Friday, February 10, 2012

Civic and Economic Robbery / Mackandal – Manuel Aguirre Lavarrere

Civic and Economic Robbery / Mackandal – Manuel Aguirre Lavarrere
Mackandal - Manuel Aguirre Lavarrere, Translator: Unstated

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

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=14926

No comments:

Post a Comment