IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 53

positions in the labor market and participate in this ethnic market that Cuesta
Morúa characterizes as peripheral, illegal, and marked technical poverty.

(a euphemism for the unhealthy places
in which people live without dignity).
These are like Venezuelan ranchos,
Argentina’s villas miserias, or Brazil’s
favelas, all different names for a unique
phenomenon that both socialism and
capitalism have generated: poverty, in
addition to exclusion and informality.

Remember that a landmark of Cuban,
nineteenth-century history was the brutal repression of the Ladder Conspiracy
(1844) that eliminated the existence of
any possible, black middle class. According to Cuesta Morúa, there is a nascent, black, middle class between 1933
and 1967, as a result of this ethnic
economy. This has nothing to do with
the recent state ventures, cooperatives,
and models for private property. It is
impossible to unlink this kind of economy from a “culture of poverty” and
informal, dangerous spaces like “La
Cuevita,” a black market (in both its
meanings), a “mega-fair” with unthinkable products, considering how little is
offered in the ration booklet.

The Forum’s objective
One of the Forum’s objectives, according to
its final declaration, is to guide average
Cubans (generally blacks or mulattoes)
towards a proselytizing mission, by empowering them as members of an Afrodescendant collective; reach them via activities that are not only academic in nature;
and helping them become acknowledged as
part of a paradoxically silenced majority
due to State, statistical manipulation. The
greatest problem is fear: it is the primary
impediment for them getting involved in
party-aligned work. This was the crux of
several of the conversations after the
presentations. In terms of new actions, the
participants agreed to reinforce horizontal
ties between groups that deal with identity
issues in other Cuban regions. The challenge is also to make a call for hope, and
allow the possibility of seeing a new Cuba
where blacks don’t have to feel ashamed,
flourish.

The aforementioned Cuban intellectual
classifies this kind of ethnic market as
part of an authoritarian, extractive model that does not take Afro-descendants
or their development into consideration.
A subsequent solution will be eventual
modernization, which depends on a majority, precisely the one that includes
the greatest number of Cuban poor people and is made up almost entirely of
those living in more than one hundred
marginal neighborhoods

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