A Cuban dissident group has published a report detailing 145 cases of human rights violations against black Cubans, sanctioned by the communist Castro regime, which proclaimed the end of racism in 1962.
The Spain-based Diario de Cuba details the accusations in “Denial, Exclusion, and Repression,” a report by the Citizens’ Committee for Racial Integration (CIR), a dissident group dedicated to exposing the oppression of racial minorities under communism in Cuba. While the group reportedly completed the study this month, Diario notes that State Security policemen shut down an attempt to formally debut the results of the study.
“The Afro-Cuban population has been excluded from the main labor mobility scenarios, as shown by several studies carried out by official institutions. These findings contradict the results of the National Population and Housing Census, which alleges that there are no significant differences according to skin color in terms of economic indicators,” the study reportedly reads.
Diario‘s Yusimí Rodríguez López notes that the findings in the report do not differ from conclusions white dictator Fidel Castro made in the final years of his life: “Blacks live in the worst housing, have the hardest and worst-paid jobs, and receive between five and six times less in family remittances in dollars than their white compatriots.”
Marthadela Tamayo, a member of the CIR, told the Miami-based Martí Noticias that the study found a “marked inequality of opportunity” for black Cubans that stems from “structural racism” imposed by the white communist elite.
“They tell us that [denouncing racism] affects national unity, that we are a group of black African descendants looking to foster some sort of anti-regime movement,” Tamayo protested. But in reality, “we base ourselves in how Afro-Cubans are denied and excluded from certain jobs in Cuba” and how “in this country, there is a small, if not nonexistent, Afro-Cuban presence in wait staff, hotel managers, or in the culture centers, or as stars of movies or television.”
Martí notes that CIR found that 82 percent of money entering the country through outside family transfers was delivered to white Cubans.
CIR members took their complaints to the Interamerican Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in March of this year, prior to having fully completed the report out this month.
“The Revolution thinks that we have to be appreciative to them for treating us as people,” CIR spokesman Juan Antonio Madrazo told the IHRC at the time.
Madrazo was arrested in September for inquiring with local authorities on how to participate in upcoming “elections.”
The face of the Cuban pro-democracy resistance is largely a black one. From Ladies in White leader Berta Soler and husband Ángel Moya to award-winning hunger-strike protester Guillermo Fariñas to 17-year political prisoner Jorge Luis García Pérez, the leaders of the counter-revolution largely come from the black non-elite.
When ESPN traveled to Cuba to cover President Barack Obama’s vacation there in 2016, it was a black protester – blind former political prisoner Yasser Rivero Boni – who interrupted the broadcast to call for freedom before being hauled away by plain-clothed police officers on camera. Even those protesters who are not affiliated with any dissident movement, such as pro-American prisoner Daniel Llorente, tend to come from the Afro-Cuban community.
In contrast, despite decades of vows of racial equality and disingenuous support for leftist racial equality movements in Africa, white Cubans have dominated both the communist government itself and the Castro cult’s iconography. Perhaps the best-known face of the Revolution internationally is that of an Irishman: mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Only one black man, Juan Almeida, was part of the original group of communists to rebel against mixed-race President Fulgencio Batista.