Camagüey.- They say you cannot judge anyone without first putting on their shoes, and in the case of Adolfo Silva, that phrase carries a special weight: his greatest lesson in the profession was always that the best journalism book is none other than the sole of your shoes. Today, November 26th, he has passed away, and this is the text I never wanted to write.
With 55 years of journalistic practice, it is still impressive to think about the endurance, persistence, and curiosity that sustained that journey. I remember that day he came home recalling the moment he entered a newsroom for the first time. It was a radio newsroom, and a man named Manuel Rodríguez Cruz pointed to a typewriter so he could hear him typing, as if in the sound of the keys striking one could guess the destiny of a journalist. Later came Adelante, the agency, the assignments, and that creativity of his capable of circumventing the strictest rules without losing accuracy.
Adolfo Silva Silva died, yet I still see him standing. Just as I saw him the time he climbed those marble stairs without handrails, fear in his feet and determination in his eyes. He was no longer the agency journalist who dictated phrases as if chiseling the air, but a man struck by a cerebral infarction, a man whose life had gradually erased his fluency, his writing, his pulse. But there he was: trembling, firm, stubbornly determined to remain himself.
For days now, I have carried that image close to my heart. An image that today overlaps with another: his dining table, the place where he wrote the stories of De lo que fue y pudo ser en Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, that book which lived for so many years as a scattered, surviving manuscript. He wrote it amid losses: over 150 stories conceived, 50 stolen in a computer theft that left him breathless and too weakened to redo them. But Silva was never one to give up. It hurt him, yes, but he kept writing. And one can imagine him there, at that table inherited from his grandfather, with his pipe lit and imagination unleashed, tracking characters from the 16th century as if chasing fireflies in the portals of Camagüey.
Silva was many things: a journalist of surgical precision, a storyteller of Creole magical realism, a hunter of mysteries, the creator of contests that have made generations shine — the Nicolás Guillén of chronicles, the Pablo de la Torriente Brau of reports — a teacher of journalists without intending to be one, although he was part of the founding faculty of the Journalism program at the University of Camagüey. He was also the man who told me, when I was looking for a topic for my thesis, to look into the journalism of Nicolás Guillén; and he was right.
Perhaps that is why that day in the classroom hurt me so much. The teenagers laughed, with that unconscious laughter of those who do not realize they are hurting someone. They laughed at a man who struggled to pronounce every syllable, at hands that could no longer write or shave without trembling. I took a deep breath, asked for applause, and said his name as one says things that must not be broken. It was a moment of learning for everyone: for the lads, for me, even for him. When we went down the stairs, something had changed in his gaze. Perhaps a relief. Perhaps the certainty that there were still spaces where he was recognized whole.
Today I think about that sparkle and mix it with his stories, with that book that almost nobody knows in its entirety but that exists just as he existed: against the wind, against illness, against silence. Of what was and what could have been... it not only recreates an old village where the real and the fantastic court each other; it is also the perfect metaphor for his life. What could have been more. What was immense. What can still be in the hands of those of us who read it in fragments and dream of seeing it published as it deserves.
During this year's Book Fair, we shared the manuscript among colleagues. It was not a finished book. It was a map of his imagination, irrefutable proof that Silva never stopped being curious, never stopped following clues, never stopped illuminating corners of deep Camagüey. Silva also walked the boundary between reality and fable with a fluency that seemed inherited from another era.
I also think about the Rolando Ramírez Provincial Journalism Award for Lifetime Achievement that he received in 2021 and the chronicle he dedicated to Ramírez, calling him “the man who never messed up his hair.” I never imagined that today I would have to say that Silva was the man who never stopped writing, even when life tried to take writing away from him.
With Adolfo Silva, it was always the same: I never knew how to say no to him. He invited me both to present my books and to talk about Pisto Manchego, that commercial section that Guillén turned — with subtle humor and sharp irony — into a space for veiled challenge to power. Silva was fascinated by that early rebellion of the poet, by that way of slipping social critique into a soap advertisement or a note about foreign affairs, and I went because he insisted, yes, but also because I recognized in his enthusiasm a mirror.
He was part of a generation of adventurous journalists and creators, including the designer Roberto Funes Funes, who wrote Confesión sacramental del diablo (Ácana Publishing, 2022), a novel set in 18th-century Puerto Príncipe, where he turned several of his colleagues into characters. There appears the pirate Jácome Adolfo Da Silva y Da Silva, with a "light brown mustache of bristles as hard as a brush," an endearing caricature of Adolfo Silva that reveals how much he himself enjoyed traveling to the past, moving freely through those centuries, searching in distant history for the keys to the present. And perhaps that is why his obsessions with Guillén, with imagination, with the mysteries of Camagüey, shared the same pulse: the certainty that in any crevice — an improvised gathering, a forgotten page, a passing conversation — he could exercise, both as Interim and as the fictional pirate caricatured by his friend, that subtle and luminous freedom to challenge authority.
Beyond his admirable craft as an agency reporter—capable of turning a heritage detail into news, as if the city whispered in his ear—Silva was also a generous collaborator of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz, for which he wrote with particular devotion profiles of young artists and writers, pieces where he not only described but encouraged, motivated, and legitimized them.
In Adelante he also left memorable pages, like the one where he narrates, with the intact enthusiasm of his 16 years, how he fell asleep in a cave during his early adventures as a caver and apprentice archaeologist in the Sierra Maestra surroundings. He liked to tell that story because it contained something essential about him: the naturalness with which he ventured into the unknown, the mix of daring and curiosity that accompanied him all his life, and that almost childlike—and very serious—faith that there was always something more to discover beneath the stone, in the archive, in memory, or in any shadow of deep Camagüey.
Silva leaves us an intimate echo: that of a great journalist who lived by the word even when the word failed him.
I appreciated—and still appreciate—his lessons against pompous paragraphs, sleepy texts, and heartless lines. I toasted then to his health and friendship; today I toast to his entire life, to what he walked and to what he taught us without saying it: not to turn our backs, to stay, to speak, to respect.
And perhaps, just perhaps, that is enough to keep writing him.
