In Cuba there are two plaques in honour of two Bulgarians – one of them is captain Georgi Georgiev, and the other – the Bulgarian Apostle of Liberty Vasil Levski.
You can find the second plaque on the territory of the plasticware factory “Vasil Levski”. A friend of mine told me that the factory is situated close to Cienfuegos from Guamа to the right after the refineries. The factory name in Spanish is Empresa de Producciones Plásticas Vasil Levski, Petrocasasa.
I have tried to get in the factory four times and see the bust statue of the Apostle with my eyes. However, every time I am denied access since the factory is treated with strict confidentiality and I have no right to get inside, neither can they take photos. For this, I need a special permit, which I might or might not get in the near 30 years…
I have given up my attempts to enter the factory. Now I just show it from a distance to my tourists, when we pass by. The only photo I managed to take was from the control post and another photo was taken by Todor Kuzmanov, whose story you will hear further in this material.
There is this factory in Cuba. Built from Bulgaria. By Bulgarians. When it was turned over to the Cuban government for management and maintenance Emil suddenly said that maybe a day would come when the name of the factory wouldn’t be “Vasil Levski” anymore and we all felt very sad. Then the idea was born to make something devoted to the Apostle that would last. We thought that the simplest thing is to build a bust statue of Vasil Levski in the factory, so we wrote a letter to Liudmila Zhivkova with а request to send us the bust from Bulgaria. Time passed, we had already turned the first sod on the small hill in the middle of the factory yard. And we did it with a special dedication since we were sure it would happen.
During the small celebration with representatives of the local media, photographs and a lot of excitement the Cuban factory director Mario Gonsales Sanches and I turned the first sod. We created а project of the pedestal and the bust statue itself…
I asked all the wives and children of the Bulgarians in Cienfuegos to take part in building the statue. They were great!
My daughter inserted in the pedestal a rock, which we had brought from Siera Maestra to Santiago de Cuba.
Time was ticking away, though… Towards the end of 1980, we decided to build the bust statue on our own. I travelled to Havana, went to the library of the Bulgarian Trade Mission, and took all the books, connected to the Apostle’s name and activity. Fortunately, there were a lot of pictures of him there.
I went back to Cienfuegos and showed the pictures to two young Cuban sculptоrs, who had already made a bust statue of Manuel de Cespedes. They taught fine arts at my daughter’s school. I told them about Vasil Levski and how important he is to all Bulgarians and asked them whether they could do the job.
They needed different materials, but first and foremost they needed clay, which was delivered from the factory in Matanzas with a gas truck 51. To fortify the plaster cast they needed henequen fibres, that I was fortunately given as a gift from the other end of the Cienfuegos Bay, where later they started but didn’t finish building a nuclear power plant.
The bust statue was 1-2 m tall and all the Bulgarian were coming to see it and give an opinion. I wanted everybody to share the initiative. I took the liberty of fixing one of the lips the way I felt right. The bust itself was a deed of Felix Madrigal Echemendia and the plaque with the bas-relief of Huan Garcia Krus. The latter still lives in Cienfuegos and is already over the age of 50.
We poured out the lion’s head through a heated model so we needed beeswax. This is the only material they wanted something in return for. Up to this moment and until the end whenever I asked the Cubans what we need next – they simply delivered it, as long as they had it. For the beeswax, however, they required two bottles of rum, which we shared the price for after voting at a trade-union meeting. To cast the moulds we had to have mould boxes that would endure the weight of the casts. At first, we thought about making wooden mould boxes, but after two failures we decided to seek another solution.
I travelled to Santa Clara, where they had a Soviet machine factory and I asked them to give me mould boxes for big casts. They gave them to me as a present. We restarted the process all over again.
The furnace we used to mould the separate parts of the monument had a maximum capacity of 2-3 kg and we needed to mould casts ten times heavier. We were forced to build a new furnace, which helped us to successfully pour out the elements of the monument with a total weight of over 500 kg of bronze.
I thought that the easiest part would be pouring out the front plaque with the inscription: “Who dies in the name of liberty, lives forever!”, but then I didn’t know that we would need to cast and smelt the metal three times. The ready cast was went out in knots and with a void in the middle every time we tried to mould it. I travelled to Havanа to visit their Art Galery, where I found an elderly caster working in a local craftshop. I asked him what I was doing wrong and in five minutes I was already aware of my mistake. I put the plaque in a horizontal position when I had to bend it and start casting from the bottom. When we started compiling the separate elements of the cast we realized that we are too far from the end. The elements didn’t fit for centimetres. This is when the true torture started. I found а grinder with disks and electrodes at the port for kamaroni (shrimps), the bay of Cienfuegos. Of course – I received them as a gift from a friend of mine. After all this turmoil was over I gave him a bottle of Havana Club. It was such a thrilling journey. At the finish line, we had to solder the separate parts into one piece for two nights…
We had a plan “B” – to install a plaster bust for the opening, so I found bronze paint from the Terry Theatre in Cienfuegos. A guy who worked at the Cinco de Septiembre (On the 5th of September) Baseball Stadium gave it to me. It was such a good paint – genuine bronze! They used it to renovate the theatre 60 years ago. It had to be diluted with alcohol. We needed this plan “B” since we had already announced the opening of the bust statue of Vasil Levski and everyone was expecting it. Meanwhile, I was summoned at the Bulgarian Embassy in Havanа by the ambassador Boyko Dimitrov – the son of Georgi Dimitrov. The ambassador said that they had received a bust statue of Vasil Levski from Bulgaria (as high as 30 cm) and warned me not to even imagine that we would not install the bust from Bulgaria on the pedestal, which was 3 m high! I simply suggested installing the bust from Bulgaria as the entrance hall of the factory main building…
“How? The bust from Liudmila Zhivkova!?” The ambassador was scared and so were we – this is why we had plan “B”… I painted the plaster cast with the bronze paint so that in case of a delay we would hold the opening with this temporary bust. Fortunately, it was never needed.
After three sleepless nights /they stole from my car the alcohol I used to dilute the paint/ at noon with Serafim Elenkov from Berkovitsa using a huge hydraulic Japanese crane we installed the bronze bust of Vasil Levski on the pedestal.
At 1.00 pm in front of a troop of armed seamen and many Bulgarians, we held the opening of the first monument devoted to Vasil Levski in Latin America. On the same day, I broke the bronze plaster bust – I wanted the original to be unique. In a small niche in the pedestal, we inserted a capsule from stainless steel with a message to future generations. Also on the niche upper plate, we engraved the following inscription: “To be opened in 2037 on Vasil Levski’s birth date”, when I will be long gone.
I am writing all this after the 19th of February 2008 – 27 years later, realizing that no one would really ever understand how we felt and that nothing will be left but this story. However, I will never forget it!
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Did you know about this factory? See how much the Bulgarians from Cienfuegos had to suffer just to show that Bulgarians are a nation that remembers its Heroes! We really appreciate every drop of blood, spilled for the liberty of our country and we believe that i will always be the Mother of Great Man!
Todor Kuzmanov and Valentin Petlov
