Ku Klux Klan cartoon

by Pedro de la Hoz

In the heat of a holiday that is completely alien to our cultural identity, although increasingly implanted in sectors of the population, a group of young people have provoked outrage, especially in social networks, by taking to the streets dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods, asking: "Where are the Blacks?"

This public expression is absolutely inadmissible.  And much more unacceptable is the passivity and permissiveness that surrounded the act.  It cannot be ignored that racist manifestations are punishable under Cuban criminal law.

It is necessary to go beyond the anecdotal, even though, I insist, the institutional and legal response to the act remains to be seen.

Racism is a cultural construction that, if not attacked at its roots, penetrates and survives in human subjectivity.   The supremacist culture, which privileges the supposed advantages of one skin color over others, is not exclusive to the United States, the nation that developed this perverse approach with the greatest force.

In Cuba, we have had to fight tooth and nail against "the deception of the races", an accurate Orticiano concept, to vindicate the historical and cultural legacy of the enslaved Africans and their descendants to our legitimate mestizo culture.  Much will have to continue fighting, but the process of revolutionary transformations of recent decades has not only given impetus to this perspective, but has also observed those areas where insufficient progress has been made and where racist patterns and stereotypes are still being reproduced.

In any case, what has happened reveals the communicating vessels between a repudiatory ideology that is alien to the ethical values of our society and the uncritical assimilation of cultural models of consumption that have nothing to do with our idiosyncrasy.

It would be appropriate to refresh with reflex art the problem in all its complexity during one of the episodes of the first season of the series Calendar. Anti-racist education is a consubstantial element of Cuban socialism and everything that is done to inculcate these precepts will always be welcome and necessary.