Iván César Martínez

Iván César Martínez had a career as a Cuban diplomat, then joined the faculty at the University of West Indies, Mona, in Kingston, Jamaica, where he is a sociologist in the Government Department. Prior to that, he was Ambassador to Guyana, Barbados, and Zimbabwe.

He is the author of The Open Wound: The Scourge of Racism in Cuba from Colonialism to Communism, Arawak publications, 2007, and has more books on the way.

The Open Wound: The Scourge of Racism in Cuba from Colonialism to Communism (Perfect Paperback), Arawak publications; 1st edition (April 18, 2007), 248p

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This book examines the root causes of racism, its historical development and persistence in Cuba through to the present period. Martinez adds his voice to the theoretical discussion of the most decisive and challenging issue to have faced Cuban society from the time of the Iberian conquest to the present day. The Open Wound is intended to fill certain gaps, both in the general historiography of Cuba and in the philosophical approach to racism. 

It touches how and why this ideology has survived for more that 500 years and also attempts to explain how the Cuban colored population has shared, collectively, the experience of White racism, creating the need among them for a specific national Black-Mulatto agenda that has always been stubbornly suppressed by the White dominant group. 

The chapters of The Open Wound follow a historical sequence tracing the devastating effects produced by this ideological political system on the psyche, the habits, the cultural and aesthetic values, the patriotic and revolutionary behaviors and the material life of the Cuban people. The work aims to demonstrate how for five centuries Cuba s darker-skinned population have not achieved real freedom, and to explain why the different moments in this long period -- colonialism and slavery; abolitionist period with colonial rule; republican-subordinated independent era; anti-democratic dependent regimes; and the period of communism or totalitarian socialism -- have not been able to solve the race-color problem so entrenched in the Cuban elite ideology of White supremacy. The work is also intended to serve as a tool to eradicate this terrible scourge by demystifying the so-called color-blindness of Cuban society and showing clearly the existence of a hierarchical color-structure of power that has never changed and that keeps the majority of the population -- Cubans that have been sentenced for the crime of having been born with a darker skin color -- at the bottom of the society, permanently excluded and reined in.

CONTENTS

Preface 

Acknowledgments 

1. Cuba's Racial Ideology - An Overview - The State of Probation 

2. The Iberians and their Conquest of the Americas - The Convenient Elasticity of the Racial Divide - Europe Before the Era of New World Colonization - Spain Before Columbus' First Voyage - The Introduction of African Religion and Philosophy to Cuba in the Sixteenth Century 

3. The Development of the Ideology of White Supremacy in Cuba 

4. The Haitian Syndrome A Totalitarian Ideology of Social Exclusion: The Subrogee Mentality of Cuba's Elite and its Historical Defense of Racism 

5. Racialism and Racism in the Wars of Independence - The Tragedy of the First War of Independence - José Martí and the Last War of Independence -  Lessons From the Two Great Wars of Independence 

6. The White Mongrels and the Whitening of Cuba - White Racial Hatred in the War of 1912 

7. The Silent Racial Confrontation (1913 1959)
 
8. The Enemy Theory, Nationalism and the Race Issue 

9. Racism Within Radical Communism - The Application of the Criminal Code as an Instrument of Racism, and Job Discrimination in the Last two Decades - Exodus from the Cuban Mainland 

10. Has the US Embargo Influenced the Race Issue in Cuba? 

11. Racist Ideological Forms: An Analytical Conclusion