A pleiad of heroes illuminates our history. All of them, of invaluable merits, of proven values, of unrenounceable principles.
Among them, a man of humble origins and similar attitude towards life, the people and the Revolution stands out in a peculiar way: Juan Almeida Bosque, who was born in Havana on February 17, 1927, and who devoted his life to just causes, while he suffered the harshness of discrimination and the rest of the evils of a Republic subordinated to imperial power.
His imprint, as part of the generation that did not allow the Apostle to die in the year of his centenary, also immortalized him in the walls of the Moncada; in the cells of the then wrongly called Model Prison; in the Mexican exile and in the preparation of the struggle; in the Granma, in the guerrilla, in his 3rd Front Dr. Mario Muñoz Monroy, in "that day of January that ended with the unjust".
It is impossible not to think about it, whenever we talk about socialist construction and the defense of its conquests.
But Almeida is, above all, in the heart of his people of "whites and blacks holding hands (...) of fraternity, of the black and the poor redeemed, with the white and the rich equalized"; that people that honors him and assumes that in this land there is no possible surrender. That people that remembers him in the corners chatting in an affable way, worried and occupied by the most diverse situations, and that hums ‘La Lupe’, ‘Este camino largo’, ‘Mejor concluir’, ‘Vuelve pronto’ or any other of his 300 musical compositions, placing him in a place of honor. Almeida is on the hill of La Esperanza, leading his comrades in struggle, where he will be paid homage today.
He also left us, as an indisputable premise, his sensible advice "to those who have the duty to give continuity to our process", remembering "as an eternal combatant, a thought of Maceo: I want to have the glory of having contributed to the good and independence of Cuba, and to carry, with pride, the title of good citizen, which gives brightness and greatness when it is obtained without stain".
