Elio Delgado-Legon’s Diary

I had joined the guerrilla a month before and still hadn’t taken part in any important actions. Only the most senior and experienced members, who had the best guns, had been sent to acquire weapons and to ambush a police patrol.

The people of Cuba and Mexico share a history of common struggle. We can turn to many historical and cultural facts that demonstrate this. The people of Mexico always took in and protected those Cuban revolutionaries who, at certain points in history…

The early days of October 1958 were upon us. On the first, I had joined the rebel camp. That’s how my life as a guerrilla began. It was a new experience for me, although I had already spent more than four years in the struggle against the dictatorship.

I’ve recently read a number of articles that make the baseless claim that Cuba is attempting to rebuild a capitalist system, or that socialism is disappearing in our country.

I had received confirmation that I could join the guerrilla camp some days before. It was my window of opportunity, as it was relatively close by and the farmer who carried supplies to the campsite could lead me there.

I have read articles and comments by the foreign press criticizing Cuba for exporting medical services on more than one occasion. These express opinions full of cynicism and bad intentions and use false or distorted information to denigrate the Cuban government.

Shortly after Fidel Castro began the war against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship at the Sierra Maestra mountain range, I asked the leadership of the 26th of July Movement in the province of Las Villas to send me to a guerrilla front.

Cuban sugar industry workers had been demanding the differential pay they were entitled to since the beginning of December, 1955. That year, sugar had been sold at higher price than that which had been used to calculate wages after the previous harvest.

As a result of the failure of neo-liberalism and the worsening of living conditions, left-wing, progressive or nationalist parties have come to power in most Latin American and Caribbean countries. Faced with successive defeats at the ballot boxes, the Right has devised a new kind of coup d’état.