Love defeated hate

Bandera y Palma Real en el Cementerio de Santa Ifigenia. Foto: Marcelino Vázquez Hernández / ACN / Cubadebate

That July 11, a year ago, Cuba gave a frontal battle for life. The MINSAP reported 6,923 new cases of COVID-19, more than 50,000 admitted and 47 deceased. The Delta variant spread with its contagiousness over our population. Main leaders of the Party and the Government were deployed in different provinces of the country leading the confrontation to the pandemic outbreak. A small team of our young journalists began a special coverage from Matanzas , the epicenter of the pandemic.

Just two days earlier, the CECMED had authorised the emergency use of the Cuban Abdala vaccine . Our scientists accomplished the feat of validating the first Latin American vaccine against COVID. The health system was preparing to begin a massive vaccination campaign throughout the Cuban geography, in a battle against time. Millions of syringes arrived sent by Cubans abroad and other supportive friends.

In the midst of the challenge, the United States Government treacherously lengthened the impact of the 243 measures taken by the Trump administration to reinforce the economic-financial war against the Cuban nation, causing more shortages and hardships in our people, in the tense days of confinement. sanitary.

Meanwhile, it allocated abundant millions to support the subversive machinery against the Revolution, with the generous financing of its political operators and the media machinery that had been created in recent times, fundamentally in the digital public space.

Washington was betting on reviving Mallory ‘s genocidal policy : extreme “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the government.” And they figured the time had come.

Since the days prior to that Sunday, they intensely deployed a large-scale political-communicational operation, in which the opportunistic and cynical pronouncements of the anti-Cuban political clique were combined with the manipulative strategy of the large media outlets aligned with the empire and a greased army of cybernetic haters, bots and trolls that flooded social networks with hypocritical calls for help to Matanzas and Cuba, while at the same time crying out for more blockade and even military invasions.

That July 11 it seemed that the imperial strategy had borne fruit. The spark was lit in San Antonio de los Baños and reached other places in our geography. The combined effect of the material shortages, the blackouts, the necessary confinement, the health emergency, the reinforced blockade, our errors and insufficiencies, and the intense campaign of psychological influence on the networks caused the social outbreak that the imperial strategists longed for.

To their mercenaries and provocateurs on the ground, they managed to add dissatisfied people and a few vandals, who soon turned the protest into the scene of violent acts, looting of establishments and attacks against the forces of order and the revolutionary people.

The political-communicational echo chamber that tried to sell the world the notion of a social protest that sought to “overthrow the dictatorship” and put an end to the “failed state” was immediately activated. Social networks seemed to explode with the “end of the Cuban Revolution.” Manipulated or totally untrue images were used with the perverse purpose of giving internal and external fuel to the Soft Coup plan against Cuba.

But, as in August 1994, the leadership of the Revolution came out first to lead the fight and trusted, as then, in the people as guarantors of the revolutionary prevalence in our streets and of citizen tranquility in the country.

Within a few hours, the careful and well-financed enemy attempt at a vandalistic Coup d’état was defeated. The manipulation was stripped bare. Imperial cynicism on display. The people again proclaimed their victory.

The unity was once again the most powerful weapon of the Revolution against its enemies. The truth is our most important tool. Love our best shield against hate.

We Cubans defended that July 11 our aspiration of a country that wants life, that defends peace, that aspires to development without interference or impositions from the powerful, that believes in its independence and freedom as precious and inalienable conquests.

Little has changed since then in the imperial attempt to bend us either by seduction and manipulation, or by force.

Nor have the difficulties that we have to face in the economic and social order (in a context of acute international economic crisis) changed much, much less the blockade.

But less has changed our ability to turn setbacks into victory, our transformative spirit, our creative resilience, our hopes and our dreams.

We have grown as a people in this year of momentous battles. We were able to defeat the pandemic, we have multiplied in the neighborhoods and in the digital scenarios; we have reinforced our economic strategy in the face of the crisis; we have strengthened our spaces for participation and our socialist democracy, and we have not stopped preparing ourselves for the defense of the homeland.

Social justice and popular participation continue to be our guidelines.

New political, economic and social challenges await us; there is little we have to do and to create. We are inspired by the unwavering spirit of struggle and victory of the generation that starred in the historic feat of July 26.

For truth and ideas, for independence and socialism, we continue in combat!


source: Cubadebate