Cuba condemns events in eastern Cuban province

HAVANA, Cuba, Oct 31 (ACN) The Aponte Commission of the National Association of Cuban Writers and Artists ( UNEAC by its Spanish acronym) condemned the racist and ethically detestable actions of the organizers and participants in the events that took place in Holguin on Saturday, the UNEAC reported today on its website.

Due to its importance, we transmit in its entirety the Declaration of the Aponte Commission of UNEAC.

An unusual event took place recently in the city of Holguin. According to testimonies published on social networks, a group of young people, after celebrating Halloween in a space they rented, at the final moment of their party, went to the public street masked in white with KKK insignia and a cross, with aggressive and provocative shouts such as "Where are the blacks?

Our society cannot allow such actions, with impunity, on behalf of freedom of expression. Our Aponte Commission, made up of writers, artists and researchers from all over the country, strongly condemns the racist and ethically detestable behavior of the organizers and participants in this demonstration that has nothing to do with our culture and identity and much less with the values we advocate in the construction of a better society.

We demand the criminal responsibilities that the organizers and participants in this act of violence deserve, for violating the right to equality, foreseen and sanctioned in the Penal Code.

As a people, with an identity in constant process of assimilation of new foreign influences, at the same time that we contribute more and more, from the Cuban culture, to the universal culture and to that of different near and distant people, aware that globalization is an objective process of civilization, we do not condemn the Halloween festivity; However, we reaffirm that it is not part of our cultural heritage, that we can integrate from it what is identified with our habits, customs and traditions, as has happened with other cultural manifestations of the most diverse origins, including the Anglo-Saxon.

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 assumed and transculturated in our own way.

Nowadays we are creators of a Latin Jazz and a Cuban Jazz, which was not born in New Orleans but in our halls. We cultivate the filin 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 neighbourhoods. 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. 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.

Nor should a holiday, whatever its origin, be conflated with racial hatred. Halloween, although not ours, is not a racist tradition and it is an act of lese culture to tarnish it with a felony such as the one that occurred.

In Cuba we do not have several ethnic groups, nor are we multiethnic, we are ethnologically a single people: the Cuban, and anthropologically, an ethno-nation. We are genetically and culturally mixed, we are inclusive and our phenotypic diversity makes us diverse in appearance, but we are unique in our essence.

Racism, although historically present in the four colonial centuries and the 60 years of neocolony, 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 development, we have built a new society, which seeks a new man and a new woman, and socialism is incongruent with racism and any form of discrimination.
Acts of discrimination and hatred are intolerable and reprehensible in a society that we built with love, fraternity and unity.