A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime

Black Lives Matter, for sure….

A wonderful editorial by Charles Lane in El Guasintonpó (Washington Post)

Millions around the world know Patria y Vida” — “Fatherland and Life” — the scintillating music video that inverted the Cuban Communist Party’s slogan — “Fatherland or Death” — and became the anthem of protests in Cuba on July 11.

Less familiar is “Oe’ Policia Pinga” — roughly, “F— the Police” — by the rappers Marichal and Daryelo Sánchez. Whereas “Patria y Vida” denounces 60 years of official “lies” and praises dissident artists of Cuba’s San Isidro Movement, “Oe’ Policia Pinga” channels popular fury at the regime’s day-in-day-out enforcers: “You’re the most hated guy in your neighborhood . . . You’ll see what happens to you when the people come for you/ No saint on heaven or earth can protect you.” Two Cuba-based rappers who appear in “Patria y Vida” have just released a remix of “Oe’ Policia Pinga” on YouTube, accompanied by images of protesters pelting police with rocks and overturning their cars on July 11.

Almost all these artists, like many of their compatriots who took to Cuba’s streets, are of African descent.

Cuba’s protests, suffocated for now, were overwhelmingly peaceful and included people of all ages and races. They have many causes — political dictatorship, economic deprivation, a failed government response to covid, sheer frustration.

Yet contained within them — indeed, at their forefront — are the special grievances of Black people in a country where enslaved Africans were first brought during Spanish colonial times, followed in the 20th century by Caribbean laborers such as the Haitians who were exploited by Angel Castro, Fidel and Raúl Castro’s father, on his vast estate.

Castro propaganda depicted the 1959 revolution as a triumph for Black workers and other poor Cubans, and many international progressives still believe it, judging by the endorsements on a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming U.S. trade sanctions for Cuba’s predicament.

The signatories included Black Lives Matter Global Network, which thereby lent its prestige to the largely White Cuban government’s denial of responsibility for deepening and increasingly racialized poverty in Cuba since its economy’s post-Soviet collapse.

Continue reading HERE

1 thought on “A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime”

  1. It seems that the disguise which has served Castro, Inc. so well for so long is becoming increasingly tattered and threadbare, and the foulness it’s been covering up is increasingly visible. True, it was always evident to those prepared to see it and call it what it was, but there had to be a disguise as a crutch and pretext for the willfully blind. Once that has too many holes in it, the “blind” will have to “see the light”–as in the case of Harvey Weinstein, who wound up rejected by many who had been only too happy to be his “friends.” If the costume continues to unravel, Castro, Inc. may be forced to replace its current puppet “president” with one of color, at least to buy some time. One thing’s for sure–it will do whatever it thinks will keep it in power, it will always lie as always, and it will play, however falsely, to whatever crowd can help it.

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