Bayamo, October 17. With the symbolic ceremony of the flags in the first Plaza of the Revolution of the Island, and a special tribute to the famous patriot Francisco Vicente Aguilera in the year of the bicentennial of his birth, the XXVII edition of the Fiesta de la Cubanía was started today.
Since the glorious days of October 1868, the will, dedication and unity of the children of the largest of the Antilles around their independence, configure a cultural notion that has wanted to be demobilized and denatured as a way of castrating our roots, was expressed in the opening words by the renowned poet Luis Carlos Suárez.
Those who try this, he warned, have the marked intention of making the conquests and the purposes of the present sterile, because it is vital to defend as a nation a culture that understands diversity, loves equality and the collective, and nurtures the best of each person to face the dehumanization of the contemporary world.
The popular democratic character and the defense of identity are essences of Cuban cultural policy that encouraged the creation of this event, from which we continue to defend them, now with new content and ways of communicating given the circumstances imposed by the pandemic of the COVID-19 and the resurgence of the imperial blockade, he stressed.
Floral offerings to Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Father of the Nation, and to the author of the National Anthem Pedro Figueredo, were placed by the highest political and governmental authorities of the province of Granma, while the fertile life of Francisco Vicente Aguilera, born in Bayamo on June 23, 1821, was remembered through theater and music.
After a ceremonial tour around the aforementioned Plaza, a spur used by Aguilera in the independence struggle was exposed in the Provincial Library 1868, a building where the birthplace of the hero was once located.
The inaugural activities included the cancellation of a special first-day stamp, issued on the occasion of the bicentennial of the birth of the former president of the Bayamo Revolutionary Committee, Major General, Secretary of War, General-in-Chief of the Eastern Army and vice president of the Republic in Arms.
Bypassing the limitations imposed by COVID-19 for the second consecutive year, the Fiesta de la Cubanía adds face-to-face actions and to a greater extent through different digital platforms, mainly the online channel Videos Crisol.
Live your roots is the call for the program that, until next October 20, also pays tribute to the Son as a musical genre, and to the 60th anniversary of Words to Intellectuals, a momentous speech delivered in 1961 by the historic leader of the Revolution Fidel Castro.