Alberto Jones is an Afro-Cuban of Jamaican ancestry who runs the Caribbean American Children Foundation in Palm Coast, Florida
At this late stage of the fifty year old US-CUBA political strife, reasonable individuals would assume that those charged with inflicting pain, suffering and destruction on the Cuban people, would have concluded that their despicable task have come to an end, that the game is over, and as good sportsmen, they would retreat to their burrows and accept defeat with dignity.Doing what is right would have earned these Cuba-haters at least a few milligrams of sympathy, but it is now clear, that such principles are not part of their genetic make-up nor their life values.
Today, we were introduced to Dr. Jose Azel’s treatise. ‘Fidel Plays the Race Card’, Cuba Transition Project 6/16/09 ctp.iccas@MIAMI.EDU in which his mimetic, new found love for Afro-Cubans living in Cuba without family members overseas sending remittances, broke his heart. He is also profoundly offended by Castro casting himself once again as Robin Hood, with sinister overtones.
What this opportunist fails to include in his article, is that he is part of this multi-pronged effort to incite racial division, strife and a potentially dangerous racial confrontation without lines of demarcation, in such a highly mixed society.Like many others bent on squeezing out every penny out of US-AID, CIA and front foundations willing to pump millions of dollars into every fake organization purporting to be fighting the Cuban government, they are required to present a bio, a body of dirty work against Cuba to support their job application and approval.
Clever, educated and able to use some extra cash, why should Dr. Azel not build up his standing among his peers and future employers, by regularly compiling and publishing tendentious fact sheets as others do?
Key in this chain of command is Mr. Frank Calzon, who has not being indicted as yet, notwithstanding his closest aid, Felix Sixto sits in prison for the next six years, for depleting and pocketing nearly half a million dollars earmarked for their ‘Freedom Fighters’ in Cuba.
Still, the most disgraceful trait of this band of opportunists, is their shameless attempt to exploit real, unresolved problems that seriously affect the wellbeing of tens of thousands of Afro-Cubans, by pretending to be their benefactors, when most who are familiar with our convulsive history since our forceful arrival on these shores, are acutely aware of who our real tormentors are.
Beautifully laid out, are Dr. Azel’s bio-statistics of the Cuban government breakdown, is sublimely presented to draw a parallel with the racist, apartheid South Africa government, which by the way, most of them wholeheartedly supported and many fought alongside their defense forces.
Pitifully invoking the name of their newly coined poster boy, Dr. Elias Biscet and proudly reminding us of his Presidential Medal of Freedom, I wonder, as so many other Cuban dissidents who decided after time to set up shop in south Florida, if Dr. Biscet will be a welcome guest in his neighborhood, his home or as other Afro-Cubans, he will be confined and forced to find refuge in Allapath, Overtown, Parramore, Cabrina Greens or any of the hundreds of Ghettos reserved for Blacks and other minorities across the United States?
Has Dr Azel evolved at such an astronomic speed, that he no longer thinks and acts like his proud ancestors, who brag of having kept their puppet President Fulgencio Batista out of their exclusive Havana Yacht Club, Nat King Cole forced to use the kitchen door at the Hotel Nacional to perform, or when the Kasalta restaurant marked the border, beyond which, Afro-Cubans could not go after dark, without being escorted out Miramar by their private security guards?
Can any of these south Floridian, right-wing Cuban-Americans, suddenly enamored with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and staunch supporters of the Civil Rights Movement, present any document, pictures, newspaper articles or oral history, demonstrating that any one of them supported or was ever near any of these history changing developments in the early 60’s, when they enjoyed privileges denied to all blacks in the United States?
Although Cuban-Americans since the early 60’s had wide access to radio and print media in the US, never, did anyone of these upper class, rich, powerful individuals, with ample access to the highest level of the US government, ever uttered a word on behalf of blacks, whose flesh was ripped apart by attack dogs, lynched by supremacists, incarcerated in mass and murdered with impunity.
Thanks, but no Thanks, is all we can say to Dr. Azel and thousands like him, who are skillfully resorting to mimetic tactics, trying to inflame our sentiments, fight the Cuban government and hand them in a silver platter, a country they have proven to be genetically unfit to fight for by themselves.
The following article on race in Cuba, authored by a Cuban psychologist, is of interest.
Race Matters in Cuba
By Sandra Alvarez Ramirez*
Blacks have been main ones who have helped to examine diverse topics of this Cuban social reality. Photo: Caridad
HAVANA TIMES, July 3 (IPS) - A recurrent fallacy in the discussion of racial consciousness being raised in Cuba at the moment is the fact of speaking only about that which concerns blacks when dealing with the issue of race.
It is as if restricting the analysis of what is occurring to negritude. This aspect can be explained by the fact that black people, for the most part, have been those who have historically experienced the particularities of racism and racial discrimination in Cuba, and how this has soaked deeply into current Cuban society.
Blacks have been main ones who have helped to examine diverse topics of this Cuban social reality, such as the treatment of black people by the media and in publicity, especially the female body; black aesthetics; the role of the family in the formation of racial identities; slavery in the establishment of racist thought; discriminatory stereotypes present in the social imagination, the participation of black people and mestizos in the nation’s history, the social representation of black men and women, among other themes.
Another of the controversial questions related to racial consciousness is which name should be used when one speaks of black people? ”A person of African descent,” “Afro-Cuban” or simply “black” are the variety of available nouns, each of them having a specific particularity with differentiated connotations.
I believe that there could be many variants and positions, and the sole fact that a person decides to describe themself in a certain way makes the term valid. In no way do I believe that the self-description of a person of African descent or Afro-Cuban is copying the African-(US)-American pattern, or anything of that manner. Each is entitled to be named as they desire. Identity exists so that people can exercise it in their favor.
Color Absent from Cuban Schools
Another of the recurrent questions is the posing of the racial question as if it were only of interest to black people and mestizos. White supremacy has not only pushed blacks to the periphery, but also those issues that could interest them.
The statement “I don’t have anything to do with that, I don’t feel racism” alerts us that there are those who do not recognize that this is a concern for everyone, given that in the established relations of subordination there are those who hold the power and those who do not, generating inequities that are expressed in very diverse forms.
The following anecdote illustrates the situation: recently, during the presentation of a compilation of works on negritude by Nicolas Guillen, one person on a panel suggested that a copy of the book be given to every black child in the country, because (supposedly) it was written for them by our national poet. Beyond my thoughts on this matter, it is important to highlight how still - in the current Cuban discussion of race - people continue to think of black issues, race matters and racial discrimination as a “black problem.”
The above-mentioned is very subtle and sophisticated evidence of this. Fortunately, before the conclusion of the activity, someone on the same panel highlighted that such a volume should be provided to every Cuban young person, regardless of their race, because the racial question in Cuba is a problem for everyone.
In this same vein, the recurring phrase “we’re all same” no longer convinces many, because in reality, this supposed equality has its paradigm in whiteness. Whenever we speak of a human being, we universally think of someone who is white; this explains the blindness that many have when it comes to skillfully detecting when racist prejudice is being used to evaluate human behavior.
As professor and intellectual Esteban Morales put quite clearly, in Cuba color is not mentioned in our primary schools, nor is there a scientific discussion of the theme; therefore, people are by default educated to be white, once again supremacy is white. This is, for us, evidence of institutionalized racism by omission.
Neo-Racism Cuban Style
The previous aspects are expressions of racial prejudice, even when some are so sophisticated that they end up constituting a type of “neo-racism Cuban style,” with it being masked, mutated and transmuted due to the lack of open and recalcitrant discriminatory manifestations, like those expressed in some other countries (against indigenous women, for example).
White supremacy has not only pushed blacks to the periphery, but also those issues that could interest them. Photo: Caridad
Nevertheless, there still remain certain biologically-oriented theories, recently confirmed by me and having a marked retrograde character; these reproduce old hypotheses now rejected by the natural sciences for quite some time, if not centuries.
The existence of such arguments (which range from explanations of why blacks are not or cannot be excellent dancers in Cuba’s classical ballet to reasons why few are not part of our national aquatic sports team) also alert us of the permanency of a racism that we had come to believe had been eradicated from our social mind set.
Careful! Such assertions can be very harmful when they are offered by scientific assessments, and we now know the damage that can be done by science (or rather pseudo-science) in the establishment of discrimination between human beings.
In this same manner, if we analyze the currently existing stereotype about the hyper-sexuality of women of African descent, sustained in the belief that black people are closer to primates and therefore to nature, it is as if they were more primitive, more savage and less educable.
This, together with the opinions of biological theorists, can lead us to understand how racist and sexist prejudices can be interrelated and result in arguments that are fully discriminatory and very difficult to dismantle or deconstruct.
*Excerpt from an Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) article by Sandra Alvarez Ramirez, a Cuban psychologist. Translation from Spanish to English by Havana Times.
Article printed from Havana Times.org: http://www.havanatimes.org
Article on Sandra Alvarez: “Black Female Cuban Blogger”
URL to article: http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=10901
As an African Cuban whose politics/culture and those of my family are rooted in both the Taino indigenous native of the Caribbean as well as Africa (Angola to be exact)
i am appalled at the comments above by Sister Alvarez,
>Each is entitled to be named as they desire. Identity exists so that people can exercise it in their favor.
This tells me that it is obvious to her, accepting the labels created by others, is in African Cubans favor?
Well, i disagree. As a Cuban of African descent i make sure to always push my own face and those who look like me..into the light of day, because for i as well as African Cubans, to continue allow others to define us with labels which continue to deny, dilute and destroy our being is ludicrous in 2009.
The issues which affect Africans in Cuba where 70% of my own relatives still reside have been decided by some ignorant African Cubans and others who seek business as usual.
The criteria for acceptance is one in which the African remain quiet, willing and able to bow his/her head/ accept peicemeal/and deny his/her own humanity.
The African Cuban, is far more guilty due to our own story one of our continuous battles for recognition and for “OUR OWN FAIR SHARE” so in light of this,
i continue to speak out in rage amd disbelief towards those who know OUR story vs His story yet continue to accept hand me downs.
Fidel, my own parents, uncles, and other family members struggled for freedom, left blood on Cuban and “African soil while Marti, Maceo and others also did likewise for Cubans.
Marti, struggled and died for a united Cuba, not for African Cubans to be denied thier right to be called African. Cubans we are, no denial, However, Africans we are as well, and we should never ever cease to keep our face, in the face of the WORLD!!
Many, have this wrong, and perhaps some serious study more education, and willingness to at least examine African Cuban roots would serve to dispel myths about Negro, Negrito, Mulatta, Prieto, and Negrazo?
These names my sister Sandra, are NOT endearing and even if they were, your own words> identity exists so that people can exercise it in thier favor? tell us that there is doubt?
My question is..what is favorable or beneficial about leaving African out? When all African Cubans, i am aware of and have encountered worldwide have the entire map of Africa on thier faces?.
My thoughts about this reason are directly related to the control. This, coupled with the need for those in power to maintain things as so, as well as for those same supremacists to feel no shame when they are seen with a lightskinned or African Cuban passing for white, but African features.??
This denial of Africaness, gives the controlling society the right to dictate rules, deny rights and forego change for all Cubans of African decent. It also alows for the psychological re-enslavement of the mind, and the preparation for what many percieve as the return to chattel slavery..
In other words..Control the slave, tell him/her to enter through the back, and if there is no back the slave will make one because he is OBEDIENT.
I REST MY CASE
JUST90MILES@YAHOO.COM