A Racist Intellectual Legacy

A Racist Intellectual Legacy / Mackandal – Manuel Aguirre Lavarrere
Translator: Chabeli

Racism was supposedly abolished by the revolution of the Constitution
and from public places, but there were no policies to educate the
citizens to be conscious about their actions.

The revolution did not care about intellectual abolition of racism and
did not educate the people about this phenomenon.

Blacks are seen as inferior beings with an ugly skin pigmentation and a
lower IQ, and therefore, they must be treated according to these
differences, so that at least one day they will become closer to the
civilization imposed by the white race, which claims itself to be the
superior race. Everything that does not fall within the whites' rules is
considered as culturally and humanly disposable.

All this has been the result of a racist intellectual legacy.

The phenomenon of the right to own property adds to the worsening of the
racial issues in Cuba. The Cuban regime suppressed private property,
which it considered to be one of the vices of capitalism. In the Castro
regime's society, private property exists by custom and acceptance, but
not — until recently — by law and rights, which are still subject to the
will and rules of an arbitrary regime.

This has to do with social and ethnic relations because the regime is
the sole owner and guarantor of rights, and it can grant or expropriate
goods and property, with tricky laws whenever it pleases.

Black and mestizos in Cuba are the property of the regimen, which from
redemption and free labor has turned them into a cheap labor force. A
large supply of slaves, all from a single owner.

Within Cuban socialism, skin color weighs heavily over social relations,
and the man loses all of his freedom rights, becoming property of an
ideology that manipulates him and can put him on sale or make him
disappear whenever his Master, the State, says so.
Skin color and class struggles become meaningless. The man does not
exist as such, no matter how much they want to pretend the opposite.

The invisibility of blacks is their punishment for being a bad example
and a stigma for society.

Today's racism is the fruit of a prolonged belief in eugenics and of a
white-focused and anti-black legacy.

Only open regimens may be able to provide spaces for everyone, to create
spaces for debate about social issues without the presence of the State,
whose only obligation is to respond to the will of its people. And this
is only accomplished in representative democracies whose ideological and
political formula is so far not surpassed by any other in guaranteeing
individual rights.

Published by Primavera Digital, July 7, 2012

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