By Alejandra Garcia on April 16, 2023 from Havana
Fidel announces the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution.
Cubans who lived through the first years of the Revolution, remember April 16, 1961 as if it were yesterday. On that day, the corner of 23rd and 12th streets, in the capital’s Vedado district, was filled with thousands of people, combatants of the 148th battalion of the National Revolutionary Militias, guerrillas, and leaders of the new-born social process.
That crowd gathered with rifles in hand and were witnesses to a historic day. The Commander-in-Chief, Fidel Castro Ruz, proclaimed, for the first time, the socialist nature of the Revolution.
“Comrades workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic Revolution of the humble, with the humble, and for the humble,” Fidel said on that occasion, during the burial of the victims of the cruel bombing perpetrated by US planes against the air bases of Ciudad Libertad, San Antonio de los Baños and Santiago de Cuba, which was a preamble to the invasion of the Bay of Pigs.
After his words, everyone sang the words of The Internationale -the official anthem of the workers of the whole world, and the majority of the socialist and communist parties-. Sixty-two years have passed since that day that was immortalized forever in the pages of our history.
The day before the declaration, eight US B-26 bombers camouflaged with Cuban air force insignia departed from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and simultaneously attacked the Cuban airfields. Seven people died, and half a hundred were wounded, among them the militiaman Eduardo García Delgado, who wrote Fidel’s name with his blood before his death.
Washington sought to stop the transformations that the country had been undergoing since January 1, 1959 by trying to spread terror and confusion, neutralize the country’s scarce air defense capabilities to allow the subsequent landing of mercenary troops and present the event as a fracture in the revolutionary ranks through a media campaign.
Cuba’s efforts to normalize relations with Washington, restore trade relations, and live together in harmony and respect, were in vain and this was the last straw as the US made it crystal clear that their intentions was to crush the revolution by any means possible.
“What they cannot forgive us for, is that we have made a Socialist Revolution under the very noses of the United States, and that we defend that socialist Revolution with those rifles,” said Fidel on that April 16.
This Revolution is Socialist, corner of 23rd and 12th in Vedado, photo: Bill Hackwell
The actions were executed without a prior declaration of war, and with them, it launched the Pluto operation, orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the early morning of April 17, the mercenary landing began at Playa Giron (also known as Bay of Pigs), on the Zapata Peninsula, in the western province of Matanzas. The mercenaries sought to present a supposed provisional government, already appointed in the United States, which would call for US troops to intervene.
This effort failed, thanks to the fulminating victory of the revolutionary forces, which surrendered the invaders in barely 66 hours; on April 19, 1961.
Today, at the downtown corner of 23rd and 12th, leaders of the Communist Party of Cuba, the Government, the State, and the population remembered once again the event that marked the ideological course that still guides us.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano-US