identity keys

The tragic accidents that have occurred in recent months—such as the one at the Hotel Saratoga and the one at the supertanker base in Matanzas—incite us to reflect on what we are, that is, to delve into the complex network of factors that have shaped the profile of our identity, inscribed in the intangible realm of spirituality.

A deep connoisseur of our history, Fidel always trusted the people. With its painful toll of victims and despite the apparent defeat, the Moncada constituted, above all, a call to recover faith in the possibility of conquering dreams always postponed, through a strategy based on armed struggle.

In trusting his people, Fidel was not mistaken, because he never conceived it as an abstract entity, but rather as a living body immersed in the dialectic of history. That vision was clearly expressed in History will absolve me.

What had been initiated by a small minority achieved, in a short time, the growing support of a majority sector. In full euphoria after the triumph of January 1959 he announced that the most difficult thing was yet to be done. In dialogue with the people, he faced the attack on Playa Girón, the October Crisis and the signs that announced the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union.

The nation began to forge during the wars for independence. In La Demajagua, with a single cut, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes cut the Gordian knot that tied us to colonialism. He proclaimed independence and freed the slaves from him. In increasing progression, from 1968 until the war organized by Martí, blacks and mestizos reached high military ranks, although many of them were unjustly relegated. From the experience of marooning, practices were derived to ensure survival in the mambise camps, often reduced to conditions of extreme precariousness.

The invasion from East to West fractured the fence that separated the two territories, Cuba A and Cuba B, according to the denomination of Juan Pérez de la Riva. In the West, the sacrarocracy had established its economic power on the basis of sugar production. Annexationist temptations lurked within it, inspired by the desire to find a secure market in the neighboring country.

Defeated by the mambises, behind the backs of the Cubans, the empire in decline handed over the domain of the island to the expanding imperialism. The Platt Amendment was the legal instrument that protected, with far-reaching supplementary measures, the application in Cuba of the first neocolonial formula.

As the demographic data shows, the country was in ruins. To the effects of years of struggle, the disastrous consequences of the brutal reconcentration imposed by Valeriano Weyler were added.

At this dramatic juncture, North American companies, led by United Fruit, acquired with a few cents immense territories in the eastern part of the country, where they installed large sugar mills, displaced settlers and small farmers and entrenched the deforming effects of the plantation economy. . It was not enough. They implemented the Commercial Reciprocity Treaty, which Manuel Sanguily opposed bravely, lucidly and with a solid argument that would be worth rescuing. We had become a single-producer country, chaining its destiny to a single market.

However, the Cubans did not give up. During half a century of the neocolonial Republic, the combat continued under different forms of political struggle, of organization of popular forces: peasants, workers, students, women, intellectuals. The ideology of yesteryear remained enriched by the renewal of thought, by the work of historians, made collective memory through public school teachers. Also for the research of social scientists, ethnographers and for an artistic creation with a national accent, crystallization of high aesthetic values. All this makes up a story about which there is much to tell and has no place in this short space.

In the 1950s, the neocolonial Republic was doomed to a terminal political and economic crisis, as demonstrated by the study carried out by the Truslow Commission, invited by President Carlos Prío Socarrás. Some neighborhoods in Havana—Vedado, Miramar, the Country Club—displayed an illusory facade of well-being that masked the profound reality of the island, a characteristic feature of all underdeveloped countries. But, in such an adverse scenario, life continued to beat in the intangible space of the spiritual, refuge of dreams and values.

Ethereal, flexible and resistant as a steel thread, amalgamation of objective and subjective factors, of the I and the us, spirituality is the residence of the soul, synonymous with life, the generating nucleus of the meaning of existence, of our identity and of our values. . It escapes from our lips only when we exhale the last breath.

A hard struggle weighs on our daily life, traversed by difficulties that seem to multiply in the course of each day. Manifestations of behaviors that lacerate our social project also emerge. But when major events shake us, the throbbing soul of “an energetic and virile people” is revealed. As a powerful metaphor for the mystery of the island, when the 14 disappeared in the Matanzas disaster were buried, a rainbow lit up the city sky.

identity keys