(FIRMAS PRESS) It happened during a summer afternoon in 1957. Batista ruled Cuba and the opposition resorted to terrorism. At the Commodore Club in Havana, a resort where families went to swim, dance or play squash, some callous swine set off a bomb that wounded several innocent people. A beautiful young woman wept nervously next to two young children who turned out to be her siblings. I, a young man of 14, went over to protect her and offered to lead them out of that hell of shouts and shrieks. Amid the confusion, she told me her name was Linda. Ever since, for almost half a century, we have been together. I think it's the only time a terrorist act has helped create something beautiful.

Linda's mother was Lebanese, and at her home I discovered the most remarkable features of that fabulous tribe. They were feverishly hard-working and intelligent. The women were usually very beautiful and everyone seemed genetically predisposed to engage in commerce and industry. They loved jewelry, made money honorably, and loved to talk about how they earned it. They also enjoyed Arab food and talked sensually about recipes and flavors. They argued with each other intensely and loudly, but reconciled so promptly that their strong family ties were never in danger.

They were profoundly Catholic, although they came from a lateral branch of the Church, the Maronite sect, whose priests, on some occasions, were permitted to marry. With the passing of years, my trips and studies, I realized that the successful and peculiar family I had joined, far from being exceptional, was almost the rule. In all Latin American capitals there were nuclei of Lebanese Christians who stood out in all fields of endeavor.

In general, Lebanese Christians migrated to America in the early 20th Century. They used to carry a Turkish passport and their primary language was Arabic, but the two aspects were deceiving. They were neither Turks nor Arabs. They were proud descendants of the legendary Phoenicians, great navigators and builders of empires, the creators of our alphabet. Along with the Greek, the Jews and the Romans, they saw themselves as an essential part of the founding nucleus of the West, a link they stressed as they proudly narrated the feats of their Christian forebears, aides in the Crusades, who resisted the siege of Islamic troops and the centenary Ottoman occupation, hiding in snow-covered mountains and in cedar forests where they learned to love freedom.

That Western and modern vocation was clearly evidenced by the creation of Lebanon, a nation invented in 1920 by the Maronite Christians with the collaboration of France, an imperial power that, together with England, redistributed the territories seized from Turkey. The Lebanese (using a precedent later utilized by Israel) created not a tribal monarchy like the rest of the Arab territories but a modern republic that defined itself, though not in so many words, as an entity voluntarily different from the Islamic world.

For that reason, the first Lebanese flag (modified some years later) bore the colors of the French ensign, plus a cedar tree in the middle. France understood that the Lebanese were different from the Syrians and gave them their own territory, separate and apart. The Lebanese spoke Arabic and ate Turkish food but were neither one nor the other. They formed an ethnic group that was much more open to progress and the future, something they demonstrated in no time at all. In a few decades, after World War II, Lebanon became the wealthiest nation in the region, with a banking sector that rivaled Switzerland, while Beirut was justly called "the Paris of the Middle East."

Obviously, the dream of the Maronite Christians fades as the country turns Islamic under the demographic weight of the Muslim population, which already has amply surpassed the Christian presence. Add to this the influence of the Syrians and the nefarious presence of Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist organization financed and trained by Iran not only to fight Israel but also to undermine and destroy the Christian infidels.

Frankly, it is not easy to predict a happy ending for these singular and virtuous people. The difficult part will not be to remove the rubble and rebuild the nation after the guns grow silent in this new war between Hezbollah and Israel. The difficult part will be to keep Iran's religious fundamentalism, joined by the anti-West hatred of the Syrian satrapy, from crushing forever what has been one of the most notable expressions of the human spirit. Hezbollah and its accomplices will not destroy Israel but they might finish off Lebanon, just as its Christian founders feared.