Miami/64 years have passed. The countless crises that have happened to it have perhaps tarnished those 13 days of October a little; But those of us who lived through them will carry them in our backpacks until the day of final judgment.
Although, to be honest, I believe that many of us who were involved in the fight against totalitarianism in the making, at that time, were not able to realize how close we came to the delusion of grandeur of the tyrant-in-chief, Fidel Castro, pulverizing the world.
Cuba was a chaos controlled by the new class: citizen disorientation was absolute, the regime encouraged envy and confrontation, repression was present throughout society, and distrust and doubt preyed on everyone.
The slogans were commandments of imperative compliance; The progressive lack of supplies, control of the press and confiscations of assets were all part of a government plan to destabilize the population and crush the growing opposition.
We reacted to the violation of our rights, the repression, the mass incarcerations and the fateful wall that echoed from one end of the Island to the other.
The Castros and their lackeys left nothing to chance: fear had to rule over everyone. The confusion was total. We reacted to the violation of our rights, the repression, the mass incarcerations and the fateful wall that echoed from one end of the Island to the other, but we did not realize the magnitude of the events, which far exceeded our levels of understanding.
I recognize that we were not prepared for the challenge we faced. We were teenagers scattered in various secondary schools; We acted on principles, inspired by the transcendental values of the Homeland, but we were no more than simple extras in what would be the great Cuban tragedy, which not even the most clever of us, Aquilino Álvarez and the current writer José Antonio Albertini, could imagine.
For its part, the then dictatorship knew what it wanted and what to do; He knew no limits to the unscrupulousness of his leaders. He handed over national sovereignty to the Soviet Union. The country became the Kremlin’s aircraft carrier in the Caribbean. Society was militarized and the regime showed its true face, which many of us already knew.
Destroying Cuba and everything Cuban was their objective; the ruin of the Cuban nation, its main goal. Later, he chose the United States as an international enemy. Washington and the Cuban people underestimated him; Nobody conceived the absolute absence of patriotic values of the Castro leadership, its purpose of turning the Island into a satrapy of the Kremlin in order to achieve the material and political support it required to perpetuate itself in power while ascending to the world leadership that, apparently, it always aspired to. A project in which the October Crisis was particularly useful.
Not even the enemies of Castroism believed Fidel was capable of sinking the Island into the sea, as he had written in his manifesto ‘History will absolve me’
For months it was said that there were missiles in Cuba. Some of us didn’t believe it. I remember a colleague, with the nickname Billín, who incessantly repeated that the missiles were camouflaged inside the palms; He insisted on it so much that we renamed it Palm Atomica. Not even the enemies of Castroism believed that Fidel was capable of sinking the island into the sea, as he had written in his manifesto. History will absolve me. We laughed, but suspicions grew.
Large trucks, driven and protected by Soviets, with completely covered loads, crossed rural areas, and the population they passed through was ordered to lock themselves in their homes. The resistance reported it; several of its members went to prison for obtaining information about these operations.
The deployment of the military was frightening. The Army and militias were mobilized. In any place they deployed Soviet machine guns known as “four mouths”; Fear spread like never before.
The downing of U2 was falsely attributed to Fidel Castro. Even when it seemed like the world would break into a thousand pieces, the supreme dictator’s ego continued to grow. Castro was, as they say colloquially, in his element. He had always wanted the death of others regardless of the cost, to the extent that he asked Nikita Khrushchev to preventively bomb the United States before Cuba was attacked. I have no doubt that he dreamed of atomic missiles overshadowing the sun: a kind of Nero who, delighting in a cohiba, enjoyed how life on Earth was becoming extinct, including his own. His faith in life was to win, no matter the cost.
