Pretoria, December 2, 2024.- Cuban diplomatic personnel and from other nations, together with military attachés accredited in South Africa, celebrated this Friday the Day of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba. The Cuban Military Attaché to South Africa, Josué Manuel Ortega Martínez, recalled the origins and facts that shaped and constitute the values of this armed corps.
Ortega Martínez recalled how, on December 2, 1956, 82 expeditionary troops led by the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, began the final stage of the island's national liberation.
At that time, after the initial dispersion of the guerrillas, when only a small group was reunited and Fidel knew that they had only seven rifles, he exclaimed: "Now we have won the war! This expression of faith in victory, the Cuban military attaché pointed out, is what has always accompanied us.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are the pride of our people, because their soldiers, officers and reserves, as well as the fighters of the Ministry of the Interior, are the uniformed people, and they are a model of discipline, humility, commitment and loyalty to the revolution, the party and the homeland, Ortega Martínez added. But our fighters, he said, not only have a deep sense of patriotism and love for the land of their birth, they also have a profound internationalist spirit and are willing to offer their revolutionary services to other peoples.
Thus, he explained, the FAR's consistent practice of internationalism extends from Algeria to Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, where the decisive defeat of the South African apartheid army was a victory for all of Africa. More than 300,000 Cuban soldiers, Ortega Martinez pointed out, fought alongside their African brothers in southern Africa.
Likewise, he concluded, the hundreds of thousands of Cuban professionals who have been serving brotherly peoples for sixty years, and who continue to do so in the present difficult conditions due to the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States, are inspired by the same philosophy that guided us on that December 2, 68 years ago.
(Cuban Embassy in South Africa)