IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 8

mendous socio-economic polarization
and inequality the Cuban people endure,
with Afro-descendants having the worst
time of it. This review of Cuba’s economic and social disaster, and its constant worsening, are frustrating even for
those who lived in its midst for many
years and return from trips abroad with
an idea about something that never existed, as Armando Soler discusses in
“The Unusual Emigrant.”

convinced that there are thousands of
people like me…I was received all sorts
of abuses, both from students and teachers. A teacher verbally abused me and
kicked me so hard it hurt by back. I escaped from that school and ran through
the peanut fields, with a number of
teachers chasing after me… They were
able to affect the way I see life. I became an apathetic youth; I became
afraid of the street.”

From the international scene, we have
the article “High Noon in August,” by
Bonita Lee Penn. It discusses the race
problem in the United States and, above
all, the frequent racial violence that
plagues neighborhoods and cities there,
by examining the events in Ferguson,
Missouri, and the death of a young, African-American man, Michael Brown, at
the hands of a white police officer, and
the official perspectives that were presented to get a reduction in the criminal
charges against him, which were in
sharp contrast to eyewitness accounts
and the reactions seen in the local community, nationally, and internationally.

Natividad focuses on the “Rural
Schools” in which all Cuban students
were required to par ѥ