The following remarks were delivered at the dedication of Jose Villa's statue of John Lennon in Lennon Park, Havana, Cuba on December 8. It was the 20th anniversary of Lennon's assassination.
Companeras y companeros,
Here, in front of the excellent work of art of Jose Villa, nostalgia
does not bring us together. We are not inaugurating a monument to the past,
nor a site to commemorate something that disappeared.
This place will always be a testimonial to struggle, a summoning to
humanism. It will also be a permanent homage to a generation that wanted
to transform the world, and to the rebellious spirit of the artist who
helped forge that generation and is one of its most authentic symbols.
The sixties were much more than a period in time. The attitudes toward
life that developed then profoundly affected culture, society and politics,
and crossed all borders. The sixties' renewing impulse overwhelmed the
decade, but it had been born before that time and has not stopped even
today.
To those years, we look back with the loyalty that all combatants feel
for their earliest and most distant battle. With obstinate antagonism,
some still denigrate that time � those who know that to kill history, they
must first tear out its most luminous and hopeful moment.
In that time, old imperial colonies fell, people previously ignored
arose and their art, literature and ideas started to penetrate the opulent
nations. The Third World was born and solidarity grew.
Within the rich North, another �Third World� also awakened. In the United
States, a century after the Civil War, black people fought for the right
to be treated as persons and with them marched many white students. In
Europe, young people repudiated imperialist violence and identified themselves
with the condemned of the Earth. Nobody spoke yet of globalization but,
for everyone, the Earth got smaller, the whole world became closer.
Finally liberated in 1959, Cuba was an inseparable part of the sixties.
A revolution fully pledged to liberty, life and truth.
Victory seemed possible immediately. To obtain it, people strove without
rest. In mountains and cities, with stones and fists, with weapons snatched
from the oppressors, and also with speeches, poems and songs. They tried
to assault the sky, to overcome, in a single act, all injustice � for blacks
and women, for workers and the poor, for the sick, the ignorant, and the
marginalised. They believed they could win peace between nations and equality
among people.
The sixties were more than anything the rebellion of the youth. Before
their impetus fell dogmas and fetishes. They broke the moulds of hypocrisy
and banality, they turned on the dull mediocrity of an unjust and false
society that reduced human activity to merchandise.
Years afterward, affirming the continuity of the movement, John Lennon
described it with these words: �The sixties saw a revolution among the
youth ... a complete revolution in the mode of thinking. The young people
took it up first, and the following generation afterwards. The Beatles
were a part of the revolution. We were all in that boat in the sixties.
Our generation [was] a boat that went to discover the New World. And the
Beatles were the lookouts on that boat. We were a part of it.�
Tumultuous was the passage from that memorable concert in 1963 when
Lennon asked the people who occupied the most expensive theatre seats to
rattle their jewels, to six Novembers later when he returned the Order
of the British Empire in protest at the US aggression in Vietnam and the
colonialist intervention in Africa.
Highlights included: the refusal to perform before an exclusively white
public in Florida, in 1966; the refusal to perform in apartheid South Africa;
the denunciation of racism in the US when the Beatles arrived there to
perform in concerts that had been boycotted by the Ku Klux Klan; Lennon's
calls for peace in the Middle East; his support for young people who deserted
the Yankee aggressor army and his constant support to the Vietnamese resistance;
his support for the struggle of the Irish people; his incessant search
for new forms of expression, without ever abandoning the roots and authentic
language of the people; his repudiation of the bourgeois system, its codes
and merchandising mechanisms; and the creation of a corporation to combat
them and defend artistic liberty.
The personal contribution of John Lennon stood out and endured beyond
the dissolution of the Beatles. His songs form the most complete inventory
of the collective struggle of the young people for peace, revolution, popular
power, the emancipation of the working class and of women, the rights of
indigenous peoples and racial equality. Lennon's songs demanded the liberation
of Angela Davis and John Sinclair and other political prisoners, denounced
the massacre at Attica prison and the situation in North American prisons.
In interviews and public statements, Lennon openly expressed his identification
with the socialist ideal.
Lennon was the object of intense and obstinate persecution by the Yankee
authorities. The FBI, CIA and immigration service, instigated directly
by US President Richard Nixon, spied on and harassed him, and strove to
expel him from the US. These agencies still keep secret the documents proving
the tenacious harassment they unleashed against Lennon. The little that
they have revealed shows that in just one year, between 1971 and 1972,
their spies accumulated 300 pages and a file that weighs 26 pounds.
With no other weapons than his talent and the solidarity of lots of
North Americans, Lennon was forced to confront the powerful empire led
by the most sordid and arrogant political machine.
Lennon emerged as a paradigm of the entirely free and creative intellectual,
precisely engaged with his time.
Dear John, it was more that a few who said that December 1980 was the
end of an era. Many among the millions who offered you 10 minutes' silence
and the multitude that on the December 14 that year congregated in Central
Park in New York to express a pain that time does not placate feared that
the spirit of the sixties may die with you.
It was Yoko Ono who then advised, �The message should not end�. And
little Sean, knew how to express the greater truth, imagined you bigger
after death, �because now you are everywhere�. Your message could not disappear
because love had, and still has, many battles to fight.
You have always been among us. Now, the Cuban people offer you this
bench where you can rest and this park to receive your companeros
and friends.
Wasn't it a yellow submarine that surfaced that afternoon in 1966 in
the port of New York and marched at the front of thousands of young people
who condemned the war? How many hundreds of thousands demanded that peace
be given a chance, and were in solidarity with the people of Vietnam, there
in Washington on that unforgettable November 15 in 1969? On that day, didn't
your art reach its highest realisation?
John, I am sure that you remember the martyrs of Kent State University
who wanted to follow you as working class heroes. It is known that it was
your verses that were their only shield in front of the bullets of Nixon.
There were more, many more, that met to celebrate the 20th anniversary
of the song �Imagine� in 1991, when others said that the story had already
ended. All of us, you too, were happy. We saw, astonished, the faces of
old comrades, confounded to be among countless young people who had not
even been born when you, in Liverpool, intoned ballads of love with proletarian
words and we here defied the monster.
Our boat will continue sailing. Nothing will stop it. It is driven by
�a wind that never dies�. They will call us dreamers but we are not the
only ones and our ranks will grow. We will defend the vanquished dream
and struggle to make real all dreams. Neither storms nor pirates will hold
us back. We will sail on until we reach the new world that we will know
how to build.
We will meet again, tonight, at the concert. We will go on together,
always.
[Ricardo Alarcon is the president of the Cuban National Assembly. He
spent many years in New York City as Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations.
Alarcon's speech was originally published by Juventud Rebelde. It
was translated by Cindy O'Hara. Visit the John Lennon tribute page at http://www.blythe.org/nytransfer-subs/alarcon-lennon.html.]