# A Man Who Has Forgotten: Ali, the Nimitz, and the Betrayal of Memory

Opinion | The 592 Guardian

There is a particular kind of political sin that does not announce itself with scandal or corruption. It arrives quietly, dressed in the language of progress and partnership, wearing a smile cultivated for cameras and handshakes. It is the sin of ingratitude — and President Irfaan Ali committed it in full view of the world when he stood aboard the USS Nimitz and beamed.

Let us be precise about what that image represents. The Nimitz is not a diplomatic vessel. It is not a hospital ship or a vessel of goodwill. It is among the most lethal instruments of power ever constructed by human hands — a floating airfield capable of projecting destruction to any corner of the earth. It is the embodiment of the very military-economic architecture that has strangled Cuba for over six decades, enforcing a blockade that has denied ordinary Cuban people medicine, food, and the basic dignities of modern life. To stand aboard it — not quietly, not reluctantly, but with visible pride and enthusiasm — is to make a statement. Whether Ali intended it or not, the statement was made.

And that statement lands like a slap across the face of every Guyanese who was kept alive, educated, or healed by the hands of a Cuban.

 What Cuba Did When No One Else Would

This is not nostalgia. This is not romanticism. This is recorded history.

When Guyana’s hospital wards were understaffed and its patients were dying for want of qualified physicians, it was not Washington that answered the call. It was Havana. Cuban doctors arrived in communities that had never seen a specialist, in regions where the nearest clinic was a day’s journey away. They did not come on short-term contracts with generous compensation packages. They came under the banner of solidarity — a word that has grown unfashionable in an era of transactional diplomacy, but which once meant something real.

When classrooms across this country sat empty for want of teachers, Cuban educators filled them. When Guyanese students had neither the finances nor the connections to access quality higher education, Cuban scholarships opened doors that would otherwise have remained permanently shut. The professionals produced by those opportunities — the doctors, engineers, teachers, and public servants who have contributed to this country’s development — are a living monument to what that partnership meant.

That relationship was built not on oil or military strategy or leverage. It was built on the simple, radical idea that a small nation should help another small nation because it is right to do so. Cuba asked for nothing that Guyana could not give. And for decades, Guyana benefited enormously from that generosity.

Now, the man who leads this country stands on the deck of the vessel most associated with the power that has tormented Cuba, and he poses for photographs.

 The Captured Head of State

There is a phrase in the language of postcolonial political analysis: state capture. It typically refers to the corruption of institutions by private interests. But there is another form of capture — subtler, more insidious — in which a leader becomes so thoroughly absorbed into the worldview, the ambitions, and the validation framework of a more powerful foreign patron that he loses the ability to see himself, his country, and its history through his own eyes.

Irfaan Ali has the look of a man so captured.

Watch how he performs on the international stage. Watch the eagerness to be seen in proximity to American military and economic power. Watch the carefully calibrated language that never discomforts Washington, never challenges the prevailing orthodoxies of the hemisphere’s dominant power. Watch how his government’s rhetoric has quietly drifted from the Non-Aligned tradition that once defined Caribbean and Caricom foreign policy, toward something that increasingly resembles client-state diplomacy dressed up as strategic partnership.

A leader grounded in his own history does not need to perform allegiance to the powerful. A leader who remembers where he came from does not need to be told that gratitude is a political value, not merely a personal virtue. A leader with a genuine foreign policy vision would know that the strength of small nations lies precisely in their ability to maintain relationships across ideological lines — to be friends with everyone without being owned by anyone.

But Ali does not appear to know this. Or if he knows it, he does not appear to care.

 Pragmatism Is Not the Alibi It Pretends to Be

The apologists will invoke pragmatism. They always do. They will say that Guyana must protect its oil wealth, that it faces real security threats, that aligning with the United States is a matter of national survival. They will speak of Venezuela, of regional instability, of the need for a powerful friend.

All of this contains a measure of truth. No serious analyst denies that Guyana’s security environment has changed dramatically with the discovery of oil, or that the country requires credible defence arrangements. The United States is a natural partner in that equation, and engagement with American military forces is not, by itself, a matter for condemnation.

But pragmatism is not a moral blank cheque. It does not erase obligation. It does not permit a government to court a new patron with such theatrical enthusiasm that it implicitly signals contempt for an old friend. It does not excuse the complete absence of any balancing gesture, any acknowledgment, any word of continued respect for the nation that staffed Guyana’s hospitals when Washington was indifferent to their condition.

If Ali’s government had paired its American engagement with even a quiet reaffirmation of Guyana’s relationship with Cuba — a statement, a visit, a diplomatic expression of continued solidarity — the Nimitz photograph would have read differently. It would have read as the act of a confident, balanced statesman navigating a complex world. Instead, it reads as the act of a man who has decided which side his bread is buttered on, and who no longer feels the need to pretend otherwise.

That is not pragmatism. That is opportunism. And in a region with a long memory of what opportunism costs small nations, it is a dangerous and shameful thing.

 Memory as a Political Obligation

There is a broader principle at stake here, one that extends beyond Guyana’s relationship with any single country

A nation that allows its foreign policy to be dictated entirely by present-tense power calculations — that discards old alliances the moment they become inconvenient, that forgets the names of those who stood with it in its hour of need — is a nation that cannot be trusted. It signals to every future partner: we will abandon you too, when the calculus changes. It hollows out the very concept of international solidarity, replacing it with pure transaction.

For Guyana — a small, developing nation navigating a world in which it is perpetually at risk of being overwhelmed by larger powers — this is not merely an ethical failure. It is a strategic one. The nations that earn respect in the international community are not those that grovel most effectively before the powerful. They are those that demonstrate consistency, principle, and the kind of moral seriousness that makes them reliable actors. Guyana once had a claim to that reputation. The Nimitz photograph puts it in question.

 The Image He Should Carry

President Ali would do well to remember a different image than the one now circulating from the Nimitz.

He should remember the image of a Cuban doctor in the Guyanese interior, treating patients who had no other option. He should remember the image of a Cuban teacher in a Guyanese classroom, shaping minds that would go on to build this country’s institutions. He should remember the image of a Guyanese student arriving in Havana on a scholarship, with nothing but promise and the generosity of a small island nation that asked nothing in return but solidarity.

Those images built Guyana. They deserve more than to be quietly retired the moment a more glamorous partnership becomes available.

A head of state who has forgotten this has not merely made a diplomatic misstep. He has revealed something about his character — about what he values, what he remembers, and what he is willing to discard when the lights are bright and the cameras are rolling.

In the end, how a leader treats those who helped him when he was weak tells you everything about who he is when he is strong.

On the deck of the USS Nimitz, Irfaan Ali told us exactly who he is

The 592 Guardian publishes independent commentary on Guyanese civic and political affairs.*