IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 29

of the forgotten African descendants.
And it is full of circular reasoning while
talking about social mobility, economic
equality
and
other
measurable
dimensions of the social order. The
signals of progress appear in the visible
intensification of old paradigms:
cultural
confinement
and
epic
cooptation of the Otherness. We will
quote at length two important points:
Point 12. "As a result of these
discussions, it was agreed to increase —
in the curricula of the different learning
levels— the approach to relevant black
and mestizo figures and to appalling
historical events linked to expressions
of racism and racial discrimination in
different
periods
of
the
prerevolutionary history to raise the
awareness, since the early ages, about
the need to keep confronting such a
phenomenon."
Point 13: "It was also acknowledged the
importance of keeping on spreading
actions aimed to clarify the significant
African heritage in the Cuban culture
through music, dance, performing and
visual arts, and other artistic
manifestations, provided the awareness
that such a phenomenon must also be
faced in the cultural field."
By opening and coloring the pantheon
of heroes and turning the feasts into a
political instrument, the government
exactly reproduces the old republican
cultural paradigm that reproduced the
sociological structures of racism and
froze the social mobility of significant
sectors of African descent. When epic
and culture are simply understood as
artistic expressions, they are not areas
for the sociological majority. The key
terms of the report: African cultural
heritage, traditional culture, traditions
of African origin, relevant figures in
history, shocking events… show the
continuity of the pre-modern paradigm
about a diversity handled in the idle
margins of society, as well as the

hurried re-colonization of actors who do
not longer want to continue being
invisible.
Why the recovery of the Others stops in
the artistic or religious culture, and does
not follow toward civic culture,
knowledge, politics and economics
generated by these Others? Such
silences are explained by the
government unwillingness to address
the issues of racism in key areas that
would shed light on the discriminators
effects produced by many structures of
the current Cuban society:
• Legal. The articles 72-74 of the Penal
Code (1987) typify the so-called social
danger
• Sociological. The restructuration and
fragmentation of the economy and the
urban space along racial criteria
• Value judgement. The ghettoization of
original religions, paralyzed in their
creative civic consequences, causes
close-minded behaviors and reinforces
the trend toward ritualized social
violence
• Political. Racial "representation" in the
bodies of the State is simply a
reproduction of ideological paradigms
based on racist superiority of some over
others, as the Seventh Congress of the
Communist Party has just confirmed
and the Constitution establishes in its
Article 5.
It is forced to contrast how the Penal
Code specifies the crimes of genocide
and apartheid, as the report emphasizes
in points 34 and 35, but there is no
equal emphasis on racial crimes. The
government is rather reluctant to
consider the recommendation of
including racial motivation as an
aggravating factor in crimes against
persons. Maybe among the “latest
development,” the Criminal Code
would regressively stimulate the racially
motivated conviction of young citizens,
because now the police can apply
punishments in some cases without

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