Race in Cuba by Esteban Morales Domínguez

Author:Esteban Morales Domínguez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2013-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Racism Still Exists

Cuba is no longer the racist society that it was until the end of the Republic, but non-whites are still made into stereotypes (blacks in particular) and racial prejudice and discrimination still breathe in our social environment.44 Our national culture cannot be said to be racism-free by a long shot. This is despite the extraordinarily humane work developed by the Revolution in every field and the fact that nearly fifty years of economic, political, social, and cultural change have managed to bolster anti-discrimination ethics throughout society. These ethics are so strong that now we can describe the fight against all forms of discrimination as an unshakable mainstay of the Revolution’s domestic and foreign policy.45

The huge, far-reaching social and cultural work achieved, and the internationalism practiced by Cuba, prove to be two great living examples of this assertion and true models of the Revolution’s endeavor to abolish discrimination and social injustice.

The racism that still dwells in Cuba comes from neither the state’s institutions nor the government. On the contrary, these structures of our society work hard, as no one ever did in our recorded history, to design policies in favor of social equality that in more than a few cases have bordered on egalitarianism.46 In Cuba today we are all ruled by a government, a state and a political leadership, that make our needs their own—particularly for the good of the poorest and formerly discriminated against strata. They strive to take social assistance, welfare, and every conceivable benefit to the four corners of our geography. However, racism and discrimination have survived with the help of racial profiling and prejudice, still lurking in some institutions, individual consciousness, our economy, family, and society at large. This has been fueled since the 1990s by the profound effects of an economic crisis—which shows glimpses of social crisis—that we are merely starting to overcome. This is nothing but a colossal slap in the face to those idealists who stubbornly held in 1962 that racism had been banished from Cuba.47

Cuba is perhaps one of the few countries worldwide where whites, blacks, and mestizos geographically share more common social, economic, cultural, and political spaces in which mixture is the rule thanks to a radical and extraordinarily humanist revolution. This revolution declared war on discrimination, exclusion, poverty, and inequality, and more has been done, and is still being done, to eliminate these evils and improve social justice.48

It would be absurd, then, not to make the most of the fact that for the first time in Cuban history blacks and mestizos can get rid of all forms of discrimination and share Cuba’s fate with the so-called whites on equal terms from their rightful place in a multiracial/multicolored society.

Some problems, however, remain as yet unsolved, such as the failure to tackle the race issue from within. This only makes it harder to banish racism and discrimination from society’s macrocosm, especially in Cuba at mid-crisis, and impairs the development of our culture, national identity, and social project. The most serious

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