This thesis is a comparative analysis and discussion of affirmative action(s) for underrepresented groups in Brazil, Cuba, and Ecuador, with particular attention being paid to afro-descendants. Despite shared identities as Latin American countries, the aforementioned countries have responded differently to discussions around affirmative action policies in their respective countries because of a difference in social consciousness influenced by historical events and political ideologies. This difference in social consciousness can be seen to emerge at critical junctures -colonization and slavery, freedom movements, questioning political sovereignty and stability -which have shaped present-day identity politics. The differences seen here among countries once political linked and now economically linked can hopefully engender an appreciation for differences in identity and racial politics seen elsewhere and provide a serious discussion for how to address racial inequality.

Historical and political influences on modern debates: affirmative actions in postcolonial latin america

WHEN I WAS A child and the communist authorities would send a volunteer worker to inquire why I had not yet joined the Pioneros or generally was not going along with the rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, my grandmother would react in a way I found puzzling. She would show the visitor, usually a woman, to the sitting room my family used for people with whom we were not intimate, and then serve coffee in the good china (not the chipped and weathered cups used with family and friends). Then she invariably would launch into a version of the same routine. Abuela would employ an exceedingly cordial but distant manner, with none of the comfortable banter that Cubans with bonds of friendship use with one another--though she was careful to drop here and there a well-calibrated cubanismo, to display her roots in the native soil. A cold smile fixed on her lips, she would get around to informing our visitor that "this family has been in these parts for many generations--centuries." Yes, she would go on, "we've noticed there is a Revolution going on outside. The important thing to us is that we're a familia cubanisima. And what was it that you said about my grandson again? Oh, no, he won't take part in that civic event Sunday morning. He will be at church, you see. He's an altar boy there. Our family built that church, by the way, the one you saw on the way here. Yes, our name is on the first brick was laid there." Why on earth Abuela wanted to share these things with these visitors, I always wondered. Today, four decades on, I know why she proclaimed we were a corner stone. We had memories of a time past, and history put things in context. From earliest childhood I was taught that my father's family's roots in Cuba ran deep. "Childhood" is perhaps too quaint a word for what was a daily anomaly: Outside raged the Revolution, with such foreign visitors as Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael descending on Havana to join Fidel in marches, sloganeering, and taunting counterrevolutionaries; inside our walls, laden with portraits of ancestors, angels, and saints, we had ourselves, books, and hallways that echoed of La traviata and Cavalleria rusticana, emanating from my father's record player and prized 78-rpm record collection. Our knowledge of the past amounted to more than just the point of pride that people take in their family histories in stable countries. History gave us a sense of permanence that assured us of our daily survival, just as oaks can withstand gale force winds because of deep tap roots. The people of Cuba today need that permanence, that stability and sense of belonging. This may jar those who have visited Cuba and seen a deprived but proud people. Yet, as the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez has written, "Most young people's eyes are looking to the outside, because they see that they cannot make change in their country. They desire to take a plane to Miami or Europe and in ten hours change their lives completely." Convincing them that they have a future on the island will require wholesale change: massive amounts of capital, a huge infusion of technical know-how, and restoration of the rule of law (respect for private property, for starters). But even these major fixes won't be sufficient to secure the island's revival. As the Cuban writer Jose Azel recently observed, "Post-Castro Cuba will need to rebuild much more than its economy; it will need to rebuild its national identity." That is because wiping out that identity--one that had grown organically through the centuries and had produced an enterprising and creative national character--was Job One for the Revolution; it was a necessity, even an obsession, to communists intent on imposing an alien blueprint on the people of Cuba. "Cubanism" had to be wrung out of the people's consciousness so that the much-touted "revolutionary consciousness" could be installed in its place. Timeless habits had to be changed, ways of thinking rewired, history rewritten. …

Michael Gonzalez

Papers

Cuba's Lost History