11 de diciembre de 2024

Radio 26 – Matanzas, Cuba

Emisora provincial de Matanzas, Cuba, La Radio de tu Corazón

Antonio Maceo: Echoes of Baraguá.

His country’s prestige was rapidly diminishing. Collapse was imminent. But he was there to reverse the situation. He alone was capable of maintaining Spain’s dominion over Cuba and he would not let anyone take it away from him.

 

His country’s prestige was rapidly diminishing. The collapse was imminent. But he was there to reverse the situation. He alone was capable of maintaining Spain’s dominion over Cuba and he would not let anyone take it away from him.

Nine years of previous combat had already taken their toll on the island. Exhaustion and fatigue were working against the people. There was a shortage of food, supplies, foreign support, medicines… and the revolutionary unity was fading away, vulnerable to those who were hurting its path.

Thus Arsenio Martinez Campos began his pacification process in Cuba, winning supporters to whom he promised peace and national economic relief, but without independence or the abolition of slavery.

His actions were consolidated on February 10th, 1878 when, using political-ideological trickery and taking advantage of the physical decadence of his adversaries, he signed the shameful Zanjón Pact, where he granted his nation the destiny of ours and strengthened his military offensive while the emancipation of the largest of the Antilles hung in the balance.

But the military arrogance with which he deprived of freedom to an island reluctant to the colonial yoke, was decorously snatched away by a young man from Santiago full of libertarian blood who confronted him on March 15th in the eastern Mangos de Baragua.

Martinez Campos was well aware of the growing journey of the insurgent Antonio Maceo Grajales but he always believed himself superior to him and, to his surprise, the Iberian military chief was little worth the use of pleonasms and flattery to persuade the consent of the Mambi titan, because the servile answer that, regarding the future of the homeland he expected, came to him converted into a resounding denial.

Maceo was not alone in his feat. His host included, among others, his brother José, Félix and Fernando Figueredo, Guillermo Moncada, Flor Crombet, Silverio del Prado, Modesto Fonseca, Leonardo del Mármol and Manuel Calvar.

And race mattered little on that day, because the slavery that Campos stubbornly protected, was overthrown by the whites, blacks, free mulattos and former slaves who gathered there and who, as in ’68, joined Céspedes for the libertarian cause.

The nobility, military intransigence and courage of that group of men commanded by the Bronze Titan against the Zanjón Pact, constitutes a reference for all generations of Cubans who, in admiration and evocation of its protagonists, extrapolate the patriotic decorum and fidelity towards the Cuban revolutionary vanguard, because that sword that we dropped in a painful Zanjón, we extol it with a dignified, illustrious and eternal Baraguá.

…ONLINE AUDIO

Written by Yadiel Barbón Salgado.

 

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