I shudder to think where we people of African descent would be without our allies in the international community. It's been our everything, quite frankly.

I once wrote that Black Americans are involved in an intriguing experiment to see if an oppressed minority can continue to march forward if there is not a strong and vibrant left-wing and radical movement. That's not an experiment I would recommend, although the story is still unfolding and we will see how it unfolds, but they are not the sort of conditions in which an oppressed minority should have to struggle.

As long as colonialism was allowed to reign and fester in Africa, it was going to be a source of tension, if not war, as was evidenced by World War I itself, which, among other things, featured Germany on one side of the barricades and Britain, which had come earlier to the table of colonial plunder, on the other.

I think - particularly in terms of the destiny of Africans in North America - our destiny has also been shaped indelibly by global alliances.

Germany had come late to feast at the table of colonialism and did not feel that the division of colonial spoils at that particular moment in time reflected its true strength and its true weight in the imperialist world.

I think that even though we should always welcome allies within the four corners of the United States, we shouldn't limit our allies to the four corners of the United States. I think that would be a grave mistake.

Cuba was in some ways a de facto state of the United States before 1959, given its proximity and given its neocolonial status.