BY THE HONORABLE MINISTER LOUIS FARRAKHAN | LAST UPDATED: APR 24, 2018 – 11:46:36 AM

[Editor’s note: The following article contains excerpts from an interview conducted by Juni Liburd, host of Issues: St. Kitts-Nevis on Freedom FM 106.5, with the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan at the Marriott Hotel in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts & Nevis on April 13, 2018, which was streamed live via FreedomSKN.com and Facebook Live. This is part one of a two part interview.]

Juni Liburd (aka “The Big JL”):  We are greeting you from the Frigate Bay Marriott Hotel and Resort.  And we are very honored and privileged to have The Minister, the Honorable Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam as our very special guest here on Issues, on Freedom FM in St. Kitts and Nevis. We greet all the listeners who are across the federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, across the Caribbean and worldwide following on FreedomSKN.com. Most of you should know by now that Minister Louis Farrakhan’s mother is a Kittitian by birth, and so this is his ancestral home. He has come back time and time again to enlighten us, to give us food for thought on the best solutions to what we are going through in our lives, no matter what it may be—be it social, economic, be it political. And so this afternoon it gives me great pleasure to introduce a great man of history of all times, the living legend: Minister Louis Farrakhan. Good afternoon, Minister Farrakhan.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan (HMLF):  Good afternoon, my dear brother.  Peace to you and peace to all of your listeners in St. Kitts and Nevis, and throughout the world.  It’s an honor to be here with you.

Juni Liburd:  So how are things with you, Minister?

HMLF:  Well, health wise I am grateful to God.  All that we have been through fighting cancer.  But God is great, and if He didn’t have something more for me to do I wouldn’t be here.  I thank God for my health and my strength.  Next month, God willing, I will be 85 years of age. …

HMLF:  And God has been so good.  And I have my family here with me, my wife and several of my children; and, of course, friends.  And some of the brothers from different parts of the country: when they heard that I was going to be here—and, of course, before I came here, I was in Cuba with a delegation of  23 persons.  We had been trying to get to Cuba to pay our respect to Comandante Fidel Castro, and so we were not able to do it when he passed a year or so ago, so this was our opportunity, so we came.  We were blessed to be able to go to Santiago de Cuba and see where he is laid to rest, and we paid our respect to our brother.  I couldn’t be in the Caribbean and not come to St. Kitts, and to see my ancestral home.  And, just to be quiet.

Juni Liburd:  Interesting that you mention Cuba, because they have provided tremendous assistance to the Federation of St. Kitts in health particularly, and in sports, in economic upliftment of the country so to speak—they have done that; they have been here for us. And so, and they have to a very large extent revolutionized medicine in Cuba, especially we’re now hearing that they have discovered a cure for certain forms of cancer.  Have you found out anything about this during your visit?

HMLF:  Yes, yes.  Years ago when cancer had taken a grip on me, I came to Cuba, and Fidel Castro introduced me to his doctors, and they told me of an operation that I would ultimately have to have.  I didn’t like that because I had already been cut on, and I didn’t want to be cut on anymore.  But, they were right.  So in 2007, I went in the hospital and was on the operating table for 14 hours, and at that time they removed a lot of my organs that had been destroyed by radiation therapy that was not necessarily designed to cure me, but designed to kill me—and so that they could say that “Farrakhan died of natural causes.”

When I met with Winnie Mandela during that time, she said: “You know, Farrakhan, when you were in the hospital they announced in South Africa that you had died”; and in America, CNN and the New York Times had an obituary already written for me because they did not expect that I would live.  But by the grace of God I am here, and even though I am not 100 percent, I’m still able to function.

We need to be free to think beyond White people’s education, politics and jurisprudence. That’s going to take some doing, but if we continue the way we are going, our people will be free—I see it from the top down, and I hear it from the bottom up.

Juni Liburd:  You’re looking well for 85.  …   You’re looking exceptionally well, and I hope God will give you strength and longevity, which I am sure is part of your DNA. 

HMLF:  Thank you.  While I was in Cuba, Comandante Fidel offered the Nation of Islam 1,000 medical scholarships.  And when I went back to the United States, I met with a brother who was over all of the community colleges in Chicago, that we could work together to fulfill what Comandante had given to us.  But the fear of communism, the fear of the propaganda of the media against Castro, against Cuba: many did not wish to take advantage of that offer.  So we in the Nation of Islam tried our best, and we have now several students that have graduated from that institution.  And I have two grandchildren that are five years there, and in two years, God willing, they will graduate as doctors.  And the only thing that Fidel required was that you take the knowledge of medicine back to the community out of which you came—and that we are bound to do.

Juni Liburd:  Exceptional.  That is just great news!  Do you see a lessening of the embargo and the restrictions that were previously imposed on Cuba happening in our time?  …  We now know that flights are going to Havana from the U.S.; and under Mr. Obama, the previous president, there was a “relaxation,” if you will, on the strict rules and regulations governing U.S. and Cuba relations.

HMLF:  Thanks to President Obama the door opened.  Not fully, but it opened.  And unfortunately, our present president seems to have a, hatred for the things that President Obama did, so he tried to close the door—but it did not close completely.  Now that Americans have been free to travel here, and family members have come back to meet members of their family, the embargo still is in place, but there is a weakening politically of the will to continue that embargo.  And I believe before not too long Cuba will be free of that; in fact, what is happening now in America is signaling the clouds of war to gather. …

And while I am on this broadcast I would like to send a message to our president, because the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that we are in a period called “the lull before the storm.”  The “storm” is World War III, or what is called in the Bible “The War of Armageddon.”  In that War, which is prophesied—and we can’t make the prophets liars: everything that they prophesied in both the Bible and Qur’an are going to come to pass.  So the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, knowing that there was a political dynamic at the time that he wrote this article, “The Lull Before The Storm,” he said: “Whoever should be president, it would be to his advantage to delay the war as long as he could because it could be a great benefit to whoever would be in power.”  Unfortunately, President Trump has gathered around him some of the neo-conservatives, who are considered warmongers.  And if President Trump attacks Syria under a false-flag operation—that President Assad killed his own people through use of chemical warfare: If Mr. Trump goes the way he is presently going, it would be like taking a gun and putting it to his head, and to the head of America, and to the head of the Western world.  The Western world will not survive this War; so once the War is started, the end of this present world has arrived.  That is my warning to Mr. Trump:  Delay it as long as you can, for your benefit, and to the benefit of America and all your so-called allies.

Juni Liburd:  I want to move from the international scene that you have just so very vividly described in terms of the U.S. and its relationship with the world, to look now specifically, if you will, at the Black struggle in the U.S., the Caribbean and the UK, wherever Black people are in the Diaspora.  In your opinion, Minister Farrakhan, are things getting better or worse for the Black man today?  We have seen all that President Trump is doing.  We have seen the rise in the shooting of Black youth in the United States at a rate that is unprecedented.  We are seeing crime in the ghettos of America where violence and crime [is] highlighting the failure to provide adequate jobs, housing, social programs for our youth.  What is your comment on the state of Black America?

HMLF:  We are victims of social engineering.  Taking factories out of the inner cities 40 years ago and not replacing them with anything that would give job opportunities to Black people to feed their families, then drugs were brought in, guns were brought in to create the havoc that we now see.  Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a national security adviser, I think under Jimmy Carter, he said, “It’s easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.” 

With the technology that’s now available: You and I are talking, and the words that we just spoke are on social media.  If it’s on Facebook, if it’s on Instagram, if it’s on Twitter, if it’s on any of the media outlets that this iPhone and smartphone, and the work of Steve Jobs and others has done, the whole world is at our fingertips in an instant. The control of the masses that has always been the purview of elites who control media and information that goes to the public—that’s over now!  So what you have in Black America, in the Caribbean, in the UK, in Africa, all over the world, is an instant communication that is causing the awakening of the masses.  This is both good and bad. It’s good that we are awakening, which means we are demanding more, we are trying to correct the mistakes that we make, but we are also forcing government to do what government does not want to do for the masses of Black and Brown people.  So things are better in one way, and worse in another. 

What is worse?  The fact that the enemy—and we do have a vicious enemy, an enemy that wants to see us slaughter each other.  So guns that young people don’t have the money to buy nor do they have the skill in use, sometimes, some of the gang leaders have said that they come into the community with crates full of the most deadly kind of weapons—the Uzi, the AK-47, the Mac-10.  All of these automatic weapons, bullets are brought in; then they are distributed among the gangs.  So the gang mentality is “we kill each other.”  So right now the youth of America, Black and Brown, are under assault by the government and the use of police force against young people.  They stop us, they frisk us; if we have marijuana on our person, or we are found with a gun: We usually don’t live if we’re found with a gun; but with marijuana, the prison industrial complex gets our bodies—and the 13th Amendment will be in full force, that you only are a “citizen” as long as you are not a felon.  So as many felons as there are in the prison system of America, they are working for the multi-national corporations for no jobs [i.e. no pay], but when they get out of prison there is no job for them at all, so crime is offered to them.  So, that’s the bad thing.  But war that is coming up is going to break the power of those that have subjected both the Black and the Brown, and those who are struggling in the Caribbean. …  This is another place where you see things happening, and you’re not so sure of what you are looking at. 

But I remember when I was a young Calypsonian there was a song that a Calypsonian [Lord Vader, “Small Island”] sang; it goes:  “Small island go back where you come from / They come by de one and de two and de t[h]ree—now I find dem up inside me breadfruit tree!  So Trinidad a too-small island, Go back where you really come from!”  Well, now you see people coming; they’re buying citizenship, they bring money—but that’s how they came to Texas.  When Texas was under the control of Mexico, they came “by the one, the two and the three,” then pretty soon a war started, and that caused America to go to war with Mexico.  Mexico lost Texas, Mexico lost Arizona, California, because of a few that came that opened the door for the many whose desire it was to come.  So we’ve got to change that lyric: “They come by de one and de two and de t[h]ree, soon dey gonna tell you, ‘We own all your country.’”

So if we are not wise, knowledgeable as to how this is going, we are opening the door to the “Trojan horse” that has in their mind to take the resources of the Caribbean, to take the islands of the Caribbean—because Europe is going up in flames in the Third World War, so they’re looking for a place to hide, a place to live, and a place to continue to keep us in servitude.  So now we are servants in the tourist industry, not  producing industry, and that’s why the unity of the Caribbean is a must.

Juni Liburd:  I want to touch on something that you said concerning the unity in the Caribbean; because we’ve had CARICOM, which is a failure by my reckoning, and we’ve had some other regional attempts at coming together not politically but economically, and these have failed. 

One of the things that has struck me is the fact that our young people are coming back to serve the tourist industry, where they are just making the beds, and doing the usual thing—that is something that happened under slavery as well.  And so, tourism is seen as almost a new kind of slavery, if you will.  … 

Everywhere you go in the Caribbean you have this range of young people in the droves, in the hundreds, in the thousands without jobs, not knowing where they are going; it seems they are just drifting with the tide. 

And so my question to you is how can we arrest the downward slide, if you will, of the young people in the Caribbean? What can they do? Why aren’t governments focusing on giving young people adequate jobs, reinforcing those who want to go into entrepreneurship and so on?  Why is there this outbreak of crime in Trinidad, in Jamaica?  Even here in St. Kitts and Nevis we’ve had 10 people who have been murdered for the year. 

This is a small country.  Last year I think we had almost 30 people who were murdered in St. Kitts, and this was unheard of when I was growing up.  And I’m not that old, but I’m saying, I mean if you had one person who was murdered for a year, that was a lot.  But now it seems to have become the norm throughout the Caribbean, where young people are just roaming, and so materialistic and so on.  What is the vision of our leaders in terms of righting this wrong?

HMLF:  When I was a young boy growing up in America, West Indian people loved their islands, but we were always clashing with each other—the “Bejan this,” the “Trinidadian that,” the “Jamaican this.”  That was fostered by the enemy!  So you have the British West Indies, you have the Spanish Caribbean, you have the Dutch Caribbean, the French Caribbean, and each of these Europeans have all fought each other over the spoils of the Caribbean.  So the hatred that they have for one another, they bred it into us.  So the British hatred for the Spanish: That’s all in the history of the educational system, so we grow up not only disliking fellow members of the British West Indies, we grow up hating the Spanish members of the Caribbean, the Dutch members of the Caribbean and the French members of the Caribbean.  And unfortunately, that residue of that self-hate is still here.  It takes political will. … 

The economists in CARICOM, they mean good, but the enemy also is working against the good thinking of the leaders of CARICOM!  Look at how many of our nations in the Caribbean are subjected to the IMF and the World Bank.  What is happening to the natural resources that were present when we were slaves, that in the British West Indies, according to our studies: The British West Indies brought more revenue to England than all her other territories.  Why?  Because sugar was here, tobacco was here, bananas, fruits were here; but now all of a sudden all the industries that made money for the colonial masters, where are they now?  The sugar industry is gone!  The banana industry, gone!  The bauxite that we had in Jamaica and in Guyana, we send it off to Europe; Europe makes aluminum, sells it back to us at high prices.  So we are subjected to forces that we have not quite learned how to deal with effectively! 

So in the Caribbean, now, in Barbados, our great brother is there fostering reparations; and we are all together to say to England, to say to France, to say to Europe:  “You owe us for slave labor.”  That’s nice. …  We can say it, we have all the legal documents to show what they owe us, but the reality is you can make the demand, but you don’t have the power to enforce the demand.  So when the IMF loans you money to bring a bigger port here in St. Kitts, so that bigger ships can come in—but at the same time the ships are coming in, the [producing] industry is going down, so you are still serving in tourism.  What does that mean?  There is a rise in prostitution.  Look at the food:  We used to grow food, but now our food is coming from North America, from Europe, from Australia.  …  Why do we have so much high blood pressure, obesity?  Barbados is the “amputee capital” of the Caribbean.  Why?  Because we are not growing the food that we consume, and we are trusting the enemy; so they vaccinate us, they give us drugs, but the things that they are giving us in the water, in the food, is killing us slowly.  So until and unless we awaken sufficiently—it’s not enough for CARICOM.  There has to be a spiritual awakening.  But as long as we are tied to the religious system of our former colonial and slave masters, where we see Jesus as a White man, as we see the angels as White, as we see “heaven” somewhere in the sky, then we give control of the Earth to those who have been our enemies.  We need a spiritual awakening—so the preachers have to come in line; the teachers have to come in line, then the politicians will be much more backed; and then we can do something about the conditions under which we live. 

The youth are separated from the elders: The youth don’t want what the elders are satisfied with.  You don’t find the youth going to church.  Why?  Because they see us, as preachers, as pimps over their grandmothers and mothers.  The youth are hurting because we, the elders, have not provided for them a future.  So there is anger in the youth; and all you [an enemy] have to do when you have an angry young Black man or woman: “Then bring the drugs!  Bring the guns!”  They are sending back to St. Kitts people that never knew anything about St. Kitts, that did something in America; some little misdemeanor, they deport them.  St. Kitts may not have a job for them, then what are they going to do in St. Kitts?  The same thing that they do in America: form gangs, get into criminal pursuit.  It’s a plan. …  And the only way to get out from “the plan” is to know that the enemy is working and thriving on the ignorance of us.  And ignorance is our worst enemy—the lack of knowledge; so the Bible says, “My people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge.”  You don’t know yourself, and you don’t know the enemy; he comes with a smile, and a pat on the back, and a few American dollars or Euros, and he’s buying his way.  And soon they’ll be in the parliament, soon they’ll be running for president, and their money will cause them to win favor from the ignorant masses, because we are not educating them. 

That’s why your program, that’s why this radio station is so valuable, because you are imparting knowledge to the masses of the people.  Juni, we have a lot of work to do, and it’s hard work.  But I know that if  Trump keeps going, and the war starts, remember how England used to say, that “the sun never sets on the British Empire”?  Well, the sun can hardly find it today.  And when war breaks, the power of Great Britain will be broken, and you will be saying not “God Save The Queen” [but] “God Save Us from The Queen.” 

We need to be free to think beyond White people’s education, politics and jurisprudence.  That’s going to take some doing, but if we continue the way we are going, our people will be free—I see it from the top down, and I hear it from the bottom up.  The “top” is wrestling with “How do we get out from under this?” because mentally we are enslaved to the education, religion, politics, [and] jurisprudence of our former slave masters.

Juni Liburd:  Minister Farrakhan, the Chinese are making significant inroads in the Caribbean as we speak; they are here in St. Kitts and Nevis, and you can see step-by-step they are taking control of the commanding heights of the economy.  There is a Chinatown, I’m sure, in every Caribbean island; when I lived in the United States, in Brooklyn, the Chinese were everywhere, especially with their food, the vegetables, the fruits, with their restaurants and so on.  How does this bode for the development of the Caribbean with the influx of the Chinese?

HMLF:  Everywhere you see the Chinese, you see the Indians, you see the Arabs.  They are here!  And everywhere you see them, they do business.  The Black man may be the majority population, but the power, the economic thrust and force is with those who are economically wise and skilled.  The Chinese see an opportunity; not only in the Caribbean, but in Africa—wherever we are!  But, what they call “Chinese [commercial diplomacy”], [through] the capital of [China], Beijing:  The Chinese go into Africa, and they offer you what you are not doing for yourself.  You’re not feeding yourself, so they come, they take a plot of land, and they begin farming, giving you vegetables.  They know how to farm!  They have to feed 1.2 – 1.3 billion Chinese, so they’re looking for every bit of  land they could get to produce food.  They produce food for us, they produce food for themselves …  What we need to do is learn.  They will help us!  But if we want to help ourselves, we learn from those who come in. 

But then we have to take this to ourselves; we have to do these things!  So in Trinidad, the Indians came as indentured servants or whatever.  But look at them now: The wealth of Guyana, the wealth of Trinidad, is in the hands of the Indians, the Arabs, the Chinese.  We have to learn!  It’s not that we are inferior, but the state of mind that the slave masters put us in: We have to break the chains off of our minds so that we can do business!  Because that’s the essence of life itself, is business!  And so if others are going to do business, then we’ll always be servants of  those who are doing it.  We must get up and do something for ourselves.