Every man and woman has at least one metaphor that expresses their life. A metaphor that is sometimes needy, sometimes dazzling, sometimes unknown, even by those who were encrypted by it. One of the metaphors that expresses Oswaldo Brito, who died last Tuesday night, occurred in the electoral campaign in which he tried to become a senator. It was a difficult campaign and with few means that Brito took on with his usual fierce energy until one day, in a town in the north of Tenerife, they announced a terrible puncture. He had arranged a hundred chairs on a small esplanade and at the time of the meeting absolutely no one had approached the place. No one. The event had to be stopped. But Brit refused. The event was called and he would speak, and he went to the small platform and in front of a microphone from Chichinabo he asked for the vote for the nationalism of CC for five minutes without hesitation, without hesitation, without fainting. His speech added a curious person who was out there and even let out three or four applause at the end. Then a light and fleeting drizzle fell and the election campaign continued.
It is a perfect metaphor of an indomitable will and also of a failure full of successes, intelligence and brilliance. At the end of the 1970s, everything was expected of Oswaldo Brito, whose energy, civic courage, intellectual formation and capacity seemed limitless. Neither the Social Democrats nor the Communists had anyone with such potential. Like many others, he went from Catholic workerism in adolescence to Marxism –somewhat catechumenal– and to nationalism –more sentimental than theorized– and was a trade union leader who struggled in the late Franco regime in the tobacco industry, in transport and in port stevedoring. Arrests, threats, fines, some gray hosts. The son of a magnificent school teacher, he had time to graduate and then get a doctorate in History with an ambitious and unequal thesis entitled History of the Canarian labor movement, which, published in 1980, became a reference book for a quarter of a century. Before the age of 30, he was a non-tenured professor at the University of La Laguna, inflamed with his speeches at the Unión del Pueblo Canario, organized demonstrations and rallies and co-founded the Jusocan Collective –lawyers, teachers, experts– for advice on labor disputes –which no one remembers anymore– during the prolonged death rattles of the dictatorship. From the UPC to the leadership of the Canarian Nationalist Autonomous Confederation and from the COAC –self-managed and self-determinist– to the Canarian Nationalist Left, which formed a coalition with the Canarian Assembly to present itself in the regional elections of 1987. They elected two deputies: Pedro Lezcano for Gran Canaria and Oswaldo Brito for Tenerife.
It was the moment of fullness of life politics de Brito, perhaps the best speaker the regional Chamber has seen. In his most successful interventions, he touched all the sticks: analytical capacity, sharp irony, control of the discursive rhythm, ingenious improvisation, the precise adjective, the unexpected whiplash. But when the decisive moment arrived, he was alone. It is the loneliness of Oswaldo Brito, without a solid party behind him, without pragmatic alliances and the victim of an intelligence that is too obvious and ambitious, which explains his increasingly marginal role in AIC and in Coalición Canaria, where he arrived with the conviction that he represented the only nationalism possible. José Carlos Mauricio and Oswaldo Brito never got along (Brito represented for the ex-communist what he never managed to be: an intellectual and an ideologue) and very soon ICAN was Mauricio and the historian was left out. The University ended up boring him: he gave up trying to get a professorship and his last relevant book, Argenta de Franquis, a business woman, was published in 1991. One of the most gifted politicians of his generation was exiled from politics without having even served as a managing Director. He had finally decided to call off the meeting.
