HAVANA, Cuba.- My objective is not to analyze the conditions imposed on our island with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. However, I cannot fail to mention that on January 1, 1899, the hard work began to recover a devastated country, with an infrastructure and an economy destroyed by thirty years of war. Today the “US occupation” is criticized without clarifying that it was a provisional military administration until we had our own government, or that the interveners governed with Cuban advisers eager to move the country forward.
Nor do I intend to give a dissertation on the past, but I do want to recall some facts that we learned for decades in history classes and that today the communists do not mention. They taught us that a few months after starting the reconstruction, important public sanitation works had already been carried out with resources from the country.
Thus, it was possible to eradicate yellow fever, whose transmitting agent, the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, was discovered by the Cuban scientist Carlos Juan Finlay. The reconcentrated peasants returned to the countryside to work and the members of the Liberation Army were discharged to join civilian life and work. The Supreme Court of Cuba was created, made up entirely of Cuban lawyers under the presidency of Dr. Antonio González de Mendoza. We also learned that at that time the census was carried out that provided the data of more than 200,000 Cubans killed in the war.
During the years of occupation he was gave a big boost to the creation of the Cuban public school by the Cuban pedagogue and superintendent Professor Alexis Frye (who is no longer spoken of) and with Cuban professors such as Dr. Enrique José Varona. Likewise, secondary education, the University, the Archive and the National Library were organized.
Nothing good is said about the objectives of the US military administration today, because in schools it is not convenient to emphasize that “imperialism”, our enemy, helped us pave the way for the creation of the Republic. The only interest is to stigmatize the Platt Amendment imposed in the first Cuban Constitution. By the way, our teachers of that time also spoke about the terms of that imposition.
On May 20, 1902, our Republic was established and the first president elected by the people, Mr. Tomás Estrada Palma, took office. At noon, after the US flag was lowered in the Government Palace, the Cuban flag was hoisted by the General in Chief of the Liberation Army, Máximo Gómez, who exclaimed excitedly: “Now I think we have arrived! ”.
Wise words from our Generalissimo: we Cubans already had a Republic, although much destroyed and impoverished by the war. And although we had no economic experience as a people, we managed to get ahead because we enjoyed the freedom that comes from democracy.
I do not intend to make believe that we lived in paradise, because there were difficulties to be solved. We were still a young republic, but it is undeniable that we managed to achieve remarkable development in less than half a century. However, this was abruptly cut short as of January 1, 1959, when the communist dictatorship spread terror by arresting and executing anyone who opposed it and consolidating and strengthening the repressive organs.
The communist government, in power for more than 60 years, crippled our economy by confiscating all kinds of private enterprise to set up the socialist enterprise that has proven to be a failure and has led the country to ruin and its population to famine. During all these years, Castroism has applied fascist methods to crush any attempt at change in the country, as evidenced on July 11, 2021 when Cubans took to the streets to ask for medicine, food, democracy: their peaceful claims were savagely repressed. and hundreds of protesters were sentenced to long terms.
These repressive methods have been applied with total impunity on previous occasions, such as when the rebels rose up in the Escambray and in retaliation hundreds of peasant families in the area were violently uprooted from their homes, stripped of their belongings and forcibly relocated to the captive towns of Pinar del Río and Camagüey.
Today, Cubans, disappointed and fed up with pretending to join, resort to any method at their disposal to leave the country, while the communists cling to power and the official media spread an illusory vision of our reality.
OPINION ARTICLE
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