Chanda Katonga Poet Free verse

Ghosts of Havana: A Letter from the Other Side

I speak now, not with breath,
But through the bones of history,
Through palms that never bore fruit
Because your embargo starved the soil.

You feared not our weapons—
We had none to match your bombs.
You feared our ideas,
Because they burned too brightly in the dark.

Sixty-two winters and summers,
My people have walked in chains—
Not of iron,
But of isolation, hunger, and propaganda.

Is it a crime to dream in red?
Is dignity a sin,
When worn by brown hands
On a small island that refused to kneel?

You said it was freedom—
Yet you crushed us under boots
Stamped democracy,
Laced with hypocrisy.

Your friends—your “allies”—watched.
Some nodded.
Some traded,
And many sold their silence for your gold.

Fidel is gone,
But the embargo remains—
Like a ghost that haunts both jailer and prisoner,
A curse passed down by cold-hearted kings.

America, when the axis shifts,
And the sun of the global south rises—
What will your monuments say then?
What flag will you wave when truth takes the throne?

History is a patient god.
It watches.
It remembers.
And when it judges—
It does not ask permission.

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