I stand with Cuba
By Adebayo Lamikanra In late summer of 1997, I was invited to Malmö in Sweden to take part in the annual Malmö Festival of Poetry. By that time the event
By Adebayo Lamikanra
In late summer of 1997, I was invited to Malmö in Sweden to take part in the annual Malmö Festival of Poetry. By that time the event had become quite famous with poets coming from all over the world to spend five wonderful days of scintillating poetry performance and unforgettable camaraderie. If I was not impressed by the festival before I arrived for the show, I quickly adjusted my mind and expectations after several reminders of the presence of a justly famous compatriot, Wole Soyinka at an earlier edition of the festival. I came away from that festival with such a strong impression that I started the annual Ife Poetry Festival, which later became the Ilesa Poetry House Party, the year after I attended the festival in Malmo. It went through twenty-two editions before it was throttled, first by Covid and then by security and cost challenges. Unfortunately, it is now beginning to look as if that is that unless an unlikely rescue can be engineered soon.
That year, poets were as usual invited to Malmo from virtually all parts of the globe and even before we arrived in Malmo we had become acquainted with each other through a brochure which had been sent to each one of us well in advance of our arrival. The only other black face in that brochure belonged to a Cuban lady and naturally, I looked forward to seeing her at the festival. Even then, I was not quite prepared for the warmth with which she greeted me at our first meeting. I was of course unmistakably Yoruba or at least Nigerian in my buba and sokoto and so as soon as she saw me she turned on a high voltage smile and followed it with a full bodied hug. It was in the process of delivering that hug that she disarmed me completely by whispering into my ear; 'èmi na, omo Òdùduwà ni mí.' This was not an introduction but an affirmation of a common origin, if not a blood relationship. She may have come from the other side of the Atlantic as I did but she was entitled to all the rights and privileges which my being Yoruba could have conferred on me, her absence from home notwithstanding. In her thinking, she may even have felt that she deserved any accolades on offer because after a very long absence from the source, she was still keeping the faith in a way that was not desired of me, who should be a guardian of that faith. I felt as protective of her as a Cuban as I would have felt had we left Lagos together on the same plane. There are many hundred thousand Cubans who like my fellow poet, are also the sons and daughters of Òdùduwà and their welfare must matter to me as much as she mattered to me on that balmy evening in Malmo.
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I live in a country which pretends to be governed by capitalist principles even though the situation on ground is as far from capitalist theory as it can be. Our system can be described as faux capitalism but only because we have decided to be kind. If we are willing to be truthful, we must be willing to admit that the word capitalism must not be heard in the jungle of the Nigerian market place. I am in principle and by commitment, a socialist sympathiser but will not describe myself a socialist because it really makes no sense to do so in a place which unfortunately can be described as a wasteland of ideas as far as governance structure is concerned. On the other hand, Cuba has been ruled by the Communist Party of Cuba since 1965 and that removes any ambiguity about the character of that country. And because of that, there is another reason for me to stand with Cuba, quite apart from the fact that a hefty number of my long lost relatives live on the island of Cuba.
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Cuba was a Spanish slave colony for more than four hundred years and was the last of such colonies to free her slaves. It was not until 1886 that slaves were finally granted their freedom and until then, millions of African men, women and children were forced to work for no pay to produce sugar which was consumed in Spain. Over the years the Cubans fought unsuccessfully against Spanish rule but it was not until 1902 that the colony was prised away from Spain by the USA which cited the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as justification for kicking the Spanish king right out of the western hemisphere. However, The expulsion of Spain from Cuba did not mean that Cuba had attained independence. It only led to authority passing from Spain to America even if the new rulers pretended that they had not acquired a colony since this did not sit well with their self proclaimed anticolonial principles. Indeed some money changed hands in this transaction but the reality was that the Americans simply took over the spaces which were occupied by the departed Spaniards.
Cuba was principally a sugar producing colony right from the onset of her colonisation. To be frank, that was the only thing produced on the island and all of it was exported to Spain. After the departure of the Spanish overlords, the destination of Cuban sugar switched to the nearby United States and all manufactured goods needed on the island were imported from the US. Cuba did not produce bananas but it was a banana republic in every sense of the word as it was totally dependent on the USA for everything.The tropical climate in Cuba was very attractive to the Americans who quickly turned Havana into a tourist destination and a flourishing outpost for gambling, prostitution and drug dealing. Cuba was not an American colony. It was only completely subservient to her new overlords.
The political situation within Cuba after independence was chaotic to say the least. The Americans had even taken the trouble to write a Constitution for their charges and had written into that Constitution, the right to intervene in the affairs of Cuba whenever they felt that they should do. That provision was not a decoration as it was acted upon at least three times before 1959 when the puppet regime of Batista was overthrown in Castro's revolution, an event that changed the face of Cuba profoundly and permanently.
Although Batista was their puppet, the Americans were not unhappy to see the back of him, so they were prepared to switch their backing to Fidel Castro when he seized power. After all, they had been calling the shots in Cuba for more than fifty years and in their calculation, nothing was going to change even though there were so many things wrong in the land. First the Cuban society was heavily segregated between the races so much so that Batista the President who was a mullago was barred from some clubs in Havana. Blacks were of course virtually excluded from Cuban society at every level and were as a group consequently illiterate and the only job open to them was the seasonal cutting of sugar cane. Since this occupied only four months of the year, they were jobless for most of the time and therefore lived from hand to mouth. This was in spite of the fact that black people were fully involved as soldiers in the forces which fought for independence at the turn of the century. Under such circumstances, blacks did not have any access to healthcare as did all those who were not members of the Cuban middle class. But there was a wealthy upper crust which gathered into itself all the fat of the land and gorged itself immoderately on this commodity. Under such conditions there was a great deal of inequality and discontent in the land. In other words, the country was ripe for a revolution. And it was duly delivered. That it was successful however is a story all by itself.
