Like every year, the Torch March returns, an event of great patriotic significance whose first edition took place in 1953. It was the young people of the Centennial Generation who on January 27 of that year set out to light the night with a fire redeemer that reaches us today.
That founding time, the pilgrimage began on the steps of the University of Havana and culminated in the Fragua Martiana, where voices of young leaders alternated to remember José Martí on his centenary. The march had the support of youth organizations, revolutionary groups and part of the Havana people, who joined during the journey and supported the slogans of “Revolution” and “Freedom.”
The Torch March is a Martian march. Consequently, it should serve to evoke the best of the Apostle’s ideology, which is to evoke wisdom, which is to evoke ethics, which is to evoke patriotism.
And Martí’s greatness does not occur in a single sphere of his life, but in several: he was a relevant man of Hispanic letters, a skilled journalist, an extraordinary thinker and a successful politician who managed to unite the efforts of the patriots. Cubans to wage the Necessary War in the last years of the 19th century.
During the first half of the 20th century, popular leaders such as Julio Antonio Mella and Rubén Martínez Villena claimed their political legacy, although it was not possible in those years to materialize Martí’s project for a country. By 1953, a new generation of young people, concerned about the decline of the republic, burst onto the national political scene when it seemed that the Apostle was going to die in his centenary year.
The first Torch March signaled the existence of what would since then be known as the Centennial Generation. Prominent men and women, including Fidel and Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, Abel and Haydée Santamaría, Raúl Gómez García, Frank and Josué País, José Antonio Echeverría, Armando and Enrique Hart and Alfredo Guevara , rescued the ideas of the National Hero and took them to revolutionary praxis.
The Torch March of 1953, within the framework of Batista’s tyranny, became one of the first scenes of the revolutionary plot that would culminate with the triumph of 1959.
Currently, this pilgrimage takes place in a different context, with other complexities, but also with certainties of the path that this country needs to continue walking, the one that was Martí’s homeland, and that must be with everyone and for the good of all. .
The people of Pinar del Río and all of Cuba participate tonight in the traditional Torch March, to carry with them Martí’s legacy by celebrating, like every January 28, the birth of who was the most universal of all Cubans.
