There it was on the front page of a recent Gold Star Daily, the Mindanao-based newspaper that carried this column for years. A military green cap, adorned at its front by a bright red star, seen in an old photograph on the head of a smiling revolutionary.
The Army, the accompanying story reported, had “confirmed the death of Myrna Sularte better known by her nom de guerre ‘Maria Malaya,’…in an encounter with troops in Butuan City on Wednesday.”
And suddenly my memory got jogged. Sularte, the story continued, was a leader of the communist New People’s Army and the widow of NPA insurgent Jorge Madlos, also slain by soldiers back in 2021. “We have finally brought an end to the terror in Caraga,” Brigadier General Mechelle Anayron proclaimed, echoing similar sentiments expressed by another general four years before.
What came to mind was a column I’d written about Madlos after he died. The subject interested me for two reasons: first, the country’s then-most-wanted insurgent hailed from Siargao Island, same as my wife, and was distantly related to one of her cousins. Second, he had once known one of my best friends in Surigao City.
“I urged him to give himself up,” Jun Almeda recalled. “I argued that communism would never triumph here like it did in Cuba, that he would never be another Che Guevarra.”
Madlos’ response, Almeda said, was quiet but firm. “It’s too late to change, he told me. He said he would die fighting for his cause.”
And that’s when I first saw the hat with the red star, an exact match to the one later pictured on the rebel’s now-deceased widow. Madlos had given the original to Almeda, who showed it to me. “Please keep this as a memento,” he’d instructed my friend, “and display it when I’m dead.”
There’s another reason I felt connected to the famous insurrectionist. Madlos was exactly my age. Which means his radicalization in Mindanao probably coincided with mine in New York City. I joined a Marxist group called the Young Socialist Alliance to work as a political organizer. And, though I never engaged in serious revolutionary violence or got arrested like him, I certainly believed in the overthrow of global capitalism.
My dad, too, spent some time as a communist in his mid-20s. And an uncle became a leader of communist East Germany where, in the early 1950s, he had a falling out with higher-ups who sentenced him to death in Stalinist Russia, later commuted to hard labor in Siberia.
As for me, I pretty quickly figured out that our planned Marxist revolution—assuming we could pull it off—would not only spell a personal disaster but a historic catastrophe. And that changed my life.
To be sure, Madlos and his wife became communists in another country under very different circumstances, the ruthless dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. And yet, it is difficult to understand how they—both presumably intelligent and well-educated people—could commit their lives, even after the political realities of their homeland changed, to such an improbable revolutionary goal. And, even more incredibly, follow it all the way to their graves.
Sularte, believed to be about 70, took the final step towards hers at 1:20 p.m. Feb. 12 in a fatal encounter with soldiers of the 30th Infantry Battalion in Sitio Tagulahi 13.8 kilometers from Butuan. Though details are sketchy, officials said they identified the body by its missing front teeth and white hair.
The Communist Party of the Philippines later issued a statement praising the dead rebel’s “heroism to persevere in the difficult path of revolution that she trudged throughout her life.” But no worries, it promised, there is “no dearth of veteran and young cadres…capable of picking up [her] mantel…and carrying forward her legacy.”
Which, of course, raises a critical question both literally and figuratively: whatever will become of that proverbial, red-starred cap?
I advise we all stay tuned.
_______
David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is now available for preorder on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
