The Granma edition of Monday, December 18, reported that the Coral Award to best fiction film was awarded to Alanis, a production of Argentinean filmmaker Anahí Berneri. At the same time, the award corresponding to the vote of the public was won by Cuban movie Sergio y Serguéi by director Ernesto Daranas.
As published in this digital website of Federación de Radioaficionados de Cuba (FRC), in this movie, the leading character is a Cuban radio amateur that contacts the MIR space station and an exchange occurs between both operators, giving rise to a friendship that will help them face the changes occurring in their respective countries in the decade of the 1990s.
It is true that the radio amateurs established this type of contact, as explained by Daranas, and we know that perfectly, but what the movie tells is a total fiction built based on those referents, where the leading characters of Sergio & Serguéi, played by Tomás Cao and Héctor Noa, recreate it in the movie.
In the previous article we were left with a question: To know the identity of Sergio, the radio amateur that on August 19, 2016, wrote in the Cuban television portal: Hello, my name is Sergio. Im Cuban, I studied in the USSR, Im a radio amateur and I had regular QSOs with Musa Manarov and Serguéi Krikalev during their MIR missions
Quite a few readers called me or wrote important descriptions about this radio amateur, whose identity we already discovered, and we know that he no longer belongs to FRC nor lives in Cuba. His name is Sergio González Blanco, Sergito, who first operated as CM2VV and during the time of the contacts with MIR, as CO2VV. According to José Ángel Amador (CO2JA). Sergito also made QSOs through the first satellites and was very active in Oscar 10 and Oscar 13. He studied in the former URSS, is fluent in Russian, but physically, he looks nothing like Tomás Cao.
José Ángel (CO2JA), recalling those QSOs, commented: Sergito, taking advantage of his command of Russian, built a friendship by radio with several radio amateur cosmonauts. I remember his QSOs with Musa Manarov, with whom I also spoke, and later with Serguei Krikalev
A valuable testimony that I received, as the previous one, was from Jesús González (CO2JG), who commented the following:
The radio amateur that wrote is, without a doubt, Sergio González (CO2VV), the person that inspired the story. A telecommunications engineer graduated in the USSR, he has been without a doubt, one of the more technically talented and innovative Cuban radio amateurs.
At the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s, he not only held regular QSOs with the MIR station with radio amateur cosmonauts Musa Manarov and Serguei Krikaliev, after being the first Cuban to do so, but for many years, he was also one of the pioneers in putting Cuba in the amateur radio satellite scene, practically since these were available, also in the installation of the first VHF amateur radio repeater in Cuba, in the use of digital modes, in the establishment of the first multi-port node and the first packet radio BBS in Cuba, and more. Im attaching a newspaper clipping of that time and copy of MIR QSL cards.
Mario Eduardo (CO2EP) also confirmed, with similar arguments, that without a doubt, it is Sergio González, formerly CO2VV, who became a member of FRC at the same time that he did and was always a very active and proficient radio amateur.
Nevertheless, achieving that the work of radio amateurs becomes the theme of a film is a fact that we must admire, regardless of the opinions that the movie can generate once we see it, since it was presented in the framework of last New Latin American Film International Festival. We hope to be able to see the movie soon.
Our sincere thanks to those that contributed with the FRC information system so that we could come back to this subject and our commitment so that their testimony reaches those youths that are now leading the Satellite Operations Group (abbreviated GROS in Spanish).
Joel Carrazana Valdés (CO6JC),
FRC information system.
Also available in Español (Spanish).