Cuban leader Fidel Castro greets former Guinea President Ahmed Sekou Toure and former Presidents Agostino Neto of Angola and Luis Cabral of Guinea-Bissau during the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Cuba in 1979.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
The recent statement issued by 60 African-Americans criticizing the Cuban Revolution on race relations is not representative of the opinion of progressive forces in the African community inside the United States. These individuals who signed the statement, many of whom are academics, have never really supported the revolutionary domestic and foreign policy of the Cuban government.
Judging from press accounts related to the origins of this statement, Carlos Moore, a longtime anti-Castro black Cuban, who has over the years sought to turn African-Americans against the Revolution, is behind the recent attack on the island's governent and leaders.
These individuals who signed the statement against Cuba are either confused or politically reactionary. Many of these individuals work for institutions in the United States that are staunchly racist and anti-people. Yet they are doing nothing to fight institutional racism inside the U.S.
When Obama was elected president of the U.S. over a year ago, some of these anti-Cuban elements attempted to say that the existence of an African-American president illustrated Cuba's failure to resolve race issues on the island. Such a conclusion derived from extreme idealism and the lack of a genuine class analysis of American society.
These individuals today have been exposed for their lack of rigorous analysis of a society that many of them have lived in all of their lives. Just because Obama was elected president did not mean that racism had been eliminated or even curtailed within U.S. society.
In fact by the end of 2009, many moderate and liberal groups within the African-American community have condemned Obama for his failure to address the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis on the African-American community.
Both the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) have blasted Obama for his refusal to address the economic crisis that has created depression-like conditions among Africans in the U.S.
Cuba has been hailed as a beacon of hope for oppressed people throughout the world. The elimination of racism, illiteracy and sexism as official state policy is commendable and sets an example for capitalist societies like the U.S. The Cuban government sent hundreds of thousands of its own people to fight for the liberation of southern Africa.
Many of the African-Americans who signed this statement against Cuba were just as confused about the struggle for African liberation as they are today over the question of national oppression and the class character of U.S. capitalism and imperialism.
Cuba has endured and prospered under a five decade blockade led by the United States. Rather than condemn the blockade against Cuba, which the Obama administration has continued, they would rather curry favor with U.S. imperialism by spreading false information about Cuba and its revolutionary process.
These opportunistic and petty-bourgeois intellectuals and preachers should be refuted by the progressive forces inside the African-American community. At a time when the Obama administration is making it quite clear that U.S. imperialism will intensify its attacks against the people of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the people of African descent inside the U.S., these so-called "prominent" individual have exposed their class collaborationist character and inability to provide any clear direction for African people inside the U.S.
Below is an article reprinted from Presna Latina reporting on Cuba's response to this latest provocation from the United States.
Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
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Cuban Writers Refute Fallacies About Racism
Escrito por Elsy Fors Garzon
viernes, 04 de diciembre de 2009
(Prensa Latina) Cuban writers and artists refute the false statements in a recent document circulated on behalf of a group of intellectual and African-American leaders on racism and "harassment of black citizens on the island".
In a message about this document it is underscored how this fiction seems a vagary delusional if not an outright "malicious intent of adding respectable voices of the Afro American community to the anti-Cuban campaign that seeks to undermine our sovereignty and identity.
Signed by the poet and essayist Nancy Morejon, Africanist Rogelio Martinez Fure and the poet and anthropologist Miguel Barnet, among others, the text emphasizes how since the first days of the popular victory in 1959 the institutional and legal bases of a racist society were dismantled.
Never before in the history of our country, black people and mestizos found opportunities of personal and social achievement as they did since then. These opportunities were sustained by policies and programs which led to the launching of what the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz called an integrative phase of the Cuban society that can be postponed, the message added.
If the Cuba of these times was that racist country they want to invent, its citizens would not have contributed massively to the liberation of African peoples. More than 350.000 Cuban volunteers fought alongside their African brothers against colonialism.
"A person of unquestionable global visibility, Nelson Mandela, has recognized the role of these volunteers in the final bankruptcy of the infamous apartheid regime. From Africa, he states, we only brought the remains of our dead. "
If today's Cuba felt contempt for the black, neither more than 35.000 young Africans would have been trained in our schools over the past 40 years, nor 2.800 young people from about thirty countries in the region would be studying now in our universities.
Remember how the founding president of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) was Nicolas Guillen, a black poet, one of the most remarkable in the Spanish language of the twentieth century, an active fighter against racial discrimination and personal friend of Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson.
It also points out how within the UNEAC, an organization that turn its back on this problem, has created a permanent committee to fight from a cultural perspective against all vestiges of discrimination and racial prejudice.
After dwelling on the valuation and redemption developed through these years, in relation to the historical and spiritual heritage of the acculturated African on the island and then become one of the elements of Cuban nationally, the signatories concluded by referring to the Yoruba proverb quoted at the beginning of the message:
"A lie can run for one year, the truth reaches it in one day".
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