Reprinted from CubaDebate.
I have spent hours listening by television to the entire country’s tribute to Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida Bosque. I think that confronting death was for him a duty like all of those that he fulfilled throughout his life; he did not know, nor did we, how much sadness the news of his physical absence would bring to us.
I had the privilege of knowing him: a young black man, a worker, combative who, successively, was chief of his revolutionary cell, a Moncada combatant, a prison compañero, platoon captain in the Granma landing, Rebel Army officer — brought to a standstill during his advance by a shot to the chest in the violent Combat of Uvero — a Column commander, marching to create the Third Eastern Front, a compañero who shared the leadership of our forces in the last victorious battles to overthrow the dictatorship.
I was a privileged witness to his exemplary conduct for more than half a century of heroic and victorious resistance, in the struggle against bandits, the counter-blow of Girón, the October Crisis, the internationalist missions and the resistance to the imperialist blockade.
I listened with pleasure to some of his songs, and especially that one of impassioned emotion which, in response to the homeland’s call for “victory or death,” bade farewell to human dreams. I did not know that he had written more than 300 of them that joined his literary work, a source of enjoyable reading and of historic events. He defended principles of justice that will be defended at all times and during any period, as long as human beings breathe on Earth.
Let us not say that Almeida has died! He is more alive today than ever!
Fidel Castro Ruz
September 13, 2009
3:12 p.m.
