It’s our time to show some solidarity to Cuba

03.OCT.08

Editor: It was with some sadness that I read an article where VINLEC CEO Thornley Myers had to “defend” his company’s relief assistance to Cuba following the devastation wrought on that Caribbean nation by two major hurricanes over a nine-day period.{{more}}

To live in today’s Cuba and to see the destruction is to have witnessed a country after a war. Only thing, though, is that loss of life was only seven persons of a population of 11 plus million. Today, many thousands are still without electricity.

However, the two hurricanes, Gustav and Ike, have caused damage to the tune of several billion US dollars to the country. This is the same country whose leaders, immediately following the second storm, had ministers of government personally calling to Ambassadors here to account for the safety of all foreign students. Students who all study in Cuba free of cost. And who will not be sent home because Cuba will share whatever it has with these sons and daughters of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the rest of the Caribbean and the Third World who they have undertaken to give an education.

Interestingly, CEO Myers did not want to remind Vincentians, who complained about VINLEC’s assistance, that several of his engineers, he included, were educated free of cost to SVG in this same Cuba.

But knowing Vincentians as I do, knowing that we are a loving, understanding people, I from this distance can only surmise that anyone who in a moment of frustration with VINLEC’s fuel surcharge opposed the company’s solidarity with the Cuban people must not have been aware of what Cuba has just experienced and is still experiencing following these storms. Cuba has been there for us in time of need. It is now our time to show that same kind of solidarity. We are, after all, our brothers’ keepers in times of plenty and need.

Dexter E.M. Rose
Graduate of Univ. of Havana 1988.