IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 41

40conversation about it. The reason:
because they are afraid of fracturing. It
also homogenizes the population’s
ethnic
composition
through
miscegenation and makes inequalities
invisible.
Similarly, the lack of a
political will to develop the policies
necessary to resolve the social,
economic, and political inequalities that
affect Afro-descendants is quite obvious.
The Cuban government rhetorically
acknowledges diversity and difference in
its documents,30 but not de facto. It
remains reticent to implementing
affirmative actions to move the solution
forward. The way current reforms have
been developing is widening the gap
between favored individuals and groups,
and those have been turned into losers
due to the changes. These people—urban
rural workers, families that receive no
remittances, women, blacks, mestizos,
the elderly, people who live outside
Havana province—have no place in this
new marketplace and the State continues
to administer and limit their rights. This
situation forces one to redefine and
reconsider topics such as racial
discrimination. Any agenda for social
activism and, more over, any political
platform regarding Cuba’s future, must
include these excluded voices and
demands.

Notes:
1- Alejandro de la Fuente “Tengo una
raza oscura y discriminada. El
movimiento afrocubano: hacia un
programa consensuado”, Revista Nueva

Sociedad, 11/1/2012. We consider the
contributions of this historian, as well as
Víctor Fowler’s and Carlos Moore’s,
among the most suggestive view onto
the issue of race in Cuba, and that they
impact discussion of the subject in
Cuba’s public sphere and its Diaspora.
The problem regarding the array of
social conflicts in post-Revolutionary
Cuba has also been treated by Marxist
intellectual Samuel Farber in some of
this most recent work.
2- The Cofradía de la Negritud’s
concrete proposals for public policies
made on June 22, 20111, are still
awaiting action for the government. See
the
proposals
at
http://www.afrocubaweb.com/coneg/des
delaceiba22junio11.htm
3- It has also been impossible to
correlate housing variables regarding
access by whites, blacks, and mestizos,
due to classification procedures for
blacks and mestizos in the last National
Census (2012), which have made it
seemingly impossible to see or make
inferences about these inequalities from
the information available.
4- These people also can be called
oficialistas (party liners), depending on
the degree to which they limit the
orientation of their rhetoric and practices
to the acknowledged parameters of the
official line and the practices and of
State
and
Party
institutions.
Nevertheless, some add cultural and
social demands to the government’s
agenda
5- This organic position fits with the
cultural policy created in the 1990s by
Abel Prieto. It served to reformulate
State hegemony, replacing Marxist
rhetoric with a form of nationalism
supposed rooted in Martí. This was
accomplished through an arsenal of
selective, coopting and censuring

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