IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 89

Another racial offense and
the dangerous demagogy
Leonardo Calvo Cárdenas
Historian and political scientist
Havana, Cuba

P

resident Barack Obama passed
through Havana (20-22 March
2016) with a plenty of charisma,
solid intellectual solvency, and coherent
speech. He dazzled the Cuban people
and disrupted the authorities. The simple and natural communication of the
Obama family with sensitive areas of
the Cuban reality as interlocutor of
private entrepreneurs, guest of a popular
comedy show, fan in a baseball game,
and customer in a private owned restaurant had an unexpected impact among
the citizens who tinted the historic visit
with enthusiasm and friendliness.
Obama´s message was full of concepts
and perfectly connected with the concerns and needs of the ordinary citizens.
It greatly annoyed the Cuban rulers,
who couldn´t find a coherent response
to his oratorical masterpiece, which
fostered renewed hopes among the
Cubans in the street. Just after he concluded his speech at the Grand Theater
of Havana, the spokesmen and officials
of the regime clung to their slogans and
their extremist and hindering wording in
order to try to counter the impact caused
by Obama. The comments and responses brought more of the same in terms of
the political discourse that the majority
of the Cuban people disdain and despite

of being so far away from their harsh
realities and unfulfilled longings. Nevertheless, surprise! Unexpectedly the
specter of racism appeared. All the
political commissars and censors who
carefully monitor the ideological relevance of cultural expressions couldn´t
prevent that the Havana weekly newspaper Tribuna published an article on
March 27 by the Afro-Cuban journalist
Elias Argudín Sánchez, who repeated
the same arguments and judgments
already heard about what Obama had
said, but with a particular title: "Black,
are you Swedish?", taken from a popular racist joke. Facing such a fact, several voices interested in the racial problems, especially from the intellectual
environment, raised in protest and the
journalist was forced to apologize. His
article was immediately removed from
the newspaper´s website. However, the
connotation and transcendence are
much more serious than the simple
anecdote. The article is not more than
another episode of the saga of rampant
despair and concern among the Cuban
authorities due to Obama´s presence
and the messages he delivered to the
Cuban society. The hitherto unknown
journalist strikes me as a postmodern
counter foreman —id est: an enslaved

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