"Today a unanimous clamor shakes all of Cuba, resounds in our America and has repercussions in Asia, Africa, and Europe. My little and heroic homeland is reissuing the classic struggle between David and Goliath.
Soldier of that noble cause, on the battlefront of international relations, allow me to spread that claim in the severe areopagus of the United Nations. ¡Patria o Muerte!, ¡Venceremos! ", As Raúl Roa García sentenced at the UN headquarters in New York, before the mercenary attack on Playa Girón in April 1961.
In the very heart of the empire, Roa unmasked each of the fallacious arguments of the North American representatives and demonstrated, without any doubt, that the aggression against Cuba was orchestrated with the conspiracy of Central American puppets governments and under the patronage of the United States.
Anthological was his oratory in that epic verbal confrontation against Yankee diplomacy, where he demonstrated his talent, ability and mastery to denounce the criminal aggression, until he revealed in that scenario the crushing defeat suffered by the mercenary forces.
He did justice, in that battle and the others that he waged on the international scene, to the name that the peoples of our America and the world already gave him: Chancellor of Dignity; The nickname he won in San José, Costa Rica, at the end of August 1960, when, faced with complaints from Cuba in the OAS, he announced his withdrawal and said: "I am going with my people and with my people the peoples of our America."
Precisely, this April 18 marks the 114th anniversary of the birth in the Havana neighborhood of La Víbora of a Cuban with such a rich and deep career, capable of making him one of the most important political thinkers of the last century, with an essential social legacy for these times.
At the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Commander in Chief Fidel Castro had in him an ideal interpreter of his ideas on revolutionary diplomacy. Roa served first as the island's ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) and then as Minister of State, which would later become Minister of Foreign Affairs, a position he held until 1976.
In his role as executor of the foreign policy of the Cuban Revolution, he brought to all corners of the world the voice of an independent Cuba, the voice of a country that transformed its attitude bent on North American interests into a policy of principles, always in the defense of just and noble causes.
It was also up to Roa to be the architect of Cuba's integration into the Non-Aligned Movement since its foundation, to preside over the First Tricontinental Conference (Havana, January 1966), aimed at the struggle for the independence of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and denounce Apartheid and the war against Vietnam in various international forums.
The work that, for Cuba, our America and the world, left the word and action of the Chancellor of Dignity, heir to the mambí spirit that ran through his blood, combined his intellectual and political avant-garde with the vital energy, the brilliant and powerful intellect and, above all, the revolutionary passion of his tireless work.
By the way, this Monday, April 19, at 2:30 p.m. and with reduced attendance, as demanded by the pandemic, Raúl Roa García will be remembered at the headquarters of the Cuban Association of the United Nations, in an activity called by the Press Commission of the Cuban Association of the United Nations.
(Cubaminrex: Yasmani Pérez Forteza)