By Raul Antonio Capote on May 19, 2025 from Havana
The US flag, raised before the Cuban flag on May 20, 1902, in Havana. Photo: Granma archive
What republic do Carlos Giménez, Mario Díaz-Balart, Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar and company long for, if not for that farce of May 20?
On May 20, 1902, after four centuries of Spanish colonialism and three decades of bloody war that left indelible marks of sacrifice in the history of the homeland, the Martí Republic was to be born: “just and open, one in territory, in law, in work and in cordiality; raised with all and for the good of all.”
However, on the day Tomás Estrada Palma took office as president, the nation awoke chained by an appendix to its Law of Laws that undermined its sovereignty and lacerated its dignity. A republic was born, governed by generals and doctors, subject to the designs of Washington, neither just nor for all, much less for the good of all.
The US intervention in the 1898 war of independence against Spanish rule had frustrated the revolutionary aspirations of the Cuban nationalist movement, imposing a new model of dependence.
Just four years later, large US companies controlled vast estates, railways, electricity, telephones, transportation, construction, mining, and banking on the island.
Havana became a haven for gambling, alcohol, drugs, and prostitution mafias, a realm of impunity that enriched a front-man bourgeoisie that benefited from the crumbs of power from the North.
It was a republic marked by unemployment, chronic hunger in the countryside, and precarious living conditions, in which favoritism, patronage, torture, and crime replaced justice. But Martí’s children did not give up. Once again, the sacrifice of men and women watered the fields of Cuba, first to achieve a free and independent republic in 1959, then to defend it from its enemies.
“The timid, the irresolute, the attached to wealth,” as Martí described them, heirs of those who waited in their Miami homes for the US army to return their estates and privileges, today wave the flags of annexation.
What republic do Carlos Giménez, Mario Díaz-Balart, Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar and company long for, if not that of May 20, that of the componte and the Palmacristi, the betrayal and ignominy?
Giménez, the “proud” US congressman—promoter of sanctions, champion of suffering, willing to starve to death the men and women of a nation he claims to have roots in—has little to say to Cubans. He is identified by his colors, the colors of the empire.
They belong to that class “content only that there is a master, Yankee or Spanish, who will maintain them, or create for them, as a reward for their role as pimps, the position of leading men, contemptuous of the struggling masses—the mestizo, skilled, and moving masses of the country—the intelligent and creative masses of blacks and whites.”
Source: Granma, translation Resumen – English