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
13