Santiago de Cuba -Santiagueros of all ages and sectors -representing millions of Cubans and friends from the rest of the world- came to Santiago de Cuba to witness the political act and the military ceremony in commemoration of the 172nd anniversary of his birth, at the Santa Ifigenia Patrimonial Cemetery, in the Hero City.
Floral offerings on behalf of Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution; of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez; of the president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, Esteban Lazo Hernández; and one on behalf of the Cuban people, were placed at the funeral monument.
In tune with the Master’s doctrines, it was ratified “the Latin Americanist and anti-imperialist character of the Cuban Revolution, and its marked commitment with all and for the good of all”, expressed Adriana Alvarez Legrá, president of the Organization of José Martí Pioneers in the territory.
Participating in the ceremony were members of the Central Committee of the Party, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the political organization, and Ernesto Santiesteban Velázquez, head of the Department for the Attention to the ujc and the mass organizations of the Party.

ARTILLERY SALVOS IN HONOR OF THE TEACHER

In the Santa Ifigenia Patrimonial Cemetery, in Santiago de Cuba, and in the San Carlos de La Cabaña Fortress, in Havana, around 12 noon, artillery salute ceremonies were held in honor of the 172nd anniversary of the birth of the Apostle.
The salute was a sign of the strength of the people and celebrated the immortal legacy of the most universal Cuban, inspiration to continue the struggle for justice and freedom.

One more year of the Revolution has begun and the Cuban people are highlighting their heroism in the midst of difficulties and shortages caused, in the first instance, by the giant of the seven leagues, whose commercial, economic and financial blockade has become a merciless aggression that limits and obstructs the development of the country. Added to this are the losses caused by natural disasters, as well as the consequences of mistakes made by ourselves in our journey along the hard and challenging road that means the construction of socialism.
We continue to bet on the alternative of a model that promulgates anti-values such as individualism, selfishness, the exaltation of the material, and the consumption of the most degrading products of the human condition. We continue to choose socialism and swim against the current to defeat in Cuba all vestiges of capitalism.
In the midst of an alarming crisis, the terrible drama of post-modernity and neo-liberal globalization, the de-ideologization and the cracking of a socialist conscience (circumstances and powerful forces directly threaten it), it is the duty of Cuban revolutionaries to sow ideas, to sow conscience, to act with the example and ethics of the Revolution, strengthening the socialist ideology. It is essential, above all, in the midst of the humanistic chaos we live in, in which (media and social networks impact aside), the banal, the ethically reprehensible, and the deliberate and irresponsible consumption of contents that destroy the best of the human being, that manipulate and dominate his mind and, worst of all, alienate him, prevail.
I believe it is very necessary to return to José Martí’s pedagogical testament (his last letter to María Mantilla, in April 1895): “Much store, little soul. He who has much inside, needs little outside. He who carries much outside, has little inside, and wants to conceal the little. He who feels his beauty, the inner beauty, does not look outside for borrowed beauty: he knows he is beautiful, and beauty casts light.”
Cuba is being mercilessly attacked. The media campaigns, the offensive memes, the false news, the fascist persecution of patriots and revolutionaries, the dismantling of our true history, and the cultural attack on our people to fracture our national identity, are just a sample of the criminal rampage of Yankee imperialism.
And there are those who cry out for death and destruction. This is not a confrontation of ideas, of thought, in which despite the discrepancies -these, even welcome, if they go hand in hand with an ethical and decent posture- there are things so sacred that not even in the worst of the worst of the assumptions one imagines that they will be sullied.
On occasions they have dared to offend the Apostle of Independence. One does not violate what means so much to the soul of the Homeland. One does not stain the soul of the Homeland. To offend Martí and the symbolic construction of this people, which is indeed heroic and has known how to choose its path, is an absolutely despicable act. What the people want endures in Cuba; what a selfish and immoral group has always fallen, has always fallen.
José Martí would never have served them to legitimize such behaviors; José Martí did not share with treason, with those who hate and undo. A man of integrity and integrity would never approve of servility, neo annexationist positions. He fought against annexation, he warned of the danger of submission to the Yankee empire. Martí did good, he still does, his policy was always virtuous, his choice was to cast his lot with the poor of the earth.
REDEEMING LIGHT
However, let us not think that the real confrontation is against those who act in this way. It is others who are thinking about how to destroy Cuba, how to put an end to the Revolution and socialism, how to bury our identity. A war is being waged against us, undermining the most genuine bases of our revolutionary process is their key; undermining us from within, attacking our symbolic space, making us believe that the solution to our problems is there, on the other side.
There is a very clear plan: to divide us, to cut off our conscience, to strip us of our critical capacity, to make us selfish and, in the end, to kill what sustains us, what makes us feel, what makes us live in spite of the merciless imperialist hostility.
It is up to us to unite, not to leave these attacks unchallenged is a matter of principle. Let us remember that thought is the greatest war waged against us, and it is necessary to win it with thought, from the ethical height of Martí and Fidel. As the Master expressed in a letter to Gonzalo and Benjamin: “They are beating us with a winding tongue: let us close the way to a better language, the beautiful one…”.
We have a homeland, and those who yearn to defend their homeland will see the redeeming and emancipating light of those who love and found. These are times of definitions. The struggle is for life, to keep safe the freedom and sovereignty achieved on January 1st, 1959, to defend the patriotic ideal that has accompanied us historically, to continue transforming the country from the authentic creation and with the premise that Cuba is and will always be socialist and anti-imperialist.
We are in the hour of the ovens, and as Martí tells us, only the light is to be seen in it. The historical moment we are living is a boiling point, these are times to go to bed with our weapons as a pillow and not with a handkerchief on our heads, because there are very sacred things to defend.
66 years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, we are living a defining moment. To take sides by living the Revolution of dignity and for the decorum of man, in the face of the war that is being waged against us, becomes an essential step of every revolutionary, of every patriot. It is a generational duty that never dies, because it represents the feeling that covers our actions in the midst of such dramatic and difficult circumstances. It is the love for the homeland, a continuous vigil that provokes us to overcome the possible and to create, from the heroism that does not disdain the everyday.
This is one of the keys to ensure a Revolution such as the one we keep alive in Cuba: to make the beautiful the everyday, that is patriotism, an endearing value of the sons and daughters of the Homeland. It is necessary to decipher the keys to being anti-imperialist, to assume a culture, because this is a cultural war, of resistance and critical assimilation of the historical moment; so that, with the theoretical tools and an ideological platform capable of overcoming the hegemony of an unsustainable system such as capitalism, to change what must be changed, to bring about change, to bring about change in the world.nsformar la realidad que vivimos, desde la lealtad reflexiva y la asunción de códigos comunicacionales contrahegemónicos y emancipatorios.
As José Martí bequeathed us in one of his speeches commemorating October 10th: “It seems to me that I see crossing, at roll call, a choleric and sublime shadow, the shadow of the star in the hat; and my duty, as long as I have feet left, the duty of all of us, as long as we have feet left, is to stand up and say: ¡presente!