Artemisa, Cuba - Just as the winter breeze that November 1958 curled the seas of the coastal town of Cabañas, in curious conjunction with the prodigal nature there in beauty, the story was up and there was already an afterlife in that land: the brothers Bernardino and José Isabel Miranda were the first to be murdered among the 22 victims of the vandalism, which was justly described as a massacre.

The life in Cuba in that year gave off a smell of blood; in the west, the Guerrilla Front in Pinar del Río gave clear signs that war was a national issue. The sabotage to patrol cars of the Military Intelligence Service that guarded the Guanajay - Bahia Honda bus route, had been the reason to unleash the wrath of the main leaders of the rural guard.

Give a lesson and thus "save their honor" before the Batista army was the motive of Cabo Lara, chief of the police in the town, then belonging to the province of Pinar del Rio. The suspicion of being accomplices of the 26 of July Movement was enough as a reason for accusation; to demonstrate its veracity the henchmen had no time: just over a month later the Revolution would triumph.

Between the days 16, date of the attack, and 20, in Cabañas the fury created suspects: Claudio and Bernardino because they left very early and passed near the place of the facts-they were going to till their lands-, but it was enough that some member of the Service of Military Intelligence (SIM) said that most were "blacks", according to the History.

After that fact, the fury was unleashed and as links fell even young people who only went to see what happened: Gonzalo, Octavio, José Benito, Regino Ramos, who using a piece of wood and a barbed wire twisted his stomach until to leave him unconscious, and they buried him still alive and with his feet out of the grave. There are not enough lines to describe so much horror.

Francisco Rodríguez Valdés, knowing that he was part of the Movement and refused to tell his companions despite the tortures he was subjected to, castrated him and then tied him -for "fun" of the executioners present- his genitals around his neck, shortly before to hang him like the others.

The search is said was home to home, inch by inch ... it had to be justified, it was necessary to be as or more cruel than those of the Fifth Station, in Havana, or those of the east of Cuba or that Menocal in his barracks of opprobrium in San Cristóbal, to name just a few examples.

Thus, the victims totaled 22, none more or less important than the other: Roberto Nodarse, Macos Antonio Lafá ... is that they were 22 and none less vexed; some of them were not originally from Cabañas; young people, some involved, others not in the Movement ... but they were involved in a veritable whirlwind of hatred on earth. Disappearances, burial in a common grave ... cruelty in all its ways.

Cabañas township does not erase it; the residents go to the cemetery every November 20; The month is like multiple tributes and not to repeat stories like this anywhere in the world. This town takes from the work of Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuna story , perhaps in a fairly close comparison, but equal revealing tenacious union of its inhabitants for life, without forgetting.

What is undeniable is how to its proverbial beauty, this land adds a halo of the generous blood of those young people.

TRANSLATION BY LMMS