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Socio-Existential Crisis and
Despair in Cuba
class and gender in Cuba and the world

Guillermo Ordóñez Lizama
Executive Secretary Citizens’ Observatory against Discrimination
(OCD)
Havana, Cuba

I

t is hurtful, painful, unbelievable and incalculable to see the profound imbalance in Cuban
society—it is enduring an unprecedented crisis, never before seen in history. An always selfinterested and sometimes criminal manipulation
of history and traditions, as well as officialdom’s
always demagogic, never changing rhetoric and
distortion of our everyday, cruel reality, is and has
been the policy of a regime that long ago aban-

doned its original values and reveals it lack of humanist sensibility and political responsibility
each and every day.
The slave system, with its exclusionary nature
and hegemonic economic relations evokes the
worst of our colonial period, a time in which talent, effort and never-ending sacrifice garnered
neither acknowledgement nor reward. The exportation of an ideology based on the assumed

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