Saladin
Rookie
- Oct 16, 2009
- 121
- 17
I have to admit that I have no idea about how different racial groups interacted before the Revolution. I don't know that much about the history of the country frankly. I am told that in Mexico there are racial divisions and top of the heat are the Spanish-looking types and the further down the heap you go the darker the skin and the closer the person is to indigenous ancestry. But I suppose that's par for the course in a country invaded - after all it's the case in my country so I won't cavil.
That's effectively the case, and is a consistent pattern whenever an indigenous people are subordinated under invaders of a different cultural background, with repercussions lasting long after formal discriminatory state policy is abandoned. The informal racial hierarchies that continue to exist because of lasting patterns of economic subjugation (inherited from state-enforced subjugation) will endure, and in some cases, will be as powerful as their state-sanctioned predecessors were. Moreover, as long as so-called "Western democracies" can maintain discriminatory state policy, such as the ethnoreligious supremacy that has received official sanction in "the only democracy in the Middle East," we won't progress beyond such problems.
Another problem as to Mexico and other Latin American countries specifically is a lack of knowledge among U.S. citizens of the indigenous racial backgrounds of many "illegal" immigrants. They incorrectly regard them as "Hispanic" and nothing more, and thus have no comprehension that there is a racial connection between them and the Sioux, Cherokee, or Hopi. If they did, and realized that their limited social mobility was to some extent inherited from their dispossession at the hands of European imperialists centuries earlier, that might change the blatantly jingoistic mindset of some among them.
I think you're right about the attitude towards race post the Revolution. I can't say anything about it in an authoritative manner because I have no knowledge but it would seem to me to be valid. After all when Fidel and his compadres landed in southern Cuba in the Granma they were small in number but when they moved north they gained support from the ordinary people and if I can extrapolate from other previous Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America the European types would probably have been in the elite and obviously opposed to a socialist revolution.
Yes, I agree with that.