The prevailing situation in Cuba, especially after the coup of March 10, carried out by the dictator Fulgencio Batista, which raised the frustration and discontent of the Cuban people to its highest level.
On July 26, 1953, a group of young Cubans, led by the young Fidel Castro, set out at the risk of their lives to rewrite the political and social history of a Cuba that was oppressed by the regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
The rightness of their ideas led the Centennial Generation, as this group was known in honor of the hero José Martí, to sow the seed of that historical change that despite the military failure, raised awareness of the need to fight to change the prevailing reality, something that Cubans learned to build their history from January 1, 1959.
In 1973, during the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the historic date, the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro said: “The Moncada taught us to turn setbacks into victories. It was not the only bitter test of adversity, but nothing could contain the victorious struggle of our people”.
Cuba celebrates every year the date of the assaults to the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks, as a mournful and heroic event for the blood shed. The island celebrates it as a day of rejoicing because on July 26, 1953, the death sentence of the neocolonial oppressive yoke on this Caribbean island was passed.
The evils and miseries of a dictatorship characterized by repression, violence, persecution and the worsening of the social differences to which Cubans were subjected, created the propitious conjuncture to carry out the exit of the Batista regime. That was the political strategy of the struggle initiated on July 26, 1953.
The assault on the Moncada Barracks constituted a leap in history that placed the armed struggle as the only way to reach victory and achieve the definitive independence so hard fought since 1868, when the first war for the freedom of Cuba began. Today it is up to the new generations to maintain and continue what cost so much over the years.
