Santiago on July 26 - The Santiaguans Have Nothing to Celebrate

Santiago on July 26: The Santiaguans Have Nothing to Celebrate / Aleaga
Pesant
Posted on July 27, 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, July 26, 2013, www.cubanet.org.- Like every five years,
the most important celebration of the revolutionary calendar, the
assault on the Guillermón Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on 26
July 1953, returned to the most Caribbean of our cities. The protocols
and extreme security measures that accompany Raul Castro Ruz looked
ridiculous in the middle of the overall apathy of the population
affected by the severe economic crisis affecting the country and
especially the east.

Low wages, serious unemployment, underemployment, school dropouts and
migration to other provinces, together with the impact of a hurricane
last year that affected many houses, are the most important reasons for
Santiaguans are not interested in the celebrations. With all this the
authorities were determined to inaugurate monuments, including one
dedicated to Juan Almeida, or allocating billions of dollars to the
restoration of the Plaza Antonio Maceo, to restoring road signs to give
an image of normalcy before the visits of foreign politicians.

Ten thousand Santiaguans, according to official figures, were designated
to be in the great square of the old Moncada barracks, now a school, on
July 26, escorted by a large photograph of more than ten yards high of
Fidel Castro Ruz, leader of the failed assault.

And if a particular feature is the spectacle this time, it is the large
presence of Latin American and Bolivarists presidents.

Evo Morales (Bolivia), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), José Mujica (Uruguay),
Nicolas Maduro (Venezuela), as well as the Chancellor of Ecuador and the
prime ministers of Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the
Grenadines, and St. Lucia, accompanied the senior military dictatorship.

The foreign political speeches marked by anti-Americanism, and the
exaltation of "Cuban solidarity," became a marathon "relay race" that
lasted for more than two hours.

It is speculated that such rhetoric is intended to build consensus
abroad, following the incident of the Cuban ship carrying weapons to
North Korea, making it the unwelcome guest of the political spectacle.
And toward the interior, given the difficulties faced in implementing
the reforms.

I turned sixty, and what do I have?

The General President Raul Castro Ruz, keynote speaker, in a short
speech he read, promised that the State will ensure the development of
the city of Santiago de Cuba, destroyed after Hurricane Sandy (October,
2012), which lost 50% of housing stock, as well as suffered extensive
damage to communications infrastructure.

He then offered a triumphalist reconstruct of the events of the last
sixty years. And he referred to the process of delivering, gradually,
the responsibilities of government to another generation of communist
leaders. Of new challenges, not even a word.

However, not everyone agrees with the triumphalist epic vision repeated
by the government through the media about the assault on the Guillermon
Moncada Barracks.

Jorge Hernandez is the shopkeeper in my neighborhood in El Vedado. A
newly emigrated black Santiaguan who, when asked about the significance
of the 26 July 1953, and the assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago
de Cuba, he passed his hand over his head, looked me straight in the eye
and without blinking said:

"I turned sixty and what do I have? … My life is already passed and I
have nothing. I was born the year of Moncada in San Pedrito. As a child
and young man, and until much later, I thought as I was told, that the
Moncada assault opened the way for me. But at sixty, I repeat the
question: What do I have?"

Pepe, a neighbor, a veteran of the 13 or March Directorate, almost
eighty years old, imprisoned several times in the Castillo del Príncipe,
for his revolutionary and anti-Batista activities, is less radical in
his perception:

"The Revolution was something very beautiful, but unfortunately was
betrayed, when the Communists made a clean sweep and lost their Catholic
essence, that was the responsibility of Fidel Castro, who seized the
that we had gotten with so much effort. For a long time, the celebration
of the Assault on the Moncada was for me a special day, glorious. Today
is just a sad day, to see what is left of our dream and at my age is
hard to see how this will end."

However, Alfredo, an economist currently working in Luanda, Angola, for
the military corporation ANTEX, thinks that Moncada was a defining
moment in the history of Cuba, which proved the genius of Fidel and the
Cuban revolutionary spirit:

"We have a new Moncada ahead, and it is to support Raul's requests on
the need for social discipline, to carry out the guidelines of the
National Party Conference (the communists), in order to make socialism
sustainable and especially to internationalize the campaign to free our
Five (now four) Heroes imprisoned by the empire.

In Santiago de Cuba, on the old road from Cobre, Guillermo Espinosa sees
the matter from another point of view. Besieged by the political police,
he hasn't been able to leave his house since July 23, because they are
threatening him to arrest him the minute he sets foot outside. According
to him, the majority of Santiago's democrats have been arrested or
detained in their homes, as they did on the visit of Pope Benedict XVI,
in March of last year.

To Guillermo, 45, the assault on the Moncada Barracks was the
continuation of a cycle of violence that began in the Republic and has
not yet ended.Because the so-called revolution established a military
dictatorship that deprived the people of all freedoms.

"Sixty years later," he says, "the country is poorer in the economy and
in spirit. The calls for economic measures are an aspirin for a body
already sick unto death."

aleagapesant@yahoo.es

From Cubanet

26 July 2013

Source: "Santiago on July 26: The Santiaguans Have Nothing to Celebrate
/ Aleaga Pesant | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/santiago-on-july-26-the-santiaguans-have-nothing-to-celebrate-aleaga-pesant/