By Ana Hurtado on April 30th, 2024
Fidel descends from a tank at Playa Giron during the invasion of mercenary troops of the US, April 19, 1961. Photo: Mario Collado
April for the Cuban people is a month of victories. I felt a great emotion writing about the Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs in my last article. A victory that not only meant the first great defeat of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, but also the salvation of thousands of Cuban lives that would have gone out to fight in those first years to defend the Revolution.
However, April, in other latitudes, is stained with blood. I remembered it on the 26th of this same month, when in 1937 the Condor Legion and its German Luftwaffe bombed the Basque city of Guernica and carried out an air raid in which they left more than a square kilometer completely razed to the ground with more than 85% of the city’s buildings destroyed and the rest of the constructions completely affected.
This Condor Legion that the III German Reich used to help Franco bombing the Spanish people, dropped on Guernica a minimum of 31 tons of bombs (you can consult historically the data). It seems an exaggeration, but what fascism and Francoism did to my land was not. It was rather an atrocious reality that we are not willing to forget, that they have not repaired, and a wound that is still open in the hearts of many families. Of the people.
How, in this case, are we going to ask the people of Guernica, who were in flames for several days, to forget? The total number of victims cannot even be known for certain, since Franco and his henchmen did not remove the rubble of the city until two years after the end of the war; in 1941.
I also spoke about the concept of the “devil” in a newspaper article a few months ago. I was referring to the literary passage when Faust sold his soul to him. To how throughout history the ecclesiastical institution has dedicated itself to demonize in the name of God. To how many of us are currently demonized for defending the hegemonically established by the empire and inciting people to think.
But I ask myself something:
What has often been called the devil or heresy in the name of religious values, what has been called the devil on many occasions, has been nothing more than rebellion against the established power.
But evil does exist. Indeed it exists. And it is incarnated in people. Not in the form of demonic possession, not as a fiction. Evil has and has had its representation throughout history through acts that have harmed and destroyed the earth and its people.
Therefore, we must differentiate “evil per se” from the demonization of actors and characters that do not suit the forces that work in favor of evil, in order to confuse.
Let’s touch evil with our hands through history.
April 28th, also. Year 1945. Justice is done to one of the incarnations of evil on earth. His followers knew him as “Il Duce”, but his name was Benito Mussolini. And he was evil. That devil incarnated in the man who made Italy descend into hell. A clown obsessed with showmanship whose show cost the Italians dearly.
With him came fascism, one of the evils that struck and that with different disguises and through time, strike humanity. Fascism we can also call “the angel of death”, because that is what it embodies. When it is not physical death, it is moral and spiritual death. Because it is in charge of stripping the individual of all ethical sense, of all transcendental and human sense.
He began by dabbling in journalism and in the name of socialism. But just like Satan, he stopped loving God, just causes, to start loving only himself and the privileges for the elect that he considered and chose. Once someone stops loving the collective good, socialism, the Revolution, to focus on spurious interests, personal and contrary to the people, he begins to cooperate for evil.
– What is your name? – they asked the devil.
– My name is legion, because we are many – he answered.
And that’s what Mussolini did. He created the Black Shirts. The instrument of fascist terror that later Nazi Germany would imitate with its famous “SS”. And they destroyed lives, towns, cities, countries, nations.
And in the same way evil has reproduced itself since the beginning of humanity.
It has appeared since the earliest times under various names and represented in various forms, such as the serpent.
Evil appears from the first biblical texts. The very story of Cain and Abel shows how violence has been nesting among human beings for thousands of years. How people, without awareness, are capable of the worst atrocities against each other.
We have seen how evil destroys men and women.
And we have to identify who really represents evil today. Knowing that it has manifested itself in nefarious characters throughout the history of planet earth. Those people who embody the worst of existence.
And we must position ourselves, and choose whether we are with the good, or with its opposite.
And to be clear about something very simple:
Only the Revolution can save us from evil.
Socialism is not perfect. Socialism is young. Socialism has made, makes and will make mistakes.
But it is the antidote. And we will always defend it.
We have the vaccine. And we know that the cure for this disease that is ravaging the planet is in our hands.
Some would say Hail Mary.
We say Fatherland or Death.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English