IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 46

In Suárez y Romero’s novel, Francisco,
the lead character, and the love of his
life, Dorotea, never speak to each other
about their love directly or freely.
Without exception, the author has them
talking about it to a third person. In fact,
all direct conversation is with third parties, their owners, friends, or even enemies, and even then the exchanges are
quite limited and reserved. They are
really conversations between people
who are not equals: it is the people who
have power over their lives that most
often initiate them. One of the few times
the two slaves, Francisco and Dorotea,
interact directly, free of anyone’s interference (except the author’s), we read
about their communicative intentions in
the third person: “He [Francisco] was
prepared to complain about her coldness…to ask her [Dorotea] for an explanation…yet…he was not brave
enough to ask her…”6 Never do we hear
a word spoken directly from the mouth
of Francisco. It is the novelist who expresses everything. For her part, Dorotea proclaims the following to Francisco, but not as an explanation, and Francisco remains: “unable to move…no
knowing what to do or day.” “Goodbye,
Francisco, goodbye, and now you won’t
say that I did not want to see you, or
that I’m ungrateful! But, listen to
me…”7

was decreed. It also dismantled many
Afro-Cuban societies, newspapers,
magazines, and centers that had existed
for decades. It also took up and deployed Martí’s rhetoric about how being
Cuban was “more than white, more than
black, and more than mulatto,” to obviate ‘differences,’ and guarantee the suppression of any complaint or mobilization by the black or general population.
An extreme example of this is what
happened to intellectual Walterio Carbonell after publishing that the government’s attitude and actions concerning
Afro-Cuban culture and people revealed
the real dimension of its commitment to
Africa. This suggestion cost him years
of imprisonment in a UMAP prison and
being committed to an insane asylum.8
Yet, recently, the Roberto Zurbano case
and the article he published in the New
York Times plays not only with what he
truly said, but also with the manipulation of his title. Just a few examples will
suffice to help us see the dimensions of
the scandal that ensued, and the reactions that this publication and its poorly
translated title brought about. “El país
que viene:¿y mi Cuba negra?” whose
translated title was first “For Blacks in
Cuba, the Revolution Isn’t over” and
finally became “For Blacks in Cuba, the
Revolution Hasn’t Begun?” provoked
writer José Hugo Fernández to comment: “It is hard to understand some
Cuban intellectuals who say the are defenders of black and mestizo rights…but
have a fit if another intellectual, even a
really pro-government and leftist one
like them airs opinions that contradict
official rhetoric about racism in Cuba.”9
Dimas Castellanos Martí, in “Sobre el
racismo hay mucho que discutir

The current situation in Cuba
Leaping forward quite a bit, to two
years after the triumph of the 1959
revolution, we see that the government
set into motion a number of mechanisms—among them, laws—to avoid
any questioning or disagreements regarding the end of discrimination that

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