IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 28

the Constitution.
Seen from the juridical conception of
the government and the generality of the
law with its presumed social ubiquity, it
would have been unnecessary to
present, as it happened in 2015, a
specific draft bill linked to the Labor
Code to protect the rights of the LGBTI
community. Such a bill would have
been a legislative innovation, but it was
vetoed by the National Assembly.
Thusly, both the need for specific
protections to specific subjects and the
lack of political will to respond to the
growing demands of an increasingly
diverse and complex society were
clearly demonstrated.
In the legislative horizon on racial
discrimination there is not something
like the bill for the LGBTI community.
As legislative innovation, the Cuban
State presented the same general and
vague constitutional provision of any
Latin American constitution, but
without advancing, as it occurs in the
rest of the region, to the modern
legislation that promotes and defends
the rights of African descendants and
indigenous communities.
Other points in the report revolve
around the same vagueness and
generality by trying to show how much
the Cuban government has done against
racism and racial discrimination.
Henceforth it is important to take again
into consideration a critical distinction
to analyze the approach and design, the
public policies and the structural steps
toward the solution of racial issues.
Racism and racial discrimination
organically rub together, but they are
not conceptually identical.
Racism has to do with impersonal
structures and environmental conditions
that generate structural discrimination
over collective subjects, regardless of
the decision makers’ willingness and
practices. It may be the result of an
active or inherited ideology; it could be
even institutionalized within the
habitual culture and the hegemony of

the decision makers, but it does not
need to be displayed in punishable
practices to come into discriminatory
effects. The dream of every racist would
be such a structurally viscous racism
that makes racist acts unnecessary.
Society would act on behalf of racist
individuals.
Unlike that, racial discrimination is a
matter
of
specific
individuals
discriminated by specific individuals. It
is
a
practice.
The
structural
environments of racism can stimulate
racial discrimination, but the latter can
flourish even in absence of structural
racism and against the anti-racist public
policies. Such a practice is visible
through the lenses of the criminal codes
discerning between victims and
perpetrators.
In Cuba, the issue is rather racism than
racial discrimination. Racism survives
because the legitimizing political and
cultural structures still stand, now in a
counter-narrative that conceals and
justifies itself with the true fact of life
that the acts of discrimination, people
against people, do not prevail. They
take places and even become
institutionalized in private or public
spaces where the policies are designed
to reject African descendants, but they
are not a sociological trend yet.
The entire report is crossed by the
interested confusion based on the lack
of conceptual distinction. Racism is
hidden behind the absence of a
sociologically
documented
racial
discrimination, behind the structural
silences on the institutions that
reproduce racism, and behind an
outdated conception that affirms racial
integration at the feasts and denies the
racial disintegration spread by the new
sociological conservative revolution
through the economy, specific cultural
areas, the urban and residential spaces
and, of course, politics.
The report puts emphasis on enhancing
the feasts as an effort against racism and
discrimination, as well as the epic story

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