It is an aberration that the Moncada carnage, which began a nightmare that seems endless after 65 years of dictatorship, became a national holiday.
Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 26 July 2024 — A few days ago, writing in 14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera recalled when Fidel Castro, appearing on a State TV “Roundtable” [Mesa Redonda] segment in 2000, admitted that he could have avoided the attack on the Moncada Barracks and gone up the Sierra Maestra to begin the battle against the Batista regime.
This would have prevented the loss of 86 lives: 22 military personnel and 64 revolutionaries — eight who died during the assault and 56 who were killed by the soldiers after being taken prisoner.
Fidel Castro’s plan of using 160 men armed with pistols and 22 carbines to take the Moncada Barracks—Cuba’s second military fortress, defended by a garrison of a thousand men—had no chance of success.
Even assuming that they had managed to take Moncada, and that a large part of the Santiago population would have joined the revolutionaries, and that they had also managed to take the barracks of the National Police and the Navy, Santiago de Cuba would have become a mousetrap for them. Even if the Fidelistas had managed, as they had planned, to also take the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Bayamo, they would not have been able to contain the army reinforcements that would come to Santiago. And it would have been difficult for t
