Cuba: Seminar Focuses on Racial Equality

Cuba: Seminar Focuses on Racial EqualityHavana, Jun 14. -Opportunities and strategies for reaching a regional consensus on achieving racial equality for people of African descent is the focus on Tuesday of the seminar Cuba and the People of African Descent in America.

Participants are attending the event, which began Monday and ends Friday, from the United States, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Uruguay and the UN. The program includes a tribute to Cuban independence fighter Antonio Maceo on the 166th anniversary of his birth.

Fernando Martinez, director of the Juan Marinello Center for Research and Development of Cuban Culture, which is hosting the seminar, said in opening remarks that the capitalist system emerged on the basis of slavery, generating discrimination and all forms of marginalization.

The UN Children's Fund representative to Cuba, Juan Jose Ortiz said that none of the thousands of children of African descent affected by poverty and all its secondary effects is Cuban, thanks to the government's political will.

U.S. actor Danny Glover, who is attending the event, said it is a tragedy that racism still exists in the second decade of the current century.

"We continue fighting this terrible problem and for that reason, this seminar should go beyond its borders and spread all over the world, where there are other injustices," stated Glover, who called for going beyond the racial struggle and uniting efforts to save the human species. (Prensa Latina)