By Ana Hurtado on July 25, 2025, from Havana
Moncada Barracks; now a school. photos: Bill Hackwell
Seventy-two years ago, in Santiago de Cuba, a group of young people decided they could wait no longer, and on the morning of Saint Anne’s Day, they took a step forward. Assaulting a military barracks was not madness, but an urgent necessity. They knew that people are not born free, but become free.
That attempt at freedom was, in truth, the beginning of a revolution that is still being defended, questioned, and rebuilt with dignity, despite blockades, campaigns, and betrayals. Cuba does not commemorate July 26 as an empty gesture. It embodies it every day. Because rebellion is not a pose; it is ethics.
It is the same rebellion that moves those who are left with nothing and yet share what they have. It is what makes peoples the protagonists of their own destiny.
Today, from my position as an internationalist activist and as an adopted daughter of this country, I reaffirm my commitment to that necessary rebellion. To that Cuba that does not surrender or sell out. The Cuba that taught me that truth is not negotiable and that there are trenches that do not need guns, but conviction, tenderness and, above all, loyalty.
The empire and the enemy are trying to erase this history through trickery. But they cannot. Because there is a people that continues to build a future with what it has: pride, solidarity and memory.
It is not easy to sustain a cause when everything around you pushes you to give up. But Fidel taught us that the will of a people, when organized and cultivated, is stronger than any empire. He did not say this from a desk, as many of us do, he demonstrated it in the Sierra, in Girón, in every concrete act of sovereignty.
July 26 is not just a date on the calendar: it is the starting point of a revolutionary ethic that does not allow for surrender. Even though many are determined to tarnish that ethic, to destroy it and use the enemy’s tools. That is not Revolution. Fidel did not just start a Revolution, he started a way of looking at the world.
Fidel
He warned us about the power of money, about the poison and danger of individualism, about the urgency of cultivating consciousness. That is why today, when some speak of pragmatism as if it were synonymous with surrender, defending Cuba also means defending the relevance of Fidel as an active thought, not as a statue. Cuba is our horizon.
That is why I am still here. Because this island has not offered me privileges, it has offered me meaning. Because in every daily gesture, in the steadfastness of those who resist, in the silence of those who do not sell out, there is the Revolution that continues to beat. The Revolution of Moncada, the Revolution of Fidel, the Revolution of today.
That is why, for those who struggle, July 26 is not a symbolic act that is remembered every summer. The 26th is our destiny. Our daily life.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English