FOOD FOR THOUGHT by Dr.Terence A.Marryshow.
Speech delivered at Solidarity Activity the Grenada Trade Centre, by Dr.Marryshow to welcome Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel y Bermudez to Grenada on 7th December 2022.
Cuban president
Members of Government
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Cuban collaborators
Sisters and Brothers
Sisters and brothers
What a distinct honour and pleasure it is for me to welcome to Grenada and to this gathering, the President of Cuba, Comrade Miguel Diaz-Canela and his delegation
One of the greatest experiences of my life was the opportunity given to me to live and study in Cuba for seven years after having lived in the Unites States for a similar amount of time and until the end of my days, the Cuban experience is and will always be not only one of the highlights of my life but one of my proudest moments.
That experience gave me and many others over the years, the opportunity to wake up every morning to breathe the same air, eat the same food as the Cuban people, to live among them, to experience what real friendship, love and respect was all about in a foreign country with a culture distinctly different from ours. It also gave me the opportunity to dispel the dangerous and false myths spread about Cuba by the US propaganda machine about what a Communist country is supposed to represent. I have visited many countries in my lifetime and none compare to Cuba when it comes to feeling safe and secure. I saw a people who love and care for each other as I have never seen in other countries and I felt safe and secure that I was able to walk the streets day and night without a care in my mind never once wondering if someone would attack,mug me or shoot mem, because indeed Cuba is one of the safest countries in the world with one of the lowest crimes rates.
While there are those who also lived and studied in Cuba and today refuse to speak Spanish, choose not to identify with Cuba because you never see them in single solidarity activity and would rather wash off that experience, my identification with Cuba is now second nature, it is uncompromising and unconditional because living among the Cuban people have made many of us what we are today in the Grenadian society. If one has lived in Cuba for six or seven years and have not become sensitized to the plight of the Cuban people and understand the tremendous sacrifice they have made on our behalf, then that experience would have been for naught. I also fully comprehend what the Cuban people have undergone and continue to undergo over the last 60 and the dire consequences they have endured due to the criminal and unjust economic blockade imposed on them by the US. Although in my mind, always unjustifiable, one could have made a case for that kind of harsh policy during the period of the Cold War. But since the end of the cold war and collapse of the Soviet Union since 1991, what justification can there be for the US to continue this anachronistic policy? It can only mean that Cuba and its socialist system is a thorn in the backside of the US and because they have thrown every imaginable obstacle at Cuba, aimed at breaking their will and bringing the Cuban people to their knees, the Cuban people have remained resilient and strong and continue to survive.
The argument they use today is that Cuba's system is a failed system because Cubans are fleeing the island and the so-called dictatorship in droves. If that is true why then are people from LatinAmerica,particularly Central America, Mexico and Haiti, countries with so-called democratic governments, fleeing these countries also. The answer is obvious, that people flee for mainly economic reasons, family reasons and violence and Cuba is no different except that there is no violence in Cuba. If every available means is used against Cuba for 60 years under a conscious policy of hostility, adopted since the Kennedy era in 1962 to make life as difficult as possible for Cubans so that eventually they would turn against the regime, why would they not want to leave. No country in the world in human history as we know it has been subjected to harsher and more oppressive conditions than Cuba has been faced with and no other country that I know of would have been able to survive that kind of pressure. In fact, any other country would have capitulated with just a quarter of that pressure.If the US touts itself as being so big and powerful who has the greatest military might that no one can beat or compete with, what does it fear from a small country that it is peaceful, does not bother it in the least, does not threaten it in any way and only wants to live in peace and develop itself and its peoples as they see fit? Why does everyone have to be like the US? And why does the US always have to use its military power, sanctions and economic pressure to force countries to be like them? If the US believe in democracy, where is the freedom of choice for countries like Cuba to chart their own course of development and their own destiny.
For those who advocate that Cuba has to change, otherwise the blockade would continue in perpetuity, I say that the one who has to change is the US, not Cuba, because the vast majority of the countries of the UN have consistently over the last 29 consecutive years in the UN General assembly, called on the US to unconditionally remove the blockade. It is the US who refuses to honour its obligations to the UN and respect the will of the international community. They go to the UN and hypocritically call Russia's aggression against Ukraine criminal yet they refuse to recognize their own criminality by deliberately maintaining a 60-year-old blockade or economic war against a poor struggling people who are no threat to them but aimed at suffocating and strangling the last breath out of them, only because they dare to be different and refuse to bend to the dictates of Washington.
Why should Cuba be put on a list of countries that are state sponsors of terrorism when there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim and particularly when the biggest state sponsor of terrorism is the US. The US can arbitrarily and irresponsibly put people on such a list, which prevents normal economic transactions from being carried out with that country for being on that list, but for those who can legitimately call the US a state sponsor of terrorism, which is what they have done against Cuba for 60 years including the bombing of Cuban Airlines in 1976 off Barbados, who then puts the US on that list? The US believes that because it is rich and powerful, it can do anything and everything with impunity. Of the two hundred odd military conflicts in the world in the last 100 years, the US is responsible for starting and instigating more than 70 percent of them, an astonishing figure, all designed to keep countries within its geopolitical orbit by force.But one day all of this will change and there will be a rude awakening for the US.
Cuba has a right to live and survive and be a legitimate member of the UN and international community, Cuba should have the right to trade and carry out normal economic, social, cultural, political and other relations with other countries of the world, many of whom have similar or different economic political systems with Cuba but who have normal relations with the US.
When the US blockades Cuba, it is not only affecting Cubans it is depriving the rest of the world from the rich cultural experience.
We once again call on the US to immediately and unconditionally end its economic blockade against Cuba, we call on the US to return the illegally occupied territory of Guantanamo Bay to their rightful owners, the Cuban people. And we once again express our deepest and unbreakable solidarity with the Cuban people and thank the Cuban government and people for all that they have done to assist the Grenadian and by extension the peoples of the Third World. As I always say, if all of the countries of the world would express solidarity the way the Cuban people do, faithful to the teachings of Fidel Castro, arguably the most outstanding and consequential leader of the 20th Century, what a wonderful world this would be.
Long live the Cuban people
Long live the bonds of friendship between the Cuban and Grenadian people
Long live international solidarity.
Like Cuba, let us forever go forward on our feet and never on our knees