By Owei Lakemfa
CLARA Margarita Pulido Escandell is a 61-year-old Cuban who breathes Africa. When I first met her and she discovered I had a trade union background, she enquired about the African Labour leader, Alhaji Hassan Sunmonu, the founding President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC. Sunmonu had spoken at the university in Legon, Accra, Ghana when she was a Masters degree student. His pan- Africanist exhortation continues to ring in her head over three decades later.
Fidel Castro as Cuban leader believed in children and youths and was confident that once the country took good care of them, the Cuban Revolution can never be defeated. Pulido was one of those Cuban youths who came close to Fidel. Her choice of education in Africa after her first degree in Havana was deliberate.
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In turn, her country made good use of her preferences, enthusiasm, revolutionary spirit and pan-African inclinations. Her proficiency in Spanish, French and English also stood her in good stead. The Pulido story is a study in how a country works at its overall interests while developing its citizens.
She rose from being a 1982 official of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (of the World) to Deputy Head of Mission in the Cuban Embassy in Ghana by 1999. Later, she was promoted the Director of the Centre for African and Middle Eastern Research.
In 2008, she was back in Africa, this time as ambassador to Ethiopia and the African Union with concurrent accreditation to Djibouti and South Sudan. She stayed four years; then in 2017, returned to Africa, this time as ambassador to Algeria with concurrent accreditation to the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.
When in 2019, then Cuban ambassador, Carlos Trejo Sosa, informed some of his Nigerian friends he was leaving, we expressed some sadness because he was like an elder brother who was never tired explaining the historical links between Cuba and Africa; between this continent and Latin America. Whenever we discussed the…
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