Fifteen years old: Ramón García Guerra was only fifteen years old when the bandits led by Ramón del Sol Sorí put a rope around his neck, pulled the rope until his feet separated from the ground in the middle of a desperate kicking, and moved away from the tree where he hung like a macabre fruit, taking him for certain to be dead.
What crime could possibly warrant such a punishment for a fifteen-year-old boy?
The most atrocious crime of all: teaching reading and writing. Being a literacy teacher in the Escambray Mountains of Cuba in 1961. Just a teenager with a lantern, a primer, and a pencil, who dared to share the light of knowledge with peasants who until then had only known the darkness of illiteracy. That is why they hung him. That is why he remained hanging from a tree, as a warning, as a message: whoever sows knowledge will be punished with death .
But the boy, thin and lanky like most teenagers, weighed less than the killers had imagined. The rope failed to do its job. The boy miraculously survived.
That same criminal logic—punishing with death those who dared to build a better future—manifested itself with particular cruelty on the night of January 24, 1963, at the “La Candelaria” farm in Bolondrón, Matanzas. A gang of rebels, under the orders of Juan José “Pichi” Catalá, opened fire on the peasant home of Gregorio Rodríguez and Nicolasa Díaz.
As a result of the attack, 13-year-old Fermín Rodríguez Díaz and his 11-year-old sister Yolanda died. Yolanda succumbed to her injuries hours later. Sixteen-year-old Felicia and seven-year-old Josefa were also seriously injured; Josefa suffered permanent disabilities. Their mother, Nicolasa Díaz, was also wounded in the attack.
Their only offense had been belonging to a family that supported the Revolution. The community of Bolondrón was devastated, and the children's funeral became a demonstration of mourning and public condemnation.
But terrorism doesn't always come in the form of bombs or ropes. Sometimes it disguises itself as a plague, a disease, a silent epidemic that creeps in without a sound and claims lives in its wake.
In 1981, Cuba was the victim of a biological attack that few know about and almost no one remembers outside the island. A dengue hemorrhagic fever epidemic , deliberately introduced by agents of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), affected 344,203 people throughout the country. 158 people died. Of these, 101 were children under 15 years old.
Dr. José González Valdés, then director of the Central Havana Pediatric Hospital, recounted how the emergency rooms began receiving waves of children with symptoms that resembled a common cold but rapidly worsened. The hospital reached a point of receiving between 400 and 500 patients daily, and at times as many as 1,200.
The stories of families who lost their children are heartbreaking. Silvia Torres Lara lost her 12-year-old daughter, Ernestina. Before falling asleep, the girl gave her a cold kiss and asked her not to let go of her hand. "Around two in the morning, her hand began to go limp in mine. When I looked at it, it was turning purple... And that was it."
Casimira Camejo lost her 13-year-old daughter. Zenayda Isla lost her little Yamilé, four and a half years old, who before dying told her, "Mommy, I think I'm going to die." Rosa María Acuña lost her only son, ten years old.
Terrorism against Cuba has not been an accident. It has been a state policy , maintained for more than six decades. It did not end with the cessation of bombings, nor with the open halt to the financing of violent gangs, although feverish voices from the North still clamor for a return to the bloodiest years of counterrevolutionary violence. State terrorism has transformed, it has mutated. Today it manifests itself in the longest economic, commercial, and financial blockade that humanity has ever known.
This economic war is pure terrorism. It doesn't wound with shrapnel; it wounds with hunger, with shortages, with medicines that don't arrive, with lives cut short because an entire country can't access the global market. It's a dirty strategy, designed to strangle a nation without firing a shot, but with the same result: preventable deaths, unnecessary suffering.
On August 21, the world remembers the victims of terrorism. But not all victims have names. Not all weigh equally in the balance of memory of the so-called Western world.
Cuba has suffered more than 3,500 direct deaths from acts of terrorism organized, financed, and carried out from the United States. More than 2,000 people were left permanently disabled. And the list does not include those who have died because of the blockade: those are not “victims of terrorism,” according to the official classification. But they hurt just the same. They bleed just the same.
Today, as we remember the victims, we remember Ramón García Guerra. We remember the children of Bolondrón: Fermín, 13, and Yolanda, 11. We remember the 101 children who died from the dengue hemorrhagic fever introduced by the CIA. We remember all the forgotten victims of a war they never declared.
In honor of them, their families, those who have been decimated by terrorism in all its forms, including the economic war that suffocates an entire people: terrorism has no justification.
No victim of terrorism is a statistic.
Children, people. They are Cuban. Brave children.
Their right to life is not negotiable, not with bombs, not with laws, not with blockades.
Source: http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2026/08/21/el-terrorismo-no-Siempre-se-viste-de-bomba/
