Examples of where to drink (today, tomorrow, always) to never bow the knee submissively, the history of Cuba can offer as many as we wish to current and future generations.
There is Hatuey, unbreakable among the flames of the bonfire; a teenager named José Martí, tougher than the mistreatment of the prison in the quarries; Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, affirming that Oscar, his vilely murdered offspring, is not his only son because all Cubans who have died for freedom are; Máximo Gómez, identical before the viciousness with which his adored Panchito was murdered; Mella, turned into a ball of... man while his heart pretends to stop; Abel Santamaría, looking to the future with more vision and dignity than those who plucked out his eyes so that he would betray...
February 24 also marks a landmark for any and all days of the calendar.
Year 1895. If the real hard men (José Martí, Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo...) were "dizzy" because of the disunion that put an end to the Ten Years' War, or because of the blow that meant the confiscation, by the United States, of three ships with weapons and supplies to restart the Necessary War against the Spanish Metropolis in Cuba, history would be a shame.
But José Martí had already founded a Cuban Revolutionary Party (precisely to unite, as its organ: the newspaper Patria) and, in a display of discretion and intelligence, he sent the order for the uprising to the island.
Spain must have been stunned. It was not only Baire. The Cry (thus, in capital letters) shook many places, especially in eastern Cuba, including some in Matanzas and Las Villas. Who would have dared to say that all was lost?
Weeks later, as the great ones do, Martí and Gómez disembarked at Playita de Cajobabo, in a dark night, rowing on a boat. He who harangues must lead. A beautiful lesson for anyone who leads... at least in Cuba.
Of course, that February 24 comes as a ring to our finger today. Not to rise up against ourselves (for all the calamities that the visceral hatred of U.S. policy heaps on us, without ignoring what we have not done well), but against everything that subtly or openly seeks to divide us, divide us, weaken us, confront us as if we were not all brothers, the same family, under the same roof and in the same courtyard.
To get even for "Baire", Valeriano Weyler applied a brutal human reconcentration, in camps that could very well be the embryo of those designed later by Hitler. Diseases, starvation, extreme suffering, death... none of this could break the Cuban; on the contrary. Thank you history, by golly.
It would be an unforgivable superficiality to underestimate the very complex situation we are going through today, in the midst of the "re-concentration" (isolation, asphyxiation) that the empire continues to try to impose on us.
My question is whether we are going to surrender, to let our knees bend, due to the effects of the lack of fuel, technological obsolescence or insufficient generating capacity, consequent blackouts, food shortages as never before, prices that disrespect honest wages and so many other adversities, including the "son" that not a few want to dance to without sweating their shirt off and without contributing.
It is not sensible, logical, healthy or fair with our own history or with that divine February 24, a date chosen many years later (1976) to proclaim the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba and to endorse, from Punta a Cabo, in 2019, the Magna Carta that shelters us today.
