HECTOR... travelled to Cuba recently to receive treatment for a heart operation

ST JOHN'S, ANTIGUA -- TIM Hector, the intellectual editor of the hard-hitting weekly Outlet newspaper and Antiguan Opposition political activist, died early yesterday morning at the Holberton Hospital in St John's, family members and media reports confirmed.

He was 59 and would have celebrated his 60th birthday on November 24.

Hector had travelled to Cuba recently for a second time to receive treatment for a heart operation he underwent in February. He returned to Antigua on October 31.

His family was at his bedside at the time of his death.

Conrad Luke, one of Hector's closest friends, said he was hospitalised on Monday "for blood transfusion because his blood count went down considerably but I guess after two operations the body could not stand up anymore".

Hector was a member of the 1960s generation of Caribbean radicals, who came back to the region to confront what they saw as a corrupt, earlier post-colonial order.

Prime Minister Lester Bird described his passing as a sad moment for not only Antigua but the Caribbean, while Baldwin Spencer, the Opposition leader, said the country had lost one of its "greatest sons".

"We are going to miss an independent voice which tried to bring some degree of sanity to all the tantrums that go on in this country," Bird said.

Hector studied in Canada as a contemporary and colleague of the late Dominican prime minister, Rosie Douglas, who led a black power student movement at Sir George Williams University and an angry riot that received worldwide attention.

Like the network of young black power/left-wing intellectuals across the Caribbean, Hector delved into politics on his return to Antigua.

Initially close to the now Progressive Labour Movement (PLM), a 1968 split-off from the late VC Bird's Antigua Trades and Labour Union and the only political party to have successfully challenged -- between 1971 and 1976 -- Bird's Antigua Labour Party's (ALP's) hold on the government.

But Hector soon drifted from the PLM and formed the Antigua/Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM), first as a radical pressure group, and later as a political party. He recruited bright, young people to the organisation, and developed relationships with similar organisations in the region and with Cuba and Libya.

At the same time Hector used Outlet, and his own column, Fan the Flame, to highlight corruption in Antigua and to critique the political system and played a major role in the mid 1970s of focusing international attention on a company called Space Research Corporation (SRC) that was shipping arms from St John's, Newfoundland in Canada to apartheid South Africa via Antigua. Some of the principals in SRC, who had developed big guns with long ranges, were later implicated in a programme to build a massive long-range gun for Iraq.

In later years, Hector moved towards the traditional centre of Antiguan politics and joined current Opposition leader, Baldwin Spencer, in 1992 in forming the United Progressive Party (UPP) after the failure of a string of political parties -- with many of the same personalities -- through the 1980s.

Spencer said Hector "made a contribution to politics and the social transformation" of Antigua and the Caribbean.

"Although controversial, he did make a contribution to the way this country should go," he added.

But even as he was active in politics, Hector became a cricket administrator in Antigua and the Leeward Islands and served on the West Indies Cricket Board, always pushing for radical reforms.

An eloquent writer and commentator on the game, Hector, for instance, pushed hard to bring the Leeward and Windward Islands in the mainstream of West Indies cricket, demanded that the authorities pay attention to the talent of a young Viv Richards and Andy Roberts and while on the WICB lobbied hard for Clive Lloyd's captaincy of the regional team.

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