It is an aberration that the Moncada carnage, which began a nightmare that seems endless after 65 years of dictatorship, became a national holiday.
Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 26 July 2024 — A few days ago, writing in 14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera recalled when Fidel Castro, appearing on a State TV “Roundtable” [Mesa Redonda] segment in 2000, admitted that he could have avoided the attack on the Moncada Barracks and gone up the Sierra Maestra to begin the battle against the Batista regime.
This would have prevented the loss of 86 lives: 22 military personnel and 64 revolutionaries — eight who died during the assault and 56 who were killed by the soldiers after being taken prisoner.
Fidel Castro’s plan of using 160 men armed with pistols and 22 carbines to take the Moncada Barracks—Cuba’s second military fortress, defended by a garrison of a thousand men—had no chance of success.
Even assuming that they had managed to take Moncada, and that a large part of the Santiago population would have joined the revolutionaries, and that they had also managed to take the barracks of the National Police and the Navy, Santiago de Cuba would have become a mousetrap for them. Even if the Fidelistas had managed, as they had planned, to also take the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Bayamo, they would not have been able to contain the army reinforcements that would come to Santiago. And it would have been difficult for the rebels to withdraw from the city, escape the bombings of government aircraft, and take refuge in the Sierra Maestra to start the guerrilla war.
But Fidel Castro, a delusional guy who was given to hatching the most outlandish plots, needed to make big headlines before taking up arms against the Batista regime. And he achieved that with the tragic debacle that was the attack on Moncada and, to top it all off, his subsequent statement with a title inspired by a quotation from Mein Kampf: “History will absolve me.”
Starting on July 26, 1953, and throughout the following decades, Fidel Castro’s specialty would be to take advantage of his setbacks and turn them into victories or, at least, into something that seemed like success or that he could present as such.
It is an aberration that the Moncada carnage, which began a nightmare that seems endless after 65 years of a dictatorship that has led Cuba to ruin, became not only the most exalted passage in Castro’s history but also a national holiday: the so-called “Day of National Rebellion,” the longest celebration of Castroism, with three holidays.
If it’s a matter of celebrating failures, they could have chosen, among many others, the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest that did not happen, the Havana Greenbelt [or Cordon], the energy revolution, the experiments that wiped out the country’s livestock, the destruction of the sugar industry or, more recently—in keeping with the post-Fidel-continuity regime—the Tarea Ordenamiento (Ordering Task) and its consequent uneconomic rearrangements.
But Castroism requires stories of martyrology, mourning, the cult of the dead. Like vampires, it needs blood.
Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison
