Bayamo remembers the heroes of the assault on Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Barracks

Young people from the Cuban province of Granma staged this Wednesday the traditional symbolic assault on the former Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in this eastern city, to commemorate the feat that took place here 70 years ago, on the same date, but in 1953.

The commemoration began around 5:15 a.m., the time when revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and his comrades in arms launched the simultaneous attacks on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the strategic garrison of Bayamo, where the emblematic Antonio (Ñico) López Park-Museum now stands.

Led by the highest political and governmental authorities of the territory, residents of different ages witnessed the patriotic act that highlighted the audacious, libertarian and Marti's lineage of the Centennial Generation, whose epic action continues marking the path to follow.

Those brave boys are now alive in new teachers, doctors, athletes, scientists, combatants and artists, who carry on their shoulders the responsibility of continuing to defend our conquests, said Reynaldo Fernandez Rivero, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Union of Young Communists in Granma.

According to several investigations, the Bayamese military bastion was attacked by more than twenty youths, of whom only one was wounded in the action.

Later, as a result of the ferocious hunt by the army of the tyrant Fulgencio Batista, Mario Martínez Arará, José Testa Zaragoza, Pablo Agüero Guedes, Rafael Freyre Torres, Lázaro Hernández Arroyo, Luciano González Camejo, Hugo Camejo Valdés and Pedro Véliz Hernández were murdered, as well as Ángel Guerra Díaz and Rolando San Román de la Llana, the last two found, inexplicably, among the dead of the Moncada, in Santiago de Cuba.

Victim number 11 could have been Andrés García Díaz, who saved his life by pure miracle and earned the nickname of "the living dead", since Batista's soldiers left him as dead together with the corpses of Camejo and Véliz.

In addition to the 10 martyrs, Antonio López Fernández, Calixto García Martínez, Ramiro Sánchez Domínguez, Antonio Darío López García, Adalberto Ruanes Álvarez, Raúl Martínez Arará, Armando Arencibia García, Orestes Abad Lorenzo, Gerardo Pérez-Puelles Valmaseda, Rolando Rodríguez Acosta and Orlando Castro García participated in the assault, none of whom were captured.

Andrés García Díaz, Enrique Cámara Pérez and Agustín Díaz Cartaya were tried and convicted, while Pedro Celestino Aguilera González was tried and acquitted.