The death of some people should be celebrated, not mourned. Cuba’s Fidel Castro is dead; we should celebrate his life for Castro lived and achieved the purpose of his life; the only thing left for him, was to die; may his soul rest in eternal peace.

I shouldn’t have lent out my book, ‘Legacy of Ashes; History of the CIA.’ "An addictive book,” as my friend Stephen Ruzibiza once remarked. He’s absolutely right. ‘Bay of pigs’ is my favorite anecdote in that book; a tale of an historic battle in which Castro embarrassingly defeated CIA.

Don’t bother looking for the book. You won’t find it here. But here is a summary of that famous CIA ill-prepared attack on Cuba codenamed ‘Bay of Pigs.’

"It’s April 17, 1961 when the CIA launches what its leaders believed then, would be the definitive strike to oust Cuba’s Communist system through a full-scale invasion by 1,400 American-trained Cubans who opposed Castro’s revolution. However, the invasion disastrously failed: Castro’s troops outnumbered the invaders and they surrendered after less than 24 hours of combat. The invasion was meant to restore Cuban status-quo following an incident two years earlier, when on January 1, 1959, a young Cuban nationalist named Fidel Castro drove his guerilla army into Havana and overthrew General Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973), the American-backed president. For the next two years, the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) attempted to push Castro from power.”

Castro went on to defiantly lead Cuba for 50 years, on communist principles under the noses of eleven US-Presidents until he voluntarily handed power to his younger brother, in 2008.

As President Obama prepares to relinquish the reins of the American Presidency to Donald Trump in January (a revolution of sorts); his eight years in Washington, will be remembered for restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba after five decades of impasse.

In Cuba, Africa will always be indebted, remembered for helping the continent’s erstwhile freedom fighters in their quest for self-rule. As a result, growing up in the 90s, you may remember the people we nicknamed ‘Cubans’ which literally meant, someone called in to deal with an especially complicated situation.

Monday Merido, my high school chubby buddy was fathered by a Cuban road engineer in Uganda’s Masindi district; after years of searching, he finally reunited with his father…the son is now in Cuba, happily married with a handsome son of his own.

I have not been to Cuba but I love Cubans. Granted, the country remains generally poor largely because of USA’s long standing harsh economic sanctions; but like its culture, fine cigars and beautiful beaches, Cuba’s health sector and medics proudly stand-out among the world’s finest.

That leads me to my next point which is a lamentation against East Africa’s lackadaisical medics; just this week, I watched two scandalous and lugubrious news items on, respectively, Uganda’s Nation Television (NTV) and Rwanda’s RTV.

In the first incident, a woman in a rural part of Uganda had her body chemically burnt and eyes blinded after a medical assistant at a local hospital gave her the wrong drugs for her HIV treatment; a senior doctor was quoted claiming ‘the nurse was too tired to notice her mistake.’

A related incident was brought to light here in Kigali, where an RTV reporter interviewed several locals who claimed that medical assistants at various health facilities had deliberately given them ‘expired drugs’ because they thought the ‘new’ drugs would be too expensive for the patients to afford. Utter bullocks!

When incorrectly prescribed medicine is poison; the Ugandan HIV Positive woman was poisoned by the medical doctor; she is now at the mercy of good Samaritans while the calamitous nurse continues to handle more patients’ in many cases, it has cost us lives.

Kigali authorities should investigate the claims that medical assistants are selling expired drugs to patients they deem ‘too poor to afford un-expired drugs’ otherwise we risk having our hospital perceived as ‘suicide traps.’

In all this, the internet would help; patients could self-educate on the proper use of drugs and dangers of using expired drugs; internet powered social media can also help locals share information with authorities about health centers that are abusing their professional responsibilities.

The challenge is that local service providers seem to be selling us bogus internet connectivity. Here’s a typical situation; you know you have bundles on your phone because you’re on a monthly prepaid plan; the signal shows, connectivity is strong/very good/excellent.

In spite of that, you can’t seem to open a single web link; play a YouTube video or send a text over WhatsApp (it remains unsent for close to a minute); try to post two lines on Facebook and like a jalopy driving over a steep hill; the internet fails to post the text, midway the process, it goes back to starting point, runs so fast and fails again, midway the process.

Yeah, I hear you. I need to get a 4G line, but why are 3G devices still on sale? But even for 4G, they admittedly tell you, it is not accessible in most localities outside Kigali. But I heard in other countries, they’re currently testing 5G, no? In other news, the Rugunga billboard advertising fast internet was violently brought down by CoK authorities…