On that August 5, Fidel won, the people won, Cuba won.
On that day, men and women, with their Commander in Chief Fidel Castro at the forefront as so often, crushed the stateless without firing a shot; the ideas and principles of a revolutionary Cuba aborted a low opportunist protest in the capital.
In that memorable August 1994, a cunningly manipulated mob took to the streets with the pretense of a bloodbath, dreamed of by many vultures to intervene in the island. On that memorable August 5, they broke shop windows, threw stones at the police, looted stores, while others filmed the scene to show the world a crowd protesting against the government.
But the attempt forged amidst embers of hatred and opportunism by the reactionary clique of the revolted and brutal north, in the face of the disappearance of the socialist camp, was ineffective in its script. It was not possible to put an end to the Cuban Revolution on that August 5.
The revolt was controlled in a short time and the chaos underwent an immediate metamorphosis. Fidel arrived at the most dangerous moment, silencing the paid peons and the lumpen, without a bulletproof vest, with his only shield: the olive green suit.
Suddenly the stones vanished and the throats were filled with one word: Fidel! Fidel! With no other weapons than his ideas, the riots dissolved like water in salt on the banks of the Malecon, as the Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernandez Retamar pointed out. It was the great victory of the people in honor of fidelity to the homeland.
