Island (Original painting sold, prints are available in several sizes)Today May 20, is the 106th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Cuba. It seems there's very little to celebrate after 49 years suffering under the cruelest dictatorship to have castigated our island in its entire bloody history. The Castro regime has turned Cuba into a third-world hell-hole: a daily calvary of struggle for survival, its people impoverished, terrorized, hopeless and broken in spirit, with two million of us exiled, scattered throughout the world. In fact, this date has been largely forgotten in Cuba with the total falsification of history the Castro regime has accomplished, and is not celebrated officially.
But there is much good to remember about our republic-- imperfect as it was, we had managed to achieve a first-world standard of living. By the 1950's Cuban workers enjoyed higher hourly wages than their counterparts in England and all of post-war Europe, we had good sanitation and health care; income and opportunity were much more equitably distributed than today, with the Castro nomenklatura cemented as a new aristrocracy.
What I remember most from my childhood in Cuba is the music everywhere--not the mechanical high-decibel grinding begging-for-tourist-currency I hear in the current videos coming out of Cuba --this was music coming softly from a myriad radios, street vendor chants (the "pregones"), ordinary folks anywhere who spontaneously broke out into snatches of contagious melodies. It was a joy that permeated our lives expressed as music that had made us famous around the world.
To celebrate this date I like to remember my grandfather Pa's story of what he witnessed in Havana on that May 20, 1902. Having fought for three years with the Liberation Army, he was now 22 years old; he traveled from his hometown of Remedios for the express purpose of seeing it. A huge crowd had gathered on the Malecon, which at the time ran only a few blocks beyond the Castillo de la Punta on Havana's north coast (thank you, General Leonard Wood and the American military forces who built that first stretch of the Malecon!)
A few minutes before noon, the American flag which had been flying over the Morro for four years, began to be taken down, and the Cuban flag, with "la estrella solitaria" (the lone star) began to rise. At the stroke of noon, the light breeze took hold of our flag and unfurled it, while the cannon resounded, causing the crowd to break out in wild cheering. It was the fulfillment of an ideal we had been fighting for nearly a century. Cuba was now officially and in fact, a democratic republic with a constitution modeled on that of the U.S. The partying went on for days!
My paternal grandfather, Juan Jose Maza y Artola, a lawyer from a well-to-do family, was one of the delegates to that first Constitutional Assembly of 1898 and took an active part in writing the first Cuban Constitution. He would go on to be elected to the Lower Chamber as Representative from Havana, and later serve as Senator from Havana until 1925, when he resigned to make an unsuccessful run for the Presidency. I wish I'd had the honor of knowing him, I bet he would have had some stories to tell. Unfortunately, he died about seven years before I was born, so I didn't get the chance.
Our first republic was forged out of much human sacrifice. Now after another nearly half a century of suffering the Castro dictatorship, with so much sacrificed by valiant men and women, entire families, I can only hope all of us can unite to bring forth a new Cuban republic, applying the lessons of the unhappy present to create a democratic state with true freedom for all.
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