[In the largest such march in the history of the country, 1.2 million Cubans marched through Havana on July 26, the 48th anniversary of Fidel Castro's assault on the Moncada Barracks, the first shot of the Cuban Revolution. Here we reprint an English translation of the editorial from that morning's Granma, the daily newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party.]
July 26 this year will be historic. That day, at 8am, the most massive march ever protesting the aggressions and crimes of imperialism against Cuba will begin past the US Interest Section and over 1.2 million residents of Havana will take part in it.
A few months ago, a new administration took power in the United States. The way in which this came about violated even the internal laws that rule the empire. In the manner of the "banana republics" it has created in our hemisphere, a scandalous electoral fraud was perpetrated.
This shady and contemptible episode, subsequently validated by the corrupt US legal system, was preceded by a carnivalesque political campaign costing billions of dollars. Our people, immersed in their battle of ideas and fully informed of every detail of the events, were able to grasp like never before the vast difference between true revolutionary democracy and the shameless political parody that is staged in the heart of the empire.
The new president of the United States is acting exactly as he was expected to. With regard to both domestic and foreign policy, he is promoting the most reactionary ideas of the political sector he represents, in every possible field. His sole philosophy seems to be a government of the wealthiest, by the wealthiest and for the wealthiest, within and beyond his country's borders.
At this critical and uncertain time for humanity, the empire is attempting to use its tremendous military, economic and technological power to impose the interests of its increasingly vast transnational corporations on the entire planet.
At a time when neo-liberal globalisation is provoking more and more disasters in the Third World, and the three major centres of world economy — the United States, Europe and Japan — are facing growing difficulties, the new US government is proving to be more self-serving, more insatiable and less cooperative with the rest of the world than ever before.
At a time when climatic changes are causing increasingly frequent and intense floods, droughts and other natural disasters, the new government of the United States, which is home to only 5% of the world population, yet consumes 25% of available energy annually and emits the largest amount of polluting gases, has dealt a brutal blow to the Kyoto Protocol.
At a time when a real possibility had emerged for an end to the arms race, after many decades of Cold War, the new government of the United States is unilaterally breaking the [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty and announcing the establishment of a global anti-missile shield.
Despite all the talk about the end of the Cold War, the United States' military budget, far from being reduced, has been increased year by year. New and sophisticated weapons, fit for nothing less than absolute control over the world, are being developed at a feverish pace.
Why are all these steps being taken? Where are they leading? There can be neither peace nor development in the world under these conditions.
Such a future is neither acceptable nor viable. Throughout the world, people are fighting back against the globalisation of plunder, poverty and hunger. Neither the [International Monetary Fund], nor the [World Trade Organisation], nor the Group of Seven and other such institutions, nor the ideologues of neo-liberalism can find a single place on the planet to meet any more.
Seattle, Washington, Davos, Quebec and Genoa, with their brutal scenes of repression, have demonstrated this.
Those who represent or defend the suicidal and unsustainable world order being imposed on humanity can only meet in fortified bunkers, with the use of protective gear, noxious gases, rubber bullets, high-pressure water hoses and armoured vehicles specially designed to suppress those who protest with ever-less fear and ever-greater courage.
Cuba has never accepted and will never accept this world order, just as it never accepted the status of a neo-colony of the United States and, for that very reason, carried out a profound revolution.
The new US administration cannot hide the resentment bred by the empire's impotence to force our heroic people into surrender. All of its statements, even before its fraudulent election, ooze hatred for our country. Once it had taken power, it adopted measures to even further tighten the genocidal blockade, and stepped up its warnings and threats of punitive measures against US citizens who visit our country.
The murderous Cuban Adjustment Act has been reinforced with new privileges and incentives that even further promote the smuggling of aliens and illegal migration, by virtue of a recent and highly unusual court decision, deliberately uncontested by the government, which grants resident status and the right to work to all Cubans who arrive in US territory by air, from anywhere in the world, even if they are carrying false documents.
The US government has failed to adopt measures against migrant smugglers working out of Florida, who risk the lives and cause the deaths of women, children and other citizens of Cuba. It has passed regulations that tighten the blockade and make it impossible in practice for Cuba to acquire food, medicine and medical equipment from the United States.
In the last 15 years alone, dozens of plots to assassinate the head of the Cuban state have been continually organised, planned and financed from the United States. The most recent was scheduled to take place at the Ibero-American Summit in Panama, barely eight months ago.
This makes even more criminal and disgraceful the trial against five heroic Cuban patriots who, without using violence or causing the slightest physical harm to anyone, were fulfilling their sacred duty of gathering information on terrorist plots against Cuba. They were subjected to atrocious and inhumane treatment, confined to punishment cells for 17 months, as all of our people know.
Almost a year after their arrest, the US authorities shamelessly came up with the serious charge of conspiracy to murder, linking them to the incident of the planes shot down in February 1996.
Together with other planes operating out of US territory, under the direction of a mobster, terrorist and participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion, they had been violating Cuban land and airspace for years, with the full complicity and tolerance of the US authorities.
What pretext did they use for doing this? That of providing help to those encouraged by the murderous Cuban Adjustment Act to take part in illegal emigration and migrant smuggling. What is more: when the charge was ridiculed and torn apart at the trial by the defence attorneys and by the defendants themselves, the jury was tricked, pressured and terrorised into declaring them guilty.
Today, once again, like a cowardly reprisal for their courageous "Message to the People of the United States", they find themselves locked up in punishment cells.
Cuban funds unjustly and arbitrarily blocked in the United States were made available to the terrorists of the Cuban-American mob who operate with impunity from US territory, under the guise of compensation for deaths that are the exclusive responsibility of the US authorities. Now they are trying to implicate our imprisoned compatriots in those events, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the incident that caused those deaths.
We could ask ourselves: When will the US government bring to trial the people responsible for the aggression and terrorist acts against Cuba that have claimed the lives of 3478 of our people and left another 2099 physically disabled?
When is compensation going to be paid for the crimes committed against our people and the damage caused by over 42 years of bloody aggression and the genocidal blockade?
Although the summer is traditionally a time for vacations and carnivals in our capital, July 26 will be a day of combat.
We cannot forget that in the punishment cells of a brutal jail, where they have been locked up for nearly three years as political prisoners of the empire, there are five exemplary patriots, five heroic brothers who bring honour to our people and remind us of many of the most worthy combatants in our glorious history.
To them, to the struggle against the genocidal blockade and the murderous laws that cause the loss of countless lives, to the struggle against the brutal intent to asphyxiate our people and force them into surrender through hunger and disease, to the battle of ideas, to the extraordinary merit of having withstood more than 42 years of hostility and the aggression to which we are subjected by the most powerful empire to ever exist on Earth, to the unprecedented feat of having endured ten years of the special period without giving in to the empire, we dedicate this July 26.
The streets of the capital will shake as we demonstrate to the world that we are ready for battle at their side, and along with them, we are determined to save humanity and build a better future for all of the people on our planet.
In response to the imperialistic, haughty, arrogant and menacing language that with the accent and style of Hitler we have heard in recent days, let us send a clear and unmistakable message to those who express themselves this way, that is, a calm and dignified but forceful and unmistakable message: the Cuban people feel nothing but scorn for their cowardly threats. They are people who know how to fight, people who have triumphed and will continue to triumph!