Castro's Sprawling Racism
at 4:16 PM Saturday, July 30, 2011
Excerpt from Carlos Moore's "Putting Context to Cuba's Racial Divide":
Brought to light in 2008, the first comprehensive, officially-sanctioned document addressing the issue of race in Cuba under the Revolution, The Challenges of the Racial Problem in Cuba, paints a stark picture of the situation that exists even now in 2009 for the blacks. This graphic, 385-page document, supported by a bounty of hitherto unpublicized statistics, speaks of neglect, denial, and forceful resurgence of racism in Cuba under Communism.
The publication shows a growing impoverishment of the population as a whole, but it emphasizes that black Cubans are disproportionately affected. The old segregationist Cuba is gone, according to this document, yet, somehow the country's leadership continues to be predominantly white (71%). A majority of the country's scientists and technicians are white (72.7%), even though both races have equal rates of education.
The same whitening process affects Cuba's universities at the professorial level (80% at the University of La Habana).
In the countryside, the land that is privately held is almost totally in the hands of whites (98%), and even in the State cooperatives blacks are almost nonexistent (5%).
A robust percentage of able-bodied Cubans with jobs are white, whether male (66.9%) or female (63.8%). In contrast, the overall employment rate of blacks who are fit to work is startlingly low (34.2%). We are left to conclude that most able-bodied black Cubans are unemployed (65.8%).
Never mind all that feel good political propaganda that Cuba has given refuge to Black Panther members, or Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) or that 90% of the artists look black and blacker than black. Never mind all of that. Cubans are racist. The color of your skin is all that matters. Mulatos (the correct Spanish spelling) look more like Gloria Estefan than me for instance. So a Cuban is a light skinned person? Yes, it seems that way..and all of those "light skinned" Cubans hold the better positions unless it's a government program having to do with the arts. But not engineering, technology, bio-diversity/sustainable energy, or any other infrastructure that calls for leadership.
If it sounds familiar, it is, because Cuba has a always been a Yankee stepchild.
Posted By: Marta Fernandez
Monday, August 1st 2011 at 2:53PM
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