Civic and Economic Robbery / Mackandal – Manuel Aguirre Lavarrere

From slavery heroes emerge, but from infertile freedom only the useless emerge.
José Martí

The economy has always been the soft underbelly of the Cuban government. However, before 1959 Cuba was among the countries with highest economic solvency of the Americas, second only to a few countries such as the United States and Canada. There was an economic boom that flourished over long periods and that undoubtedly would have resulted in improved conditions for the citizenry.

Through workers’ strikes — demonstrations of civil rights — the Cuban proletariat achieved several important victories.

Despite the fact that the sharks also had their times, the citizenry was moving forward.

But the unconsidered issue of Afro-Cubans as a group with very specific problems, necessitated a policy that would emphasize racial individuality, as it should have been then and as it continues to be ignored in Cuba today.

The growth that at times has been found in the financial sector — according to official data — has not guaranteed improvements for the most deprived sector of the nation’s population, where the survey should also find many white families, but in fact does not.

Today the economic robbery, for which the government is solely responsible, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs due to layoffs that do not take into account years of service or the needs of the citizen, in a country that wants to make the world believe in the advantages of socialism. They create the mechanisms of exclusion such that vagrancy and crime increase, now under the aegis of totalitarianism.

It would be worthwhile to do a comparative study with the critical years when Cuba was a colony, when blacks and mestizos, as now, got the worst of it.

No improvement will be achieved through good management of political legerdemain, with the implementation of laws aimed mainly to maintain and strengthen the regime, against a citizenry that lacks all the essentials for a decent livelihood

The vast majority of Afro-Cubans know that buying time is a maneuver that is working very well for the regime, but that falls short for solving problems of such magnitude as ending the exclusion and racism in a society where the majority don’t take it into account, although committed to radical changes and a dignified citizen solvency.

9 February 2012