Playita de Cajobabo, Guantánamo. In the night of 130 years ago, after the decade-long onslaught for independence, exile was left behind, the homeland and a handful of sons met here. From these sands a light burst forth for Cuba and Latin America.
José Martí and Máximo Gómez at the head of the disembarkation, together with Maceo, would lead the Revolution that, initiated 27 years before in La Demajagua, had left unfinished the independence task of the Island, without having disappeared the causes of origin.
No matter how much Spain persisted clinging to its colonial rule, at that point it knew it was doomed to failure, as it was unable to stop the insurrectional thrust of the Cubans. By then, an imperial shadow -the same one that still haunts us- was already hovering over our people and our brothers in the area; that was the greatest danger.
Martí was thinking of the great fatherland and our own when he set out to organize the Necessary War, destined to “prevent in time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading throughout the Antilles, and with that force to fall more on our lands of America”.
Nothing stopped him in his patriotic endeavor. The threatening gaze of the imperial beast, far from intimidating, fermented the Cubans' resolve to fight, under the guidance of Martí. The fight was hard and intense, but it made us a free and ownerless people, and that choice overflowed the island.
Latin America is a route, and Cajobabo has in it its special transcendence. Since that April night in 1895, it ceased to be just a place, for the same reasons that since then April 11 is much more than a date.
Because there, and then, there emerged a strong and united determination, a firmer and more resolute spirit when the danger for Cuba and sister America was greater.
Cajobabo and April will return in example and spirit, anywhere and at any time, as in the IX Celac Summit in Honduras, this time to confront “the opportunistic distortion of history and reality” denounced by Díaz-Canel, in the face of the “declared return to the Monroe Doctrine”, which “can only be confronted with unity”.
At the root of Cuba and Latin America there is a Cajobabo and an April 11. Root that became a tree and grew, until it was reborn in the most desired fruit: the freedom that disembarks as a legacy from one generation to another, in the dawn of each new time to come.
