By José Antonio Aponte, Declaration of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC ) on October 31, 2022
photo: Bill Hackwell
UNEAC, made up of writers, artists and researchers from all over the country, has issued a statement after a group of young people in the province of Holguin, while celebrating the Halloween holiday (alien to our cultural identity), went out dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods, asking: where are the blacks?
The document “strongly condemns the racist and ethically abhorrent conduct of the organizers and participants in this demonstration that has nothing to do with our culture and identity, much less with the values we advocate in building a better society”.
In this communiqué, the Commission demands criminal responsibility from those involved in this act, for violating the right to equality, provided for and sanctioned in the Penal Code. The text emphasizes that, although it does not condemn the Halloween festivity, since, as a people with an identity in constant process of assimilation of new foreign influences -which increasingly contributes more, from the Cuban culture, to the universal culture and to that of different peoples near and far-, we are “aware that globalization is an objective process of civilization”, this celebration however “is not part of our cultural heritage”.
“Let’s not copy a festivity that is not part of our idiosyncrasy. From the Anglo-Saxon north we received many cultural contributions that we assimilated and transculturated in our own way”, the document states, and maintains that at present “we are creators of a Latin Jazz and a Cuban Jazz, which did not emerge in New Orleans but in our living rooms. We cultivate the filin (Cuban musical genre), which is not exactly the feeling. We have a Cuban Rap and a Hip Hop culture not copied from New York, but born from the feeling of our city neighborhoods. Our rodeo in the Cuban countryside is not of blond cowboys with Texan hats, but of guajiros with yarey hats, tanned by the tropical sun”, continues the text.
“We cannot self-colonize. We have a strong and rich culture, which is the sword and shield of the nation and which we have and must save, to save ourselves as a nation and as a people,” it refers, and argues that “we should not mix a holiday, whatever its origin, with racial hatred. Halloween, although not ours, is not a racist tradition and it is an act of lèse culture to tarnish it with a felony such as the one that occurred”.
Towards its final lines, it is explained that “we do not have in Cuba several peoples, nor are we multiethnic, we are ethnologically one people: the Cuban, and anthropologically, an ethno-nation. We are genetically and culturally mestizo, we are inclusive and our phenotypic diversity makes us diverse in appearance, but we are unique in our essence”.
The statement makes it very clear that racism “is not compatible with the project of nationhood that we initiated in 1868 nor with our mestizo essence. In the last 63 years of our historical evolution we have built a new society, which seeks a new man and a new woman, and socialism is incongruent with racism and with any form of discrimination”. For such reasons, “acts of discrimination and hatred are intolerable and reprehensible in a society that we are building with love, fraternity and unity”, he concludes.
Source: Granma, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US