Political Discrimination / Fernando Damaso

Fernando Damaso, 30 August 2018 — The need to eliminate the various types of existing discrimination is constantly discussed and written-about in Cuba. Among them: race, gender, sexual orientation, region or country of origin, physical or mental disabilities, etc., etc. Even so, nothing is said or noted about getting rid of political discrimination. Apparently, just as the “irrevocable socialism” article–appended to the previous Constitution and also present in the current one–says, it possesses a like character.

Political discrimination has been a constant practice, applied from the highest levels of the Party and the State towards any such citizen who does not agree with the party line, and it can be seen–in its most fanatic, dogmatic and unhealthy extremes–in the Union of Young Communists, and in the student and youth organizations ruled and controlled by it.

Its leaders, advised and directed by their party and government “elders,” shout outdated slogans, rattle on about subjects of which they know nothing, and regularly use physical violence to impose their retrograde ideas on the rest of the young people.

They have tied them to the past, swindling them out of their present and compromising their future. For them there is no such thing as respectful dialogue, nor civilized engagement with differing opinions, because they have been brought up in the perpetual monologue: that of themselves with themselves.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison