Mayor Paz Radaza and her tourism consultant, my good friend Balbino “Ka Bino” Guerrero, cannot be faulted for pointing out, no matter how belatedly as people see it, the offense felt by Lapu-Lapu City over the EQ Diaper commercial spoofing as it were the Battle of Mactan. While it may be true that the commercial should be taken with a grain of salt and is in fact funny to a point, a city named after the 16th century native hero cannot be expected to just stand idly by and allow what it rightfully sees as a sacrilege to go unlamented.
You see, times are different between today and the time when Yoyoy Villame sang his own version of the Battle of Mactan some 40 years ago. Lapu-Lapu then was a small town called Opon and there was no international airport, no export processing zones, or multi-million peso twin bridges linking the island of Mactan to Cebu. Today, Lapu-Lapu is the main gateway for millions of visitors to Cebu and the city has a reputation and pride to protect.
What Lapu-Lapu’s officials are doing may well set the trend in advertising: Do not play around with our local heroes, men and woman who once lived out lives that made them stand above the ordinary. Can one imagine a television commercial showing Rizal executed at the Luneta because he gave the dreaded Spanish governor-general Camilo de Polvieja a gift of, say, homemade rum instead of Tanduay Rhum ? Or of Leon Kilat failing to flush Spanish soldiers out of Fort San Pedro in 1898 because he had loose bowel movement and had to hurry back home to fart to high heavens and take Loperamide?
People who dismissed Ka Bino and Mayor Radaza saw nothing wrong with the commercial because they were not the official keepers of the heroic tradition of Lapu-Lapu; the offense for them was not personal. Consider this: had Mayor Radaza not cried foul over the commercial, what kind of leader would she be seen as by her fellow Oponganons? Should she stand idly by while children bandy about– some perhaps even seriously– that the real reason for the Battle of Mactan in 1521 had nothing to do with a turf war but the wrong diapers, incidentally a modern appurtenance that does nothing after a few hours of use but pollute the environment for centuries?
The lesson from this whole experience is for keepers of heritage to be constantly vigilant as many will attempt to deface if not spoof the past. There is nothing wrong with that for as long as the heritage keepers and culture bearers do not feel offended. If the people and leaders of Lapu-Lapu City see nothing wrong with a historical event being twisted in a funny way to suit the needs of a television commercial, then who are we to cry foul over it? But when the very officials tasked not just with governing their constituents but also of keeping their historic—and heroic—tradition free from parody and blemish raise hell, we must salute them for such a noble act.
This brings me, as an aside, to another lamentation, this time by lawyer Harve Abella, a heritage advocate whose passion is to reinvigorate Cebuano awareness and pride in heroic events that unfolded in 1898. Harve raised hell on Facebook about the suggestion to move the national historical marker placed at the exact spot, now a junction, where the afternoon skirmish between Cebuano Katipuneros led by Leon Kilat and a squad of the Spanish “guardia civil” broke out on April 3, 1898. I agree with Harve that it would be a sacrilege to move the marker to a spot nearby just because the owner won’t sell the property on which the marker stands.
The fact that a national historical marker stands on that spot allows, nay, compels, the Cebu City Historical Affairs Commission (CHAC) and the Cebu City Council to allow Mayor Michael Rama—himself no stranger to celebrating Cebuano heritage—to expropriate the property on which it stands. While I can sympathize with the private owners at the loss of property for them, still, they have to realize that a higher and more noble call has been thrust upon them: to give up that property to allow for a grander and more fitting way by which to remind the present and the future about the freedom against Spain that was attained in 1898 by Cebuanos.
And it is not just this particular property that CHAC should convince the owner to sell. It should be all the properties within at least a 3,000-meter radius with the national marker as base that should be purchased by the city so that if ever a monument to the heroic unfolding of Cebuano patriotism be erected later, there would be enough space for people to sit and ponder on its significance. A park should be built around this spot so that it does not end up like the Cebu Heritage Monument in Parian: so huge but so cramped and so out of place and out of proportion with its surroundings, with cars running at its sides so that people would rather watch the basketball game being played nearby than to pause and ponder about what this humongous structure is doing there.
I wish my friends at CHAC, especially Glenda Gabuya, the executive director, all the best as they find solutions to this ponderous problem of how to reclaim the glory of Tres de Abril. We owe it not just to the descendants of the Katipuneros like Harve Abella but to ourselves as Cebuanos and Filipinos with a sense of history and a respect for the noble actions of those who came before us.