IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 5

From the Editor

T

he
inconsistency
and
ineffectiveness of the vaunted
social, educational and civic
program of the Cuban revolution are
increasingly evident
amidst
the
indolence of a government that, at all
costs, try to reform its totalitarian
structure toward an authoritarianism
that
structurally
recreates
the
inequalities
and
puts
artificial
restrictions on freedoms and on the
possibilities of citizens to build their
capacities and address their unmet
needs and their hopelessness.
Racial discrimination and inequality are
constantly worsening, due to the lack of
both recognition and political and social
programs to address them. To cap it all,
there is a persistent refusal to broaden
the debate around them. The African
descent are mostly represented in the
environments of poverty, homelessness,
beggary and lack of alternative
development and social mobility, but
this overwhelming reality also affects
other marginalized groups such as the
disabled people and women, with
heavier burden on black women and the
LGBTI community.

The Cubans of the so-called third and
fourth ages deserve special attent ion.
The country is aging rapidly and, at the
same time, an oligarchic reconstruction
of the economy and restructuration of
the inequalities are taking place. The
population
over 70
years
is
marginalized behind the generational
invisibility of social sectors that
artificially have become unproductive.
The third and fourth ages are filled with
African descent visibly installed in the
growing beggary across the cities. In
this edition, we offer a body of work
addressing such issues from different
angles and perspectives according to the
lived and accumulated experiences.
Thus, José Hugo Fernández shows us,
in “Ingratitude as reward,” the daily
landscape faced by the generations of
the third and fourth ages in their
precarious survival, against the claims
of the official propaganda. Cuban
economist Carmelo Mesa Lago is
quoted by the author for stating that
most of the 1.8 million retirees have an
equivalent to ten dollars as monthly
reward for their long years of
work. Their painful situation could be
understood if you check what can they
buy with such amount of money in a
national market that increasingly turns
into dollarization and has cancelled,
many years ago, the trumpeted
subsidized aids dubbed as the monthly
rations. So, the entire people was left on
their own, but particularly the elderly
and the children.
José Hugo affirms: "It is enough to walk
the few blocks of this populous walk
(Boulevard San Rafael) to form an
opinion about the drama of the elderly
thrown on their own in the streets,
without family protection and without
the slightest government auspice, except
by the police, which occasionally
proceeds to stack them into cage-

4