Cuba marks anniversary of begining of independece wars

HAVANA, Cuba, Oct 10 (ACN) The beginning of the first anti-colonialist, anti-slavery and Cuban independence war will be commemorated today, in La Demajagua, in the easten province pf Granma, with a political-cultural act that will highlight the transcendence of the event that took place on the same date, but in 1868.

Hundreds of people will pay tribute to the protagonists of the heroic deed led by the Father of the Homeland Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819-1874), on behalf of the people of the island, 155 years after the event.

From the now museum park, declared National Monument in 1978, poetry, music, dance and oratory will be combined to highlight aspects of special significance, such as the postulates of the Manifesto of October 10 and Céspedes' gesture of giving freedom to his slaves, calling them citizens, and inviting them to fight for freedom against the Spanish colonial yoke.

Speaking to correspondent Osviel Castro Medel of Juventud Rebelde newspaper, artistic director Mirelys Echenique Naranjo said that the script of the ceremony will highlight the idea of historic leader Fidel Castro about the continuity of a single Cuban revolutionary process, which began precisely on October 10, 1868 in La Demajagua.

Prior to the commemoration, the centenary Manzanillo Theater, in the city of the same name, hosted last night the political-cultural evening "Live Image", through which outstanding artists from the province of Granma dedicated songs, poems and dances to the patrician from Bayamo and evoked, among others, the transcendental moment in which he gave freedom to his slaves and called them to the struggle for freedom and justice.

Historians refer that on October 10, in the then sugar mill La Demajagua, approximately 12 kilometers from Manzanillo, some 500 patriots, led by the Bayamese landowner, lawyer and poet Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, took up arms.

The cry for independence marked the beginning of the era of social revolutions in Cuba, where a new people had emerged after more than three centuries of Spanish colonial rule.

The studies add that the conspiracy began in the city of Bayamo, in August 1867, and already in the second semester of 1868 hundreds of patriots were in the manigua, for which on October 9 of that year there were several uprisings ordered by Céspedes.