Puerto Rico responds to the international call for support and defense of Venezuela. Credit: ALBA Movimientos PUR Facebook
This article was translated from Spanish from a piece originally published in Prensa Latina.
San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 17 (Prensa Latina) A handful of activists today braved the intense rain that flooded the streets of the metropolitan area of San Juan to declare their support to the Venezuelan people and the Bolivarian Revolution.
Convened by various organizations, the protesters gathered in front of the statue of the Liberator Simón Bolívar in the park located at the entrance of the islet of Viejo San Juan, where they demanded that the world respect the determination of the Venezuelan people to elect Nicolás Maduro as their president for a second term.
“It is our duty as fighters for the independence of Puerto Rico, and for all the just causes of the peoples of the world, to defend Venezuela’s freedom and sovereignty,” said Dianne Viera, spokeswoman for the Puerto Rico Chapter of Alba Movimientos.
She added that “in the Latin American and Caribbean community, our territories continue to be coveted by Yankee imperialism.”
“In order to usurp the sovereignty of the free peoples of the region and gain control of their resources, they invest millions in creating and supporting far-right, fascist movements,” she added.
The spokeswoman of the Puerto Rico Chapter of Alba Movimientos—which includes the Socialist Front (Frente Socialista), the Cuba Solidarity Committee (Comité de Solidaridad con Cuba), the No More Promises Brigade (Jornada se Acabaron las Promesas), and the Ñin Negrón Movement among other organizations—declared that the counterrevolutionaries forces will fail in their actions against Venezuela and Cuba.
Viera maintained that “there can be no dictatorship in a place where, in a presidential election like the one that took place last July 28 in Venezuela, 38 political parties participated, and 10 candidates ran.”
For his part, Gerardo Lugo Segarra, president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico-Liberator Movement (Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico-Movimiento Libertador), said that they will stand with the Bolivarian Revolution, with its President Nicolás Maduro, and with the Venezuelan people in the face of the attempts of US imperialism and its lackeys of the European Union to undermine their stability.
Milagros Rivera, president of the Solidarity Committee with Cuba, lamented in conversation with Prensa Latina that the afternoon’s intense rain prevented more people committed to the cause from participating.
“Traffic was cut off in many places due to flooding,” she said.
Militant poet William Pérez Vega closed the event with a poem dedicated to the struggle of the Venezuelan people and to solidarity with their cause in the face of media attacks on President Nicolás Maduro.
Vegas’ poem read:
Those same colonizers, masters of extermination
Expropriators of native wealth
Who put crosses on their swords or make crosses with their swords
Who have never wanted the people to rise up
Who instead of manna rain down shrapnel
Who paint the canvas of life with death
Who make our poverty their wealth
Who do everything in the name of a god they themselves created, just as they create a hell for the dispossessed
Those who feed on our dead
Who know where our desaparecidos are
Who entered our paradise without permission, only to gift us their hell
Who changed our prophecies for their sacred book
Those who massacred Chile and took the Malvinas,
The friends of Duvalier, Pinochet, Videla, Somoza, Trujillo, and any other Hitler—even if they call her Corina
Those who call PROMESA the dictatorial junta they impose on us
Who banned our flag
Who hate Fidel, Chávez, Bolívar and Che
The jailers of our liberators
Who turn liberty into an empty statue and make it nothing more than a museum piece
The palefaces of the Ku Klux Klan
Who still prefer Barrabas and will buy anyone for 30 coins to turn our misery into their surplus value
The sponsors of barbarism in Gaza with their six-dagger star
The same ones who today again want to decide the fate of Venezuela by force of decrees, terror and anguish
To them, to them I dedicate this poem of spears and curses
With a metaphor of hatred in every rhyme
And a verse at the tip of our rebellion
Until there is nothing left of them
Nor spoils from helplessness
Nor wealth from poverty
Because our greatest treasure is the hope of free peoples
And I am certain—Venezuela—that somewhere in time, justice awaits us.
