"More than half a century ago, Fidel decreed the elimination of racism," said Leonardo Calvo Cardenas. But "this just made the problem deeper and more complex." Calvo Cardenas is an Afro-Cuban — a group that makes up roughly half of Cuba's population but that is greatly under-represented in its political leadership, media and nascent business class. Calvo Cardenas hasn't always been on the outside looking in. "I was the director of the Lenin Museum," he told me during a visit to Washington this month.
But Calvo Cardenas' days in the Lenin stacks came to an abrupt end in 1991, when he and his friend Manuel Cuesta Morua, a historian at Havana's Casa de Africa Museum, lost their jobs after publicly criticizing the Castro regime's lack of democracy. The two went on to form a democratic socialist organization that the regime routinely harasses but, atypically, hasn't stamped out.
"We were the first alternative political movement that publicly opposed the U.S. embargo," said Cuesta Morua, who accompanied Calvo Cardenas on his visit. "That makes it more difficult for the Cuban government to give us the kind of treatment that other dissidents have gotten."