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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. |
