April 19 will always have great significance in the history of our nation. For the Cuban people and their nascent Revolution, it meant defending the sovereignty of the country, the sacred soil of the homeland, defending their interests, their ideals and their socialist process.

“April 19 has become a historic date for our country. April 19 joins the other dates with which the history of our Revolution has been written. It belongs, like July 26, January 1, March 13, December 2, to the history of this Revolution.”

“They underestimated our people, they miscalculated; and they, accustomed to working with electronic brains, with data, with figures, with computers of all kinds, were wrong, because there is something that their electronic brains could not measure, there is something that their computers could not calculate, and that was: the dignity, morals, and the revolutionary spirit of our people.

Because it was the spirit of the people that crushed the invaders.”"The historical importance of April 19 goes beyond the limits of our own country, because on that day, yankee imperialism certainly received its first great defeat in America."

“If July 26 marked the beginning of the armed struggle of the people, April 19 marked the day that the plans drawn up by the brainy generals of the Pentagon, by the luminaries of the Central Intelligence Agency, collapsed, they came crashing down, and they came crashing down in a matter of hours.”

Thus expressed the Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro Ruz, in the Act of Commemoration of the Victory of Playa Girón, at the Chaplin Theater, April 19, 1965.

CUBADEBATE