Raúl Roa, diplomacy and battle

Born in Havana on April 18, 1907, Raul Roa Garcia lives on in the memory of his fellow countrymen since his decease in 1982 after a mandate that marked a new era within the ranks of the Revolution and diplomacy, the tribunes of the UN, and the world.

He was known as the Foreign Minister of Dignity, a label that defined him in life while he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and did justice to his verticality and courage in responding to the attacks against and lies of U.S. officials and their acolytes about Cuba.

Since his youth, first as a student and then as a professor at the University of Havana and a militant intellectual, he joined the most just and progressive causes based on the ideals of Marx, Lenin and Martí and stood out as a brilliant man whose personality shaped his diplomatic practice, during which he excelled with a straightforward, convincing and overflowing style that no listener or interlocutor could disregard.

He never put a foot wrong: a self-professed restless and insolent person, Roa was incisive and witty, using his criollo humor in his statements or counterarguments without his political message ever losing clarity and force.

Never had the defense of the Cuban Revolution and of the sovereignty of the Homeland had a better champion, which earned him growing admiration among several of his foreign colleagues.

If we take an imaginary leap to the first years of his life, we will see events such as the enthronement and implementation of the policy imposed by the Platt Amendment, a mandatory appendix added to the Cuban Constitution that sparked his will to fight for freedom, sovereignty and social justice.

He came from a family of great patriotic tradition that, in the years of the independence war, made a combative contribution. It will always be necessary for Cubans, be they diplomats, intellectuals or not, to turn to Roa as a well-deserved tribute to his person and his loyalty to Cuban history.

The minister or professor that many knew in his days as a writer, politician, diplomat and polemicist never hesitated to join demonstrations and rallies while still a teenager and young student, either in the struggle against the tyrant Gerardo Machado or after 1930, and was one of the founders of the University Students Directorate (DEU), an organization that he eventually left due to ideological differences to create the Students’ Left Wing (AIE) together with Gabriel Barceló, Pablo de la Torriente Brau and others.

Graduated as Doctor of Law in 1935, he published Bufa subversiva, a compilation of his most relevant works until then, and in 1940 he became a professor at the University of Havana.

A connoisseur and practitioner of the theory of Marxism-Leninism and a front-line anti-imperialist fighter, he was designated in 1959 to represent Cuba in the Organization of American States (OAS), where he never hid his distrust of an organization that he was quick to describe as a Ministry of Colonies. How right his assertion was and still is!

In Roa's time, Cuba left and never rejoined the OAS.

During the Batista dictatorship of the 1950s, he joined the Civic Resistance, a movement with ethical and moral assumptions very similar to those of the 26th of July Movement.

In December 1959, after his stint as ambassador to the OAS, Roa was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and, as Cuba's representative to the UN, he wrote another page of honor in his career as an outstanding person.

Countless testimonies and documents attest to his combative nature and professional stature as a Cuban true to himself, his principles and his time.

Delightful as talking about his style may often be, no one doubts that the best thing he left to his colleagues and to the Cuban people was his courage and fighting spirit, his No! to injustice or surrender, and his work as a teacher of new generations.