After very long years of work and having lost their abilities between sacrifices and shortages ; after having risked their own skin in any war without knowing its real causes or broken their own back with hard work , in the futile attempt to create a new world that never went beyond the fallacy and the decorative speech , these people are now reduced — in the final stretch of their lives — to endangered human beings in a country that has turned into a Darwinian jungle . The reasons why blacks and mestizos not only constitute a majority , but also rank among the most vulnerable persons among the people in need would not have to be explained to those halflearned on the Cuban reality . However , maybe it ’ s appropriate to bring up a couple of data that , far from being the only available , help to understand the phenomenon . In 1886 slavery was abolished . Black people formally became part of the emancipated citizenship . Their disadvantages were abysmal compared to the rest . They had no property , no money , no professional training . They don ’ t have even the means to acquire these assets in a short term . They had no choice but to continue bearing at once the burden of both the racial and the class apartheids . However , they managed to gradually get empowered by themselves . In this endeavor , it was crucial that they excelled in high demand and economic important trades . Some of these trades were being practiced by them since the slave era , but only after the formal abolition of slavery they turned into ways for socioeconomic upswing and then for citizen accreditation . Multiple trades passed from parents to children and became representative signs ( perhaps the first ones ) of their particular talents , skills and work diligence as free Cubans . Historians have already highlighted the role played by trades as leverage for economic and social advancements by descendants of black slaves and even for their organization in political entities . This conquest took decades of training , efforts and privations , but it was suddenly canceled by a blow of the revolutionary government . Since its first stages , during the 1960s , the selfemployment was forbidden and , by extension , the family practice of trades . Scholars have still pending an in-depth review of such prohibitions , since their serious consequences are acting today almost as an endemic evil . Without going any further , it is a direct cause of the social deprivation suffered by the elderly , forced throughout their working lives to rely on bland and very poorly paid state jobs , without any way out because it was prohibited by law to freely seek livelihoods and economic progress . The retirement with meager pensions is also a result of the low wages they earned in those jobs . Of course , this situation should be affecting white and black elderly without distinction ; then , why blacks and mestizos stand out so remarkably in the parade of homeless elderly that we can see today in any public place ? It is not due to a surplus of blacks and a shortfall of whites . Herein a second data comes into play . The migratory flow of Cubans , particularly to the United States and Europe , has broken records in recent times . Among the causes of our society ’ s aging we can find that the young generations have been fleeing from the island in constant and growing crowds . These young people , at least until recently , were usually white . The reasons are known all too well . The historic disadvantages of blacks and mestizos were aggravated by the status of total dependence that the Castroist government imposed over them . It was seasoned by an indoctrination system that led them to believe , for a long time , such dependence was redemptive , since it guarantees their achievements against
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