Communist Money Friday: The Cuban Peso

This is the Cuban Peso. It is currently worth 1.08 US dollars, 7.5 Chinese Yuan, 972.05 North Korean Won.

The fellow on the Peso is Jose Marti. He is best known for his poem Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses), some stanzas of which ended up in the popular song Guantanamera.

Perhaps, you recognize them…

I am a sincere man
from where the palm tree grows;
and before I die I want
to loose my verses from my heart.

I come from everywhere,
and I go everywhere:
I am art among the arts;
in the hills, I am a hill.

I know the strange names
of the grasses and the flowers,
and of mortal deceits
and of sublime griefs.

I have seen in the dark night
rain over my head
the rays of pure fire
of divine beauty.

I saw wings born on the shoulders
of beautiful women,
and butterflies come flying
from the rubbish.

I have seen a man live
with a dagger in his side,
without ever saying the name
of the woman who killed him.

Swift, like a flash,
twice I saw the soul, twice:
when the poor old man died,
when she bade me farewell.

I trembled once-at the grille,
at the entrance to the vineyard-
when the barbarous bee
stung my girl on the forehead.

I was happy once in a way
that I’ve never since been happy:
when
the sentence of my death
was read by the weeping warden.

I hear a sigh across
the lands and the sea,
and it is not a sigh, it is
that my son is going to wake.

If they say: from the jeweler,
take the best jewel,
I take a sincere friend
and put love aside.

I have seen the wounded eagle
fly to the tranquil blue,
and the poisonous viper
die in its lair.

I well know that when the world
yields, livid, to rest,
over the profound silence
the gentle brook murmurs.

I have placed a daring hand,
stiff with horror and jubilation,
upon the extinguished star
that fell in front of my door.

I hide in my wild breast
the sorrow that wounds it:
the son of an enslaved people
lives for it, is silent, and dies.

All is beautiful and constant,
all is music and reason,
and all, like the diamond,
before it is light is coal.

I know that the fool is buried
with great luxury
and great weeping,
and that there is no
fruit on earth
like that of the burial ground.

I am silent, and I understand,
and I doff
the pomp of the rhymer;
I hang from a withered tree
my doctor’s hood.

Source: Translation by
Donald Walsh in
The Borzoi Anthology of
Latin American Literature. Vol. I.
Ed. Rodriguez Monegal.
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Quoted
at the website “Guantanamera”:

http://www.nmu.edu/www-edgar/

language/Martin/guantamera.html