When Commander in Chief Fidel Castro participated in the March for Emancipation Day on August 1, 1998, accompanied by then prime minister Owen Arthur, he closed his fiery speech with the following words: "To our brothers from the Caribbean and from Barbados, we tell you that Barbados and the Caribbean can count with Cuba as a tree counts with the sap that flows through his veins", and twenty years later the Cuban ambassador, Francisco Fernández, resumed those words to thank the invitation by the Pan-Africanist movement to share the celebration of the date. Before the crowd gathered at the monument erected to the National Hero Bussa, the Barbadian slave who led the first Caribbean anti-slavery revolt on April 16, 1816, recalled the validity of the ideas expressed by the leader of the Cuban Revolution about the necessary unity of the Caribbean nations to face the current common challenges to their development, and also highlighted the historical coincidence existing on April 16 in Cuba, when in 1961 our people starred in Playa Girón another heroic battle for freedom and independence.
On the Barbadian side, among the main speakers of the act that preceded the traditional March of Emancipation, were the Secretary General of the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration, David Denny, and the current Minister of the Environment, Trevor Prescod, who in their condition as Pan-African leaders called on their people to cultivate ancestral traditions and defend the rights they have conquered. They also reiterated the call for two other prominent anti-colonialist fighters and workers such as Nany Graigg and Israel Lovell to be also recognized as national heroes