IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 37

Rescuing an Endangered
Society
Eleanor Calvo Martínez
Executive Secretary, Citizens’ Observatory for Racial Integration (OCD)
Havana,Cuba

A

fter wielding incontestable and
absolute power for more than
half a century, the Cuban authorities have demonstrated their supreme inability to create wealth, impart
justice, and guarantee respect for basic
human rights. This power imposes itself, dictates, pressures, blackmails, and
represses, but it doesn’t govern. It violated its part of the social contract a
long time ago, and has eliminated the
nation’s productive base, separated families, fractured union frameworks, done
away with many traditions, and even
put an end to the Cuban people’s good
manners.

where in the world with any degree of
social
sensibility
and
political
knowledge continue to have an idyllic
view of Cuban reality, as if so many
years of totalitarian intolerance had not
been able to remove the veil and reveal
this false and well-tooled image