Miguel Hernández García was born in the nucleus of the Holy Cross, in The Realejos. He was one of the young men who in the 1950s made the journey on horseback or on foot to the neighboring municipality of San Juan de la Rambla to go to the dances where the prettiest women were supposed to be. “Although I took the most beautiful of the entire island,” he says.
He did it with the approval of his father, who was an accomplice in all his meetings and his love story with Etelvina, whom he met on September 29, 1954, “the day of San Miguel and San Rafael”, he specifies.
That day, the orchestra of his town went to play San Juan de la Rambla and Miguel joined the truck. She was one of the members of the commission that organized the party to buy the bell for the church of San Rafael, in front of El Calvario.
It was the first time they talked and danced but not the last, because from that day on he proposed to himself “seek life to see her again”. At the end of the year he took advantage of the fact that there was a dance at school and the orchestra was coming down and he joined in again. As she arrived, she found her sitting opposite her mother. On day 1 she returned and they never separated again.
“The croissants are coming,” she would say with her aunts, as they watched them along the path that is now the highway, where cars did not even pass before and where they used to take long walks when they were dating.
Miguel did everything to see her, he even got into Post Office cars. The return to her house was not easy. He left San Juan de la Rambla at one in the morning and spent almost two hours walking along the road. “From the viewpoint of San Pedro to the Holy Cross, it was all uphill, so I took advantage of it when a truck full of pine needles came and hung up to be taken away,” he points out.
Having met her did not change his plans to emigrate to Venezuela “to wean himself from his parents” and try his luck like many Canarians of the time because he was clear that he would marry her again.
Etelvina González Martín waited for him almost three years. “He wrote me a lot of letters, almost every day he received one,” she says.
In the Andean country, Miguel did everything to earn money. He worked as a chauffeur with the famous movie actress Margot Antillano. That year-end, a dinner was organized at the artist’s house, to which Raúl Soulés Baldó, a prestigious doctor who was Minister of Health and later secretary of the presidency of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, was invited. Miguel served the table. “When the minister saw me he didn’t take his eyes off me and after seven days he sent for me. I used to earn 500 bolivars and he offered me 1,000, which was a lot of money at that time, because the change was the change to the peseta was 37, so with my eyes closed I went with him”.
But Etelvina was still in his head, so after a few months of working together, he asked permission to return to Tenerife and marry her. On September 1, 1957, he arrived in Tenerife and that same day he asked both families to sit down “so that they would not fall out of the chair” that he had to give them some news. So, without further ado, he told his future in-laws to prepare her daughter because they were getting married on January 15 and on the 30th she would return to Venezuela. He still doesn’t know how he came up with that date. They have been together for 67 years and they tell it with an enviable complicity, proud of each other.
They were married for 22 days and Miguel returned to America. On the way, sailing, the Government of Marcos Pérez Jiménez fell, Soulés Baldó ceased to be a minister and he lost his job.
However, luck played a trick on him and it was the start of a prosperous business career. He had brought some boxes of cognac and some reunions (dyes) that he sold and with that money he bought a van and started selling potatoes, fruit and everything he could find, but after eight months he had to travel to the Canary Islands because his father died.
His father inherited the house in which he lived and he stayed forever. He sold the cows, potatoes and wine that he had, and since he knew the business, he wanted to repeat his luck: he bought a truck and dedicated himself to selling wine and potatoes. With what he earned, they bought a plot of land in the Holy Cross, little by little they built his house and a large family made up of eight children – five men and three women – who have given them eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
“He had to pay me all the penalties he made me go through as boyfriends,” Miguel jokes, while his wife blushes.
The business grew and this croissant became the main wholesaler of fruits and vegetables on the island. He opened a guachinche in the Holy Cross and in just four months sold more than 40,000 liters of wine that he bought for the whole family. He acquired a farm in El Mazapé, later he had some partners from Venezuela with whom he bought the industrial zone of Los Príncipes, in Los Realejos, and carried out a frustrated operation of 5,550 million pesetas with two ships for Africa – one for Zaire and another for Guinea Conakry- in which he took cars, clothes, food and pigs.
But society faltered, the banks fell on him and he lost everything. Ana, her eldest daughter, remembers that when her parents had money “everything was flowers and cigars” and then they both asked their children not to pick up the phone because the pressure from the banks was tremendous. “We suffered it, my mother called Africa all the time, she couldn’t connect, she stayed with us playing Parcheesi until two in the morning. They took our house away from us, we were forced to change schools and they took us away from our environment”, she laments.
But Miguel was a businessman and as such, he was a far-sighted person. With money that he had saved for a fixed term, he was able to buy the house in which the couple currently lives in La Laguna and in which he set up a supermarket and started again, because if he was never afraid of something, it was work.
She set up a car agency in Santa Cruz, worked for three years even with the help of her eldest daughter, went back to doing what she knew best: selling wine, potatoes, gofio and fruit in Fuerteventura, where Ana had gone to work as a karate teacher. At 67, she said she was “done enough” from boats and retired.
Migue -as she calls him- is 85 years old. After everything they have experienced, one of the things they enjoy the most is strolling through San Juan de la Rambla, having a coffee, talking to the neighbors and reminiscing about old times. Of course, always with Etelvina, who “is proud to have been born in a quiet and beautiful town, I have loved it all my life, and I still have a family here,” she adds.
