This Vietnamese youth, presently occupying the post of Commercial Counsellor of theVietnamese diplomatic mission in Panama, assured his Cuban colleagues that the visit was of a personal nature, because it represents his debt to Fidel.
The commitment with Cuba and its leader is also infinite for Luis ‘Lucho’ Gómez, who assured he literally owes his life and that of his family to the deceased leader and to the ‘Cuban brothers’, because they gave them refuge at the residence of the Cuban Embassy when unruly U.S. soldiers persecuted him after the invasion of 1989.
‘I remember that Fidel and the Cuban Revolution saved my life, mine and my family in the difficult years of the invasion, when our people was subdued by them and the Cuban Revolution opened the doors of its Embassy to receive Panamanian patriots to preserve their lives’.
This remembrance took him to the close relation between the Commandant and the also disappeared general Omar Torrijos and that confession of the Panamanian leader when in Santiago de Cuba he assured that Fidel advised him to be calm in his relations with the United States.
Until the entrance of the centennial building on Cuba Street, venue of the diplomatic see, a man of the people arrived with a bunch of white roses, and before entering he left the flowers at the railing after expressing: ‘white flowers for Fidel, as Jose Marti wanted’.
He resumed, in a simple way, the union between the outstanding Cubans that will, soon, will rest together at the Saint Ifigenia cemetery in the eastern Santiago de Cuba.
Many of the ‘political colors’, as the Cuban ambassador in the Isthmus says, who arrive to the piece of the island in the heart of the City of Panama, where the flag of the solitary star inclines in a mourning way, because everyone coming here do so spontaneously, feel the obligation to render tribute.
A singular telephone call to the Cuban Consulate impacted those present because it came from a penitentiary and the voice was of a Cuban that serves a sentence in Panama, although he considers that does not exempt him from his feelings.
My family is now at the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, rendering homage to Fidel, saida voice who identified himself with name and surnames and. Following that, he assured he wished to communicate his fellow citizens the condolences to close with a very Cuban sentence: ‘Homeland or Death, We will Overcome’.