CONTINUATION
As a response to the call made by the new government to all the youth of
Cuba
to help in the literacy campaign the clergy in the Catholic schools called for
strikes and started to intimidate those students who supported the revolution.
-
February 6, 1961 Jesuit priests from the
school of
Electromecanica
of Belen, under the orders of Silvio González called for their students to go
on strike while at the same time threatening those students who supported the
revolution. The strike failed, however, as a very small number of the 400
students participated in the strike; there were a few students outside the
school who shouted slogans in support of the revolution.
As the calls for a strike were a failure the clergy of the school began to
dismantle the equipment and the technical installations; the clergy ended auto
shops, refrigeration shops and radio and television shops. At the
dismantling of these courses many of the students took hold of the shops and
began to lodge complaints to the Ministry of Education.
It must be said that the provocations by way of the clergy had started months
before when for example, on October 1960 the head of the school Silvio González,
warned that in the new school term he would not tolerate revolutionaries, nor
Communists, nor member of G-2, or any crazy element. He was the same
person who went into classrooms interrupting lessons to give
counterrevolutionary talks; talks which defamed everything the new government
was doing; he went as far as opposing and threatening with expulsion any
students who attended rallies in support of the revolution.
The heated rhetoric by the clergy resulted in aggression against those who
supported the revolution:
1- Germán González, a Catholic priest is attacked, hit by a bottle from
behind, by Mario Becerra, a Catholic counterrevolutionary.
2- On
February 28 1961
a bomb explodes in Novel
Academy. The explosion results in injury and loss property. Among the
injured are 16 year old Maria Eugenia Echániz, who lost her left eye and 17
year old Olga Valdéz Díaz who suffered serious injury to her neck and her arm.
This terrorist act was committed by Roberto Fernández and Adrián Sánchez,
both students of
Novel
Academy
and members of the church Iglesia Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Both were
members of a counterrevolutionary group established in the school and which held
meetings at the church. This is the same group that attacked with bottles
students who supported the revolution; the same group that would tear down
pictures of revolutionary figures.
3- On March 2 in the school
of
Belen, students supporters of the revolution denounce strikes promoted by professors
and reactionary clergymen of the school.
4- In the face of such confrontation and aggression, on
March 4,1961, Fidel Castro in a speech commemorating the first anniversary of the sabotage
of the French ship La Coubre declares: "We do not interfere in the
spiritual and religious terrain. What does it matter what they believe in?
A person's faith does not bother the revolution as long the man is conscious of
his social duties, his duties with society, his duties to his country; as long
as he follows a proper social conduct. Why do some in the name of religion
attack political ideas when we do not attack religious beliefs in the name of
politics? What we fight and struggle against is the placing of bombs,
those armed counterrevolutionaries that are trying to divide us, those who would
poison the minds of the young..."
"They should not ally themselves with those who would bloody our
country...those that would kill children...for the people know that it could be
one of their child who could get killed by a bomb...or it could be their child
who losses an arm or losses his eyesight."
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