The Cuban People Must Not Be Forgotten

 

There is a small island, ninety miles from freedom, where the salt air carries more than the scent of the sea. It carries memory...of songs once sung openly, of laughter that filed the plazas, of men and women who spoke their minds, freely and without fear of reprisal.

 

The Cuban people endure, as they have for generations, not through comfort, but through an unbroken will that refuses to yield.

 

They are a people who know hunger not only of the body, but of the spirit-the hunger for truth, for choice, for the simple dignity of living without fear.  In the stillness of their nights, of ten without electricity, beneath crumbling rooftops and fading paint, they dream of liberty as one dreams of rain in a long drought.

 

To forget them would be to abandon more than a nation; it would be to turn our backs on the very idea of endurance-on courage that still speaks more silently now, but still with feeling, not in slogans or speeches, but in the act of surviving another day. Each mother who hides her tears from her children, each old man who tunes a forbidden radio in the dark, each young soul who dares to hope that tomorrow may be different- they are the quiet chapters of a story still waiting to be written.

 

And among those chapters stand the name of Tony Cuesta- a man who could not turn away from that suffering, who believed that freedom was not a privilege to be granted, but a right to be reclaimed.  He fought not for power, not for recognition, but for the right of the Cuban people to shape their own destiny as a free and sovereign people.

 

When capture was certain, Tony chose defiance. He ignited a grenade rather than surrender to Fidel Castro's regime-that merciless machinery of repression that has silenced a nation.  The explosion cost him his arm and his sight, but not his courage. He lived-blind, in pain, yet unbowed. and spent ten long years in the darkness of imprisonment before his release.

 

He bore those scars as emblems of a truth larger than himself: that freedom is worth any price, and that a man's spirit, once awakened, cannot be subdued by chains or blindness.

 

We who live in freedom have the privilege-and the duty-to remember him, and the people for whom he fought. To speak their names when the world looks away. To honor not just the dead, but the living who carry the burden of silence.

 

For the Cuban people have not asked for pity.  They ask only that we do not forget.. That their struggle, their faith, and their fierce love of homeland not fade into the background noise of history.

 

To remember them-and the man who gave sight, limb, and freedom for their cause- is to keep alive the promise that one day, the wind across Havana will be fresh, and the sound of laughter will rise once more, unchained.