It is not necessarily the result of selfishness, but rather of instinct, that inner battle that is waged in the mind of every human being when he has to choose between his moral values, his convictions, his principles, and his material possessions.
Although the latter almost always depends on how life has been conducted thanks to the former, it is undeniable the resounding blow that produces in our hearts, almost more than in our brains, a phrase: to lose everything.
However, great is he who stops to define that "everything" and, in the end, above the disjunctive described, recognizes that it is not his material goods that define him in reality, and that this component of life can even become dispensable if at risk is what truly makes up its essence. That intangible half that has no price, nor any possibility of exchange, and that, if lost, can leave us with "nothing", even if we have "everything."
Much courage is needed for such a decision, and much must be the greatness that inhabits a man, a woman, to tip the scales on the side that probably involves supreme sacrifices; but, in the long run, it leaves in the conscience the certainty of what is right, and says more about our worth than the clothes we wear.
We Cubans have much of that as an inheritance, in that symbolic genealogical tree that does not come to us by blood, but by homeland, and that makes us bearers of a sacred testament, signed by those we call founding fathers, and the generational hosts that followed them by merit and leadership.
And for those who still wonder where our courage comes from when our enemies believe that we succumb, where our perseverance comes from if someone coins an impossible task for us, where our strength comes from that sweeps away obstacles when anyone could qualify them as insurmountable.
Let them search in History; there will be no more conclusive answer; because 156 years later, this is still the same people that one day, torch in hand, reduced Bayamo to ashes so as not to surrender it to the enemy.
Times may change, centuries may pass, but that determination remains intact.
