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Antonio Guiteras and Carlos Aponte,
genuine anti-imperialist fighters
BY
IVAN TERRERO
—Granma
International staff writer—
IT
was May 8, 1935, when the parched soil of Morrillo,
a old fort close to the Bay of Matanzas, was
moistened with the blood of two valiant and genuine
anti-imperialist fighters: Antonio (Tony) Guiteras
Holmes and Carlos Aponte Hernández.
The
previous night, Guiteras and Aponte and a group of
revolutionaries had taken refuge in that
inhospitable and remote place awaiting the arrival
of the Amalia yacht that was to take them to
Mexico. But the felony had been consummated and in
the shadows of the night was more tyrannical in its
invisibility.
On
that May morning, betrayal with its weapon under its
cloak struck its villainous blow on those
revolutionaries.
When
they became aware of the betrayal, they were already
nearly surrounded. Soldiers and marines from the
heavily armed forces had them covered. Guiteras and
Aponte decided to take their lives in their hands,
and that is what they did. They left the fort
through the back entrance in an attempt to slip the
siege on the banks of the Canímar River.
Their pursuers commenced the attack and shots were
exchanged over three hours. Already close to the
bridge over the river and at the point of climbing
the gulley, they were brought down by enemy fire,
first Antonio and then Carlos.
A
few hours later the dictator Fulgencio Batista and
his henchmen were toasting each other with
champagne. They had liberated themselves from their
most feared adversaries and amply met the orders of
their imperial masters.
“Thus the most lofty figure, the purest forged mind,
the most indomitable will, the most energetic wing
and the purest spirit of the national revolutionary
movement was lost,” affirmed Raúl Roa, known as the
Cuban Foreign Minister of Dignity), in reference to
those events.
Guiteras was born on November 22, 1906 in
Bala-Cynwyd, Montgomery county, in the suburbs of
Philadelphia, USA.
He
was the son of Cuban Calixto Guiteras Gener and
Marie Therese Holmes Walsh, a U.S. citizen of Irish
origin. He was given the name of his paternal
grandfather, one of three Guiteras brothers
(Antonio, Eusebio and Pedro José), exemplary
patriots educated at the famous La Empresa College
in Matanzas, who were forced into exile due to
persecution by the Spanish colonial authorities.
At
the age of 17 he entered the University of Havana
and graduated in Pharmacy. The anti-imperialist
struggles of 1927 surprised him in his final year.
He was one of the signatories of the statement by
the Revolutionary Directorate in 1927 against the
opportunist politics of President Gerardo Machado.
The
Machado regime unleashed a fierce wave of
persecution and Guiteras was expelled from the
University, with all the rebelliousness of youth.
He
toured the island as a laboratory rep and thus had
the opportunity to contemplate in the raw the harsh
reality of a people that were being deceived and
impoverished. It was precisely in that period when
he began his most active political task: “Machado is
nothing more than an agent of imperialism, which
sets him on the people like a guard dog.”
In
1931 he was arrested for taking part in the Río
Verde insurrection. After his release he took up
combative action again in the province of Santiago
de Cuba and other communities in the far east of the
island. He was convinced that the dictatorship had
to be overthrown by the force of arms.
He
planned an assault on the Moncada Garrison but the
action was finally carried out against the San Luis
military barracks, which was under siege for hours
until enemy superiority in numbers forced his
retreat.
In
full rebellion in the mountains he heard of the fall
of the dictator and the mediation of U.S. ambassador
Sumner Welles, who brought Carlos Manuel de Céspedes
to power. Guiteras did not lay down arms as he
emphatically rejected that criminal and treacherous
government, affirming: “I will sign and accept
mediation when it has been signed and accepted by
the men that Machado murdered.”
When
the first Ramón Grau Martín government was
constituted, Guiteras believed that an opportunity
had arrived to take forward his advanced
revolutionary ideas. For that reason he agreed to
head the Secretariats of Government and War and the
Navy. That is when he became involved in his most
creative and revolutionary activities.
The
initial progressive measures of the One Hundred Days
government were inspired by Guiteras. He drafted
laws and decrees that were deeply nationalist in
spirit, and included the establishment of a
eight-hour working day, the institution of a Pension
and Retirement System for workers and the
nationalization of the Cuban Electricity Company, to
that point a subsidiary of the U.S. Electric Bond
and Shares consortium. Guiteras went straight to the
heart of the imperialist oppressor.
The
reaction of the U.S. government was not long in
coming. The Washington military mechanism began to
operate swiftly and a fleet of battleships was
deployed off the coast of Cuba. Far from being
perturbed, Guiteras ordered the strictest vigilance
and to open fire if the marines tried to set foot on
the island.
With
Antonio Guiteras, anti-imperialist thought and
action came to power for the first time. He was
convinced that imperialism was not only crushing the
Cuban people but all the nations of the continent.
But then came the Batista coup and in January 1934
Guiteras was once again fully involved in the armed
struggle in Oriente province.
He
was hunted down by Batista and Pedraza in an attempt
to wipe from the face of the earth anyone who dared
to stand up to the monopolies. He founded La Joven
Cuba organization with an anti-imperialist and
revolutionary program to prepare a popular
insurrection.
It
was at that point that he came to know the man who
would die at his side, Venezuelan Carlos Aponte
Hernández, who had been deported from Cuba by the
Machado government in 1928, and had returned via
Ecuador after hearing of the fall of that regime.
Aponte fervently wanted to know who was keeping the
nascent Batista military dictatorship in check and
disrupting the sleep of the U.S. ambassador Caffery.
Carlos Aponte was born in La Pastora, Caracas,
Venezuela on November 2, 1900 and at the age of 17
joined the uprisings on the plains of Anzoátegui
headed by General Emilio Arévalo Cedeño against Juan
Viciente (Bisonte) Gómez. Seven years later he was
deported to Cuba, where he commenced his political
training as a veteran anti-imperialist fighter and
refined internationalist.
Without much preamble, in their first meeting the
two men agreed to combine efforts in the struggle
against Batista. Aponte’s experiences as a combatant
against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua within the
forces of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the general of free
men, and in Peru in the popular uprisings in
Trujillo against the dictatorship of Sánchez Cerro,
introduced him to La Joven Cuba revolutionaries as a
veteran anti-imperialist fighter.
“The
son of temerity and courage, the symbol of a compass
in the face of imperialism,” as Pablo de la
Torriente Brau called him, always continued to act
in line with the Bolivarian slogan: “The soldiers of
liberty do not ask how many they are, but where they
are.”
They
were, simply, men of the revolution who had dared to
defy the U.S. consortiums and to organize a
transcendental movement in all the neocolonial
pseudo-republics on the continent.
Thus
it was that in 1935, that the circle tightened fast
around Guiteras and he understood that he had to
leave the country at the earliest opportunity. The
betrayal of men without honor was the best weapon of
the hired killers to cut off the lives of these two
brothers in the anti-imperialist struggle.
They
had planned to leave for Mexico, but the Amalia
did not arrive.
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