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Crimes of Information and

class and gender in Cuba and the world

Racism
Manuel Cuesta Morúa
Historian and political scientist
Spokesperson, Progressive Arc Party (Parp)
National Coordinator, Nuevo País Platform
Member, Citizens’ Committee for Racial Integration (CIR)
Havana, Cuba
ccording to Octavio Paz’s excellent
book Las trampas de la Fe [Traps of
Faith], Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz suggested it was always important to reflect upon the
smaller things in life to learn a great deal about
society.
I would like to use this almost epistemological
perspective to delve into the subject of racism in
Cuba and its controversial relationship to a right
that is not and should not even be under debate:
the right to express one’s opinion.
As is it more or less known, I was arrested at the
end of January 2014, at the time of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States
(CELAC) Summit in Havana, for trying to organize an alternative forum within civil society. The
arrest would be—and was—just one more anecdote about repression within the broader context
of a failed attempt to squelch the vital impulses
that characteristically and naturally emanate from
our society. It is important to note that the State
considers society to exist only as an autonomous
space. If not for this distance, we find ourselves
before the phenomenon of socialized States that

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are something other than society—as a reflection
of social totalitarianism.
Yet, my arrest stopped being just an anecdote
when the regime tried to end the incident with a
strange political move that, like all projections,
ended up subconsciously revealing the government’s important thinking on two matters—the
first, its structural negation of the value of opinion
(opinion is like a plurality of opinions, or a diversity of views); the second, the legal trappings that
disguise its racist policies.
I would like to focus on the second of these matters. The dissemination of false news—of which
I was accused—and enemy propaganda or the
supposed leaking of information to foreign powers or countries can begin being used as legal evidence to contain the increasing intellectual or political criticism of structural racism on the island.
This is similar to what is done with ‘social dangerousness’ and racial profiling, which allows for
the incarceration of the marginal—mostly blacks
from the lower classes—because they constitute a
threat to the racist order the white criollos instituted in Cuba since time immemorial.

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