Stella Calloni
Cuba has been the heart and beacon of Latin America since the beginning of 1959, when we saw those who some called the bearded “angels” come down from the Sierra Maestra mountain range, who had accomplished the greatest feat in our history, defeating the imperial power in the middle of the 20th century, only 90 miles from its coasts, starting a true revolution, overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista, imposed, armed, advised and maintained by the United States.
We fell in love from that unique moment, when the owners of economic and political power fled in a hurry to Miami – refuge of the dictators of the entire region – with the army and police surrendered to that revolutionary army that replaced firepower with the imagination and love that inspired their cause.
This was and is the historical continuity of the independence and anti-colonial process marked by the Montecristi Manifesto of José Martí and Máximo Gómez in 1898, which reappeared in brilliant form in History Will Absolve Me, the text with which Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz defended himself as a lawyer before the executioners of his country, announcing that he was facing a true path of definitive liberation.
That is what the generations of that time fell in love with, with that process of inspiring struggle for the peoples subjected to colonialism and its consequences.
And then we continued to fall in love with the giant steps taken since the revolutionary triumph, the audacity and imagination at the service of liberation and justice, the eternal dream come true there in a small Caribbean island defeating the imperial power of the world that to dominate our peoples has imposed on us the terrorism that is in its essence and that we have all suffered in our region, where we continue to cradle our dead, the millions of brothers who succumbed to the violence imposed by the oppressor and by the misery and hunger before the ruthless plundering of our wealth.
Cuba built a real independence under the constant and merciless attack of the imperial power, from the first days of the triumphant revolution, surrounded by brutal dictatorships in Central America and the Caribbean.
The triumph of the revolutionaries took place after the Second World War with the creation in 1947 of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) already with illegal attributes, and one of whose first actions was the assassination of Colombian leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, followed by multitudes, continuing with the support of all the dictatorships in the region, which led to the infiltration and diversion of the liberation project of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement of Bolivia in 1952, the invasion of Guatemala promoted by the empire against the popular government of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in 1954.
In order to invade Guatemala, they militarily occupied Honduras and having created the Southern Command in the Panama Canal Zone, they realized that our America was considered their colonial territory by Washington,
They created the Organization of American States (OAS), in Bogota Colombia as a true “ministry of colonies” in the midst of the outbreak of the Colombian people in that April 1948, victim of violence since those days that lasts until today and that began a devastating path for our region.
The fact that in the 1950s, the U.S. ambassador-at-large, Spruille Braden, was the first U.S. ambassador to Colombia. The fact that in the 1950s, the US Ambassador-at-Large Spruille Braden was the key figure in Washington’s actions in Bolivia in 1952, in Guatemala in 1954 and in Argentina against the popular government of General Juan Domingo Perón, overthrown in a second term by a military coup for which they formed the so-called Democratic Unity, installing the “Liberating Revolution” a dictatorship, which the people called the “fusillade” succeeded by a series of new dictatorial regimes, The Cuban revolution did not frighten the combatants of the Sierra Maestra, whose epic rebellion had wonderful, magical, hard and painful moments in its development, but never left behind the decision to maintain their dream of justice, sovereignty, dignity and demonstrate, without arrogance, the possibility of definitive liberation, resisting hour by hour, day by day.
The Cuban revolution has been resisting for more than 60 years, being the greatest example not only of the dignity of a people and a leadership, which to this day resists the longest war siege in the history of mankind, such as the blockade.
A resistance that amazes the world by achieving the first great victory in 1961: defeating an attempted military invasion by the United States and its mercenaries in Playa Giron two years after the revolutionary triumph. Another heroic epic,
That terrorist empire has always led wars, installed dictatorships one after another, invasions, occupations, genocides throughout the last two centuries.
But Cuba is still standing, and having been totally isolated, it is today a leading power in health, education, academic training, cultural irradiation, revolutionary justice, resisting genocide, with solidarity, imagination, without abandoning its principles, when they try to impose unconditional surrender through hunger by applying all forms of terrorism.
I ask myself how not to make entire generations fall in love, especially in our countries, victims of terror and plunder, condemning our peoples to subordination, through governments that deliver us bound hand and foot.
We have resisted, our communities of native peoples have resisted for five centuries, victims of a true holocaust, which nobody mentions as such, and of more than 200 years of supposed independence, which we have not yet achieved in our region.
Only Cuba is there in the Caribbean, paying every day the cost of its independence, distributing solidarity without distinctions, putting within our reach knowledge and scientific research, sending teachers and doctors, who are also part of the intensity and revolutionary depth of solidarity.
Today more than ever, in the dark wasteland and in the chaos of irrational hatred that is sown, with the criminal return of colonial wars, of destruction and death, when the fierce face of the empire shows itself without masks, in its inevitable decadence. “Our Cuba” shines in a merciless world and blows us the strength of love and dignity like air, the oxygen we need to live and an unwavering revolutionary morality.
How can we not fall in love with that fountain of love, with the eternally extended hand, with that island where the most important universal figure of our history emerged, our Fidel and his comrades in struggle like Ernesto CHE Guevara, whose face resorts the roads of the world in the hands of millions of young people, and a leadership that continues to stand firm with a people over whom a blockade is applied, which is a crime against humanity.
I have been in very difficult times in Cuba, and I have surrendered to the love with which the people always receive us and share with us their humble table and their dignity, but especially, their creative imagination to survive such an imperial scourge, without surrendering.
When asked why we love Cuba, simple words emerge, the only ones that can give transparency to the language of communication with our peoples, who in the most hidden places of our territories continue to resist invisibilized, barefoot, helpless, also without surrendering, maintaining their dignity and their ancestral cultures.
In Cuba we always find the response of solidarity, the hand that mitigates pains and storms, the open smile, the joy and peace that becomes life and not empty slogans. For this and much more we love Cuba.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 