Cuba: Crackdown on Afro-Cubans destroys myth of racial equality

Jon Purdue in The Miami Herald:

Crackdown on Afro-Cubans destroys myth of racial equality

 

Berta Soler was in Oslo this week, where the Human Rights Foundation awarded her former Czech President Vaclav Havel's Prize for Creative Dissent.

OSLO, Norway At the time of Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba in 1959, “separate but equal” was the norm in much of the Western world. Castro won plaudits from early supporters for banning the practice of separate facilities on the island, promising a raceless, equal society under the new regime. Today, the regime instead targets any Afro-Cuban who dares challenge the historical fallacy that blacks on the island have fared better under the Revolution.

[…]

The regime’s racially-focused crackdown received international attention last month when Roberto Zumbrano was fired from his job as editor of a publishing house in Havana after his New York Times article pointed out the reality for Afro-Cubans in Cuba: “To question the extent of racial progress was tantamount to a counterrevolutionary act,” Zambrano wrote. “This made it almost impossible to point out the obvious: racism is alive and well.” About the same time, an overtly racist cartoon video, made by paid propagandists of the Castro regime and uploaded to YouTube, slandered Berta Soler, the head of the peaceful protest group Ladies in White, portraying her as an orangutan.

Soler took the mantle as the head of the Ladies in White after its former leader, Laura Pollán, died in mysterious circumstances after a run-in with the regime’s enforcers last year. The group has come under more aggressive attacks in the last year, enduring beatings while in the act of leaving their Havana church to walk silently and carrying a single flower in remembrance of their political prisoner husbands and family members.

Soler is in Oslo this week to receive the Václav Havel Prize at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an international human rights event that brings dissidents from throughout the world to a place where they can speak freely, out from under the gaze of their oppressors.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/15/v-print/3399285/crackdown-on-afro-cubans-destroys.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/15/v-print/3399285/crackdown-on-afro-cubans-destroys.html#storylink=cpy

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