Harlem’s IFCO leads 33rd caravan to Cuba
Dr. Jean Kennedy is in Cuba this week, taking part in the 33rd IFCO/Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan to the island nation.
“Actually, coming here in person is so much more enlightening for me,” Dr. Kennedy, a Fresno, California resident, said in a video message to the Amsterdam News. “For me, I want this to be a legacy––not just for myself, as an educator, or for my students, but even for my own grandchildren. As a grandmother, I’m hoping that I’m creating a pathway so that my son will be able to come, and my daughter will be able to come, and my grandchildren will be able to come. I leave them that legacy.”
This is Dr. Kennedy’s second time joining a Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba. She’s one of 30 U.S. citizens taking part in a trip sponsored by the Harlem-based nonprofit IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization), which has been leading groups to the island nation since 1992.
This year’s caravan takes place from July 15 through July 29. IFCO promoted participation in the caravan as an opportunity for U.S. citizens to have “the impact of seeing Cuba for yourself.” With a home-base in the city of Santiago de Cuba, caravan participants are making visits to the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, site of the graves of famed Cubans like Fidel Castro; 19th-century nationalist and independence hero José Martí; Mambi Army of Liberation General Antonio Maceo and his revolution-oriented mother, Mariana Grajales; and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the nation’s first president. Caravanners have been able to retrace the paths taken by Fidel Castro and his rebel army in the Sierra Maestra mountains as they strategized methods to overthrow the dictator, Fulgencio Batista. They are taking day trips to visit locations like the small fishing village of Caimanera which sits outside the U.S. naval base and prison on Guantánamo Bay. They volunteered to help clean at a hospital, went to the Bayamo Wax Museum, and visited Oscar Lambert’s “Las Elenas” farm.
Caravan participant Kelly Camacho, from Buffalo, N.Y., said she has felt inspired by the caravan tour. “Yesterday we got to go to a community garden, and it was really beautiful to see the way community love exists here in Cuba,” she said. “Back home, we’re really taught to be individualistic. We’re taught a scarcity mindset: that there’s not enough for everybody. But here in Cuba, where there are a lot less resources because of the blockade of the United States, they’re doing so much more with so much less. They take care of each other: it is what it truly means to be a community, and that is extremely revolutionary.
“The blockade was put in place to keep those revolutionary ideas confined to here because they are afraid of the power that it would generate in places like Puerto Rico, the rest of the Caribbean, even in the United States. … More people need to come here to Cuba and see what is out here because there is so much more to offer.”
Mariam Osman from Denver, Colorado, was also encouraged by her time with the IFCO caravan. She said the trip gives her the chance to “see what it means to live in a place where people seem committed to the struggle and seem committed to each other’s needs being met and seem committed to what it means to exist in community and care for one another.”
Importantly, the 33rd Friendshipment Caravan brought with it a shipment of antibiotics, painkillers, and other priority medicines for residents on the island. Cuba has had pharmaceutical drug shortages in recent years and there are reports of people becoming reliant on herbal medicines and drug swap markets.
A paucity of food and lack of access to international markets have continued in Cuba ever since the United States imposed an economic embargo on the socialist nation in the wake of its 1959 revolution. Cuba’s revolution transitioned its national economy from functioning based on a deeply corrupt capitalism and evolved into a mostly state-run socialist system. Cubans were granted free education; healthcare for all; agrarian reform; and social supports. But, to this day, thousands of Cubans who flee the island say political freedoms are lacking, and the instability of the island’s economy makes it difficult to live there.
It was the U.S. embargo that led the late Rev. Lucius Walker, IFCO’s founding director, to create Pastors for Peace which brought caravans of supplies to Latin American nations suffering from U.S.-enforced embargos. Rev. Walker deemed the embargoes a form of U.S. imperialism.
IFCO is now led by Gail Walker, Rev. Walker’s daughter. Her many years of contact with Cuban government representatives has helped maintain IFCO’s open-arms welcome on the island. Gail Walker’s birthday took place during the caravan and Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, notably tweeted a special birthday message to Walker to congratulate her.
As part of their trip, the 33rd IFCO caravan participants will get to witness the 70th anniversary celebrations of Castro’s rebel army assault on the Moncada Barracks. It will be a commemoration of the rebel army’s unsuccessful attempt to steal weapons from the military barracks on July 26, 1953. The assault on the barracks failed, but it made Fidel Castro a national figure and it led to his famous speech in court where he claimed that “history would absolve” him, because it would point to the purpose behind his actions.
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