Capitán Marcos of the EZLN says Cuba Maintains its "social project amidst all possible threats"
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"Maybe the letters to spell the word 'surrender' don’t exist in the Cuban alphabet.”

This article by Elio Henríquez originally appeared in the May 17, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. The resistance and rebellion of the Cuban people, who “suffer a blockade and a new threat of military intervention,” are evident and “have maintained a social project amidst all possible threats, facing all imaginable and unimaginable aggressions, enduring worldwide campaigns of slander and lies,” stated Captain Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

He maintained that “Cuba, so close to the United States and so far from understanding, will endure. Because there are those who expect the island to become a Mariel from end to end, but there are those who know that what the sun will see when it rises will be a Playa Girón… the day after.”

In a statement dedicated to Professor Enrique Ávila Carrillo “and to the teachers who teach and learn… by fighting,” he declared that “this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the death (at least in the media) of what the people themselves call the Cuban revolution is decreed. In recent decades… okay, well, since that January of ’59, it is said, repeated, recited, and even belched out: ‘Cuba will not survive… if it does not betray itself.’ Well, not in those words.”

He added: “And it’s not just a matter of forgetting Girón and Fidel Castro flailing his arms with his team because they wouldn’t let him go to the front lines (in those days when commanders marched at the head of their troops). Nor is it about forgetting the futile efforts of the infamous Central Intelligence Agency, the American CIA, to eliminate the leadership. Just recall the desperation of a US congressman from that time, when he summoned those responsible for ‘solving the Cuban problem’: the agent explained, in great detail, the plan to poison Fidel Castro… so that his legendary beard would fall out. The congressman, his eyes and voice flaring, demanded: ‘So we spent so many millions to shave Castro’s beard, to shave him? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just shoot him?’”

Marcos, who dedicated “a few words to that people whom we respect and admire,” who “suffer a blockade (now without the euphemism of ’embargo’) and a new threat of military intervention,” continued: “And the downed planes, the terrorist attacks, the sabotage, the ’embargo,’ the media belches of the experts on everything and experts on nothing. And someone might ask: if they achieved all that they have achieved with all that against them, how much more could they have done if they had been left in peace?”

It is, above all, he said, “about forgetting the fundamental thing: whether it is true or not that they have had, have, and will have mistakes, but they are their mistakes, their successes, their history, their present, and their future. And that is difficult to understand from the desks of academia, with sterile theory (without practice, that is), and banal and useless commentary that doesn’t even get the obligatory likes.”

He emphasized: “But let’s disregard the trends on social media and in the news. Why haven’t they been able to break them? Why would a US military intervention be necessary if, with the support the Cuban opposition has received, they would have already achieved ‘liberation’? Listen, something there just doesn’t add up. There’s something about that people that’s hard to understand, and it has nothing to do with individualism, selfishness, greed, and so on. Perhaps—I don’t know, it could be, it’s just a guess—but it occurs to me that it’s a matter of language: maybe the letters to spell the word ‘surrender’ don’t exist in the Cuban alphabet.”

He explained that “Cuba is also relevant because, as far as I recall, the 26th of July Movement did not follow the manuals of the communist orthodoxy of the time, which had confined the work of the Latin American left to the dictates of the then ‘socialist camp’. In short: they made their own history. Not for books, analyses, or reflections without consistent practice, but for life.”

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