BY IVAN TERRERO —Granma International staff writer—

IT was May 8, 1935, when the parched soil of Morrillo, a old fort close to the Bay of Matanzas, was moistened with the blood of two valiant and genuine anti-imperialist fighters: Antonio (Tony) Guiteras Holmes and Carlos Aponte Hernández.

The previous night, Guiteras and Aponte and a group of revolutionaries had taken refuge in that inhospitable and remote place awaiting the arrival of the Amalia yacht that was to take them to Mexico. But the felony had been consummated and in the shadows of the night was more tyrannical in its invisibility.

On that May morning, betrayal with its weapon under its cloak struck its villainous blow on those revolutionaries.

When they became aware of the betrayal, they were already nearly surrounded. Soldiers and marines from the heavily armed forces had them covered. Guiteras and Aponte decided to take their lives in their hands, and that is what they did. They left the fort through the back entrance in an attempt to slip the siege on the banks of the Canímar River.

Their pursuers commenced the attack and shots were exchanged over three hours. Already close to the bridge over the river and at the point of climbing the gulley, they were brought down by enemy fire, first Antonio and then Carlos.

A few hours later the dictator Fulgencio Batista and his henchmen were toasting each other with champagne. They had liberated themselves from their most feared adversaries and amply met the orders of their imperial masters.

“Thus the most lofty figure, the purest forged mind, the most indomitable will, the most energetic wing and the purest spirit of the national revolutionary movement was lost,” affirmed Raúl Roa, known as the Cuban Foreign Minister of Dignity), in reference to those events.

Guiteras was born on November 22, 1906 in Bala-Cynwyd, Montgomery county, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, USA.

He was the son of Cuban Calixto Guiteras Gener and Marie Therese Holmes Walsh, a U.S. citizen of Irish origin. He was given the name of his paternal grandfather, one of three Guiteras brothers (Antonio, Eusebio and Pedro José), exemplary patriots educated at the famous La Empresa College in Matanzas, who were forced into exile due to persecution by the Spanish colonial authorities.

At the age of 17 he entered the University of Havana and graduated in Pharmacy. The anti-imperialist struggles of 1927 surprised him in his final year. He was one of the signatories of the statement by the Revolutionary Directorate in 1927 against the opportunist politics of President Gerardo Machado.

The Machado regime unleashed a fierce wave of persecution and Guiteras was expelled from the University, with all the rebelliousness of youth.

He toured the island as a laboratory rep and thus had the opportunity to contemplate in the raw the harsh reality of a people that were being deceived and impoverished. It was precisely in that period when he began his most active political task: “Machado is nothing more than an agent of imperialism, which sets him on the people like a guard dog.”

In 1931 he was arrested for taking part in the Río Verde insurrection. After his release he took up combative action again in the province of Santiago de Cuba and other communities in the far east of the island. He was convinced that the dictatorship had to be overthrown by the force of arms.

He planned an assault on the Moncada Garrison but the action was finally carried out against the San Luis military barracks, which was under siege for hours until enemy superiority in numbers forced his retreat.

In full rebellion in the mountains he heard of the fall of the dictator and the mediation of U.S. ambassador Sumner Welles, who brought Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to power. Guiteras did not lay down arms as he emphatically rejected that criminal and treacherous government, affirming: “I will sign and accept mediation when it has been signed and accepted by the men that Machado murdered.”

When the first Ramón Grau Martín government was constituted, Guiteras believed that an opportunity had arrived to take forward his advanced revolutionary ideas. For that reason he agreed to head the Secretariats of Government and War and the Navy. That is when he became involved in his most creative and revolutionary activities.

The initial progressive measures of the One Hundred Days government were inspired by Guiteras. He drafted laws and decrees that were deeply nationalist in spirit, and included the establishment of a eight-hour working day, the institution of a Pension and Retirement System for workers and the nationalization of the Cuban Electricity Company, to that point a subsidiary of the U.S. Electric Bond and Shares consortium. Guiteras went straight to the heart of the imperialist oppressor.

The reaction of the U.S. government was not long in coming. The Washington military mechanism began to operate swiftly and a fleet of battleships was deployed off the coast of Cuba. Far from being perturbed, Guiteras ordered the strictest vigilance and to open fire if the marines tried to set foot on the island.

With Antonio Guiteras, anti-imperialist thought and action came to power for the first time. He was convinced that imperialism was not only crushing the Cuban people but all the nations of the continent. But then came the Batista coup and in January 1934 Guiteras was once again fully involved in the armed struggle in Oriente province.

He was hunted down by Batista and Pedraza in an attempt to wipe from the face of the earth anyone who dared to stand up to the monopolies. He founded La Joven Cuba organization with an anti-imperialist and revolutionary program to prepare a popular insurrection.

It was at that point that he came to know the man who would die at his side, Venezuelan Carlos Aponte Hernández, who had been deported from Cuba by the Machado government in 1928, and had returned via Ecuador after hearing of the fall of that regime. Aponte fervently wanted to know who was keeping the nascent Batista military dictatorship in check and disrupting the sleep of the U.S. ambassador Caffery.

Carlos Aponte was born in La Pastora, Caracas, Venezuela on November 2, 1900 and at the age of 17 joined the uprisings on the plains of Anzoátegui headed by General Emilio Arévalo Cedeño against Juan Viciente (Bisonte) Gómez. Seven years later he was deported to Cuba, where he commenced his political training as a veteran anti-imperialist fighter and refined internationalist.

Without much preamble, in their first meeting the two men agreed to combine efforts in the struggle against Batista. Aponte’s experiences as a combatant against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua within the forces of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the general of free men, and in Peru in the popular uprisings in Trujillo against the dictatorship of Sánchez Cerro, introduced him to La Joven Cuba revolutionaries as a veteran anti-imperialist fighter.

“The son of temerity and courage, the symbol of a compass in the face of imperialism,” as Pablo de la Torriente Brau called him, always continued to act in line with the Bolivarian slogan: “The soldiers of liberty do not ask how many they are, but where they are.”

They were, simply, men of the revolution who had dared to defy the U.S. consortiums and to organize a transcendental movement in all the neocolonial pseudo-republics on the continent.

Thus it was that in 1935, that the circle tightened fast around Guiteras and he understood that he had to leave the country at the earliest opportunity. The betrayal of men without honor was the best weapon of the hired killers to cut off the lives of these two brothers in the anti-imperialist struggle.

They had planned to leave for Mexico, but the Amalia did not arrive.