"I Stopped For You Because You're White"

"I stopped for you because you're white," the taxi driver tells me after the tires screech in Reina Street around midnight. From his wide mulatto lips come the justifications, one after another, for why he doesn't accept clients "of color" at this late hour. He looks for complicity in me, who was born in a majority black neighborhood and who loves skin the color of cinnamon. I barely listen to him. Those who discriminate against people like themselves especially bother me: the hotel doorman who berates the Cuban but lets a shouting gesturing tourist pass; the prostitute who will go, for ten convertible pesos, with a Canadian twice her age but doesn't want to seem "defeated" by accepting a fellow Cuban; the Santiaguan who, once installed in Havana, mocks the accents of people from his own city.

Often I wake up and wish I was mixed, like Reinaldo and Teo, because when you look at my straight nose and my pale skin you think I have it easy. But it's not true. There are many ways of being separate, because along with racism here we have discrimination based on social origin, the stigma of ideological affiliation, and the exclusion for not belonging to a family clan with power, influence or relationships. Not to mention the underestimation one receives in a macho society for having a pair of ovaries hidden in the middle of your belly. And so I am bothered by the dissertation of the driver who stopped the car because of the pallor of my skin. I want to get out, but it's late, very late.

"What do you do?" he asks me under the streetlights of Belascoain Street. I'm a blogger, I warn him, and the lights of Carlos III Avenue show me his suspicious and fearful face. "Look, don't go and tell what I just said," he says, changing the indulgent tone he used when picking me up amid the gloom. "I don't want you to publish later some nonsense about me on the Internet," he clarifies, while grabbing his crotch in a gesture of power. My straight hair is no longer a reason to trust me, now my eyes don't seem so almond-shaped, and when I explain--through my narrow lips--the subjects I deal with in my blog, it's as if I am threatening him, razor in hand, a dangerous criminal. I confirm, then, that his spectrum of classification stigmatizes not only some shades of color, but also certain leanings of opinion, those tones which are not carried on the epidermis but that also lead, on this Island, to displays of segregation and rejection.

Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.

 

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Comments

[SigmundF]

Most penal population in Cuba is black. It has a lot to do with the institutional racism of the governmental class. Castro and his establishment are white. The movement that helped him to the power was a white based movement designed to push out the power the former dictator Batista, too “dark” for the taste of the Cuban dominant class and US department of state. 70 % of Cuban dissidents and opposites are black; Cuban black population suffers the hardest live condition. This part of the Cuban population suffers racism continuously since the slavery era until today when the racism becomes deeper due to the impoverishing of the country. Racism has become institutional because racists people has the power. It is so briefed accepted racism among the governmental class and its supporter that even those that uses internet for supporting Castro dare openly to show theirs racism in the web demonstrating in this way racism is part of the castrism ideology.
Here a link to a pogrom of Castro supporter on Cubans dissidents (Oscar E. Bicset, a black opposite)…. You maybe will believe it is Mississippi 1950 but not, it is Cuba 1999:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CrDqFIacLk

[oustfan]

What do you think about people living in Alabama who make fun of the local accents?