Güímar is no longer immune to these issues full of controversy. The last, the claim of a former socialist councilor with Mayor Rigoberto González in the nineties, who has transferred to the City Council the request to change the name of Alférez Luis Hernández Bertrán de Lis street and to remove the cross of the fallen of the Town Hall square.
The request was discussed on Thursday in the Honors and Distinctions commission, with the majority being the idea of maintaining the name of the street and moving the cross, given its deterioration and the project to remodel the square, to the municipal cemetery. This proposal will be discussed in an information committee and subsequently brought to the Plenary Session.
The commission is made up of a councilor for each political party in the council (4) in addition to three relevant people from culture proposed by each of the majority groups (PP, CC and PSOE) and one for Unidas Sí Podemos and another for Nueva Canary Islands.
One of those members is the official chronicler of the municipality, Octavio Rodríguez, who remembers that Güímar distinguished himself by removing Francoist symbols long before the Historical Memory Law. It was in 1984 when Rodríguez was Councilor for Culture, removing the names of General Franco, José Antonio Primo de Rivera and 18 de Julio, among others, from the Güimarera roads. The official chronicler is against changing the name of Alférez Hernández Bertrán de Lis street, as well as other güimareros such as Bishop Pérez Cáceres, Pedro Guerra, Julián Zafra or Tomás Cruz who were named by Franco and who “were not to blame for that they would have to live in the dictatorship,” he commented.
Luis Hernández Bertrán de Lis was the highest-ranking güimarero (lieutenant) in the Civil War. He was wounded and returned to his hometown, to rejoin and die on the front at only 21 years old. He belonged to the National side, the only one in the Canary Islands in that tragic conflict between Spaniards.
The removal of the cross, with the current Historical Memory Law, is more than probable, despite the fact that a few years ago the yoke and arrows, the laurel wreath and the name of José Antonio Primo de Rivera were removed from the monument, which heads the list of those killed in the Civil War, leaving only those born in Güímar and under the title: ‘Güímar, to those who died in the War’.
