THE ‘UNPAYABLE DEBT’ TO CUBA
A JAMAICAN lad, 12 years old when Fidel Castro and his ‘comrades’ stormed the Monacada Barracks to herald the downfall of the United States-backed notorious dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, has been reflecting on 50 years of the Cuban Revolution and what it has meant for Cubans and Cuba’s enduring solidarity with poor and developing nations of the world, including our Caribbean region.

The lad was Norman Girvan, whose stature as one of the outstanding economists and radical thinkers of the Caribbean grew as Castro-led revolution was gaining world-wide attention for the social and economic transformation taking place amid the continuing aggression from the USA. 

Last month, Girvan, a former economic adviser to the late Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley; one of the founders of the Association of Caribbean Economists and later a former Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), was the recipient of an honorary degree of Doctor of Economic Sciences from the University of Havana, one of the recognised and distinguished universities in this hemisphere. 

There have been three recipients of honorary doctorates from the University of Havana since Eric Williams, the historian and first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, became the first to have been so honoured back in 1975.

The others were the Jamaican scholar, Keith Ellis (1999); the noted political novelist and commentator George Lamming (2007); and last month Girvan.

His reflections on the Cuban revolution came in a presentation on receipt of his honorary degree, an event that took place five days before last month’s Third Cuba-CARICOM Summit, and as Cubans were engaged in preparations to mark last Thursday’s 50th anniversary of their January 1, 1959 revolution.

But before sharing excerpts from Girvan’s acceptance speech, it is worth recording that although subdued — consequences of further major economic blows from hurricane and other natural disasters in 2008 — in comparison to earlier huge anniversary celebrations, the international media, governments, political parties and organisations around the world took note last week of the survival of one of the great revolutions of the 20th Century.

Cuba, under the now octogenarian Castro, has survived the administrations of nine United States Presidents and their schemes to destroy its revolution with an unprecedented economic blockade that has proven a humiliating failure against that small Caribbean nation 90 miles off America’s shore, with eyes now focused on what Barack Obama as President will do. 

One BBC ‘Special Report’ earlier this week noted that the streets of Havana were still filled with old American cars that had been in existence when the Castro-led revolution occurred. That could also be a recognition of Cuban ingenuity to keep those cars on the roads alongside the modern cars and other vehicles now also in evidence. 

Of greater relevance and measure of progress, amidst all odds, would certainly be the startling gains of the Cuban revolution in the fields of health and education, as catalogued by the United Nations, and as others have been reporting in the areas of housing accommodation and, unmistakably, the solidarity and heroism of a people in defense of their motherland. 

The quartet of CARICOM leaders — Errol Barrow, Eric Williams, Forbes Burnham and Michael Manley — who created history in this hemisphere by their joint diplomatic relations with Cuba back in 1972, have long passed away. But that gesture of Caribbean solidarity with Cuba was to foster a deep bond of friendship, which was cause for renewal of the spirit of cooperation at the Third Cuba — CARICOM Summit on December 8.

Three days earlier, Norman Girvan had spoken of the “unpayable debt” owed to the Cuban revolution by the Caribbean, African and other poor and developing nations of the world for the quality and sustainability of solidarity.

The ‘indebtedness’
The following excerpts from Girvan’s acceptance speech speak eloquently to the meaning of the Cuban revolution from an informed Caribbean perspective that spanned his years as a high school student, whose imagination was captured by the unique nation-wide literacy programme launched by the revolutionary government, to recent years.

Noting that Jamaica and other West Indian territories were preparing for national independence while Eric Williams was also engaged in a battle with the USA for the return of the Chaguaramas Naval Base to Trinidad and Tobago, Girvan was to quote the observations of famous intellectual colleagues of the ‘New World Group’ like Lloyd Best and George Beckford, as well as Williams, in contextualising the Cuban revolution and ‘integration of the regional consciousness’.

“The revolution had a huge impact on the thinking, on the imagination of my generation and, indeed, on those that followed,” said Girvan, adding: “It has retained its iconic significance as a permanent feature of our Caribbean landscape.

“I am reminded of the words of Prime Minister Michael Manley at the Non-Aligned Summit of 1980, that Latin America and the Caribbean could count ‘on a movement and a rock and that movement is the Cuban revolution and that rock is Fidel Castro…’”

After referring to the support provided by Cuba to the people of Grenada during the 1979-1983 period, and tragedies suffered by Cubans from external aggression, including the bombing of the Cubana passenger aircraft off Barbados in 1976, Girvan told his audience of his own deep admiration for the Cuban people in facing up to the enormous survival challenges they faced following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He then recalled that in 1985, he attended a conference in Cuba on the External Debt of Latin America and the Caribbean that was proclaimed by host President Fidel Castro as “La Deuda es Impagable”– “The Debt is Unpayable.”

“Tonight, my Cuban friends,” Girvan declared, “I accept this honour you have given me, not only in my name but in the name of my generation of Pan-Caribbean thinkers; in the names of Lloyd Best and George Beckford and others in the New World Group; tonight I want to acknowledge to Cuba (in the words of Fidel) that ‘the debt is unpayable….’

“But I do not mean the debt that is owed to the banks by the people of Latin America and the Caribbean and is measured in United States dollars. I mean the debt that is owed to the Cuban people by the rest of the Caribbean, and indeed all humanity, that is measured by their sacrifices and their solidarity and the unshakeable resolve of their leadership…

“For the 185,000 Cuban medical personnel who have served in 103 countries in the last ten years; for the 350 million visits carried out by Cuba’s ‘Global Health Programme’ in poor communities abroad in the past seven years; for the one million, four hundred thousand lives that have been saved; and for the 327,000 persons who have had their sight restored under ‘Operation Milagro’, the debt is unpayable…

“Also, for the two million, four hundred and fifty one thousand persons in thirteen countries who have learned to read and write through Cuban literacy programmes; for the 27,000 students from 120 countries currently studying in Cuba; for the 330,000 Cubans who served in Angola from 1975 to 1991; and for the blood of 2,000 of them who gave their lives in the struggle against the racist regime and for the families whom they left behind….

“And for doing all this, while withstanding an economic embargo for nearly half a century from the mightiest power on the planet, that cost an estimated US$93 Billion, equivalent to twelve times the foreign debt of Cuba….”