On the fifth day of August 1942, the historian Gustavo Adolfo Sed Nieves was born in Camagüey, who would die in February 2002.
Our historian of the city was a lucid man, intellectually capable of venturing into historical science, if you want to be more cautious in entering into the analysis of documents and ancient references than to arrive with haste to the integrative synthesis of information; that yes ingenious in the handling of the sources that by very diverse ways arrived at its tremulous hands.
Gustavo enjoyed the regional history of Camagüey, like a child who rejoices at a new toy. His black eyes shone when this happened, and many times we recognized that state. The novelty and exclusiveness of the historical data made him euphoric, especially when he himself made the public deliveries or in appearances in texts of his authorship.
Saving History
There were plenty of critics who called “empiricism” his passionate and timeless dedication to the affairs of local daily life in his ancestral homeland. Pages could be filled out to disprove that undeserved qualification.
The important thing that goes beyond the “human miseries” was that our historian, using his “art of contagion” –this is how we could qualify that particular treatment that he showed to friends and professionals – to attract them to a preference for the affairs of our History, and to make donations of how many rare books, old documents, notebooks, notebooks, photographs …, and everything that could be saved that would help to complete and enrich the History of Camagüey.
The very “treasure” of History
Gustavo would come to collect hundreds of these materials from the primary sources of history, most of them unpublished. The payroll covered a notebook in the handwriting of the notes of Major General Máximo Gómez in his transit through Camagüey; papers loaded with valuable references from the life of the town relating during the seventeenth century; genealogical notebooks of families from the 18th and 19th centuries; interesting notes by Marianita Betancourt Garay from Camagüey, some related to the arrival in the city of the corpse of Major Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz; unpublished photographs of personalities, patriots and generals from Camagüey; letters of extraordinary historical value; the first test run with notes in the margin of the book A Fair of La Caridad in 18…, made by the intellectual José Ramón de Betancourt y Betancourt; notes by Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros “El Lugareño”; just to cite these.
Frasquito Agüero Velasco
This was his work that filled him with satisfaction, perhaps not because of the award received in the “July 26th Contest”, but because of the time spent searching for information and classification that Sed took to synthesize and write that volume of references and data that for the first time came to the public light about a significant period of our struggles, the 1820s. To achieve this, he had searched arduously among the documentary collections of the National Archive of Cuba, also in those of the Regional Historical Archive of Camagüey; and he extracted papers from his personal “collection” that he had accumulated thanks to multiple donations.
Through Sed we learned from Frasquito of the true father of the “pundonoroso” Alderman of the City Hall of Puerto Príncipe; of the Bolivarian walks of the patriot through Philadelphia, Jamaica and Greater Colombia to gather support for the Cuban struggles; of Frasquito’s dishonest denouncement letter for whoever was his companion; of his plans to land the Venezuelan-Colombian expeditionary force in southern Camaguey; of the revolutionary Proclamation against the colonial regime of the oidor de la Audiencia written by the Peruvian Manuel L. Vidaurre.
The unfinished but infinite work
Shortly before his death, Gustavo Sed confessed to friends that he had many projects in mind to continue contributing to the History of Camagüey. He was not going to give her up or betray her, known to all that History was his only girlfriend and his only wife. In short, our historian with a frank smile and measured speech, seems to point us to continue what life did not allow him to complete and be able to save the infinite history of our Legendary Camagüey.
Traslated by: Aileen Álvarez García
