Before a world—mortally wounded since October 7, 2023, since we began helplessly witnessing the holocaust of the Palestinian people—only two positions remain to choose: in Martí's words, we are either on the side of those who hate and destroy, or on the side of those who know how to love and build.

These days have denied us the possibility of nuances, of half-measures, of moderate preferences. And in a world where hatred has taken hold, love is the only possible act of rebellion.

Living in our Cuba, so heroic and long-suffering, we feel in our own flesh the imperial attempt to kill her drop by drop, to gradually leave her without oxygen so that, with that death, the good sentiments that moved millions of women and men to carry out a Revolution might also disappear. The onslaught tears us apart, but it does not defeat us.

These are difficult times, but not lost times. That is why it is urgent to reflect on the need for us to love. It is something that goes beyond a date like February 14, Love and Friendship Day. With astonishing precision, Haydée Santamaría defined the triumphant feat of January 1, 1959, as a torrent of sentiments. Her beautiful description is explained because each hero, each martyr, each guerrilla inspired by preceding founding fathers set their soul ablaze with the heat of love for the best causes.

It is that impulse to reach out to others—that possibility of understanding another's pain, fears, obsessions, and dreams—that the sworn enemy seeks to annihilate. They, the big shots, cold as automatons, murderers and egomaniacs, intend to extinguish all light—both literal and metaphorical. They dream of our paralysis, of a madness that is not the madness of love. They believe, from some other realm, from a modern world they have prevented us from entering, that by flipping the switch on the tangible and necessary, they can extinguish good impulses and even the desire to stand tall and live.

In this story of chiaroscuro, of love against hatred, the sinister forces of the planet forget one detail that tips the scales and speaks volumes like a seal: they have not calmly studied, without prejudice, who we are. They have not wanted to, not even out of curiosity. And that is an essential error, because we come, for example, from a José Julián Martí who came to affirm in his poetry: "I only know of love," and who knew how to fall before a rifle volley, precisely for being a man in love with humanity, with his brothers and sisters of the island land; he fell because he had arrived in Cuba desperate, without uttering a single complaint as he climbed the hills, and convinced that the palm trees were "brides" waiting for him.

Do those who hate us know that we come from an Antonio Maceo with an implacable arm and a fine heart, a Titan who promised his María Cabrales that all glory would be for her? The unfathomable detail is that we come from poets, from die-hard romantics, from people easily moved to tears but who have known—and know—how to die well. We come—and therefore we are—from women who took to the hills following the steps of their mambí companions; and from a Juana Borrero—dreamer of "a kiss of love and without fire"; and from a Mella who knew how to love with resolve; from a feverish Villena with his unattainable verses. We come from women and men who decided to create, among ferns and gunpowder, the poetics of a new country, of a Revolution in love with all that is human.

In this nation that has long suffered the cruelty of arrogance and imperial power, loving is the path of struggle. It is something that goes beyond a date's ritual, beyond a gift, because it has to do with one's gaze, with a stance before a world that is bleeding and becoming dehumanized.

What bothers the executioner is that we still have warm hearts and that we have not surrendered in our choice to sustain one another. I can attest to this from my recent journeys across the archipelago: I have seen the faces, the nobility in the eyes, the courage of people who look you straight in the eye and open the door for you, pull out a chair for you, and offer you a piece of bread. I have seen many believing in the integrity of the word pledged by those who must show their faces while attempting the miracle of multiplying loaves and fishes. I have seen them: they have not fallen into absolute oblivion, thanks to the work of love, thanks to the stubbornness of a country that resembles itself time and again, that reads not in numbers but in lives with names, surnames, and purposes.

On the reverse side, the others, those of stone, want to brand the lovers as obsolete, rigid, and crazy. They, making clouds of black smoke, with so many lies and false causes, want to drive us crazy—as a prelude to extinction. But hatred is a lost cause—my humble heart whispers to me: I sense that in the most desolate scenario, on land razed by a mortal blow, someone will always appear standing and triumphant, someone—countering stupidity and fear—will say like José Julián and thus will be restarting dreams: "I only know of love."