Armando, a man from Guantanamo who fought against the Yankee swipe

GUANTANAMO, Cuba, Apr 19 (ACN) At 85, Armando Iván Fernández Pérez clearly remembers his participation in the fight against the mercenary invasion of Bay of Pigs, the first futile attack of capitalist Nazi fascism to recover lost privileges.

Six decades ago, on April 18, 1961—a fateful year for the counterrevolution and its puppets—the siren call of combat reached the National Revolutionary Police unit in western Cuba where Armando was posted. “We left straight for Bay of Pigs, arriving there at 4:00 a.m. on the 19th, and the Police Battalion went into action at the orders of Samuel Rodiles Planas, also from the province of Guantanamo, who is now a Major General and Hero of the Republic of Cuba.”

Following the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, Armando joined he had joined that great unit, where was privileged to keep serving his country and fight the mercenaries, who were eventually defeated, demoralized and exchanged for soft food for babies.

He is as happy to recall the homage that the organization of Cuban Trade Unions paid to those from his province who took part in the heroic deed as he is sad for two of his comrades to who fell in the line of duty at Bay of Pigs, his townee Luis López Mustelier and José Miguel Bañuls Perera from the province of Santiago de Cuba. Still, he holds that even if they are not here in the flesh they will always live on in the memory of their homeland and their people.