América Latina: ¿clase media de las naciones?

questions about Castro's commitment to the national integrity oE African States. . There has been a suggestion in some drdes that Cuba's interven– bon is in fad a kind of renewed validation of Pan-Afrioanism. AfteraIl, Cuba's population is at Jeast farty per cent black in one sense or another. In the streets of MexÍco City 1 have myself known the excitement of being mistaken for a Cubano It gave me a feeling :about the wide distribution of people of African deseent in the Western hemisphere. . In his dfort to legitimize Cuba's intervention in Angola Castro himself has emphasiz,ed the African bIood flowing in the veins of many Cubans. In his rhetoric he has even suggest-ed it was flowing in his own veins, though that seems to be :a statement made more' in respons,e to the exigencies of the Angolan situation than in response tu the boundaries of genuine biological self-definiHon. At the Second General Meeting of the African Association of PolíticaI Science' held in Lagos, Nigeria, in ApriI 1976, a relative of President Neto of Angola aIso attempt-ed to legitimize Cuba's participation in an African civil war on the grounds that Cuba was nan Afro-Garibbean :country". But if the Unitoo States were tostart describingitself as fundamentalIy an "Afro.Caucasian country" would that he1p to give Washington ,legitimacy to partidpate in a future African war? Is the presence oE peopIe of African .a,ncestry in a country outside AfrÍca an a<Iequate basis for the intervention by that externaI country in an internal African conflict? But there were positiveaspects also to Castro's daim on the issue oE tace. Afterall, under his revolution, Cuba has' witnessed remarkabIe changes in race relations. A correspondent for the New York Times, David Bind'er, explored this issue once even before Cuba's, involvement in the Angolan civil war. He intera-cted with a Cuban poet\.l)f mixoo ancestry, NicoIa Guillen, from the 'eastern part oE the isIand. Guillen, a .roan who began writing verse in the 1920's and soonturned ro themes of race and racial oppresion, captured the change in Cuba in the foUowing teJ:lms: 13 "My revolutionary feeling wasawakenoo by the struggle against racism in Cuba. 1 was consideroo black. Ther,e was a dear1y ,definoo color Ene in Cuba, a produet oE 400 years of colonialism that included 60' years under United States influence, particulary the Southern United States. No blacks wereaUowed In the 13 David Binder, "Cuba ~I\1S to Vanquish Racism", The New York Times, October 9, 1974. 82