Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 6

The subject of economic, social and cultural inequalities is garnering more and more attention in
Cuban civil society amid increasing challenges to
the government’s stagnancy and the struggle for
democratization and respect for human rights. In
this context, the recent declaration about the
reestablishment of diplomatic relations between
Cuba and the United States, broken since 1961,
seems to be capable of highlighting all these issues with even greater fervor. Initial reactions
among those who support this move, doubtlessly
designed by the U.S. administration, and those
opposed, have been varied and diverse as this issue of IDENTIDADES is being finalized.

Some believe it to be impromptu and precipitated,
given the stubbornness the Cuban government
has always demonstrated regarding the issue of
human rights, its intransigence in maintaining a
totalitarian State, and its obvious interest in prolonging its control of the country despite the
price, the violation of the most basic human, political, social and cultural rights of Cubans. Others see in these measures a consequent political
strategy on the part of U.S. government, which is

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noteworthy not only as a positive step after numerous decades of confrontation, but also puts
pressure on the internal and foreign policies that
Cuba has been employing, which could open up
new spaces and create new opportunities of which
Cubans should be ready to take advantage.
To this end, we include, at the last minute, Manuel Cuesta Morúa’s “A Normalization of the Divide,” in which he acknowledges the positive
outcome that these new conditions can generate,
but he also reaffirms that the real results and their
effects are yet to be seen. He offers us a brief reflection about the possible repercussions of a solution to some of the problems that muddy the
ability of Cubans to get along, in a sociocultural
sense, specifically regarding racial inequality. For
decades, Revolutionary propaganda has insisted
that the more radicalized the Revolutionary process became, that problem’s solution would be
closer at hand. Yet, the reality has been quite different, and the racial divide became even stronger
from the 1990s on, as part of the deepening crisis
and the due to the dysfunctional socio-economic
and political framework that had been defended
and imposed. The author warns that the new
measures announced by the U.S. government
could deepen this divide, as has happened with
policy reforms in the past which, despite their
positive intentions, caused mixed results for Cubans; such is the case with family remittances.
Cuesta Morúa also offers some ideas and steps
that could be taken to mitigate potential adverse
consequences.
In Cuesta Morúa’s second article for this issue, he
concludes that the so-called government reforms
to-date have resulted in “a racially based economy that is overwhelmingly poor and definitively
marginal.” In “Ethnic Economy: An Abbreviated
Version,” the author articulates how Cuban Afrodescendants have seen themselves obliged to exist somewhere between the subsistence ethnic
economy and the marginalized ethnic market.
The result is that these new extractive institutions,
hailed by the government as an “updating of the
Cuban Social Model,” depress and repress in order to produce and reproduce the precarious well