"As your sister from a suffering United States, I tell you: we miss you," expressed African American writer, poet, and activist Alice Walker, honoring the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, in the year of his centennial.

"Thinking about what I admired most about you, I remember, first of all, your love for children," said Walker, winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Color Purple, adapted into film under the same name, first in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, and later in 2023 by Blitz Bazawule.

That feeling for children "manifested itself in shoes, schools, food, and shelter. But also how you liked to joke with them," added the writer in a text published on social media.

"I remember photos of you playing with them, to show how U.S. leaders assumed they only had to say 'jump' for Cubans to ask 'how high?' You turned the situation around with the children, making them jump every time someone said 'Yankee!' And another asked: 'How high?'" she noted.

"You taught them," she pointed out, "not to be discouraged by reality: Cuba's small size compared to the enormous United States, and its supposed superiority."

Highlighting that "this year we celebrate your centennial (of Fidel)," Walker emphasized that there was something in his tireless resistance that invited one to keep fighting "for food, justice, equality, the freedom to love, and whom to join in the battle against the greedy forces that devour us."

She noted that Fidel (August 13, 1926 – November 25, 2016) was "an expert at fostering the growth of great spirits around the world. Wherever people felt minimized by the oligarchs who devoured them."

In her text, Walker highlighted the value the Cuban leader gave to women's equality and confessed that what moved her about his personality, beyond his political or social innovations, was his love for reading.

"In particular, your relationship with one of the great literary masters of our time, your friend Gabriel García Márquez," added Walker, who is also a member, among other honors, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"I was amused and loved to think of you there, in the presidential 'palace' (which you surely renamed in secret), without boots or glasses, pencil in hand, reviewing and editing the fabulous novels of one of the world's greatest literary imaginations," she concluded.

Alice Walker (Eatonton, Georgia; February 9, 1944) is also an essayist, university professor, screenwriter, actress, film producer, and climate activist. Throughout her career she has published 17 novels and short story collections, 12 works of nonfiction, and collections of essays and poetry.