The following was written by César Reynel Aguilera and published at Penultimos Dias. Posted here in English, as translated by my good friend Regina:

The Right to Exist
February 25, 2010

Recently a billboard has shaken the North American public. The announcement, to which almost no one can remain indifferent, reads: Black children, a species in danger of extinction. The reason for this shocking idea is given with the reference to a web site whose name is “toomanyaborted.com.”

The African-American population of the U.S. is decreasing, and this is happening in spite of the fact that women in this ethnic group have a much higher probability of becoming pregnant than white women. The problem comes from an appraisal of abortions, which is double that of Caucasian women who are pregnant. This calls attention to the fact that the black female community of the U.S. not only has had the right to know about these alarming statistics, but also that some of them have enjoyed the possibility of creating a campaign directed to correcting something that, with all logic, they consider as a demographic and cultural catastrophe. No one has denied them the right to know about the data. No one has put them in prison for reacting in order to defend something that, like the immense majority of human beings, they consider sacred: their identity.

In Cuba, however, the black population enjoys the sad right of statistical invisibility. Simply put, they don’t exist. Any review of the annual demographics and indicators of health in Cuba shows that it’s almost impossible to know, to a scientific certainty, the number of pregnancies and abortions according to racial origin. These data appear to be secret, or worse, figures that are subject to the disquieting capacity of the Castro regime for disinformation.

In spite of this, any health professional knows, by his own experience on the ground, that the demographic harm caused by the Castro regime to the black Cuban population is much worse than the already alarming harm caused to the population in general. Let’s remember Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, a man of black race, who is serving a prison term of 25 years, in inhuman conditions, for his defense of the rights of man and his opposition—it’s important to remember—to indiscriminate abortion.

This penalty, as exaggerated as it can appear, is in full agreement with the contempt that the Castro regime always has shown for the black population, and the cruelty that it enjoys inflicting on the Cuban opposition that surges inside this population.
The recent proof of this cruelty is the assassination of the opposition figure Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a construction worker who never engaged in violent activity, a man who was incarcerated for his ideas, and who suffered maltreatment and humiliations by the guilt of his skin color. For Castro, the major crime of Orlando and Oscar, as well as having been born, was to throw back one of the most precious sentences: “Don’t tell me what you did, tell me what you are doing.” Those two black men brandished their right to criticize reality. They declined the barter of a supposedly free education for silence and complicity with today’s abuses.

That’s what the Castro brothers want to conceal. It’s a reality that, according to the latest authorized published statistics, shows, among other horrifying data, a slackening of the growth in the black population for the last 25 years, a limited representation of this skin color in the dominant caste, an unemployment level which duplicates that of whites, and a prison population almost six times higher and with an average age between 18 and 28. If we add to this that only 15 percent of Cuban-Americans are of African origin, we shall recognize that 85% of the black population in Cuba does not have much possibility of receiving remittances from abroad. This is one of the time-bombs that Castro wants to leave as an inheritance to Cubans.

The defenders of the Castro brothers want to present Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s death as a consequence, hypocritically sad, of the human right to die. They forget the word “dignity.” They pretend to cover with bloody fingers the brightness of a simple man, who after years and years of tortures and humiliations had no other remedy than to use his own body like a public billboard to tell the world—without a bomb, without firing a weapon, without murdering anyone other than himself—what the Castro regime did to him, his race and his people.

César Reynel Aguilera
Montreal