Today is July 26, the sixty second anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks by revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the brutal Batista dictatorship in Cuba. The attack failed but it was a beginning. At his tria, Fidel Castro, leader of the attack, acted with such courage and strength that the dictatorship feared to execute him. Exiled, he returned to Cuba to leader revolutionary guerrila fighters who overthrow the dictatorship at the beginning of 1959 had caught the attention of the whole waorld. Cuba became a "protectorate" of the U.S. in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War(1898) Cuba also became the center of direct military interventions and the model for military interventions in support of dictatorships tied to U.S. economic interests under th "Platt Amendment" which give the U.S. the right to intervene to defend the "independence of nations in Central America and the Carribean as it definded "independence." Although the Platt Amendment was formally renounced by Franklin Roosevet it was not only restored but made the model, under the Truman Doctrine, for U.S. interventions in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, and the creation of U.S. bilateral and multi-lateral alliances in the name of "freedom" and "independence."
From 1960 on Cuba has faced and survived a blockade. It survived the CIA managed invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Fidel and Raul Castro survived many CIA and CIA-Mafia attempts to murder them
When Fidel made this statement in 1973, the Nixon administration, still committed to destroying the Cuban revolution and murdering Fidel, was mired in the Watergate crisis, where, ironically the stooges of the Committee to Re-elect the President(CREEP) were Cubans who had for years been engaged in the CIA's criminal attacks on Cuba.
The whole world survived the Cuban Missie Crisis of 1962. Fidel and Raul survived and still stand. There has been an Aftican-American President since 2009 and more recently a Pope from Argentina who has moved in a very progressive direction. Relations between the U.S. and Cuba are being normalized although no U.S. government has admitted its crimes and what forms the normalization will take is still not completely clear. And of course, Guantanamo, the naval base the U.S. established under the Platt Ammendment policy for than a century ago still stands, today as a notorious prison camp for people in the "war against terrorism."
Long Live the Cuban Revolution and Long Live Cuban Socialism
Cuba Si, Imperialismo, No!!!
Norman Markowitz