Apostle

Albi

 Extraordinary talent, children and teenagers singing like angels, art entering through every chink of the soul. It all happened yesterday, May 19, just meters away from the obelisk that marks the place where José Martí fell.

So was the national act that recalled the 130th anniversary of the Apostle's fall in combat, impeccable and emotional, led by First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez; by member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of Organization Roberto Morales Ojeda, by local authorities and the people.

Among so much life and color, in the same nature and under the same sun that illuminated the face of the good man as he fell, one idea was recurrent: This was what he wanted; beyond any uncomfortable nuance, beyond any pain, beyond all that may be missing, it was this - joy, brotherhood and freedom - precisely what unveiled the man whom the barefoot mambí fighters began to call President, just by listening to his voice as if it were an embrace.

This is how the intense and very clear morning in Dos Ríos began this Monday. If he had seen these moments of the National Anthem sung with pride and without fear; if he had seen how we remember what he said: “no deed without mercy and without cleanliness will ever leave my heart”.

“We are not here to evoke a static past,” said Danhiz Díaz Pereira, deputy to the National Assembly of People's Power and president of the Martí Movement of Young People. “Martí taught us that every Cuban deserves respect.”

Referring to the master, he affirmed that he “is the fire that burns us when we falter,” and that the resistance of now is the reflection of the Martí spirit.

“Sisters and brothers of this heroic Cuba”, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Granma Yudelkis Ortiz Barceló began her speech in a fiery, beautiful and patriotic intervention, and spoke about the ‘Martí's perpetuity’ that was born precisely from the fall of the exceptional man.

We are not before a simple memory, we are before a fire that will not be extinguished. In such a way, the party leader affirmed that, “facing the sun” -that Martian phrase- means among Cubans to live with dignity, to embrace the future and to do it without fear, not to give up. “In every Cuban who resists with dignity, there is Martí”.