Down with Columbus and Up with Fidel!
Christopher Columbus and Fidel Castro are two people who are historically connected to Spain and Cuba.
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They are also connected because both of them have had a tremendous impact on the lives of Black and Brown people around the world.
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Admiral Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 and he died on May 20th 1506. In primary schools in The Bahamas they teach us that in 1492 Columbus was a Captain who was eager to find spices and a new route to the East around the world. We are also taught Columbus was backed by Spain to sail the high seas with men and three ships and he in turn crossed the ocean and discovered the New World where he found the naked but peaceful Arawaks and war-like Caribs.
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Up to this day, everybody in the Caribbean region knows the name of Columbus' three ships from that voyage in 1492; The Nina, The Pinta and The Santa Maria.
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However, none of us are familiar with any of names of the Indigenous people who Columbus and his fellow invaders met here in 1492. The reason; they are not here any more. And their existence is intentionally kept out of our thought process.
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Caribbean history and Capitalism has historically leaped over the fact of the near genocide of the Indigenous people. It is a historical fact that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions according to a Catholic Priest, of the Indigenous people in this region died as a result of slavery and war-fare. Columbus and the invaders that followed after him fought them for their land and then made them dig for minerals and dive for pearls on islands like Hispaniola and Cuba. This resulted in the mass genocide of the indigenous people and then a catholic priest and other religious monks then suggested that Africa would be a good hunting ground to feed their ferocious economic need for free labor to build the New World.
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The colonization and enslavement of Africa and her people thus began. Africa was attacked, with the same zeal that was used against the Indigenous people in the New World, and millions of Africans were brought from Africa to the Western Hemisphere in a process that they refer to today as the slave trade. As Professor John Henrik Clarke has stated this attack on Africa should be rightfully called the African Holocaust because of the tremendous pain and suffering that it brought to Africa and the world at large. In regards to the Spanish Kingdom this new stolen wealth was used to consolidate the Spanish people and develope the cities of Madrid and Seville.
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Christopher Columbus was the catalyst of this movement. That's how the New World was started, or to be more specific and scientific, that's how the White Modern World began.
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Capitalism has conveniently caused Caribbean history to forget or ignore these essential primitive elements.
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Commander Fidel Castro was born on August 13th 1926 and he passed away on November 25th 2016. He comes from Cuba; one of the places that Columbus and his fellow invaders "discovered".
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Cuba and Fidel Castro have made significant contributions to the resistance of Black and Brown people against imperial domination.
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When the invaders landed in 1492, they met a people who would not be conquered. They met Hatuey. He was a warrior chief of the Indigenous people from Cuba. Hatuey and his people fought the invaders. He had to flee and was captured in Hispaniola. Before he was sentenced to death, the Priest asked Hatuey to ask God for forgiveness so that he could enter Heaven. Hatuey told the Priest he would rather go to Hell if the Spanish soldiers were going to that same Heaven.
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However, the imperial white powers killed the Indigenous people and conquered the land of Hispaniola. The French took one side of the island and the Spanish took the other side. The part of the island that the French controlled, which was based on the enslavement of Africans, basically became the foundation of the economy of the French Kingdom at that time. It represented 2/3 of the French kingdom's trade in export. This stolen wealth built the French cities of Paris and Marseille.
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After a bloody war that began in the middle of the 1790's and that lasted for over twelve years some 500,000 Africans in a successful revolution fought off three imperial powers and liberated the part of the island that the French ruled. In January 1804 the land was declared the First Free Republic in the Western Hemisphere. The revolutionary Africans called the land "Haiti" in remembrance of Hatuey. They said that every African or person who lived there or came there was Free. These revolutionary Africans in Haiti also aided the revolutionary movement of the indigenous people and Africans against imperialism in South America. The imperial powers took revenge on Haiti by imposing an embargo on Haiti and they also made the new nation compensate the French for the loss of their African slaves. This information can be found in "From Columbus to Castro" by Professor Eric Williams and "The Black Jacobins" by C.L.R. James. Cuba's connection to the resistance of Black people does not stop there.
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After the Cuban War of Independence, Africans who had fought in the war in Cuba formed the first black political party in this region in August of 1908. It was called The Independent Party of Color.
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By the 1920's, Marcus Garvey an African who was born on the island of Jamaica and who had been inspired by the revolutionary Africans of Haiti, had built an organization of millions of Africans world-wide. The name of the organization was the Universal Negro Improvement Association and it had branches on mostly all of the Caribbean islands including; Trinidad, Antigua, The Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Barbados and Bermuda. Garvey and the U.NI.A.'s slogan was "Africa for the Africans at Home and Abroad".
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According to Professor Tony Martin in his book the "Pan-African Connection", Cuba had more U.N.I.A. branches (52) than any other territory in the West Indies and indeed more than any other country other than the United States. Professor Martin also wrote that in 1923 the British government seriously considered recognizing the Cuban U.N.I.A. as the body representing the British West Indian population in that country.
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In 1958 after a successful revolutionary movement led by Commander Fidel Castro to overthrew a puppet regime, the island of Cuba, the birthplace of Hatuey and the former colony of Spain, was declared a Socialist Republic.
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From the 1960s to the1980's Fidel Castro and Cuba supported and inspired national liberation movements in the United States and throughout the Caribbean; in Jamaica, Grenada and Guyana. Cuba also supported revolutionary movements throughout South America. And that support crossed the ocean back to Africa. It was Cuba that supported the liberation movements in Ghana, Guinea, Mozambique and throughout the continent of Africa.
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In 1975 it was Fidel Castro and this same Socialist Republic that would send thousands of troops across the ocean, Back to Africa, to aid the African revolutionaries in Angola and Southern Africa to prevent White Apartheid from completely taking over the entire Southern Region of Africa.
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In September 1980, the first African to travel into space, Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez, was from the Cuban Socialist Republic.
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After former South African president Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 he thanked Commander Fidel Castro and Cuba for all the work it had done in supporting the African national liberation movement and other revolutionary movements of the so called Third World.
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To this very day Cuba is still sending thousands of doctors, engineers and teachers to those in need around the world.
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Today Cuba suffers just like Haiti. The United States of America has imposed and maintains an unjust embargo against Cuba.
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Christopher Columbus and Fidel Castro were both dreamers. But Columbus fought for the international oppression and exploitation of white people over Black and Brown people and Castro fought for the international resistance and liberation of Black and Brown people over imperialism.
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For us, the former is the Old World and the latter is the New World.
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We choose the latter.
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Uhuru
One Africa One Nation.