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I can hear you telling me about the systematic elimination of alternatives and progressive leaders. I read Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, George Jackson's Soledad Brother, Ward Churchill's Agents of Repression, William Blum's Killing Hope, and how many other books you suggested? I know that living through the Chicago police and the FBI murder of 21-year-old Fred Hampton, the rising star of the Chicago Black Panther party, in his sleep, and the U.S. military napalming of entire villages in Vietnam drove you down a long, long road from pacifism, where you spent the first seven years of your career as an activist, to revolutionary armed struggle in support of third world liberation movements.

During the past few months, as I traveled overland from Santiago, Chile, to Caracas, Venezuela, you and your political legacy were with me. If I had grown up with different parents, that journey might have been nothing more than an adventure vacation. Instead, I was constantly looking to understand the challenges of local circumstances and the beauty and resilience of the cultures that developed in response. You helped teach me the value of an open heart and mind. In a sense, you enabled me to learn from that bus driver in Antofagasta, Chile; the single mother in Manaus, Brazil; and the youth activists in Caracas.

Having you with me on life's journeys not only encourages me to appreciate the luxury of my freedoms, but also to learn from the world around me and to actively search for ways to play a positive role in it. You and your experience helped me realize that staying put was never an option, not after all we have seen and lived. Because of you, I can see myself, with one foot in Yale or in Oxford and the other in Latin America, as a possible conduit for resources to flow against the current, back to the poor countries and communities I have known. Your legacy encourages me to stay here in Venezuela and dedicate whatever skills I may have to supporting the Bolivarian Revolution in the face of ongoing U.S. intervention.

Che Guevara would have described your revolutionary spirit as guided by love. My ability to carry your spirit with me wherever I go, a skill necessarily learned from too early an age, means you are and will always be with me. Your presence, your spirit, and your example give me solace as I prepare to face the temptations, the tough decisions, the struggles, the losses, and the joys in the years to come. From Amsterdam Avenue to Auburn, from Hyde Park to Attica, from great ivory towers to Great Meadows, and from the revolutionary streets of Caracas to the snow-covered razor wire at Clinton Max, I am sending you much love.

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