The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

Erica Woodland: So I know that you recently just returned from a trip to Cuba and I wanted to actually open up some space to hear about some of your insights and how some of your experiences there really fold into this conversation around how we’re archiving and lifting up our people’s revolutionary traditions.

Paul Coates: So thank you for opening that up. Marc and I was just talking, I was telling him, I went to Cuba middle of last month. I came back at the end of the month, I think it was. The bottom line was probably for the first five or six days back, I cried every day. And I cried every day. It wasn’t my first trip to Cuba, I’ve been several times. But this time to see the suffering that this country, your president, and his gang is subjecting a whole country too. It’s just criminal. And I know that I will resist. I know that there are ways that I’ve figured out to resist and I will resist, but I still feel those ways are powerless. I still don’t feel a lot of power. And that’s why the emotion comes.

And I’m not alone in feeling that. And I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing this, but I’m going to share it anyway. I was home and I was really feeling bad and crying, thinking about Cuba and thinking about the things I had to do to resist. What do I have to do? And I got a call … Yeah, I don’t have to name his name. I got a call from another publisher who is my elder. And he just said hi, Paul. And he said, “They’re killing him. They’re killing us in Cuba. They’re killing us in Cuba.” And he was crying as he was saying that. And so you had these two old guys sitting on beds in different cities crying and pledging that we had to do something. We have to do something. And I encourage people in this room to understand that we’ve got to do something because everything, this is like they’re doing it all over the world.

Cuba’s not alone. It’s not isolated all over the world. They’re bombing. They’re doing it in our name. All of those bombs that are dropping, all the bombs that dropped in Gaza, those American made bombs, American made planes, the ones that are dropping in Iran, American made bombs, American made planes. In Cuba, they’re not bombing, but they’re really destroying the people. They’re really killing people. They’re killing infants. They’re killing people who go to the hospital with infections. It’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. And the thing that we have to understand is, especially for black folks, Cuba is the closest … We only have to go like 40 minutes and we’re in Africa. It’s like one of them things. It’s like 40 minutes and you’re in Africa. And I’ve felt more at home in Cuba than I have in Africa. Okay? Part of it is because so much of the tradition is preserved and you’re looking at that tradition.

And when you’re looking at that tradition, you’re seeing your history, you’re seeing how we got here. And you see that one boat stopped there in Cuba and they dropped them off of the Spanish and another boat stopped in Virginia or Annapolis and they dropped us off. But we’re the same people and they’ve been able to retain. But now they’re being punished because the gangsters, Trump and his gangsters want that island, which is one of the most beautiful spaces in this hemisphere. They want it and they’re taking it. So I don’t even know where we started, where I started with this. The point is what I’m trying to say, and for now and for the record, we have a moral responsibility to join the Cuban people. And this is people of conscience around the world, but especially Black people and especially people of African descent because when [Africa] called [Cuba] came, they went into Africa and they sent 350 some odd thousand people to fight for our freedom and to fight for Nelson Mandela’s freedom.
And that’s why Nelson Mandela went there first. We owe a great debt. They protected our freedom fighters. All of our freedom fighters, whether it’s Robert Williams or whether it’s down to Sada Shakur, we owe a debt and we have to pay that debt. We have to pay it back to the Cuban. When Obama wanted to exchange, y’all remember people in this room remember this? He wanted to exchange. He wanted to exchange a side of Shakur for more liberal trade in Cuba. And the Cuba said, no, we ain’t doing that.

We’ll do something else, but we ain’t doing that. We’re not doing that. And even today, these moral people, these people are insistent. They don’t know how they’re going to survive, but they will survive. They’re committed to get through it. And we have a responsibility. I feel I have a responsibility. One of the things I’m doing is trying to encourage people to go down with delegations, to take people down to Cuba, because yes, it is still legal and because we can take humanitarian aid down, but more importantly, we can go there and show that we support our brothers and sisters in Cuba, that we’re there to pay the debt. And there was a hard thing going down. You know how hard things are in Cuba people? A lot of people don’t have food. They don’t have this. They don’t have that. But here’s the deal that was explained to me by the people who were there.

It is better for us to go in solidarity and be in Cuba than it is for us to stay here. Like the group I went down, we were concerned. Were we going to eat the food and stuff? No. What you end up doing is when you go down, you provide employment for people because you know the tourist industry is so vital and that’s where they’re getting hit at. So you provide jobs, you provide work. While we were there, those people were employed. When we left, they were unemployed. So the people are happy to see you come down in support. The people are happy to see the solidarity that you have, and it becomes a way of resisting. And this is the part that I love. It’s a way of resisting and it’s totally legal to resist. So the Cuba thing ties in, I won’t even go with the literature and the history and all of that.

The point is, for me, we owe a debt and it’s got to be paid or else I don’t know how you sleep at night without paying that kind of debt, that those people would suffer like that.

Erica Woodland: And really, you’re just mapping out how interconnected everything is, right? So there’s literally no world where we can be free with what’s happening in Cuba, right?

Paul Coates: Yeah. Yeah.

Erica Woodland: Yeah. As people who live and benefit inside the Imperial Core, even as Black people, we have to reckon with that. That’s

Paul Coates: Right.

Erica Woodland: And so your clarity I think is important because there are people who say things like, “That’s not my fight. That’s none of my business.” But Cuba is our business.

Paul Coates: Cuba is our business. Cuba’s our business. And all of these places, like Gaza is our business, Iran is our business, all of the places, the Congo is our business, all these places where these folks are exerting themselves and expanding and really bringing together white supremacy and white domination in a new wave of that whole thing of make America great. Again, everyone here in this room understands what that is. And the question is, I think most of the people in this room certainly are up for resisting. And we have, many people I was talking with Dick Oaks over there, Dick is saying he’s standing on a bridge, he’s standing on a bridge and got frostbite, protested it as well. So there are fighters in this room. There are people who have long histories in this room. So yeah, we all got that debt. We all got that thing.

And the thing is, we’ve got to explore ways to energize the networks that are around us, the people who are around us so that our energy multiplies. So it’s not just Dick standing on that bridge, it’s his neighbor, it’s our neighbors or what have you. We’ve got to do that. If we do it in Cuba, we affect what’s happening in Iran. We affect what’s happening in Venezuela. We affect because we’re resistant in any form of resistance, any form of resistance is resistance to the whole thing. They can’t tolerate resistance.