Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. – Abraham Lincoln
Raul Garcia’s continued incarceration at the Dodds facility reminds me in many ways of the mental, psychological and emotional condition in which many African slaves found themselves after Emancipation. While this unfortunate case does not sit on all fours in every respect, there are elements that provide for some reflection, if not comparison.
As the media has detailed, Mr Garcia grew up in the United States where he was socialized and is believed to have developed his inclination towards criminal behaviour. Born in Cuba, he lost his citizenship and as such has no legal right to repatriation. Raul earned his freedom two years ago but he remains at Dodds – still incarcerated.
In essence, a man who has “done the time” for his freedom remains in prison. Raul Garcia has done his time and, as such, is being deprived of his freedom to which he is rightly entitled.
Mark Klobas, in his writing entitled Been In The Storm So Long: The Aftermath Of Slavery, notes that “few populations in history have gone through the dramatic changes that African Americans underwent at the end of the Civil War. People who had suffered slavery for generations suddenly found themselves free, a welcome yet uncertain status that required considerable exploration and adjustment”.
For many African Americans, change began with the Civil War. Slaves in areas occupied by Union soldiers would be liberated from bondage and many African Americans took up arms as the war went on.
The end of the war and the ratification of the 13th Amendment meant freedom for African Americans, freedom to live their lives as they wanted.
For most, the first step was finding their scattered families and coming to terms with their time as slaves. Freedom also meant discovering a new identity, especially with regards to their former masters, as African Americans now had to deal with whites in new ways, both socially and in the workplace.
One freedman, Houston Hartsfield Holloway, wrote: “We coloured people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free coloured person about them.” Thousands of Southern slaves became “freedmen”. Though they had eagerly awaited their liberators, freedom was accompanied by frightening uncertainties.
The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the ultimate abolition of slavery in 1834 brought both legal and logistical closure to that transatlantic enterprise that decimated Africa and its peoples in a way that no other human experience did.
The difference though is that our forefathers fought for their freedom from the time they were captured and “coffled”, and turned and treated like chattel during years of backbreaking work that dehumanized them. Up until today many Blacks are still suffering from the ravages of that enslavement. Up until now many of us, as descendants of that experience, do not know how to be free, how to walk away from the prison gates even though we fought for it with our blood, sweat and tears.
The evidence exists in the extent to which we are still thwarted in spirit by self-doubt, self-hate and the inability to trust one another. Raul Garcia has earned his freedom. Our foreparents who were slaves fought for theirs; it was not granted on a platter.
So that while David Comissiong and those who recognize the injustice being done Mr Garcia should be applauded, without being disingenuous to his cause, that of helping black people to truly understand what it means to be free has long been in need of people to champion it.
We celebrate the successes of the pioneers of the fight for liberation of Blacks around the world, but it seems as though the baton has been dropped somewhere along the line. Yes, there is a black man in the White House but that is not new. For there have always been Blacks in the Whites’ houses!
The statue of General Bussa and the symbol of Emancipation located at the roundabout at Haggatt Hall is a bitter-sweet image of our past and a blur to our future as black people. Yes, it represents our hard-fought-for freedom. It symbolizes the end of both the rebellion and the uprising but it also reminds us painfully that the battle is not yet won.
The fact is, the same chains that once enslaved us still hang “dangerously” on our wrists and continue to restrict our forward thrust for freedom.
Like Raul Garcia, we have served our time and we have earned our freedom yet many of us remain behind bars, yet to experience what freedom in all its dimensions truly means.
Let us, both black and white Barbadians, return to the Emancipation Statue and break the mutual blood-knot by ceremonially removing those chains on Bussa’s wrists or, as Blacks, our hopes, dreams and aspirations will remain perpetually at risk.
