14ymedio, Havana, 18 February 2021 — Covid-19 offers no truce — 923 cases and 5 deaths in the last report — but Cuban authorities seemed more concerned this Thursday about the surprising success of the video clip Patria y vida, which has gone viral on social networks. All the official media, starting with Granma, the daily of the Communist Party, dedicate several articles to denigrating the authors.
“Cuba will not renounce the slogan ‘homeland or death’, a declaration of principles of the historic leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro,” said Abel Prieto, former Minister of Culture and president of the Casa de las Américas, according to the Prensa agency. Latin.
Even the president of the Provincial Defense Council of Havana, Luis Antonio Torres Iríbar, spoke about it in his daily meeting. After highlighting the effort “of the medical and paramedical personnel, various specialists, experts, the Police and the people in this contest, in which Cuba makes a difference with the rest of the world, due to the way it faces the pandemic,” the official insisted that “many people today repudiate counterrevolutionary songs on social networks created by artists who sold their souls to the empire and live under it.
Torres Iríbar called for “continues fighting against enemies, under the slogan of ‘homeland or death’ and the conviction that we will win, because the only way to win is by fighting,” the official press reports.
According to testimonies collected by 14ymedio, the authorities are calling for figures of the national culture to record a video singing the notes of the national anthem and conclude the song with the official slogan “homeland or death,” proclaimed for the first time by Fidel Castro in 1960.
“We are making a call that starting today at nine o’clock at night, in addition to the applause to support our doctors, we want our heroic anthem and the phrase ’homeland or death’ to be heard,” a Communist Party militant said this Thursday morning at an emergency meeting with retirees from a neighborhood in Havana’s Plaza municipality.
“We are not going stand by, because we have the last word,” said the pensioner in front of a dozen militants over 65 years old.
In the midst of the worrying panorama of the pandemic, the authorities, who in recent days had expressed certain self-criticism, acknowledging failures in the detection of the virus and calling for greater observance of health standards in institutions and work centers, have taken up the triumphalist tone to attack the song composed by Gente de Zona, Descemer Bueno, Yotuel Romero, Maykel Castillo Osorbo and El Funky,
Despite the strict measures, which include the confinement of the neighborhood with the highest incidence and the night curfew, the capital remains at the forefront of infections. Santiago de Cuba, which the previous day had a lower figure, returned to second place, with 117 cases.
Among the positives of the day, only a minority, 36, were imported. The accumulated number of positives since the pandemic began, in March last year, amounts to 41,688, and the number of deaths has risen to 282.
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