maneuver of the CIA to discredit real revolutionaries, because this episode with Hermenegildo is far from the stance that I’m accustomed to from true communists.