Alice Walker walks for the life challenging, attempting that we love each other. Her own life experience to reach justice “has been very hard, really difficult, a quite long fight; in fact, seemingly endless.”
So, it’s not rare to see this grateful afro North American writer too concerned with Cuban rights fighting and the Five’s Cubans liberation cause, facing all the opposite pronouncements of international organizations and the owns one of North American justice, because, in spite of all, the five prisoners are still there.
Writer of the Prologue of The Sweet Abyss -book which achieves all the correspondence between the Fives and their relatives-, Pulitzer reward winner and outstanding activist for USA civil rights, Alice Walker reveals her patriotic feelings in this interview.
Which are your impressions about the Cuban Revolution?
“I am quite in favour of the Cuban Revolution. My parents and grandparents were colonists and sharecroppers. They had more movement than the Afro-American enslaved, but women worked hard and they were tied by the maternity (Fannie Lou Hamer’s * mother, who should have been my grandmother’s contemporary, she had twenty-four childbirths). The high black people reproduction was propitiated by the owners in order to have an endless and almost free manpower supply to work the lands.
”The white people domination meant that black people were private of their rights, which should be respected. It was a hunt season in the whole South.
When I was in high school, a friend from the North was put in prison, hit and sentenced, because he knelt down in a public street of my small town of Eatonton, Georgia, trying to fix the bicycle chain of a white girl.
”There was not medical attention, neither a dentist. People were auto-medicating them selves and they had to take off their own teeth. If they got money enough to go to a dentist so, the doctor just took off the painful one. That was the only thing that they considered pertinent for the most of these people, just as if we were horses.
”When I read about the Cuban Revolution I recognized those conditions, under which people lived in previous stages, they were as those as I lived and my parents and my grandparents did. Even if the Revolution Victory had failed I know that for people's soul it was something good, because it taught them to rebel them selves. When you must cross a «public» common street stopping your breathing, or you know that you should never defend your self if someone attacked you, it is easy to feel unworthy of the human kindness. And every person is worthy of the human kindness.”
What is your motivation for narrating the deprived history?
“Writing about those deprived is just to warn about what t is happening in the real world and even, to realize that this social group has not still lost the possibility to create a lovely community, or to inherit the earth as a paradise. In my novels there is always a movement of this kind toward the education, and it is not in my conscience to believe or to act as if everything were lost.”
How and when did you know about the Five Cuban prisoners?
“I don't remember when I read for the first time about them; it’s probably I received something thru e-mail. But when I came to Havana Book Fair in 2002, Ricardo Alarcón asked me to write the introduction for a book with the Five’s letters and drawings, that they were compiling”.
This book is named The Sweet Abyss, does its content impacted you?
“I was surprised with the force which this book spoke to me. We are living in moments when our prisons are full, too much full, and are going to be built more of them. It’s easy, I guess, to leave aside the fact that a heap of mommies and dads are in prison. What will happen to their children? I often wonder. Children deeply suffer when they are separated from their parents.”
Have you thought about writing a novel narrating the experiences and sufferings of the Five’s relatives?
“No. I think that it is something that should be done by a Cuban writer.”
What do you feel toward the women directly involved in this history?
“I feel a tender compassion toward them. Not to have their dear beings near by, not to share with them the feelings of happiness and the challenges of their children growing up, it is something painful. I hug them in my heart and I offer my self as a sister for them and as an aunt for their children.”
Is the Five’s cause recognized in the Afro-American community?
“I can never respond questions of this type. I feel aside of all the communities, excepting the ones that I helped to create myself, those spiritual, artistic, activists”.
“I know what I feel, because I understand great part of the USA-Cuba relationship history. I have already four times visited Cuban island; I have friends living there. For me the Cuban children are beautiful. The blockade, that makes anyone of them suffer, is also painful to me.”
Have you already visited someone of the Five’s imprison?
“No, I have not visited them yet. I would like to do it.”
How do you support the efforts to increase the consciousness about the Five imprisoned inside your country and around the world?
“Speaking and writing about it , mainly. I published the introduction for their book in my book «We are those whom they have been waiting for: an inside light in dark times».”
In one of the forums that you participated supporting the Five, you said referring to Cuba: «I love each angel that has flown over the Island». When did you see the last angel flying over our sky?
“I feel that Cuba is protected by its own determination angel to be free, to be educated, to be vibrantly alive and useful for the world. If United States chooses to serve the world like Cuba does, and ends its Earth and poor people domination and exploitation, we will be happily surprised seeing that we have created our own angel and we will be safe, in such a way, of all harm”.
“We can still greatly suffer, as Cuba does; but, when someone has got a good heart, appears a shield against which many blows are useless, even if some of them are mortal.”
You have said that destroying Cuba would be the same as giving fire to a school. Where lead the convergence of Cuba and the school that your parents built and the white ones burned?
“My parents, as many others Afro-Americans, believed with all their heart that the education is the road toward the freedom. They were right. They understood that the white landowners maintained their children (my siblings) out of the school attendance by burning the black people school”.
“Cuba is a school to everybody, to where can especially attend poor and coloured inhabitants of the world. It is a progressive place in crucial forms. I am a gardener, a farmer's daughter; I know what means that Cuba is able to feed by it self out of its own fields and organic orchards.
”This is a revolution upstanding on its own base. 100% of the Cubans can read and write. The U.S. government would like to set on fire this school, because they ideally, would want the Cubans to work for the same corporations that so many North Americans work. They would like to control Cuba as if it were «valuable goods».”
“It is really the point of view of the old school, to say the minimum thing. Nobody wants or has the intention of being raised of somebody or field peon forever , and Cuba demonstrates the possibility of the liberation. The Cubans also demonstrate an energy type, compassion and depth that a great part of the world in fight finds irresistible.”
In your book you has related how the North American prisoners and their families, once separated, they lose their will to keep on fighting, resisting. Why do you think it has not happened with the Fives?
The Cuban Five know that their cause is altruist, fair. They are support and loved by their people and also very applauded all around the world by millions of people that know their cause. The North Americans are the less informed ones about which the reality of Cuba is and about this people, about what we are sorry.”
Do you think that your commitment to Cuba and this cause could bring over you some repression?
“It’s possible. However, I understand why the Five wanted to alert their country about the terrorist attacks from Miami. Their cause was not judged with justice. If I can help others to see deeper what do they do with them, so I will be happy.”
“We really lean on each other. If at any time happens to me an injustice like this one, I would want that those that have the power to write and to speak, say or write a word for me.”
Does it consider that the members of the Congress, the senators and the representatives, could they support a case as east?
“Yes, I think so. There is something that is above a politician position. Some of those that we choose should know it.”
*Fannie Lou Hamer, grateful sharecropper who tried to vote in Mississippi in the sixties and she was gravely hit and heady out of the plantation where she and her family lived. She ended up becoming the main leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
(October 2007)
