CAMAGÜEY.- Now, it will be a year of his departure and, nevertheless, the Cubans and also many that are not, they find him in every step, because Fidel Castro is a continuous and imperishable presence among us, as many here as in other places, because we see him and speak in the multiple places at which he is present, even the most unsuspected ones.

Inquisitor, he wants to know everything, of “the mass to the average”, as his mentor, José Martí, the Apostle of our wars of independence, wanted: How does the blacksmith forge the iron with his forge and the hammer, how does the teacher teach and how does the pupil learn, how does the scientist discover the secrets of the science, how does the seed germinate, what dangers does the global warming lock up and how does warmonger of the capitalism threaten the voraciousness to devastate the life on the face of the ground?

For the knowledge, Fidel was always exhausting, the knowledge of his intellect and the keenness of his ideas and thought, he used them in a creative way, inside and outside the borders, with entire detachment, because everything never wanted anything for himself and everything for others.

Cuba was one before January 1st, 1959 and another one after Fidel. If there is a star today in the firmament with this name that shines with proper light, this one was put by the Revolution of Fidel and the Cuban people with his spirit of struggle, with his beginning, with his steadfastness and his capacity of resistance, and his unbreakable faith in the victory.

Fidel was a strategist of the war of liberation against the Batista´s dictatorship, and he is a strategist of the formation and development of our country, gaining him all the battles to the North American imperialism, that of the invasion of Girón in 1961, that of his criminal blockade and that of the sickly hostility of his governments of shift.

Those who could think that his departure of one year ago confined him to the enclosure where his ashes are kept in the heroic province of Santiago de Cuba, they did not know him, not even know him now. For him there is no rest. Like the Quixote, he rides on another Rocinante, undoing wrongs and defeating the mills of the evil.

To his passage, there grows the hope of the oppressed ones, of the exploited ones, of the outsiders and the breath of fighting comes to them, fighting and fighting for their right to a better life, which is possible, opposite to all the adversities, with dignity, sovereignty and independence.

If the men write the history, ours of now has a name, as also a little the history of Latin America, that of the Caribbean Sea and their peoples, which if today they are somewhat freer it is because there was and there will be a Fidel and a Cuban Revolution that illuminates with his example and with the validity of his ideas, he demonstrates that it is possible to conquer a present and a better future for all.

If today thousands of men and women of the whole universe revere him and admit that it is because in every tribune and forum that he spoke, it was to give voice to those who have never had it, and to say the truths that many people should want to express and they did not do it for ancestral ties or for fear of the countermeasures of the powerful empire of the North.

His thought is and will be the best speaker of those who do not have anything and the redeeming sword that will be able to hoist to fight for the conquests of which they have been deprived to the centuries´ length by the colonialist potency, neocolonialists and imperialists.

Opposite to the circumstantial right-wing advance in the Latin-American and Caribbean region, the history of the sovereign and pro-independence forge of our peoples will take charge of reverse it, as he achieved it and Cuba manages to do it, because we have patriotism and dignity enough to do it and because we are provided with a Fidel who will never leave us to our luck.

  • Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez