By Alejandra Garcia on July 23, 2024 from Havana
The Martyrs of the Moncada, photos: Bill Hackwell
The countdown begun for July 26, our National Rebellion Day, and this year the eyes of the people will be on Sancti Spiritus, the main venue of the celebrations. Cuba will mark 71 years of one of the most heroic events in the long history of struggle of this small island nation. On that day, in 1953, a group of young men led by Fidel Castro, attempted to storm the Moncada Barracks, Cuba’s second-largest military fortress.
That Saint Ann’s Day morning, 131 combatants, including Raul Castro, dressed in uniforms of the Army of the then ruler, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, so as not to arouse suspicion. They organized themselves into three groups, the first of which, with Fidel at the head, would attack the Moncada Barracks. The other two groups, commanded by Abel Santamaría and Raúl Castro, would try to take two important buildings adjacent to the barracks: the Saturnino Lora Civil Hospital, where the wounded would be treated, and the Palace of Justice, where from the rooftop they would support the main action.
Shortly after 4:00 a.m., everyone began to leave the small Siboney farm in cars towards the city of Santiago de Cuba. The groups led by Abel and Raul fulfilled their objective. The main group, led by Fidel, was surprised by a patrol that arrived unexpectedly.
the Moncada today
These were a few revolutionaries against thousands of soldiers. The young men managed to inflict casualties on the dictatorship’s forces, but many died soon after the action began, and those who managed to penetrate the fortress were cruelly killed by the military forces. Realizing that continuing the struggle under those conditions was collective suicide, Fidel ordered a retreat. At the same time that this was happening in Santiago, 28 revolutionaries assaulted the Bayamo barracks, an operation that also failed.
The late journalist Marta Rojas, a witness to these events, recounted what she saw after 6:00 pm, during “a dramatic pilgrimage through the courtyards, stairways and corridors of the Moncada. Dantesque scenes opened before my eyes: corpses without teeth or fingernails, shot in the forehead; bloody and agonized hand-prints clinging to the wall; half-dressed bodies with clean and new Batista’s army uniforms… And as if that were not enough, guards pushed aside the revolutionaries’ guts to allow the passage of those who were walking through the place”.
This initial event was the driving flame of what would come later with the Barbudos of the Sierra Maestra, who achieved what the Moncada started on January 1, 1959, when Fulgencio Batista scurried into an airplane to the Dominican Republic, seeing that his tyranny was crumbling. “The assaults on the Moncada Barracks, in Santiago de Cuba and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, in Bayamo awakened the popular conscience and initiated the gestation of the future Rebel Army that would achieve the definitive victory on January 1, 1959,” Rojas said.
Today the Moncada is a school and a museum.
Seventy-one years later, the celebration of July 26 will constitute, as always, a moment of revolutionary reaffirmation and of special impulse to the economic, social and defense tasks carried out by our people, aware that it is the best tribute we could make to those days of struggle and bloodshed.
“To Raúl, to Ramiro and to all the fighters who are with us: Thank you for the trust, for the example and the legacy,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel mentioned in the Moncada Barracks, today transformed into a school, during the celebrations for the Day of the Rebellion last year.
This Friday, from Sancti Spiritus, these words will gain strength. The courage of those young assailants, who were brothers more than friends, was not in vain. They put the nation ahead, thought of the country as a family and showed the firmness of the young Revolution in the face of the pressures of the then U.S. administration, and the bloodthirsty dictator Batista. “The heroism of these men is not a dead letter but living history, our history.”
Alejandra Garcia is the lead correspondent in Cuba for Resumen Latinoamericano in English and an anchor on TelSur nightly news program in English.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English