That heroic 5th of September

On September 5, 1957, members of the 26th of July Movement, some Navy officers and personnel and the people in general made history by uprising in the city of Cienfuegos against Batista’s better equipped army.
Despite being outgunned, their courageous action in support of the liberation campaign already under way in the Sierra Maestra mountains placed Cienfuegos at the center of the Homeland’s heart, even if they failed to meet their tactical goals.

On that day, valuable children of our country lost their lives, so this is a sacred act of remembrance in honor of a revolt that Fidel valued years later as a truly resolute and heroic battle resulting from the Cuban people’s growing awareness that a frontal struggle was then the most suitable way to achieve justice in the country, in the spirit of those who had been fighting in the east since the late 1956.

The assault still maintains its full glory after so many years as the local population visit, in an annual pilgrimage, the cemetery where the remains of the heroes massacred by the dictatorship rest.

The rebels took Cayo Loco and other enclaves of a city whose citizens had the courage to defy the corrupt and murderous ruler and to offer their support in a sobering day of light and commitment that made them taste full freedom. What represented an instant in time revealed to their compatriots the firmness of the Cuban people’s resolve to fight.

What was to be expected happened: the rebels and their followers could not cope with the brutal onslaught of a well-equipped army and its criminal cruelty. Batista's repressive forces killed, wounded and maimed dozens in their eagerness to thwart the uprising, but he never imagined that the act of rebellion was in itself an invaluable moral victory that resonated throughout the country. They had surprised the dictator, who did everything to decimate and dismantle the M-26-7 and its rapprochement to other progressive forces in the city, which eventually had consequences.

The revolutionaries thought that the actions in Cienfuegos would trigger nationwide uprisings, including assaults on the Presidential Palace and the General Staff of the Navy in Havana and other attacks in the city of Santiago de Cuba. However, the magnitude of their goals called for more time to prepare an action originally planned for April, postponed until May, and finally put on hold for technical difficulties and, eventually, betrayal.

Julio Camacho Aguilera, who was then the chief of a group of officers, was in charge of the bold initiative that sought to take the whole city, as well as the maritime police headquarters, the radio stations and the Rural Guard barracks.

In his speech for the 20th anniversary of the revolt, Fidel said: “No one can imagine the extraordinary help that the uprising scheduled for May 28th and the opening of a second guerrilla front in the Escambray would have meant for the combatants of the Sierra Maestra mountains. (...) The Cienfuegos uprising brought us extraordinary moral encouragement. The tyranny could no longer talk about the unity of its armed forces. (…) We could not seize the Cayo then, nor the San Lorenzo College, the City Hall, the Martí Park, or the city... We did not take them then, but later, and our people have them now definitively and forever. Today we are the owners of our homeland, not only because we knew how to conquer it, but also how to defend it with dignity and heroically”.

By midnight, exhausted and out of ammunition, the revolutionaries stopped fighting. What followed was predictable: a wave of torture, assassinations and persecutions in the barbaric style of a tyrant who plunged Cuba into mourning while he enriched himself by surrendering the country to foreign capital and the national oligarchy.

Still, the freedom that inspired such sacrifice finally arrived in January 1959. Cienfuegos and Cuba do not forget their best children, immolated on September 5, 1957. All around this city by the Caribbean, people remember the action.