A Mambí with his foot always “in the stirrup” On the occasion of Raul’s 90th birthday, Cubans recall his loyalty to the Revolution and service to the homeland, as Fidel said, an extraordinary cadre who happened to be a brother
Author: Juan Antonio Borrego | internet@granma.cu june 3, 2021 09:06:00
Photo: Estudios Revolución When on July 26, 1953 Raul Castro snatched the pistol wielded by a Batista police chief attempting to take him prisoner in the Santiago de Cuba Court and pointed the gun at his would-be captors, in less than a second he radically changed the course of the history he was living, saving not only his life and those of his comrades, but also a piece of the Revolution that had begun to take shape that very day.
Fidel spoke of his loyalty and service to the homeland at the First Party Congress, when he recalled that in the Revolution “nepotism cannot and will never exist,” but that sometimes “two cadres get together,” and that Raul, beyond being an extraordinary cadre, happened to be his brother.
Something very similar was recalled by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, upon assuming the position of Party First Secretary, when he evoked Raúl’s immeasurable contribution to the Revolution, from the Moncada and the Sierra to the process of continuity that he prepared, conducted and led, always on the basis of loyalty and modesty.
This is the same altruism described by Nikolai Leonov in his biography Raul Castro, a Man in Revolution, when he came across a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to his literary project: His hero, also his friend, does not seek publicity, “he rather avoids it,” Leonov stated.
When the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the socialist camp fell like a curse on Cuba, and the usual enemies began to rub their hands in glee, he made no apologies for the Revolution, assuring his people, as he had already proven in the luminous days of the Second Front, that resistance was possible; and in the long run he was right: it was possible and is possible.
This was not the last difficult test. He faced the death of Vilma, his companion in all battles, and Fidel’s illness, that obliged him to assume positions to which he never aspired.
At the head of the country, he did his job, not allowing the blockade to prevent him from looking to the future and undertaking the updating of our socio-economic model; renegotiating foreign debt and promoting non-state forms of management; achieving the release of the Cuban Five and leading talks with the United States; while supporting transcendental laws for the country and leading the democratic process of drafting the new Constitution of the Republic.
He has done more than enough to earn some rest, but always the guerillero, he told Cubans last April 16 that, as long as he lived, he will be ready “with his foot in the stirrup,” a phrase that, for a people who know him well, needs no translation.
Felicita Díaz-Canel a Raúl con motivo de su 90 cumpleaños El General de Ejército ‒quien es un referente para cualquier comunista y revolucionario cubano‒, o Raúl, como cariñosamente le llama nuestro pueblo, arriba este 3 de junio a su 90 cumpleaños
Autor: Maylenis Oliva Perrales | internet@granma.cu 3 de junio de 2021 12:06:10
Diaz Canel y Raul Foto: Estudios Revolución Con la admiración y el respeto a un líder intachable y la honrosa responsabilidad de darle continuidad a su obra en Revolución, el Primer Secretario del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba y Presidente de la República, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, felicitó hoy al General de Ejército, Raúl Castro Ruz, por su 90 cumpleaños. «Felicidades Raúl así como cariñosamente lo llama el pueblo. Y también General de Ejército, referente para cualquier comunista y revolucionario cubano», escribió en su cuenta en Twitter Díaz-Canel, quien también resaltó en otros tuit los valores éticos y morales del mejor discípulo de Fidel, cuyos aportes a la defensa de la nación y al proceso de perfeccionamiento y actualización del modelo económico y social cubano constituyen baluartes imperecederos para la Patria.
The U.S. government, an accomplice of terrorists, accuses Cuba of terrorism Biden maintains brutal policy toward Cuba, following the steps of previous administrations and resorting to the most fallacious, absurd arguments to justify U.S. aggression
Author: Delfin Xiqués | xiques@granma.cu may 28, 2021 10:05:00 The political intolerance of an empire that has witnessed a Revolution taking place under its nose has hardened to the extent that – after 62 years of Cuba’s heroic resistance – the most fallacious and absurd arguments are deployed to justify the hostility, including accusations linking Cuba to terrorism, a scourge that the island has in fact suffered at the hands of self-confessed terrorists to whom the U.S. government has provided financing, logistics and immunity. Is it really necessary to recount the criminal U.S. record against Cuba? Apparently another repetition is needed, although its promoters in the immoral north are well aware of the history.
INTENT ON DESTROYING THE REVOLUTION, AT ANY COST
One of the first terrorist attacks against the nascent Revolution occurred on October 21, 1959. On that day, a traitor pilot exiled in Miami, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, who had been an officer in the Cuban Air Force, flying a twin-engine B-25, bombed several Havana neighborhoods, causing 45 injuries and the death of two persons.
Diaz Lanz himself would later confirm his responsibility for the attack. With full impunity and protection from U.S. authorities, he departed from Pompano Beach, Florida, where no one created any obstacle to his plans.
Thus began the terrorist war against Cuba, sponsored by the U.S. government and conceived as state policy, fully documented and denounced by Cuba in international forums.
A wide variety of political, military, economic, biological, diplomatic, psychological, propaganda, espionage and sabotage methods have been utilized in the attacks. Armed gangs have also been organized and logistically supported, while desertion has been encouraged and plots hatched to assassinate leaders of the Revolution.
Numerous declassified secret documents provide evidence of these crimes, along with the millions of dollars approved annually for this purpose, an amount which is published in the media as just another line item in the government budget, behind the backs of taxpayers, who are largely unaware of the allocation’s final destination.
Behind the neon lights of 1950s Cuba Counterrevolutionaries long for an era that never was
Raúl Antonio Capotemay 25, 2021 09:05:47
The poverty and abandon in which the majority of campesinos lived were among the dire realities faced, and transformed, by the nascent
Revolution. Photo: Korda, Alberto Whenever the media at the service of the U.S. government, the corporate press or the network of counterrevolutionary digital sites refer to pre-1959 Cuba, they paint a picture of a country that never was.
They present a magazine photo, something fit for commercial advertising, and since they are desperately attempting to sell us a return to that “golden era,” they must get rid of everything in their way, sweeping away, one by one, all the steps taken by the Revolution to uphold the dignity of the people, returning our fields and cities to the social reality overcome by the Rebel Army victory of 1959.
What was lurking behind the neon lights of Cuba in the 1950s?
Behind the commercial scenery ran the blood left by the Batista dictatorship’s crimes, committed by institutions that served as models for repression in Latin America, including the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities (BRAC), the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), the Naval Intelligence Service (SIN), the Maritime Police, the Bureau of Investigations and the National Police, true academies of torture and death.
Havana was a paradise, yes, but for the mafias controlling gambling, alcohol, drug and prostitution in a kingdom of impunity that grew as a “sin city,” alongside Las Vegas, with great advantages over the pearl of Nevada.
What happened in Havana stayed in Havana. There was no popular site without a drug stash, a gambling table, and prostitutes on hand.
Dazzling hotels and casinos were built with the country’s money, and the profits they generated were sent daily to the United States. It was a big “bisnes” thanks to Batista, the strong man who protected every scheme to fleece the people, using public financing for dirty businesses that were of absolutely no use to them.
Among the great public works that are featured today in anti-Cuba propaganda, allegedly indicative of the success of the bourgeois republic, many were based on corruption. State funds were given to companies owned by the regime’s authorities, who received millions of pesos for projects that cost thousands.
Batista reaped 35% of all “transactions,” that is, 35% of absolutely all spurious profits from corruption.
In this “marvelous” Cuba, thousands of people occupied positions in ministries and were paid without lifting a finger. This was the famous “free ride” instituted in the republic, appointments made as payment for favors, political commitments, etc.
While the capital was filled with casinos and dream hotels, cathedrals to deceit and fraud, the other side of the city lived in painfully extreme poverty.
Hundreds of miserable slums were erected. Las Yaguas, the Cueva del Humo and so many other destitute neighborhoods grew in the shadow of the new ostentatious constructions.
In the neighborhood of Las Yaguas, as can be seen in the magazine Bohemia, thousands of families lived in subhuman conditions, sheltered under palm fronds, used by the cigar industry to wrap tobacco leaves, and recycled as walls and roofs after they were discarded outside factories.
Girls from the countryside were tricked into traveling to the capital, to be exploited in the infamous prostitution belt that served hotels, casinos and cabarets.
The island paradise belonged to Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, Amleto Battisti Lora, Joe Stassi, Amadeo Barletta and Fulgencio Batista; five capos, one president, all in one and the same mafia.
The Sicilian Santo Trafficante, second in command of the so-called Havana Empire, the visible head of U.S. mafia operations in Cuba, with his headquarters in the Sans Souci cabaret, beginning in the 1930s took charge of bringing in cocaine from the Colombian city of Medellin and heroin from Marseilles.
For these trafficking operations, they founded airline companies in Cuba that flew in and out of military airports, serviced with equipment and by technicians from the Cuban air force, protected by the army and the national police. Havana was also the most important money laundering center in the Americas.
The Cuba which the counterrevolution presents toady as “a developed country,” was more accurately documented in the 1953 census, which determined that 68.5% of campesinos lived in miserable huts with palm roofs and dirt floors, 85% had no running water and 54% lacked any type of sanitary services.
Only 11% of families consumed milk, 4% meat and 2% eggs; 44% were illiterate, and, according to the National Economic Council, some 738,000 persons were unemployed – in a population of six million.
Almost 3,000,000 Cubans had no access to electricity, since the infrastructure reached only 56% of the country.
When the Revolution triumphed, there were 600,000 children without schools and 10,000 teachers without jobs. One and a half million inhabitants over six years of age had no schooling, barely 17% of young people between 15 and 19 years of age received any kind of education and the population over 15 years of age had an average educational level below the third grade.
In the cities, one out of every five inhabitants could not read or write; in the countryside, one out of every two campesinos was illiterate, and the few schools that existed were abandoned.
Only 20% of the arable land was cultivated, while 60% of the food was imported from the USA. More than half of the best land in the country was in foreign hands, and the properties of the United Fruit and West Indian companies stretched from the north coast all the way to the southern coastline of the former Oriente province.
According to data from Inter Press Service (ips), when the Revolution took power, the nation’s housing stock was seriously deteriorated, given the severe shortage of dwellings, notable differences between the countryside and the city, the variability of the materials used and the existence of poverty belts in the main cities, especially Havana. A 1953 study, coordinated by the U.S. Census Bureau, concluded that only 13% of homes could be considered in good condition.
In the capital, existing on the one hand was an ostentatious waterfront with exclusive bourgeoisie housing developments, luxurious apartment buildings and lavish residences, and on the other, huge areas of poor neighborhoods.
Given the conditions of economic underdevelopment that plagued Cuba, water resources were poorly administered. Of the 300 settlements with more than 1,000 inhabitants, only 114 had water distribution aqueducts and 12 had sewage systems.
At the beginning of 1959, 16 chlorination facilities were in operation and, of the four water treatment plants in Camagüey, Santa Clara, Palma Soriano and Cienfuegos, two lacked the required chemicals and one had not been operating for three years.
Havana’s sewage system was almost 50 years old and totally inadequate.
The only sewage treatment plant, located in Santa Clara, was abandoned, and sewage systems in Holguín, Guantánamo and Pinar del Río had been under construction for several years.
There were only 13 small reservoirs in the nation, located in Camagüey, Las Villas, Holguín and Santiago de Cuba.
This collection of facts, of course, does not match the commercial restoration presented by those who yearn for a return to the 50s, accepted by the naive who “swallow” the deception. Nor will they acknowledge that the cause of all this was Cuba’s status as a neocolony of the United States, a condition that plunged the country into the most brutal levels of underdevelopment and dependence, at the mercy of an oligarchy of military assassins, corrupt authorities and organized crime.
Nor will the restorers admit that the miserable reality suffered on the island was the driving force behind the warmth the people felt for the guerrilla insurgents in the mountains, fighting for a radical revolution in the country – the same Revolution that is today undefeated, heroically resisting, and aspiring to a prosperity obstructed by those who desire and invoke it, at the cost of selling the entire nation and our dignity, as was the case in the 50s they long for.
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