I WAS admittedly exaggerating when I wrote that the Cebu City Government did not celebrate Tres de Abril, or the 1898 “skirmish” that opened the uprising by Cebuano Katipuneros against the Spanish colonial forces. A City Hall functionary enlightened me on that when he messaged me about the activities done last April 3 in San Nicolas to commemorate the “skirmish.” San Nicolas is where the present-day Tres de Abril St. partly passes.
I say that City Hall could have done something more to preserve the memory of the city’s historic events like Tres de Abril. In terms of creativity, for example, Palm Grass, a private entity, did find better ways to commemorate Tres de Abril than the Cebu City Government despite the latter’s better resources.
And it is not only about Tres de Abril.
When I was with The Freeman, I did a special report about Tabunan, the former base of the Cebuano resistance against the Japanese occupation of the island during World War II. I went up to that mountain barangay together with our photographer then, Tonee Despojo, to do some interviews. A farmer brought us to a slope where suspected spies who were ordered executed by guerilla leader Harry Fenton were buried.
To prove the farmer’s claim, we dug parts of the ground there and did find some human bones. Tonee then came up with a good suggestion. Why don’t we, he said, come up with a marker for the area in the form of a tombstone like the ones sold by tombstone makers at the Carreta cemetery and then erect that in a ceremony sometime later?
We did come up with the marker but we never got to the phase of erecting it in Tabunan, the idea lost in the shuffle that was our journalistic work. But like what Jobers Bersales of the University of San Carlos said, that should have been the function of Cebu City Hall. And the City could have done better than just erecting a marker in Tabunan.
Tabunan is more than a mountain village in the city. A sitio there is even named Batalyon, a reminder of its storied past. And yet City Hall hasn’t done much for the place by way of preserving that storied past. It could have, for example, reconstructed life in Tabunan as a guerilla camp for the present generation to revisit.
It’s not only Tabunan even. There is also Sudlon, which became one of the bases of the resistance by Cebuanos to Spanish rule. Palm Grass did better than City Hall by having the band Aggressive Audio put music to a lyric of an old Cebuano Katipunan song that mentioned Sudlon. Palm Grass even had the band visit Sudlon.
I also wrote articles in The Freeman that City Hall can pick up in my blog Rebelmind about the World War II tunnels that dot Cebu. One of them, said to be a former hospital, can even be found in the city proper, in the bosom of a hill just across Jollibee in Banawa. There are photos of that tunnel in my blog, taken by former The Freeman fotog Arlene Solis Chua.
What has City Hall done to preserve those sites for the education of the present generation about our “storied past”? I say nothing much, and I am not exaggerating this time.