“Nothing and no one can separate us because, above all barriers, our souls are fused in the excellency of all ideals,” Manolo wrote to Minerva Mirabal. The two were imprisoned and were trafficking in cigarette filters, in the tiny indications of medications, between the straps of bras and the threads of skirts, the poetry that sustained the love struggle that transcended, from the Caribbean, to the world. The marches against sexist violence They walk rooted with an open envelope through which flickers a historical romance that is a compass in times of setback.
The Mirabal sisters (Minerva, Patria and María Teresa) were murdered on November 25, 1960. The triple femicide became an emblem of struggle. In 1981, at the First Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, it was decided that every November 25 the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The date that is commemorated in marches, events and talks has its origins in the Dominican Republic. On December 17, 1999, the UN decreed 25N an emblematic date for defend women’s lives against sexist violence.
Minerva Mirabal was born in Ojo de Agua, in the Dominican Republic. The dictator Rafael Trujillo harassed her and she rejected him. She was imprisoned, raped and tortured. But not silenced. Even behind bars he managed to clandestine the love letters that are collected in the book Tomorrow I will write to you again. The book compiles 117 notes, letters and telegrams, from 1954 to 1960, between Minerva Mirabal and Manolo Tavárez. Minerva’s husband was president of the June 14 Group (where the sisters were already known as Las Mariposas), created in 1959 and sought to unify all movements against the Trujillo dictatorship (which lasted from 1930 to 1961).
The letter trembles in the rounded graph and with the ink pen that flickers with courtship, is consolidated with marriage and intensifies in prison subsistence. “The letters from prison are terrible. It was difficult for me to keep them in my hands,” said Minou, her daughter, who decided to publish them because intimacy is political and politics is also showing the love that united a woman who became a butterfly. , abode and magnetic in the fight against gender violence which, today more than ever, is a fight against political violence against women and for a democracy without harassment.
“Pain and sacrifice have magnified love,” Manolo told Minerva. In a context of authoritarianism, machismo elected at the polls and victorious rapists, the fight against violence It is more necessary than ever. Also the other side of other forms of love are essential so that messages of hate do not dilute the force that gives rise to the marches that shake the planet on 25N.
“Long live the love that always makes us better!” highlighted Minou Tavárez Mirabal, the daughter of Minerva and Manolo, who decided to get them out of jail and the closet and explained the reasons for the book: “The letters, treasured and preciously classified by Manolo and the books through which Minerva broadened her spirit and deepened her thought merge and confuse in consciousness.” The heir to the letters, trafficked between the hems of dresses, hesitated between keeping the hand-drawn letters for her intimate altar or whether to offer them to a public reflection that walks with those who leave the houses so that the correspondence becomes collective.
He chose for love to become, once again, a political decision. “The years I spent treasuring that bundle of words were marked by the doubt of whether or not to reveal something so intimate“, he reflects. And he goes deeper: “It was my dad who cleared up those doubts when I came to the conclusion that he had reviewed the letters a thousand times and had organized and classified them and preserved them from the raids they suffered because he was always aware of their significance.” .
“Tomorrow I will write to you again,” was the way of saying goodbye, predicting a new literary encounter, an ink chat that had no ghosts, but rather the hope of looking at each other through the paper. “With pleasure a pact written in stone until it becomes hope,” defines his daughter, a member of the Council of the Trust Fund for Victims of the International Criminal Court. “His legacy is a permanent letter,” he challenges and highlights: “Long live the love that always makes us better!”
In 2019 The Argentine philosopher Diana Maffía shared a meeting with Angela Davis and Minou Mirabal, in Montevideo, Uruguay, in which they talked for a long time and she took a gift book for the feminist love letter workshops that she teaches at the Tierra Violeto cultural center. “In the letters they express their affection, their revolutionary ideas and they worry about whether their companions have blankets for the cold and food to eat. Political love is living love in a personal and community way, not just individually.”
Love is a trap where many times violence lurks. The philosopher lists the disciplinary love that has so many costs, the love of the better half that if you do not have a counterpart you are not a complete person, the only heterosexual love and the possessive love where women are property for the man. But it is not about disarming love, but about finding other forms of love.
However, the philosopher finds no alternative among the letters of notable left-wing political leaders. “In the letters that Marx wrote to his wife, when she was his girlfriend and he was studying in Germany, they were very disciplinary in which he told her not to go out with friends, or ride a bicycle. It already made people think that he wanted to emancipate the people. but he had a fixed idea of role of a woman in a marriage. “Che Guevara is going to Africa and he very sternly told his partner not to go because he couldn’t take care of her and he imposed on her how she had to take care of her children,” says Maffía.
The Mirabal letters, however, are an emblem against violence and an alternative of love that must continue to be read. But it’s not just encapsulated love. “It is a testimony of love not only between them, but of love for the ideals that united them and the struggle that made them endure the most terrible tortures what they did to them,” Maffía points out. The letters were wrapped in several papers in a party bag when her daughter discovered them. The worst thing was when they were discovered to Manolo in prison and that earned him more torture. For this reason, he He told her to break them, so as not to take risks. But Minerva did not listen to him and hoarded them even at the risk of having them hidden between the bras that supported her chest.
His daughter also shares a correspondence that is not published in the book, which he wrote, in 1959, to his friend Tobías Emilio Cabral (Larry), in New York: “It is a happiness to do what we can for our country that suffers this agony. “It’s sad to sit with your arms crossed,” said Minerva and showed the friendship as another form of love and the democratic struggle as a form of happiness that combated the sadness of letting oneself collapse by the dictatorship.
On a piece of paper that came with a toothpaste, Minerva managed to dedicate a smile to Manolo. “Remember, they can separate our bodies but not our spirits.” And I asked him about his daughters and family. Writing was a painkiller: “We must anesthetize all those thorns that are stuck in our hearts.” And it was also used to place orders. “Ask Patria if she brought me appropriate clothes to go to court; if not, ask her to buy me in the capital the black checkered dress with elbow-length sleeves that I wanted Mary to buy and some No. 7½ shoes and let me have them.” with Dulce or with anyone who brings a canteen so that he can give them to the sergeant”, he detailed and ended: “Your wife always adores you.”
She also reproached him for having written more than him and the correspondence became real, palpable and not just idealistic, between dresses, shoes, pain and demands. She tells him that she wrote him two letters and he wrote none and he tells her that he wrote two pages. The correspondence was reflected in the fine print that was rolled between the cigarettes that they were allowed to spend in prison. Love did not go up in smoke. “How proud I am of my wife. What a pity that our children cannot know. Receive all the love from your husband,” Manolo left an impression on him.
Camila Minerva Rodríguez is the granddaughter of Minerva Mirabal and Manolo, and an expert in environmental and risk policy. She does not want butterflies to be trivialized and the root of the political struggle of 25N. But love is not frivolity, but depth in the struggle, and rescues: “I love a letter in which Minerva complains to Manolo that he did not write to her so long. One of my favorite things is that she was five years older than him and “He hid it from her so that she wouldn’t stop going out with him because he was younger. I like that unusual situation and reading in the letter the ordinary nature of everyday life and being a couple and building together.” Minerva wanted to get married and have a rights office. He feminicide prevented it. But thousands of women are demanding more rights around the world in their name. And among the banners, the love letters also demand more letters, more words and more affection without bars.
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