It is that on December 14, 1950, the young lawyer, only 24 years old, took up his defense before the Emergency Court of the city of Santa Clara (downtown), then capital of the province of Las Villas.
And the event that motivated that judicial process had occurred a month earlier, on November 12, in the port city of Cienfuegos, in the same territorial demarcation.
The man who would later be the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution arrived in what is known as the Pearl of the South in solidarity with the student group of the Institute of Secondary Education (ISE, baccalaureate), who in those days led a strike.
He was accompanied by the leaders of the Federation of University Students (FEU) Enrique Benavides, Idalberto Cué, Francisco Valdés, Mauro Hernández and Agustín Valero, members of a university committee that supported the protest of their high school friends.
In Cienfuegos, 240 kilometers southeast of Havana, would-be high school graduates had started a movement at the beginning of the academic year to repudiate the measures by the Minister of Education, Aureliano Sánchez Arango, which they consider harmful to their interests.
Following the call for the strike, which was joined by the five ISEs of the province of Villarreal and that of the city of Matanzas (west), the convent of Cienfuegos expelled the president of the student association, René Morejón, for five months.
It was under these circumstances that Fidel Castro and his companions arrived in the city to participate in the city rally called by the students in front of the educational center on the afternoon of November 12, 1950.
Despite initially having permission from the Municipal Mayor’s Office, shortly before the start of the demonstration, the Police announced that it could not be held.
Fidel Castro and the FEU entourage visited the local police chief, who showed them a telegram from the interior minister and ratified the rejection of the popular demonstration.
So Fidel proposed to hold the event anyway and to do it in front of the Government Palace itself.
When he enters the police station in the company of Enrique Benavides to have a friendly discussion of the new course of events, he is arrested and then transferred to the Santa Clara bivouac at night.
ACCUSATION IN SANTA CLARA
When on December 30, 1977 the then president of the Councils of State and Ministers spoke at the inaugural ceremony of the section of the Havana-Santa Clara high-speed railway, he recalled that distant passage in his history of struggles.
“Yes, I remember when I was just out of law school that I came here to Santa Clara; because there was a captain around Cienfuegos who was vicious against the students. They put me in prison and tried. I have come to defend myself. Luckily I wasn’t imprisoned,” he recalled.
In his self-defense before the Emergency Court of Las Villas (two years, eight months and fourteen days before the assault on the Moncada Barracks, on July 26, 1953), the young revolutionary practically parked the charges against him for the failed rally of the Hundred Fires.
Instead, he emphatically argued for the lack of constitutional guarantees and administrative corruption, especially the misappropriation of state funds, prevalent under the government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948-1952).
On October 16, 1953, in the small nurses’ room of the Saturnino Lora hospital in Santiago de Cuba, the former leader of the Centenary Generation once again took up his defense.
The prosecution that time focused on reporting the murders of more than 40 of his comrades imprisoned for failing to take the second military fortress on the island; and at the same time expounding what is known as the Moncada Program, which in essence proclaimed the revolutionary solution to the nation’s fundamental problems: land, education, health care, social security, industrialization and housing.
lam/fgn
