Tatiana Coll * / La Jornada
The President of the Council of Ministers, dictator of Spain, and restorer of the monarchy, Cánovas del Castillo, faced with the overwhelming success of the invasion of the West by the independence fighters, declared that he was prepared to maintain control over Cuba “to the last man and the last peseta.” To guarantee this, he appointed General Valeriano Weyler, on February 10, 1896, to head the Spanish army on the island. He was already well known to Cubans, since during the first Ten Years’ War, he had executed entire families and burned and looted entire villages. This time, a true war of extermination would be waged, whose central strategy would be to “reconcentrate peasant families,” even if this brought “horrible misery and hunger.”
The invasion of western Cuba from the east was a brilliant military strategy devised by Generals Maceo and Gómez. On October 22, 1895, a column of one thousand men departed from Mangos de Baraguá, leaving from that very spot to deliver Maceo’s unequivocal message: no one would negotiate and no one would surrender. The Protest of Baraguá was also the name Fidel Castro gave to the Party Congress held during the Special Period following the collapse of the USSR. Just three months later, the invading column reached Mantua, at the other end of the island, having marched 424 leagues. The feat was renowned, and a veteran of the Civil War declared: “We must place Gómez and Maceo at the forefront of military prowess.”
The central objective of the “reconcentration” was to sever the links of sustenance and support from the peasants to the independence insurrection. Weyler had already distinguished himself in the previous war as an efficient exterminator. In October 1896, he decreed that “all inhabitants in the countryside or outside the fortified lines of the towns must be reconcentrated within eight days in the towns occupied by the troops.” Anyone who disobeyed would be considered a rebel and tried. The removal and distribution of provisions was prohibited. Cattle had to be brought to the towns by troops. An eyewitness wrote that mothers carried their young children hanging from their dry, lifeless breasts to create the illusion of nursing.
An anecdote recounted in the book *History of Cuba* (1968) relates that the mayor of Güines, frightened by the appalling condition of those reconcentrated, went to Weyler to ask for provisions and medicine; The response was emphatic: “You say the people in the reconcentration camps are dying of hunger? Well, that’s precisely why I implemented the reconcentration camps.” The number of people in the reconcentration camps is estimated at around 400,000, and the number of deaths at around 200,000. The photographs that exist from that time are horrific, comparable only to those of Nazi concentration camps. Many historians have stated that Weyler was the inventor of the concentration camps.
The American war correspondent, Appelyee, said of him: “a petty man, diminutive in every respect, shriveled and wrinkled, eager for immortal fame without caring whether his prestige smells of roses or manure.” He could well have been talking about Trump, a figure who fits this description perfectly.
Trump and Weyler are of the same ilk; he rules by force, overbearing, deciding the fates of entire nations, and most ruthlessly over the people of Cuba. Like Weyler, he claims that the total blockade is precisely to force them to surrender through hunger and disease. It is incredibly shameful that everyone in the world accepts these barbaric decrees in the 21st century. There are 7,000 paid-for containers full of medicine and food being held up in the Dominican Republic, and not a single ship from any country dares to collect them and take them safely to port in Cuba, for which the transport service would also be paid.
It is immoral, and I would even say indecent, that countries that pride themselves on being democratic and developed accept the shameful role of begging extras in the face of the brazen tariffs that this modern-day Weyler brandishes every day, the absurd annexation threats, the changes in country names, the threats and bombings, the murders at sea and in the streets, the deportations, and the brutal imprisonments. Accused of pedophilia and instigating a coup d’état, he remains unpunished.
But despite Weyler and Trump, the Cuban people triumphed and resisted, and continue to resist day after day, with immeasurable strength, energy, and vigor, with creative audacity, inventing a thousand almost nonexistent possibilities, with determination facing each day, sometimes without electricity for two days, without water, since the pumps don’t work without electricity, without basic services, in a feat that few of us could accomplish. Resolute, today that people debates and discusses the new measures adopted by the National Assembly of People’s Power, perhaps hoping for a new horizon; we would ask for a humanitarian and solidarity-based horizon for such a resilient people.
* Author of Between Quetzalcoatl and Che, Laurette Sejourné: A Life Against the Current in 20th-Century Mexico
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo Marco Peláez / Archive
[ SOURCE: www.cubainformacion.tv ]
