July 26: 70 years of a decisive achievement.

I was resting that early morning from the noisy carnival that, in the previous hours, caused insomnia in the Santiago night. Dawn was almost dawn and, while the community was dozing, a trail of Marti’s light was shining on a group of daring young men who, although aware of the risk they were exposing themselves to, were not afraid to offer their lives for the destiny of their country and played a leading role in one of the most effervescent epics of our patriotic history.

The largest of the Antilles was going through one of its most worrisome political and social crises, heightened by the coup d’état that on March 10th, 1952 established the implacable rule of Fulgencio Batista. These mishaps motivated a twenty-year-old Fidel Castro to glimpse in the armed struggle the most successful response against the dictatorship and the opportunity to unify the nation and build a better future for it.

Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo witnessed those libertarian yearnings on July 26th, 1953, when under the command of Fidel himself, Raúl Martínez, Abel Santamaría and Léster Rodríguez, the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Garrisons, as well as the Saturnino Lora Civil Hospital and the Palace of Justice became the eastern points to initiate the guerrilla outbreak against the Batista regime.

Although the courage shown by that group of rebels, both in Bayamon and Santiago, was evidenced by the respective enemy flanks, the superiority in men and weapons of the latter ended up undermining the journey of the insurgent squads and the retreat was the most feasible option for the revolutionaries.

The smile that the East showed in previous days of July was shattered after these events, when Batista’s repressive yoke hid the freedom of some assailants and stained with crimson the existence of many others. The pain seized the virile people who supported them and, once again, in Cuba, injustice trembled with horror.

Today marks seven decades of that Moncadist deed carried out by the Mambises of the Centennial Generation and although it ended up being an unexpected military setback, it was the impulse that the country needed to dismantle Batista’s power, to ensure the revolutionary triumph of the Island and, undoubtedly, the patriotic effluvium that emanates from its legacy was jubilantly absolved by our History.

Written by Yadiel Barbón Salgado.