IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 2 ENGLISH | Page 9

March and April, and its contribution to the debate about historical and cultural traditions,
Cuba’s complex social reality, as well as the political importance of their public participation at
events that which they heretofore had been prevented from attending. Madrazo informs us about
new contacts in Latin America and the possibility
for Cuban activists and intellectuals to have new
experiences and be part of new venues for Afrodescendant political and social mobilization. The
Cubans’ contact with other working groups, and
kinds of organization and resistance—as in the
case of San Basilio de Palenque, in Colombia—
coupled with their struggle to insert themselves
and participate in the political process, are lessons
and experiences from which Cuba has been forcefully distanced for a long time. But, this new reality is impacting the Cuban civic agenda, its opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, and the
threats against it. All this work is beginning to reinsert Cuba into the international arena and has
contributed to strengthening the need for international solidarity.
From Panama, Cecilia Moreno Rojas offers us
“Afro-Descendant Women: Poverty, Exclusion
and Racism,” in which she narrates the realities
that have characterized the Afro-descendant population in Latin America and the need to improve
the way in which the race problem is seen and analyzed, not only to confront the many existing
evils, but also to achieve that community’s
greater and more active political, economic, social and cultural participation, something so necessary for creating new paths to social insertion
and equality.
On historical matters, Fidel Guillermo Duarte
shares with us “Black and Mulatto Societies in Pinar del Río (1902-1963): Their Realities and Encounters.” In it, he discusses the conditions in

which these organizations emerged in the country’s extreme, western part, as a response to racial
discrimination and the rejection of the black population. He also explains how they reproduced internal contradictions because they existed in a society that imposed western, white, cultural values
everywhere. Quite apart from their struggle for
equality, they reproduced prejudices and stereotypes in the social imaginary that distanced these
associations from the true, solid practice of African descendants. The author ends his article with
testimonies concerning the imposing and violent
way in which these societies were shut down after
the revolutionary triumph of 1959.
There is an interesting story about the ties between Cuban Afro-descendants and the first immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies (in what eventually became the United States) in “The Mayflower’s Afro-Cuban Secrets,” by Rodolfo Bofill.
In it, he discusses the Cuban mulatto W2F