Guantánamo.—If the largest and busiest park in this province were called Pedro Agustín Pérez (Periquito), as was initially intended, no one who knows history would dare ask why.
When Periquito himself objected to the proposal, and as an alternative pronounced the name of José Martí to baptize the main public space of the Guantanamo city at the time, there was no disdain in that position; It was another gesture of the greatness that was natural to him, and which he never flaunted.
He came into the world on April 29, 1844 in a wealthy mansion in San Anselmo de Tiguabos, a rural, dusty Taíno town, which, according to the poet Regino Eladio Boti Barreiro, “had pretensions of a city, when Guantánamo did not exist.”
Son of wealthy colonialists, spending his childhood and youth in such a home environment, it was logical that he defended that caste as he did in the Ten Years’ War, from the peninsular army that promoted him to Commander.
But, the trinomial homeland-justice-reason, compass and astrolabe in Periquito’s soul, showed him his true path. And this is how, from the ranks of the colony, he became a collaborator of military counterintelligence, in favor of the insurgent high command.
In that turn he found his nature as a patriot, politician and human being; It was a rectifying act, not a traitor, although Spain discovered it and, once arrested, foisted that charge on him, subjecting him to a delicate process that pointed towards the wall. In that via crucis he met Flor Crombet.
An edition of the newspaper Venceremos quotes the historian José Sánchez Guerra, who maintains that Periquito Pérez “is one of the few – if not the only prisoner – who was able to escape from Castillo del Morro in Santiago de Cuba.” In that escape the mambí saved his life.
Associated with his leadership in this region is the fact that he saved Cuba from a tragedy by saving Martí and Gómez from a deadly ambush in the days after the landing on April 11.
Spark plug of the uprising of February 24, 1895 in seven Guantanamo locations, Major General Pedro Agustín Pérezes, according to Sánchez Guerra, the only leader on whose shoulders fell the political and military commands of the uprising in a region of the Island.
It was no coincidence that Martí cited him as “the first Guantánamo rebel”; It was not by chance that he named him Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in the Upper East; The trust of the people in Pedro Agustín was no different, once the War of ’95 was over, when this city elected him its first mayor.
The nickname Periquito, some say, is due to his small feet; others attribute to him the gifts of a gallant and a seducer. They are speculations. The truth is that, over money, luxury and living comfortably, at the risk of his own existence, this man put the dream of Cuba before him. The example of a hero seduces people.
