Havana, July 22 (RHC)-- Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel delivered the closing speech of First Ordinary Session of the 10th Legislature Saturday afternoon at the Palacio de Convenciones in Havana.

The Cuban president recalled that 70 years ago, a representation of the best of Cuban youth stormed the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks.  "As martyrs or as heroes, without themselves knowing it, they were going to enter history," he said.

"Two of those young men accompanied us in this session, Army General Raúl Castro, leader of the Revolution, and Commander Ramiro Valdez Menéndez.  To them, first of all, I would like to dedicate my words."

"This is not only an act of historical justice, but of two men who continue assaulting fortresses every day with their feet in the stirrup of difficulties and their rifles pointed at mistakes," said the president when addressing the plenary of the National Assembly of People's Power.  

He considered that the recent session of the Assembly "has been good." including the call of the parliament president Esteban Lazo Hernández and other deputies to name names, causes and possible solutions to our problems.  "Those that have nothing to do directly with the blockade or that reinforce the omnipresent blockade due to inaction, apathy, insensitivity, incapacity or simple tiredness and lack of faith that it will be possible to overcome the difficulties."

"We have addressed with a sense of urgency and without prejudice the problems of our difficult daily life, such as food production, electricity generation, water availability, crime, rising inflation, abusive prices.

"We have done so without abandoning pending and strategic matters such as the State policy for the attention to children, adolescents and youth and the Military Penal Code Law."

Cuban President Diaz-Canel emphasized that the bond of the deputies with the population has been verified in these months.   "These months of exchange with the people in the streets, in the neighborhoods, have been the proof of what it means to work with the ear glued to the ground.  An assembly in permanent session disconnected from the people who elected it can never be called an assembly of people's power.

"We can never forget that the enemies of the Cuban nation are betting on fracturing national unity, on separating the people and their government, on us getting tired of insisting, on us lowering our arms, on us believing that the path of surrender is preferable to resisting.  But the option of surrender was erased from the DNA of Cubans."