"Peoples, like men, have hours of heroic virtue".
José Martí on April 10th
That only six months after being in the Cuban fields, fighting against Spanish colonialism, the great men and women of the war met to dream of a country, to debate on its form of government, to consolidate a nation, to write a Constitution, shows the longing for homeland and freedom that overflowed in Guáimaro, that April 1869.
The war was not going through a good moment: Bayamo and other towns that had been taken in the first months of the war were once again in Spanish hands. The complicated context did not prevent them from carrying out a unique process, up to that moment, in the independence struggles of Latin America.
There were contradictions and the previous contacts between Ignacio Agramonte and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes were not enough to prevent the divergent points from putting in tension that first attempt of revolutionary institutionality. But beyond the differences, in Guáimaro, collective interests prevailed over individual ones. It was more important for Cuba to be united than divided by regions.
Unity, based on the principles that were defended on April 10th, have defined Cuba in more than 155 years of battle against colonialism. It is not for nothing that the leader of the Revolution, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, called to defend it last January 1st. Unity is and will continue to be the main conquest of this people.
Constitutions are daughters of their time. The Guáimaro Constitution was heir to a history that goes back to the first people who thought of the Cuban nation and, moreover, transcends its time. Following that constitutionalist tradition, even in the most difficult moments, five years ago Cuba proclaimed a Magna Carta that also drank from those that emerged in the manigua, so that today's constitution defends guarantees and ensures the construction and irrevocability of socialism
