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Once in his office of golden lights at sunset and mud tiles on the floor, where his strides echoed sweetly from one side of the room to the other, he told me: "Ideas develop, Katiuska, ideas develop", affirmation that would lead me to think that feelings also beat, unfold, emerge. In Comandante Fidel, rebellion in the face of the unjust was always growing, as well as the relentless pursuit of justice for all in any corner of Cuba, Our America or humanity.
He was a few years old when he began to rebel, were true skirmishes that he managed to overcome in the realm of everyday life, when he decided not to comply with the orders in the house of Santiago de Cuba, where he was sent on the initiative of a rough teacher, who used unhealthily Angel and Lina's wish - Fidel's parents - for their children to learn and continue higher education, impossible in the small rural school of the town of Birán, a town northwest of the former province of Oriente, where Fidel was born in the summer of 1926, then, almost unknown place of the national geography that did not even appear on the maps.
In Santiago, Fidel lived a rigor of intense appetites and misunderstandings that made him suffer and decide to insubordination, although everything was interpreted as childish effort of a child. From that time, he would never forget the sad row of deported Haitian braceros: next to the Alameda, the huge chimney ship that would take them back to greater misfortunes. Years later he would move heaven and earth to help the country that starred in the first great libertarian revolution in the Caribbean and Latin America. In 2010, Haiti, shaken with pain, dragged the weight of Western revenge that led to its ruin and the ferocity of a nature that collapses and intensifies hurricanes, earthquakes and sea floods.
But in his childhood Fidel still did not glimpse such misfortunes. At La Salle College, he assumed the same challenging attitude in the face of a Brother being run over and the unfair verdict of the Director given to the old Angel, who decided not to send his children back to school. Faced with such determination, Fidel spoke resolutely with his mother whom he convinced that everything was a great injustice. This time he threatened to set the house on fire if he was not sent to study, although throughout his life he always assured that he would never have done anything in that regard. He had the support of Lina who interceded with the old man and, in January 1938, Don Ángel traveled to the capital city of the province to enroll him in the Dolores College of the Society of Jesus.
They were the times when he returned to Birán on vacation and perceived the differences between him and his friends, children of employees and peasants, but he still did not explain them, it was all as something established, natural and incomprehensible order that awakened in him solidarity, gestures generous and sharers with whom, in their eyes, they lacked clothes and food. Restless, he had already asked why there were no black students among the school students. The answer did not convince him. They said that so they would not feel uncomfortable being different or being in a minority. He looked around and began to observe with insight, he asked himself many questions. With persistence, he remembered that his childhood friends had not been able to study.
There was no just cause that did not have him among his most vehement defenders: anti-racism, the consolidation of university and country life, the independence of Puerto Rico, solidarity with the Dominican people who suffered Trujillo's excesses, pronouncements against him Somoza dictator in Nicaragua, the struggles for the sovereignty of the Panama Canal, the Argentine right to Las Malvinas, the anti-fascist solidarity, the popular Bogota outbreak, the Cuban social struggles against the cost of living, the manifest anti-imperialism, the idea of fighting because Cuba was a sovereign and fair country.
When he graduated as a lawyer, he put himself at the service of the poor, of those run over, of those who had nothing to pay him for the performance of their offices. He resigned for ethics and delicacy to lawsuits where he could have been enriched. He defended the inhabitants of several neighborhoods of the capital, such as La Pelusa, so that they would not be evicted without compensation; to workers of the Chargers Union of the Single Market of Havana, to groups of students accused of public disorder, to peasants in the Santa Cruz del Norte area. Fidel also sympathized with the carpenters who owed money to the loggers.
He joined the ranks of the Orthodox Party, a popular avalanche that would be a valuable nutritional source for his struggles. He began to dream of a Revolution, with dictating from the Congress revolutionary laws that would change the unequal and unfair face of the Island, which is why he ran for Representative. In 1951, Fidel directed his firm to follow the file in the Central Public Services Directorate against the powerful Telephone Company for the excessive collection of users. The authorities delayed the process until 1954, when Fidel was unable to attend because he was in the Isla de Pinos Prison; by his guidance, instead, Dr. Pelayo Cuervo Navarro appeared, who was killed at close range in 1957.
Fidel showed great courage in representing Justa Rodríguez, mother of the young cabinetmaker Carlos Rodríguez, beaten with brutal brutality by police repression in a demonstration in repudiation of the increase in the passage. Fidel asked for 30 years in prison for those responsible for the crime: Rafael Casals and Rafael Salas Cañizares, Head of the Motorized Section and Second Chief of that same Section, respectively. The judge ordered the arrest of both officers and Fidel, before the probable evasion of the executive of said order of the judiciary and the question of whether he believed that both could escape from justice, stated:
"The world would have to fall, it would be something like taking the first steps to fall into an open plane of military dictatorship."
This occurs in September 1951, a few months later the coup d'etat of Batista takes place, and, the next morning of March 10, 1952, Rafael Salas Cañizares was appointed Chief of Police in Havana. Fidel has to go immediately to hiding, but even in those circumstances, he writes his complaint entitled: Revolution no, zarpazo and puts a complaint before the Constitutional Court against those who have replaced the Magna Carta with bayonets and the place of magistrates for the military.
With the coup, another more well-known stage of Fidel began on his route of historical struggle against injustice. Shortly before assaulting the Moncada he visited his parents' house in Birán, back to the root in a farewell. When he was already in prison, he wrote as if he was relieving a sad feeling with the desire to relieve, dream and do something so that once all injustices faded away. He pointed out that day:
Everything has remained the same for more than twenty years. My little school a little older, my steps a little heavier, the faces of the children maybe a little more amazed and nothing more!
This would translate into the persistent struggle of their entire existence for a decent life for Cubans, with work, free health care, culture, peace, full rights and especially education.
Fidel lived and fought for education. He moved his energies to transform the greater archipelago of the Antilles that is our Homeland, also Latin America and the World, because education for all was not possible, without justice for all. The Cuban Revolution was made for justice and that is the banner that defends today with firm beauty and courageous audacity for the happy fullness of the beings that inhabit the planet. The Revolution was made for justice and education which is the same as saying for life. With education - I wrote some time ago - the Revolution is true, it roots the idea of the Homeland turned to its intimate surroundings: Caribbean and Latin American, and its humanistic and planetary vocation. With José Martí we think that Patria is humanity.
On the social level, Fidel always maintained that justice is necessary so that there is no revenge. It was the infallible formula for the people to entrust the authorities with the punishment of criminals; commitment fulfilled through revolutionary justice. He argued that the victorious Revolution should apply justice vigorously but also magnanimously. At the beginning of the Revolution, on January 23, in his speech at the El Silencio Air Plaza, while he was in Caracas, Venezuela, he reflected:
Never an army in the world, never a revolution in the world was carried out as exemplary, as gentlemanly, as the Cuban Revolution was carried out. We taught our men that torturing a prisoner was cowardice, that only the minions tortured. We teach our partners that murdering prisoners, killing a combatant when he has surrendered and when his life has been offered if he surrenders was cowardice, and a prisoner was never killed.
[…] We told the Cuban people: don't drag anyone and fear absolutely nothing, crimes will not go unpunished; there will be justice so that there is no revenge, and the people trusted us. We told him that there would be justice and he trusted us: he did not drag anyone, he did not even hit any of the minions that fell into his hands, they handed them over to the revolutionary authorities. I had faith that we were going to do justice, and it was essential that there be justice, because without justice there can be no democracy, without justice there can be no peace, without justice there can be no freedom.
The most terrible damage done to our peoples is the impunity of crime, it is the absence of justice, because in our villages there has never been justice.
It would be infinite the count of so many noble and reckless adhesions in Fidel in favor of the peoples, with a humanity that still grows as a leafy tree for tomorrow: even the blood for the heroic people of Vietnam, in favor of the Palestinian cause and the front Saharawi, against the dictatorships in the Southern Cone of our Continent, against the unpayable foreign debt, against the recolonization of Our America intended by the FTAA, by the peoples of Africa, against invasions and nuclear weapons, against the dispossession and humiliation of villages; The fight against apartheid is perhaps the most human and risky of them all, but there are so many that this session would never end to mention them in their entirety.
The causes of the people fit in the desires of Fidel and the Cuban Revolution from always and to the future. Cuba demonstrates it in the wonder of being an example and vortex of Revolutions.
Words in the III International Symposium of the Cuban Revolution: genesis and historical development. Convention Palace, October 31, 2019.