Life
Black in Cuba
Still, Castro added: “I am satisfied by what we’re doing to discover causes that, if we don’t fight them vigorously, tend to prolong alienation in successive generations.”
But Castro’s own Communist Party and government fall short on the race front. Only four recognizably black faces sit on the party’s 21- member Political Bureau, and only two sit on the government’s top body, the 39 member Council of Ministers.
The highest-ranking black in Cuba is Esteban Lazo, a former party chief in the provinces of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Lazo was tapped by Castro when he took ill in the summer of 2006, along with brother Raúl Castro and four others, to help rule Cuba in his absence.
And yet, black faces populate Cuba’s political prisons. Some of the nation’s best known dissidents are black. They include independent librarian Omar Pernét Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physician Oscar Elias Biscét. The latter was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King’s non–violent forms of protest.
“Race is the biggest social issue facing Cuba,” said Enrique Patterson, a Cuban-born Miami author who writes extensively about race, and calls this nation’s race problem a “social bomb.”
“If this problem is not addressed, Cuba will not be governable in the future.”
