IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 7

the historic development of how the
people learned to discuss those
questions and to move from words to
action in these and other social
conflicts, so that "instead of settling for
a leveled playing field, where everyone
would be equally treated by teachers,
judges, directors and police officers, the
communities began trying to build
public arenas."
Herein the social actors openly
acknowledge their differences and agree
to continuously cooperate on equal
terms. The lesson drawn by Leighninger
has paramount importance for the
democratic governance. Improving
citizen participation in public debates
and
increasing
the
intercultural
understanding
are
complementary
tasks. In the unfinished business of
public participation in the debate about
race —the author says— unity
presupposes recognizing the differences
and appreciating all cultures with the
cardinal purpose of "giving people the
feeling that their past experiences with
discrimination and prejudice will be
corrected or at least won´t be repeated."
All the problems derived from the
violation of civil rights in Cuba,
particularly
racism
and
racial
discrimination, are presented by
the Citizens Committee for
Racial
Integration (acronym
in
Spanish:
CIR) in the second edition of the
document "Cuba speaks from its
depths." Six years after the first
edition, CIR begins with the significant
question: What real changes have been
brought by the state in the fight against
racism and racial discrimination? And
for its comprehensive argumentation,
CRI answers another basic question:
What reveals the preliminary analysis of
the report by the Cuban government to
the Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination (CERD)? It´s
clear that virtually every point in the
report moves at the same level of
vagueness and generality in a failed
attempt to show how much the Cuban

government has made against racism
and racial discrimination.
The conclusions by CIR accurately
reflect the current reality while
answering another crucial question:
What stage are we at in 2016? The
racial inequities are abysmal in the labor
market; the inequality throughout the
social fabric is worrisome, especially
among the increasingly poor black
population, marginalized from the main
enclaves of the state and private
emerging economies.
There is no political will to bring the
statistical records on racial distribution
in the self - employment activities, but
the mere sociological observation shows
that people of African descent are
under-represented in the positions with
better opportunities and hardly benefit
from decent work to improve their
quality of life. The Afro-descendant
community
is
generally
decapitalized. It
has
neither
the
professional knowledge that is now
profitable nor with the sufficient
resources to face the uncertainties and
challenges
of
the
economic
reform. Thus,
Afro-descendants
continue trapped in the net of poverty.
Cuban prisons are still mainly populated
by African descent; the timid reforms
intensify the inequalities and set the
new
economy
on
racial
grounds; the African descendants return
to the old structure of trades during the
pre-1959 republic in both the public and
private sectors. The hinges that impede
social mobility in the basic fields of the
knowledge economy, the digitized
economy of services and the middle and
upper income segments are closed at the
very threshold for the Afro population,
displaced to the peripheries of both
society and economy.
In the fight against these scourges, the
CIR stands out, as Marthadela Tamayo
exemplifies in "Let's talk about
racism and discrimination from the
perspective of art". She refers to
the workshop that commemorated the

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