Freedom means fatherland

As a result of the La Coubre ship sabotage on March 4, 1960, more than a hundred Cubans lost their lives, including dockworkers, port workers and members of the Rebel Army. Granma newspaper remembers the date with fragments of Fidel’s words in the burial of the victims.

The people were not frightened by the explosion, the people advanced towards the explosion; the people were not filled with fear, but were filled with courage and, even though they did not know what had happened, they went there and there the workers, militias, soldiers and other members of the public force went there, all to give whatever help was within their reach (…).

Those interested in us not receiving these explosives are the enemies of our Revolution, those who do not want our country to defend itself, those who do not want our country to be able to defend its sovereignty (…).

So why don’t they want us to have the necessary means? It is simply because they want us not to be able to defend ourselves, they want us to be defenseless. And why do they want us to be defenseless? To subdue us, to subjugate us, so that we do not resist the pressures, so that we do not resist the aggressions. And do they have precisely the right to hinder our efforts in acquiring the means to defend us, the authorities of a country that has not been able to prevent its territory from being used systematically to bomb us? (…).

And these facts are not unique. Because, who should be surprised that a ship explodes in the port while the workers work? Who should be surprised by a sabotage that costs the blood of workers? Who should be surprised, if just a month ago – if there is a month – a U.S. airplane, coming from U.S. territory and handled by a U.S. pilot and with a U.S. bomb, tried to drop it on a center where there were more than 200 workers? (…).

Now freedom means something else: freedom means fatherland. And our choice would be homeland or death.

And so on a day like today, mournful and tragic, painful for the people, painful for the government, painful for the families of the workers and soldiers, and the citizens who were killed; in a moment like this, important, it is good that we leave these things seated, and that our willingness to resist is not just the willingness to resist militarily. They may believe that we have the courage to die, but that we do not have the courage to resist privations, and men have the courage to resist, even the least imagined privations (…).

And by firing them, on the threshold of the cemetery, a promise that more than today’s promise is yesterday’s and always’s promise: Cuba will not flinch, Cuba will not retreat; the Revolution will not stop, the Revolution will not back down, the Revolution will continue victoriously, the Revolution will keep on marching unwaveringly!

And that is our promise not to those who have died, because to die for the homeland is to live, but to the comrades that we will always carry in our memory as our own; and not in the memory in the heart of a man, or of men, but in the only memory that can never be erased: the memory in the heart of a people.

Written by Radio Grito de Baire