Calm and firmness for a glorious July

July has come again, and it will be 70 years since that outburst of fearlessness and bravery that definitively changed the course of history in the Cuban nation.

The calendar brings the days closer to the date when a handful of young people, determined to offer their lives to free the nation from the opprobrium of tyranny, bequeathed to the homeland an example that sustains the national conscience in the face of new threats and adversities.

The actions of that defining date, which turned the assault on the two main military fortresses in the east of the country into the most transcendental event of the 20th century in Cuba before 1959, have not lost over the years the meaning and encouragement that inspire Cuban revolutionaries.
As historian Pedro Pablo Rodriguez has accurately expressed: "With the Martian doctrines in their hearts, and also in their minds, the assailants of the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Garrisons marched into combat. The history of the Cuban Revolution has advanced with the doctrines of the Master, and from them this country has advanced along the socialist path".

The Moncada Program outlined by Fidel has been materializing year after year, in spite of the enormous difficulties imposed on us by the blockade and the subversive war aimed at sowing discouragement and discrediting everything that is being done in the country to move forward.
July is once again calm amidst the embers of the island summer. The obstacles we are facing in the pursuit of greater development and sustainability of the economy and society, far from diminishing the revolutionary will of the majority, strengthen the optimism in which Fidel educated this people.

There are ill-intentioned and traitors, who sell themselves unscrupulously to the usual aggressor; but since that unprecedented challenge to barbarism and oppression that the 26th of July meant, the decision to resist and win has been forged in the consciences of millions of Cubans.
In the midst of the crisis, nowadays, prospects of economic encouragement for Cuba are opening up. With better organization and speed, foreign investment is gaining momentum; international cooperation is growing and the strengthening of ties with countries of solid economy such as Russia is felt with joy.

In these difficult times, we receive from Russia the renewed will of a collaboration that opened its doors with the existence of the USSR, when the United States tried to close them all.

We can feel with satisfaction how the island arouses admiration and respect in all corners of the world.

The Sao Paulo Forum, the axis of convergence of the most enlightened thinking of the Latin American left since its creation by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Fidel Castro, has just condemned the barbaric dimension of the blockade and proclaimed this unsubmissive archipelago we inhabit as "Heritage of Dignity".

Thus, with legitimate pride, the seventh month of the year will continue being for Cubans that period of thirty-one days bathed by the spring that cleans us of untimely stains.

In spite of those who dream of establishing violence and chaos in our streets, in every neighborhood that is rebuilt and reborn there is an open trench with the determination to move forward and the conviction that it is possible.