IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 50

Tendentious statistics
The forum’s presentations offered testimonies about an irrefutable reality.
Afro-descendants in Cuba are going
through a difficult time and enjoy none
of the acknowledgment they deserve,
despite the fact that Cuban intellectual
Fernando Ortiz asserted that Cuba
would not be what it is without blacks.
A number of the presenters insisted upon a remarkable fact. Despite the fact
that approximately 60% of the 11.7 million Cubans are Afro-descendants, the
government barely acknowledges that
Afro-Cubans constitute a bit over 9% of
the population. Given statistical pretention speaks volumes about their invisibilization, and leads to no evident acknowledgment of their living conditions. This strategic manipulation is in
keeping with a persistent colonial-era,
white, and Hispanic pattern that tends
towards a whitening of the population.
This is complicated by the existence of
27 color categories, and blackness is
rewarded with disdain and endorsed by
a persistent frame of mind that scorns
an absence or lack of whiteness.

any official statistics, what is important
is how one should construct his or her
identity, personally, and any phenotypic
reference. Centuries of slave opprobrium and discrimination are responsible
for this externalization of this shame in
defining an identity at the current time.
The numbers shared at the Forum confirm the sort of marginalization AfroCubans are normally subjected to every
day, a phenomenon whose roots go
back way before the Cuban revolution.
After a delayed abolition of slavery
(1886), no program to raise black selfesteem was ever created. The limitations of blackness were extremely present from the time the Republic’s establishment, in 1902.
One of the speakers mentioned the process of forced migration that started in
1958 and is still in full swing, the abandoning of homes, and the “abandoned
house-occupied house” phenomenon:
the occupying of spaces by representative of the new political elite, but without the inclusion of any blacks or mestizos. Similarly, black numbers among
political parties and leadership positions
is at barely 0.5%. Not even the famous
July 26th Revolutionary Movement
(MR-26-7) or the March 13th Revolutionary Directory (DR-13-M) had any
significant number of Afro-descendant
representatives. Even so, being represented does not eliminate the problem
of discrimination or racial prejudice.

It’s not just about numbers, although
they are what are most visible. When all
the Latin American nation-States were
constituted during the nineteenth century throughout the continent, Europe was
their model. While it is true that America was built upon three bases, governments looked the other way in the case
of blacks. In Cuba, the government
should have acknowledged that they
were more than half the population.
Nowadays, Cuban blacks are resigned
to their condition and hide it. Beyond

Revolution and promises
The moment the Revolution barged onto the scene, quite a lot of senior citi-

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