The Saiz brothers’ legacy is in good hands

The clandestine movement in the town of San Juan y Martinez had decided to organize a public rally on August 13, 1957, to mark the leader Fidel Castro’s 31st birthday, so the brothers Luis and Sergio Saiz Montes de Oca, leaders of the local 26th of July Movement (M7/26), got ready to participate and said goodbye to their mother Esther, a primary school teacher, to whom they said: "Don’t be afraid, one day you will be proud of us".

They headed for a movie theater in town, where they planned to distribute revolutionary propaganda. Sergio was right in front of the box office when a soldier ran up to him and tried to frisk him violently, but he resisted, so the henchman tried to hit him. Luis tried to defend his brother but, as he demanded the soldier to leave him alone, the man shot him.

When Sergio, who was lying on the ground, saw what happened, he opened his shirt and shouted: "Murderer, you killed my brother, kill me too!" The soldier pulled the trigger and pierced his chest.
Bodies lying dormant / hugging the cement / of a street and a star..., Sergio had written in a poem, as if anticipating the day of his and his brother’s death. Their murder shocked the town and the whole region.

The intellectual Abel Prieto, who as a child knew Sergio, recalls: "A heavy mantle of anguish and horror pervaded the whole province. My mother cried as my father repeated over and over again that they were unarmed (...), it was a fierce, blind, inconceivable blow, which I gradually came to understand.”

Over and above social differences, the people of San Juan y Martínez gave their support to the brothers’ parents—Luis, a longtime local judge whose honesty earned him people’s respect, and Esther, a teacher who taught about José Martí, Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez, all of whom laid the foundations of the patriotic feelings harbored by generations of Cubans.

The brothers’ early revolutionary calling had much to do with their uprising. Luis, 18, was a member of the Revolutionary Directorate in Havana, where he intended to study before the dictatorship closed the university. However, he joined the struggle along with José Antonio Echeverría and Fructuoso Rodríguez and, upon his return to his hometown as a convinced clandestine fighter, he was appointed Municipal Coordinator of the M7/26h.

On his end, Sergio, who was a year younger and had a similar upbringing, joined his brother in every action and possibly became Cuba’s youngest person to be in charge of Action and Sabotage.
They visited the United States together with their parents, wrote political literature, and studied José Martí, universal history and philosophy. They knew the ideas of Karl Marx, to whom Sergio dedicated a poem: ... the mute scalpel of your doctrine / makes the hard temple of exploitation / tremble and vibrate....

Among their papers are analyses about and denunciations of racial discrimination in Cuba, the role of education in the formation of revolutionary values, and the need for a social Revolution, all of which amazingly profound if we take into account that they were just teenagers.

Shortly before their assassination, they had written the text Por qué Luchamos (Why we fight), considered their political testament, in which they stated: "(...) We only have our lives, endorsed by the honesty of just thinking and an immense work to carry out and, as an offering of devotion and detachment, we have bestow them on the arms of the Cuban Revolution—just, great, renovating, honest, socialist—with no other hope than to see these dreams come true".

The legacy and example of these revolutionaries is in good hands in the organization that gathers the young Cuban intellectual vanguard: the Hermanos Saíz Association, founded in October 1986 to pick up where these two remarkable human beings left off.