Cuban revolutionary hero Juan Almeida Bosque passed away on September 11 at the age of 82. Almeida was a life-long revolutionary, who started work at the age of 11 as a brick layer. He took part in Fidel Castro's failed assault on the Moncada Barracks on July 26 1953, often seen as the start of the Cuban Revolution. Almedia sailed to Cuba from Mexico onboard the Granma, along with Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara to start a guerrilla struggle against the US-backed Batista dictatorship. He was one of 16 survivors of the landing.
Almeida was a leader of the armed struggle of the July 26 Movement that, along with an urban uprising, overthrew the Batista regime in 1959. Almeida, an Afro-Cuban in a deeply racist pre-revolution society, was awarded the title "Commander of the Revolution" for his role.
Almeida played a prominent role in Cuba's revolutionary government as a vice-president of the council of state and a member of the politburo of the Cuban Communist Party.
A funeral service for Almeida was held in Santiago on September 15, led by President Raul Castro and leading members of the Cuban government. A "mass mobilisation" of hundreds of thousands of people accompanied Almeida's funeral procession, the Granma newspaper said on September 16.
"The gathering of the people was moving in its simplicity and a fitting farewell to the worker who became a combatant and guerrilla leader", Granma said. "It was a spontaneous, massive, heartfelt tribute, emanating from the profound affection and respect of the people of Santiago for this Hero of the Revolution."
Below is a September 15 article by former Cuban president and central leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, in which he pays tribute to his late comrade.
* * *
I have spent hours listening by television to the entire country's tribute to Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida Bosque. I think that confronting death was for him a duty like all of those that he fulfilled throughout his life; he did not know, nor did we, how much sadness the news of his physical absence would bring to us.
I had the privilege of knowing him: a young black man, a worker, combative who, successively, was chief of his revolutionary cell, a Moncada combatant, a prison companero, platoon captain in the Granma landing, Rebel Army officer — brought to a standstill during his advance by a shot to the chest in the violent Combat of Uvero — a Column commander, marching to create the Third Eastern Front, a companero who shared the leadership of our forces in the last victorious battles to overthrow the dictatorship.
I was a privileged witness to his exemplary conduct for more than half a century of heroic and victorious resistance, in the struggle against bandits, the counter-blow of Giron (the "Bay of Pigs"), the October Crisis, the internationalist missions and the resistance to the imperialist blockade.
I listened with pleasure to some of his songs, and especially that one of impassioned emotion, which, in response to the homeland's call for "victory or death", bade farewell to human dreams.
I did not know that he had written more than 300 of them that joined his literary work, a source of enjoyable reading and of historic events.
He defended principles of justice that will be defended at all times and during any period, as long as human beings breathe on Earth.
Let us not say that Almeida has died! He is more alive today than ever!