IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 2 ENGLISH | Page 14

That is Cuban tradition as far as its successful,
historical project of racism: to cover it up and fill
it with justice and legality in order to compensate
for the blame by criminalizing race, just as in the
early twentieth century. I recommend that anyone
who knows or is willing to familiarize him or herself with this tradition of criminalizing others via
a perfect trio—repression, anthropology and legalism—read the early work of Fernando Ortiz,
Los negros brujos, and all the era’s criminal anthropology. What is important has nothing to do
with the period’s thought or paradigm, but rather
with the fact that they always contributed to an
article of law or procedural law that exploited cultural and social difference, so they could process
them in the courts and lock them up in prisons.
There has never been any segregation or apartheid-style racism in Cuba. It is good to know that,
but there has been the sort of racism that is filtered
through the adjudication of socially and culturally
different behavior. The idea that there is racism
only where it is socially intentional and its intention is to highlight differences in the public realm
does not tend to understand racism outside the
Germanic and Anglo-Saxon world.
This explains why to understand the racism of
those with the power to control information,
thought or opinion one must interpret the law as
broadly as possible. Even having a racial profiling
law is enough for controlling those with no voice,
what is needed for those who have a story to tell
is to create “criminal” figures who disseminate
false news, enemy propaganda or other crimes
covered by the Gag Law. It is their ideas that are
attacked at a very dangerous level, because it creates doubt where only those with power can.
Interestingly, is precisely the ease with which
those in power transfer the influence of the law to
a sphere whose narrative is based precisely on the
intersection of the social, the many corners of the
mind, the conceptual outing of what is hidden in
the revelation of the meaning of symbols in the

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interpretation of an ancestral aesthetic and in the
world of inter-subject relations in society. This
truly reveals the racist nucleus of the power elite
and leads one to understand that to judge an Afrodescendant for his or her opinions about racism is
a quintessential expression of racism.
Objectively, there is a statistical way to show that
Cuba is a racist country. For example, the Cuban
university is almost entirely white, while the
prison population is exceedingly black. Yet, the
history of mentalities tells us that we need objective information, and the assumption of an education that has led to intersubjectivity, to get measurable information. The data alone reveal nothing
at all in a society that is not culturally prepared to
absorb reality’s confirmable facts. Psychology
tells us that this state of denial is the first and
deepest reactive attitude in close, unilateral societies. Denying the facts is part of everyday reality
in any society, and is the topic of an entire branch
of psychoanalysis: the one that deals with the conscious self-blocking of perception, to avoid
trauma. We Cubans are more than prepared to
turn our backs on demonstrable information.
As far as education is concerned, this is the reason
why there is a greater and better effort to instruct
people on how to think, rather than issue informative series that cannot be read or interpreted by
anyone, due to a lack of information in that education. Nowhere in the world has anyone been
able to prove the existence of racism if he or she
lacked the cultural and intellectual imagination,
or the ability to perceive it—even while having
access to the explosion of evidence and data. Prior
to positivism, there was the discussion of known
facts, yet to obtain facts, one must be able to first
visualize them.
Above all, the fight against racism primarily rests
with public opinion. How and why judge it as a
crime? By the political use of anti-modern laws
designed for the State’s totalitarian hygiene in its