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• 01 / 01 / 2010

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Cuba is the only country where blacks have the state and the government as its allies.

It would be unreasonable to think that no racial problems, negative stereotypes, discrimination and racism exist in Cuba as a dead weight, although not only a dead weigh, but as something society, in its imperfection, can still reproduce.

The recent declaration by some Afro-Americans in alleged support to the fight for civil rights in our country manipulates and magnifies them, trying to make them come across as similar to those existing in any country in this hemisphere. This is not true.

This is what Dr. Esteban Morales, political scientist and essayist, believes. Dr. Morales is one of the Cuban intellectuals who signed the message sent to their Afro-American colleagues examining the truth of this controversial issue.

“The main weakness of this declaration is that its criticism is set on the same platform the U. S. government has historically set it, expressing that there is a totalitarian dictatorship in this country, that there are no human rights in it, that there is no democracy for blacks and making the government and the political leadership accountable for the existing problems.

“The humanitarian politics of the Revolution have contributed to overcome obstacles. There is no institutional racism. It is a phenomenon dragged and reproduced during a relatively long time in which we did not pay due attention to it.  
Idealistically, we proclaimed it solved in 1962 and what it did was hiding and then remerge in the midst of the economic crisis.

“Contrary to what they express, it was Fidel Castro himself in March 1959 who, in several speeches, acknowledged the existence of racism and discrimination and expressed the need to solve this problem he considered a social blight.

“During the ‘special period,’ he himself reintroduced the topic at the UNEAC1 congresses and in meetings with teachers and his approach is highly updated.”

Why do these attitudes persist?

Professor Morales accepts that “we have made mistakes. First: idealistically believing that together with the revolutionary policies racism would disappear little by little like other blights we inherited.

“Cuba is possibly the country that has advanced the most in its eradication, especially that of the inequalities and injustice it entails, but fifty years of revolution, no matter how radical, are not enough to put an end to a problem brought about by 450 years of colonialism.

“The Spanish came on their own free will; blacks were brought in slave ships, fished in the western coasts of Africa or sold by their own tribes. Slavery was their fate, which in this part of the world took a colour, because in classic slavery slaves could be blue-eyed and blond; here they were Indians or blacks.”

From their mixture, Cuban color emerged.

“Today you walk down the streets in Havana and you can see what I am saying. Although in the Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology there are many black young people, in our neighbourhoods you find many who are marginal and have been unable to assume or reach the advantages the Revolution has offered them.

“And this is not because of differences in their points of departure as shown by a series of parameters in daily life: housing, employment, institutional prominence, access to public office and entrepreneurial jobs and, especially, to the so-called new economy.

“The level of democracy and civil rights we have reached is the same for every racial group. The degree in which we must perfect them is valid for all. Some make a better use of them than others, because they are in better conditions to do so.

“The racial problem in our country is not simply economic. It consists of many elements and, politically, is a topic that should be in the agenda of organizations and be discussed.”

Source: www.cubanow.net