The price of freedom: the tragedy of June 30th, 1957.

The painful connotation of the events that took place on Sunday, June 30th, 1957 in Santiago de Cuba still provokes consternation in an island that lost three of its most devoted sons on that day.

The painful connotation of the events that took place on Sunday, June 30th, 1957 in Santiago de Cuba still provokes consternation in an island that lost three of its most devoted sons on that day.

With the intention of undermining the growing action of the armed urban struggle in the country, the henchmen of the tyranny, arrogant and arbitrary, massacred the young Josué País García, Floro Vistel Somodevilla and Salvador Pascual Salcedo, members of the 26th of July Revolutionary Movement.

Determined to perpetuate his stay in power and to diminish, in the public eye, both the popular repudiation of his mandate and the insurgent fervor that was brewing in the nation, Fulgencio Batista organized a rally with his cronies that Sunday afternoon in the city’s Céspedes Park, whose surroundings he surrounded with members of his repressive corps to avoid any possible inconvenience.

But the rebel movement was not going to stand idly by and, despite the risk run by Frank País, due to his condition of head of the clandestine anti-dictatorial resistance, Josué, his younger brother, would follow his orders over the radio to carry out small explosions and acts of repudiation in other areas of the city.

The signal was not received by Josué, who still left with his comrades Floro and Salvador in a vehicle that, after an atrocious chase, was intercepted at the corner of Martí and Crombet streets and inside which País García’s companions were shot. He, for his part, seriously wounded, was taken to another car where a shot in the temple, on orders of the murderer José María Salas Cañizares, put an end to his existence.

The offspring of Francisco País and Rosario García was only 19 years old and his revolutionary companions, Vistel Somodevilla and Pascual Salcedo, who did not hesitate for a second in sacrificing their lives to put an end to the despotic and criminal Batista regime and whose legacy continues to be remembered with deep respect and admiration by the Cuban people, almost seven decades after the fateful day in which they perished for the future of the Homeland, were 23 years old.

Written by Yadiel Barbón Salgado.