IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 31

see each other and exchange impressions
or information beyond that having to do
with scheduled transport to the Caribe
Hilton, which was the conference’s main
site, so we could go listen to other
panels. In addition, as if that weren’t
enough, we all had difficulty with our
lodging upon arriving at our respective
hotels. For some inexplicable reason, the
reservations were made for the day after
our arrival, that is, for the day the
conference would already be under way.
This error (if it was an error) almost
caused us to have to sleep in a park or
under a bridge in San Juan. It was hard
to see that affront as a simple
coincidence, especially when we were
able to confirm that the large, official,
Cuban delegation did not have the same
fate. Nevertheless, if we still had any
doubt about this potentially unplanned
intervention, we were quickly able to
dispel it when we discovered the place
our panel had been assigned, one of the
few (and surely the only one with
Cubans) that had to take place at the
Ponce de León B room, in the Condado
area, outside and far from the Caribe
Hilton. Attendance at our panel was
guaranteed to be almost non-existent,
except, perhaps, for a few people who
found this out before hand, and were
particularly interested in hearing us and
willing to miss hearing other panels,
given the location’s distance from the
rest, and the time and date: 8:00AM on
the conference’s last morning, Saturday,
May 30th. Worse yet, there had been a
huge party for the delegates the night
before that went on into the wee hours;
what a coincidence that it was organized
by LASA’s Cuba Section.
The obligatory result
Of course, this was not time ill spent or
lost, given the fact the presentations took

place and enriched LASA’s conceptual
framework. As such, they are available
to any unconvinced scholar who does
not accept the limitations of Cuba’s
altered statistics and official sources.
Yet, it is still lamentable that these
presentations were deprived of the
opportunity of being heard in the same
place and with the same possibilities and
audience as that of the works presented
at the event by the Cuban regime’s
appointees. Furthermore, it seems
inappropriate (for lack of a better term)
that this happened at an event whose
main focus called for the protection of
“insecurities,.exclusions,.and
emergencies.” Some of our small panel’s
presentations are quite useful for anyone
who wants to know and understand the
inequalities suffered by poor people in
Cuba, who are almost the entirety of the
population, especially blacks and
mestizos, who are the majority. They
also serve to respond to LASA’s call for
a need to examine and expose the
inequalities that plague so many of the
continent’s inhabitants with integrity.
Similarly, they highlight the essential
importance of focusing on the need for
initiating real political, constitutional
and legal reforms on the island, as a
necessary
step
towards
the
empowerment of a citizenry historically
denied or held back, as in the case of
slave descendants. On this subject,
Cuesta Morúa’s presentation, “La Ley
afirmativa y la Reforma Constitucional”
[Affirmative Law and Constitutional
Reform], and Madrazo Luna’s “Debate
Racial: Espacios fiscalizados vs.
Espacios de resistencia en la Cuba
Contemporánea”
[Racial
Debate:
Fiscalized Spaces vs. Resistance Spaces
in Contemporary Cuba] are excellent.
My own paper, “El antirracismo en el
ocaso de la revolución cubana” [Anti-

31