Maceo and Che: ideals, exemplarity and mutual principles.

June 14, 2024 – The dates of birth coincide on June 14 of two men who, at key moments in Cuban history, led invading columns to extend the revolutionary war; but more than this event, Major General Antonio Maceo Grajales and Commander Ernesto Guevara de la Serna matched each other, commun principles, the exemplarity through which they assumed the profession of man that Martí described.

Master in the use of military tactics and with an unlimited courage, Antonio Maceo, who was born in 1845 in Santiago de Cuba, became Lieutenant General of the Liberating Army and, generation after generation, is identified as the Bronze Titan; by not accepting the peace with unworthy conditions proposed by the Spanish colonialism, his Baraguá Protest made him a symbol of the revolutionary intransigence of the Cubans.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in 1928 in the Argentinean city of Rosario; known worldwide as Che, the doctor specialized in allergy joined his destiny to Cuban’s since he met Fidel in Mexico and joined in Mexico the group of revolutionaries who arrived in Cuba in the expedition of the Granma yacht.

Che was the first of those promoted by Fidel Castro to the highest rank of the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra, and after the triumph of the Revolution he shone as a statesman in the most diverse responsibilities until, with absolute dedication, he offered his life in Bolivia fighting for the independence of Latin America to become the universal image of internationalism.

Despite living in different times, Maceo and Che were born into a privileged family, were educated at home and had the opportunity to study, in addition to the link with the rural environment that favored the formation of a character and physical conditions.

Visiting different countries of the American continent facilitated in both of them the formation of an anticolonialist and internationalist thought and the experiences in the battlefields made them transcend as true exponents of intransigence and revolutionary radicalism.