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Viva Cuba libre!
(Long live free Cuba!). That was the war cry throughout the
plains and the mountains, forests and sugarcane fields,
identifying those who began Cuba’s first war of independence
on October 10, 1868.
I would never have imagined I’d be hearing those words
139 years later, coming from the mouth of a president of the
United States. It is as if a king of days gone by, or his
regent, were proclaiming: Viva Cuba Libre!
On the contrary, a Spanish warship drew near the coast
and with its guns destroyed the small sugar mill where
Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared the independence of Cuba
and freed the slaves that he had inherited, just a few
kilometres from the sea.
Lincoln, son of a poor woodcutter, fought all his life
against slavery which was legal in his country almost a
hundred years after the Declaration of Independence.
Clinging to the just idea that all citizens are born free
and equal, making use of his legal and constitutional
rights, he declared the abolition of slavery. Countless
numbers of combatants gave their lives defending this idea
against the rebel slave states in the south of the country.
Lincoln is said to have stated: “You can deceive some
of the people all of the time and all of the people some of
the time, but you can’t deceive all the people all of the
time.”
He died by an assassin’s bullet when, unbeatable at the
polls, he was running for a second term as president.
I am not forgetting that tomorrow on Sunday, it will be
the 48th anniversary of Camilo Cienfuegos'
disappearance at sea, on October 28, 1959, as he was
returning to Havana in a light aircraft from Camaguey
Province, where days earlier just his presence unarmed a
garrison of simple Rebel Army soldiers whose superiors, of a
bourgeois ideology, were attempting to do what almost half a
century later Bush is demanding: rise up in arms against the
Revolution.
Che, in a wonderful introduction to his book
Guerrilla Warfare, states: “Camilo was the comrade of a
100 battles…the selfless combatant who always made sacrifice
an instrument with which to temper his character and to
forge that of the troops...it was he who gave this written
armature here presented the essential vitality of his
personality, of his intelligence and of his audacity,
something which can be achieved in such exact proportions
only in a very few personages in history.”
“Who killed him?”
“We might better wonder: who wiped out his physical
being? Because the lives of men such as he, live on in the
people...The enemy killed him, they killed him because they
wished for his death, they killed him because there are no
safe planes, because pilots cannot have all the experience
they need, because, overburdened with work, he wanted to
reach Havana in a few short hours…in his guerrilla mentality
there could be no impediment to hold back or distort a line
which had been drafted…Camilo and the other Camilos (those
who didn’t arrive and those yet to come) are the indicators
of the strength of the people, they are the highest
expression of what a nation may give, at the ready to defend
its purest ideals and with its faith anchored in the
securing of its noblest goals.”
For all the symbolism in their names, we reply to the
false Mambí:
Long live Lincoln!
Long live Che!
Long live Camilo!
Fidel Castro Ruz
October 27, 2007
7:36 p.m. |
