Simon Bolivar did not meet José Martí; the Venezuelan national hero passed away twenty-three years before the Apostle of Cuban Independence was born. Marti knew soon who was Bolivar, what he did for his country and that he fought for a Latin America that was independent and its countries kept together like a great and united nation. That's why Martí during his long exile, the first thing he did when he arrived in Caracas was to visit the Liberator’s statue; as he himself described in his book The Golden Age:  "... without shaking off the dust of the road" and “... he was crying in front the statue, and it seemed to move him, like a father when a son approaches." 

Martí felt inside a spiritual paternity lavished on him by the Bolivarian ideology, for which he firstly addressed all the children of Latin America, who are considered as the future of those lands.

When I give free rein to my imagination, I think of how an encounter between these two figures would have been, just the same as with other Latin American independence leaders such us O'Higgins, San Martin, Sucre, Juárez. How many valuable things in favor of our lives and peoples we could know now!

Life is beautiful and time is wise; we have to be aware of those signs of which even the small ones indicate us great things. Waking up today, while I was reading the news- a daily activity as is my custom- and was drinking my first little cup of morning coffee, I heard that the fiber-optic cable from the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela had arrived yesterday on the eastern Cuban coast. At that moment, I felt that historic event for the two countries was like that pending embrace between Simón Bolívar and José Martí, as an embrace from father to son, from brother to brother, from people to people, where both figures embody, lived, thought, fought, created and finished the Latin America process of liberation.

It seems that historic moment has consolidated that beautiful relation materialized in year 2007 by leaders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. The advantages of the fiber-optic submarine cable are physically supplemented by the spiritual union of our peoples. They are, today, a genuine expression of unity, a dawn more than ALBA.

It is an expression of the cultural, social and economic integration; The embrace of Marti and Bolivar is a new act of love breaking the US blockade and the isolation imposed on Cuba over decades. It is a blockade because we are suffering human and economic damages, but never isolation since the hearts of the Cuban and Latin American peoples beat as only one heart.

As in1895, when Marti arrived at Playitas beach and in 1956, Fidel, Raul and the Granma Yacht members of an expedition arrived at Las Coloradas beach, so February 9, 2011 will be historically marked as the symbolic arrival of Simon Bolivar on Siboney coast to embrace in a solidarity act, with the Cuban National Hero Jose Marti. In that sense, Martí's dreams are fulfilled, since if Bolivar had lived longer – although he still lives in a different and eternal way – he would have met Marti and he would have wanted giving him a hug. The space-time coordinates are no longer an obstacle and are taking steps towards the future.

A translation by: Silke Paez Carr

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