Conrado Benítez: "I am a revolutionary and will not betray my people"

In his last minutes of life, isolated and tortured in an intricate spot in the Escambray mountains, Conrado Benítez García replied to his assassins, who offered to spare his life if he renounced his ideal, by saying, "I am a revolutionary, I will not betray my people."
 
 A teacher at barely 18, Conrado was born to a black and humble family and had to alternate as a primary school student and as a shoeshine, until the revolutionary victory in 1959 changed the fate of his generation and led him to become a volunteer teacher in May 1960 as one of thousands of young people who would take the light of teaching across Cuba.
 
The noble project of the Literacy Campaign had started and Conrado joined the honorable task, eventually targeted by CIA-supported rebel gangs bent on preventing its effects, especially in the Escambray mountains, where hundreds of them were rampant and making the most of the vast ignorance that prevailed among the local peasants.
 
When he finished his training as a teacher, he was assigned to a very isolated spot—right in the midst of an area of operations of the bandits—where he was hosted by Eleodoro Rodríguez Linares, a farmer and member of the Rebel Army. Together with the neighbors, he set up a classroom where he gave lessons to 44 children during the day and to as many adults in the evenings.
 
According to some of his students, before going on a few days’ leave near the end of the year 1960, he enthusiastically pledged to use part of his first salary to buy school supplies and bring gifts to his pupils and comrades.
 
His standing in the community made him a target of the gangs that on January 5, 1961 broke into Eleodoro’s hut looking for the teacher, who was returning that same day, excited to hand out the presents he bought for the children as January 6—Three Kings Day—was drawing near.
 
Conrado and Eleodoro were taken to the camp of Osvaldo Ramirez, whom the CIA agent Ramon Ruisanchez (Commander Augusto), chief of the local rebels, had instructed to sow panic among the peasants and thwart the plans of the Revolution.
 
 Witnesses who were arrested later stated that one of the rebels told his boss, "This is the teacher who is washing people’s brains around here", and the murderer told Conrado, "Join us and I will spare your life", to which the teacher immediately replied: "I am a revolutionary and I will not betray my people".
They beat him, calling him a pro-Fidel communist black, and stabbed him several times with a bayonet and cut his genitals. At dawn on January 5, they hanged him next to Eleodoro.
 
His killers, who were brought to justice in the end, failed in their attempts to sabotage the Literacy Campaign, as thousands of the martyr’s young contemporaries joined the brigade named after Conrado Benitez and spread his example in the most far-off places of the country to eradicate illiteracy. In September 1960, Fidel Castro had announced in the UN General Assembly that in 1962 Cuba would be "free of illiteracy". For the first time in UN’s history, a leader of a Third World country undertook such a commitment as a goal of social development to educate in just one year more than one million illiterate people.
 
 Sixty years after its completion, the Cuban Literacy Campaign is recognized as an example by UNESCO, at a time when ending illiteracy in the world is still an unresolved matter on the agenda for the UN Sustainable Development Program for the coming years.