The sky is overcast, about to collapse. Humidity is in the air, the wind brings it twice: it collects it up from the stormy sea and from the black cloud ceiling. But a crowd gathers and grows around the Forge of Martí. It’s not a metaphor conceived for today, that’s what we call the small museum built on the remains of the quarry where the adolescent José Martí, prisoner of the Spanish colonialists, polished the stones, and his soul, with hammer blows. Forge of the Homeland, which is Humanity. Among the conspirators today there are also many adolescents, dressed in school uniforms, and young university students, and women and men of all ages. They come to demand peace in Palestine, the end of the occupation and the genocide that Israeli army carries out with total impunity. Historical aberration: that the victims are today the victimizers.

Some students shout “Down with Israel!” It shouldn’t be, but imperialist propaganda insists on confusing them: all anti-Zionists are considered anti-Semites. We advocate the constitution of two states that respect each other, but every innocent death raises insurmountable walls of hatred. “They took away my right to live in my country. Today we are all Gaza; hatred never ceases, hatred kills you,” said a Palestinian student. In the front row, Díaz-Canel, the president, together with Palestinian and Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian students studying in Cuba, and youth and government leaders from Cuba.

We go out to the Havana seafront. The Palestinian flag floats on a grey background, with intermittent blue. In the crowd, undifferentiated, are ministers and vice-ministers, neighbors and work colleagues, intellectuals and housewives. The students sometimes joke, escaping their stupor, while the humid breeze hits their faces. One of them is improvising slogans with a megaphone, another is holding a handwritten sign: “World, take notice!” Near the Anti-Imperialist Tribune, where we all arrive, two thousand five hundred pioneers are holding the colours red, green, white and black above their heads in well-defined bands. From heavens, Allah or Jehovah, if they exist, will be able to see the Palestinian flag.

Every day, television and the networks bring images of terror: 42,000 Palestinians have died. Tomorrow more will die, and then even more. The Zionists are ravaging the occupied territories. They will receive more weapons from the United States, which will prevent them from being condemned with its veto. Each new day is similar to the previous one and the good people, those who were horrified yesterday, believe that they are facing the same images: a hundred children yesterday, a hundred children today. If the images are repeated, and they are painful, why see them? The terms are hidden, concealed, manipulated. The media that rebel are destroyed with bombs or remote-controlled drones. The bombings extend to Lebanon and other Middle Eastern nations. They are not just human numbers; the fallen, the displaced, are real beings, they have mothers, children, brothers. We can raise one: the Lebanese Wafy Ibrahim, tireless activist of solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela. They did not kill her as they intended, but they destroyed her home, her memories, they pushed her to an unknown place; do you think they will also destroy her spirit, her will to fight? We won’t get used to it, we don’t naturalize death, terror, just as we don’t do with the blockade we suffer. John Donne, an English poet of the 17th century, warned in a premonitory way:

“No man is an island

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Hemingway used the final verse to name his novel about the Spanish Civil War.

Bombs keep falling on Gaza or Beirut also fall on Caracas and Havana. Let no one think that they are safe, that it’s none of their business. The voice of our troubadours are gusts of love. The march ends with El necio, the hymn of all the Numancias: of Stalingrad, of Vietnam, of Gaza, of Cuba and of Venezuela. We retreat in disorder. The sky can no longer contain its load; a few more steps and the rain breaks. The rain purifies. Palestine will win.