The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel, described this Tuesday the attempt to celebrate May 20th as a national holiday. This holiday marked the birth, in 1902, of what Cuban historiography defines as a “mediated republic.”
Through his profile on the social network X, the president affirmed that on that day, the country that fought for 30 years against an empire only to witness the false lowering of the interventionist flag. He noted that “the new empire (the United States) left a dagger stuck in Cuba’s side: the Naval Base remains there against the will of the Cuban people.”
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez also denounced on the same platform that, in order to erase history, anti-Cubans in the US are seeking to redefine May 20th, the date that marks the birth of a republic crippled by the Platt Amendment.
“The vindication of our Mambises came in 1959, after much good blood forged the path to true independence,” the Cuban foreign minister wrote in his message.
According to historians, on May 20, 1902, after three decades of bloody war against Spanish colonialism, the victory of the Mambi troops was thwarted by the United States’ intervention in the conflict (1898), and the establishment by that power of a mediated republic.
Cuba went from being a colony of Spain to a neo-colony of the United States, with the imposition of treaties aimed at formalizing ties of economic dependence and political subordination to the neighboring country.
These treaties ensured the United States control of the Cuban market while consolidating the mono-product structure of the economy; they also granted it the right to intervene in the island’s internal affairs; and the establishment of naval bases in this Caribbean nation.
For Cuban philosopher, educator, and essayist Fernando Martínez Heredia (1939-2017), the socialist revolution of national liberation that triumphed in 1959, embracing revolutionary nationalism and radicalism in the pursuit of social justice, sustained and profoundly changed the people and the country.
