‘Now Is the Time’: Ramsey Clark on Cuba and Lucius Walker (NACLA Radio) https://nacla.org/blog/‘now-time’-ramsey-clark-cuba-and-lucius-walker-nacla-radio

Over the next three weeks, over a hundred participants from across the United States and Canada will caravan to the U.S.-Mexico border with over a hundred tons of aid for Cuba. This, however, will be the first caravan without Pastors for Peace founder, Lucius Walker, who passed in September at the age of 80. Walker remains an icon in the Latin America solidarity movement both in the United States and abroad. “There are no words to express what Lucius Walker means to us,” Rodolfo Benítez Verson, Deputy Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations told the crowd at the event, “He taught by example.”

Among the more than half-dozen additional people that spoke at the emotional event was former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who captured the spirit of the evening, reminding the audience that “now is the time as never before” to continue the work that Walker began. The following is the audio and text of his speech from the event, recorded and transcribed by NACLA.I first met Lucius about 41 years ago. I had come up from Washington after eight years and decided to be a big Lawyer in New York. I’d see him in Nicaragua. He was on a boat down there when President Reagan’s Contras were invading by the thousands—

a very substantial multiple of the Bay of Pigs—and two people on the boat that Lucius was on were shot and killed. I mean they were shooting at random. It could have been him as easily as anyone else on the boat. And as with every adversity that he encountered, it only caused him to redouble his efforts, and his efforts were first focused on what can really change the world. What they implemented will change the world. Cuba became a major commitment for him, because it embodied so many of the tragedies of power in our time. The blockade—that word’s terribly inadequate. I’d always thought that in effect it was like taking a whip and lashing every man, woman, and child in Cuba;

to keep them down, to deter any chance for economic development, for the fulfillment of the potential of the people; a blockade that the whole world was against. The whole world was against it. You can count that in the numbers, the vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations, year after year. The numbers grew through the years, but I remember the year they got up to the number 184. The vote was no abstentions. 182 nations voting to end the blockade as cruel and inhumane punishment of a whole innocent people by an enormous power looming over their little island, not 90 miles off their shore. Only two nations, the United States and Israel—how sad—voted against the resolution.

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