Cuban Humberto Solás’ film-making points to essential and cultural elements that come out of the very drama of Latin American and Caribbean reality, especially Cuba’s. All of his work, including his unpublished scripts, procures enormous curiosity and attention toward the Latin American, way beyond the borders of their countries.
The structure of the cinematographic cultural view in an individual like Humberto Solás (1941-2008), who was born into a family of non-professionals, whose parents emerged in a single generation from poverty to middle class, was surely supported by contributions from diverse sociocultural contextual elements of the period.
The strategies, policies and regulations designed for the rural sphere must explicitly incorporate the gender-based focus.
Several studies note among the obstacles for rural women’s empowerment the overburdening of domestic responsibilities and child care, together with insufficient technical preparation and sexist stereotypes, which decrease their possibilities of going on to posts with greater complexity and better wages. Some of the studies place special emphasis on the need for a rural development and not just agricultural and livestock focus. This is why the public policies must better coordinate the provincial, gender and youth variables to study in depth the specific factors that can be determining in the localities the gender-based gaps and the falling behind that rural women experience, among them the young women, in their empowerment. Actions that deal with the solution of the conflict between the public and the private, a phenomenon that is significantly limited to women’s participation, must also be incorporated. The productive entities can play a relevant role in the promotion of new means of coordination between work and family life, as well as in access to employment and equal participation. On the other hand, the training and cultural transformation must continue being a prioritised activity in a world where the patriarchal culture is so rooted.
The future of the nation fundamentally rests in that there be a significant group of youths with talent and commitment with the vision of the country we defend and that they prepare for this. It is also necessary to give up the idea that the State’s capacity for control and strength resides in the amount of officials – who know very little – and assume the principle that the good state administration depends on a few officials who know a great deal; just as it is strategic that the non-state sector adapt to the new demands of the Cuban model, among other premises.
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”
Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize for Physics
The recently concluded 7th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) placed greater emphasis than the previous one on the subject of the conceptualisation of the development model. The 15-page document in which the characteristics of the model are presented, with the declared intention of promoting analysis among Party and Young Communist League members and the mass organisations, started circulating at the end of May of this year.
In Cuba, the metaphor of the revolutionary utopia presumed that, with the mass creation of social equity programmes, racism and racial discrimination would disappear spontaneously. Unfortunately, the irruption of the 21st century has rapidly demonstrated that the epistemology of racism does not disappear in a natural manner because its historic incidence in the cultural thinking requires a mechanism of specific dismantling endorsed by a production of knowledge that is not always visible or accessible to those who, from social activism, do the most to organise antiracist proposals.
The reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States has awoken multiple interests about diverse subjects regarding Cuban society. In that context, raciality seems destined to take up the media’s attention, especially outside the island.
