Bayamo, Cuba: Cuba celebrates today the National Rebellion Day, when 66 years have passed of a revolutionary military defeat, of great political resonance, Prensa Latina publishes.

The commemoration will be in this eastern city, full of history and scenery also of those events, which wears its best garments for the occasion.

The dawn of that July 26, 1953, young revolutionaries, under the command of Fidel Castro, assaulted the military fortresses Guillermón Moncada, in Santiago de Cuba, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, in Bayamo, in the centenary year of the birth of the Apostle Jose Marti

The Moncada garrison was the country's second military fortress, occupied by a thousand men and the Céspedes another important garrison.

For Fidel Castro and his comrades in arms, the attack was the way to pay tribute to Martí when his ideology was tainted by the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who ruled the Island since the coup d'etat of March 10, 1952.

The plan was elaborated in absolute secrecy. In addition to Fidel, only two colleagues from the direction of the movement and his person in charge in Santiago de Cuba knew him. The others knew that a decisive combat was going to be carried out, but they did not know exactly what it was.

Despite the wasteful bravery of the attackers, in frank numerical disadvantage and in armament, both actions resulted in a military failure.

The regime reacted with brutal repression. Batista decreed the state of siege in Santiago de Cuba and the suspension of constitutional guarantees throughout the national territory; the newspaper Noticias de Hoy, organ of the Popular Socialist Party closed, and censorship to the press and radio was applied.

The dictator's order was to eliminate 10 revolutionaries for each soldier of the regime fallen in combat. Dozens of the young people who followed Fidel were fiercely murdered. Survivors, including Fidel, prosecuted and sentenced to prison.

Before the court the leader of the rebel movement denounced the crime:

'It was not assassination for a minute, an hour or a whole day, but for a full week, the blows, the torture, the throw from roofs and the shots did not cease for a moment as an instrument of extermination handled by perfect artisans of crime' .

Fidel Castro's self-defense allegation was later known as History Will Absolve me. There he turned from accused to accuser and denounced the evils of the Republic and the hardships of the people.

A million and a half inhabitants over the age of six had no approved school grade. Between the ages of 15 and 19, only 17 percent received some type of education, while the average cultural level of those over 15 did not reach the third.

In the History Will Absolve me, Fidel offered solutions for all this tragedy, based on social programs that the Revolution would develop when it came to power:

"A revolutionary government with the support of the people and the respect of the nation, after cleaning the institutions of corrupt and civil servants, would immediately proceed to industrialize the country," he said in his famous allegation.

That intervention advanced to the nation what would later be the Agrarian Reform, the first of the great revolutionary transformations against landlordism, when arable land was in the hands of a few, in particular US companies:

"A revolutionary government, after settling on its plots as owners the 100 thousand small farmers who pay rents today, would proceed to definitively conclude the land problem."

It would also announce what was accomplished with the conversion of barracks into schools (one of them the Moncada) and the literacy campaign that made Cuba the first country in Latin America and the Caribbean free of illiteracy.

'A revolutionary government would proceed to the integral reform of our teaching ... to prepare the generations that are called to live in a happier homeland. Do not forget the words of the Apostle: (...) 'An educated people will always be strong and free'.

The events of July 26, 1953 were a military defeat, but they were the small engine that started the Cuban Revolution, triumphant just six years later.

As Fidel would say: 'El Moncada taught us to turn setbacks into victories.'

Compartir / Share