The presence of a delegation from Saint Lucia at a series of recent conferences in Venezuela on the establishment of an international anti-fascist front From Latin America to the World, allowed for exchanges on collective returns to Time and History, featuring untold stories of earlier Caribbean and Latin American struggles.
Delegations from the continent and the island region shared stories and experiences that coincided and differed in similarity, but all about the many fruitful liberation struggles and victories that long-preceded collective responses to today’s neo-colonial onslaughts on efforts to accelerate progress in the new process(es) of progress.
The final meeting establishing the international social movement alliance against fascism allowed for delegations — young and old, weak and strong — to share experiences with progressive reporters, journalists and intellectuals, parliamentarians and social media influencers, from across America and the Caribbean, from as as far back as could be remembered.
A big story was about the birth and growth of The Bolivarian Alternative for Our Americas (ALBA).
Formally established on January 24, 2004, it developed mechanisms for consolidation of the process of development of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) peoples, from the perspectives, of leveraging state power and resources to improve the lives of people across the wider region.
Venezuela (under Chavez) and Cuba (under Castro) launched the PetroCaribe-TCP initiatives that provided affordable energy alternatives and introduced bartering as a trading mechanism in efforts to develop a genuine free trade area – distinct from the opposite proposed by Washington, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
They also launched the extended region-wide Operation Milagro (Miracle) eye-care program that’s continued for decades and attended to hundreds of thousands of citizens of almost every LAC nation, including from the USA and Canada.
ALBA is saying and doing more than other traditional regional and international groupings to ensure more people get access to more and better resources, while also protecting the LAC region against traditional external influences aimed at continuing centuries of colonial and ongoing post-colonial dominance of the region and its people.
ALBA’s founders also planned an appropriate regional development bank to take similar approaches to finance and financing new development projects that marry the LAC region’s people and resources in new ways for longer-lasting equal relationships that replace the traditional top-down North-South approaches.
But while most of the heroic stories are those preserved over time by historians and writers of yore, the conferences also allowed for the likes of the Saint Lucia delegation to bring to light the progressive roles Caribbean nations and people played in the last two centuries alongside the Latin American struggles of earlier times, particularly during the 18th Century, when Slavery reigned and Racism supreme, both together manifesting fascist tendencies.
Africans from traditional liberation movements like Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) learned more about the roles played by Haiti’s leaders in defeating Napoleon and other European armies to establish the world’s first Back Republic and outlaw slavery in 1804.
Central and South Americans from El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti Liberation Movement (FMLN) and Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front (FMLN) were able to exchange with younger newcomers to the age-old struggles about the differences in and over time, including when the current Salvadoran President was associated with the FMLN as a youngster and how former celebrated guerrilla Commander Ana Maria Guadeloupe has become a Christian Democrat.
Caribbean delegates highlighted how Haiti remains under-appreciated and under-represented beyond the United Nations (UN) recognition of its historicity in the movement to end and abolish Slavery; and the undocumented contributions of the Grenada Revolution, as the first in the English-speaking CARICOM region.
ALBA’s 20th Anniversary in January 2025 will allow for a widening of the discussion and sharing of experiences beyond the traditional and out of the ordinary, to help shape current and future narratives.
ALBA’s Executive Secretary Jorge Arreaza, an experienced young servant of the Bolivarian Revolution at the highest levels including the Foreign Affairs Minister, noted the joining of ALBA by CARICOM member-states helped transform it “from an alternative to an alliance.”
That variable also represents an Alliance of Alternatives that converges and revolves around ALBA’s fulcrum, but it’s also one that started over two centuries ago, when Caribbean revolutionaries fought and earned pride of place alongside their Latin American colleagues.
Most of those undocumented stories still live through oral history passed down by holders of traditional stories of liberation entrenched in minds and shared over time by and through Indigenous First People and African and rebel Christian and Muslim faiths, through cultural and social traditions.
The French Revolution bred successive revolutions and rebel movements across the region, including the Battle at Rabot in Saint Lucia in 1796, which saw rebellious slaves defeat British forces in the Soufriere region, leading to the beheading of fascist-minded plantation owners around the 238 square-mile island with a mobile guillotine — and a subsequent ban on slavery — for one year.
Many delegates hardly believed that Saint Lucia could lay claim to being the true birthplace of Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte; or that a Saint Lucia-born shipwright named Jean Baptiste Bideau played a significant part in Venezuela’s war of independence alongside Simon Bolivar.
Many more also heard for the first time, that Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is home to the birth and growth of the Garifuna movement that was so effective as to result in the capture and forced dislocation and displacement through mass migration of an entire people to an isolated island off the then British Honduras (now Belize), who’ve now multiplied to over-800,000 people today in four Central American nations, from Belize to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Some were amazed to hear about Grenada’s Julien Fedon and the sacrifices of the island’s heroic first people at Leaper’s Hill, which both influenced the thinking behind the 1979 Revolution.
Not many were aware of the historic traditional link between Jamaica and Haiti’s armed liberation fighters, the contributions of Jamaicans and Haitians to the forces led by Bolivar in the freedom of the Gran Colombia region that gave birth to several new nations, or the Cuban Revolution before and after Jose Marti.
Many never even heard of Guyana and Surinam before their respective oil finds; or how Belize, Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago played important roles in leading the Caribbean’s response to the most recent Palestinian holocaust at the UN Security Council and General Assembly in 2024, alongside Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Nor did many realize that Britain’s Lord Nelson never set foot in Barbados, where a centuries-old statue of the decorated English pirate — who helped Britain rule the seas and plunder the entire Caribbean region – was torn-down decently, by the state.
Or that the felling of Nelson’s statue in Barbados helped cleanse the island’s whitewashed history as ‘Little England’, the first island where British slavery was established in the Caribbean and where an English parliament existed before Westminster.
All stories told, much quiet emphasis was placed on Saint Lucia’s historical and contemporary role as a traditional friend of Venezuela after the presentation at the closing ceremony of the main anti-fascist conference by Saint Lucia’s Ambassador to Venezuela, Mexico and ALBA, Peter Lansiquot, who delivered his unscripted address entirely in Spanish – and to sustained applause.
But these are just a few of the untold stories from the region that produced Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines of Haiti, Martinique’s Frantz Fanon and Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey and Michael Manley, Saint Lucia’s Arthur Lewis and Guyana’s Walter Rodney and Dr Cheddi Jagan, Grenada’s Maurice Bishop – alongside Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti, Augustino Sandino, Chile’s Salvador Allende and the other great Latin American liberators inscribed in history in letters of gold.
ALBA and the regional and continental anti-fascist movement correctly insist on exercising all available peaceful avenues and alternatives, including social movements, to achieve all possible goals.
But, as also pointed out when this writer addressed the closing session, embracing new information technology in the drive to bring about the required new world orders must not be done in ways and means that erase or ignore the established and effective traditional and trusted mainstream media mechanisms depended-upon by the majority of today’s parents and grandparents — like traditional radio, TV and newspapers accessible at the turn of a knob or available at newsstands.
Requirement for internet connections to access media in developing nations and small island states contaminated mentally by centuries of colonialism, effectively (though unintentionally) excludes the multitudes without access to or unwilling to make forced transitions into the future with invisible technologies, just to stay informed.
Such an approach would effectively erase, for example, the rule of the traditional newspaper’s pages in the hands of the ordinary person as the scaffolding around which parties and movements were built before radio.
This would also deny the possibilities that would have been if Bolivar and Garvey had access to email and social media.
My 91-year-old mother would describe that as ‘Throwing out the baby with the bathwater!