Greetings,
"I will not aspire nor accept-I repeat I will not aspire or accept -the post of President of the Council of State and commander in Chief", says Fidel Castro, announcing his retirement on Monday 18th, Feb 08. Despite the ideological challenges and the relentless campaign by his enemies, Fidel Castro has prevailed and completed his share of the work needed to create a better life for the people of Cuba and indeed several other countries in the world. This life journey of Castro, examined on its own merit, is for me an outstanding example of the work of leadership, service and principled dedication to the meaning of struggle, that being to create a more humane and just world, and to stand in active solidarity with others on the same journey.
No doubt many will continue to criticize Fidel Castro's policies as being undemocratic and in violation of human rights of the citizens of Cuba. However evidence of the lack of credibility of this propaganda is the career of Fidel Castro itself and the quality of the life for the Cuban people. The UN Human Development Index, puts Cuba ahead of almost every other Caribbean state and ahead of the USA in several areas of life. But it is to the work of Castro's solidarity with the people of the Africa, the Caribbean and the remainder of the Americas, that I would like to direct your attention. The assistance offered by Cuba has been profound in the areas of medical assistance, free education and training of large numbers of students from around the world, including the United States. In fact the efforts of Castro, Chavez and others to extend concrete support for their neighbors, comes out of a long tradition of concern and investment in the well being of sister states and the plight of the people in this hemisphere. More popular examples include the support offered by the Haitian Revolutionary state, for Simon Bolivar and his campaign to free the people of South America from imperialism, the role of freedom fighters from Jamaica and other territories in the revolutionary struggle in St. Domingue.
However the most profound contribution of Castro and the Cuban people to this historical epoch, is to me the fact that they managed to wrest from their oppressors, the right to be a free and independent state and to sustain that independence. Aside from Haiti and the compromised attempt in Grenada, under the New Jewel Movement, no Caribbean or Latin American state has been able to make a clean break with their imperial oppressors and to escape the neocolonial clutches of the American Empire and much less to sustain their sovereignty. We watch with guarded optimism, the noble efforts of the Bolivarian Republic, Bolivia, Ecuador etc. , that seem to promise a new day for justice, dignity and independence for the historically people of the region.
The example of Cuba, that it is possible to have a model of society that is not defined and controlled by the dominant Western culture, has been a serious challenge to the global rulers. Much the same, as liberated, maroon societies offered a "dangerous example", to the pervasive slave plantations of the African holocaust on which western capitalism was built. That devotion to the quest for freedom that haunted and still does, the global oppressors, but offered for us a breath of fresh air, in the promise that we could be free to work, to live, be free, to have peace and love and raise our children, shape our societies as we saw fit. This has inspired the spirit and meaning of the Caribbean itself . That community of hope and promise, where people captured, abused and brutalized in a maelstrom of blood and iron, shook off their chains, rose up against the criminal enterprise that was the European invasion of Africa, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere. Caribbean people looked their oppressors in the eye and affirmed their inherent worth by humanizing the very dungeons/territories, which were constructed to dehumanize our people for generations. This is the meaning of Fidel Castro's life and this was the legacy that informed his work for Cuba and the Caribbean .
Castro is correct when he states that "History will absolve me", for us that absolution is a living example of the failure of the forces of evil to crush the ever rising humanity of the Cuban, Caribbean and all oppressed people. Fidel Castro's life and work has been and will remain for me, a lived and living model of the essence of the irreducible creativity of the Caribbean itself.
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