Million Cubans Also Want Our Rifles

With the presence of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, and the members of the Political Bureau, GCE Álvaro López Miera, GCE Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas, and GCE Roberto Legrá Sotolongo—Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), Minister of the Interior, and First Deputy Minister of the FAR, respectively—the renowned singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez received the AKM rifle he had requested to be on the front lines against imperialist aggression.

Depending on what suits them, the freedom of homeland and the right to defend it can be brandished like banners or vilified to the point of ridicule. Such are the ways of the world these days, especially in that parallel world we inhabit through our mobile phone screens, where cowards boast of bravery and pretense earns likes.

Silvio Rodríguez demands his AKM to defend Cuba from the threats of a historical enemy, the greatest serial killer in universal history: American imperialism. He asks for it, as Martí demanded, to take to the jungle and give his life “for my country and for my duty—since I understand it and have the courage to carry it out—to prevent, in time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from expanding throughout the Antilles and falling, with that added strength, upon our lands of America.” Silvio demands his AKM from Havana, and the usual hornet’s nest is stirred up, indignant at “the folly of what today seems foolish.”

“They are more bothered by Silvio asking for his AK and friends donating aid to Cuba than by Trump’s threats to the country and everything else he does to us. Damn these outrages,” wrote the young intellectual Iramis Rosique on his Facebook wall.

Meanwhile, Karima Oliva's profile denounces: “Now they're horrified because Silvio asked for a rifle to defend his homeland if necessary. They're demonizing him. But they're not horrified by the number of nuclear weapons the empire possesses, at the risk of wiping us all off the map. Nor are they outraged by the bombs dropped a few days ago on a school, killing nearly 200 Iranian girls, nor have they noticed the weapons with which they've massacred the Palestinian people, primarily civilians, women, and children. We're in the midst of a genocide, with bullets and bombs falling everywhere, and the only weapon they've noticed is the rifle Silvio asked for.”

That's right, friends, outrage and horror are selective when there are no fundamental convictions. You don't have to be a communist to be anti-imperialist, much less to be on the front lines when the sovereignty of homeland is at stake, and that's what hundreds, thousands of Cubans did on social media: demand, along with the poet, his rifle.

That, rather than outrage them, it frightens the annexationists and the prematurely born ones who have no faith in their homeland. Verónica, a young woman who isn't a soldier but an actress, frightens them, but she's clear about it: “Wherever that man is, that's where the truth is. The rest is just smoke and mirrors and fools. I want mine too,” she said, reacting to the troubadour's post on his blog, Segunda Cita, which went viral and, quite naturally, became a kind of challenge born of love for Cuba.

They fear the songs that have been heard everywhere, repeating terrible things like “the desire to exchange each string for a sack of bullets” or “his name and surname are rifle against rifle.” They fear the songs and the number of young people who are singing them again in the face of the constant threats from a foreign, despotic, and evidently bloodthirsty president against our home, our family, our island of peace.

They fear Silvio's rifle because he forcefully exposed a truth that is and will be a thorn in the side of the stateless and the resentful: if Donald Trump believes he will have the "honor of taking Cuba," millions of us will have the honor, rifle in hand, of preventing him.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / Cubasi Translation Staff