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The men and women who marched to their posts on the front line of defense against U.S. aggression, were not surprised by the concept Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro expressed April 16, 1961, during the farewell to victims of the air attack the previous day.

His exact words defining the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution were: "... What they cannot forgive us for, is that we are right here under their noses and have made a socialist revolution right under the United States' very nose... And that we are defending a socialist revolution with these guns, and that we are defending this socialist revolution with the courage of our anti-aircraft gunners, shooting at the aggressors planes yesterday!

A stigma was left behind and a new reality was emerging. Socialism had been, until recently, a bad word. Synonymous with repression, suppression of freedom, brainwashing, invalidation of the individual, frustration of human beings. Communism was much worse, portrayed in horror stories in Readers Digest and Blackhawk comics. The darkness behind the Iron Curtain made the international Communist movement public enemy number one, according to the Organization of American States Caracas Declaration of 1954, and Peruvian Eudocio Ravines slanderous work The Great Swindle, published in certain intellectual media of the time - who better than repenter to discredit ideas he once held.

Everyday people were inculcated with the harsh narrative that communism and socialism were equivalent to having your children stolen from you, to dying of hunger. If you were poor, you would be poorer. When a communist activist stood out on the basis on individual merits, people said to themselves: so-and-so is intelligent, it's too bad he's a Communist. If the person was decent too bad, he doesn't look like a Communist.

Cubans of that defining hour, in 1961, had not read Marx, Engels or Lenin. They had never heard of Gramsci or Rosa Luxembourg, but did not need to decipher Maritegui to understand, in practice, that socialism meant heroic creation. The common sense of the struggle demonstrated then, and much more with the passage of time, that the link between socialist ideas and those of Mart's was possible and necessary.

Revolutionary praxis dictated the course of events. The people understood what Fidel meant when he said imperialism was irritated by "the dignity, the integrity, the courage, the ideological firmness, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people.

Cuban soldiers defended socialism at Playa Girn, as they would do later in the battle against counter-revolutionaries and during the October missile crisis. They and their successors have defended socialism from distortions and dogmatism, from reductionism and opportunism, from lies and betrayal. In the name of socialism they share the spirit of solidarity within and beyond the island.

"We chose socialism because it is a just system, a much more humane system," Fidel said in 1991. Cubans of today are committed to using these words to guide all our actions.

Continued here:
Socialism: Never again a foreign word Cuba Granma - Official voice of the PCC - Granma English