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From the Editor

T

his issue of Identities is marked
by the visit of President Obama
to Cuba and the 50th Anniversary of the Latin American Studies
Association (LASA), but the issues of
race, class and gender keep on being the
focus of our work. Focused in the lasting impact of racial policies by the socalled Cuban Revolution, the Cuban
writer and U.S. Professor (University of
New York) Enrique del Risco analyzes
the "Old and new adventures of revolutionary racism."

This essay reveals that "a revolutionary
racism", well-differentiated from the
traditional racism, hides behind the
1962 official declaration that racial
discrimination was eliminated. While
traditional racism preserves and justifies
inequalities, the revolutionary racism
liquidates all obvious racist manifestations and also prohibits all criticism of
racial discrimination or race except the
folkloric references. Such version of
racism is part of the dictatorial rule over
the whole society. In another substantial
essay, Dr. Marlene Azor (Metropolitan
Autonomous University in Mexico)
points out "the privilege of invisibility"
as strategy of the Cuban government
against the demands for recognition by

the population of African descent. Any
attempt to overcome the silences and
historical exclusions is branded as a risk
to "national unity" and the open national
debate on racial discrimination is always postponed with the excuse of
keeping that unity. This strategy is
clearly applied to the Cuban baseball
athletes who jump towards the professional leagues. They are mostly of
African descent and have no choice but
to emigrate to a third country in order to
pursue a career in the Major League
Baseball (MLB). The article "Slavers in
Full Count", by Jose Hugo Fernandez,
uses the analogy with the three balls and
two strikes count to describe the situation faced by the Cuban government
after the Obama administration authorized direct hiring of Cubans in the U.S.
So a key expectation of the Cuban
regime seems to fade: acting as broker
between the Cuban baseball players and
the MLB clubs in order to take the lion's
share of the contracts, as the Cuban
government does with those who, under
official permission, go to play in nonU.S. professional leagues. In the context
of social classes, Oleydis Luis Machado
offers another punctual analysis of
discrimination, centered on concrete
sociological research in the municipality
of Antilla, a northern city of the Cuban
East. Machado found that not only deep
prejudices survive against the equality
of gender and race, but also no actions
are taken by the local government to
mitigate them and to solve the problems
arising from this situation. For realizing
it, the author emphasizes that it would
be enough to experience how uncomfortable is for people of color to share
the public transportation system designed to bring the workers to the various tourist centers in the territory. From
the same municipality comes the piece

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