The Cuban social researcher and anthropologist MSc. Rodrigo Espina Prieto died today in Havana of cancer. His investigations on race and racism in Cuba were significant for the debate on Cuban society at different times during the last decades.
His publications appear in various Cuban and foreign magazines. Magazine Topics, in particular, he recognized his contribution today and mourned his death.
In a compelling essay published in Topics In 2006, Espina Prieto stated:
“Racial inequalities persist in Cuba, and have become more visible mainly since the economic crisis of the 1990s. It is the consequence of the functionalization of forms of racism that have remained hidden in the subjectivity of many people. It is a form of sociological racism that, under conditions of the opening of competitive spaces and the symbolic and real revaluation of certain economic sectors, finds the capacity to generate true inequalities. Among other aspects, a negative evaluation of blacks and a positive one of whites predominate in racial representations, which configures one of the fundamental barriers that limits the mobility of blacks towards the most advantageous sectors.»
He served as deputy scientific director of the Juan Marinello Cuban Institute. He was also a researcher at the National Center for Anthropology and at the Center for Youth Studies, among other tasks.
He leaves a truncated work in which the Cuban and the universal overlap in a natural and organic way. It includes studies, investigations and essays such as “Towards a characterization of racial prejudice in Cuba”, “The racial perspective in equity studies”, “Race Relations and Youth in Cuba”, “Towards a characterization of racial prejudice in Cuba”, and “Carpentier revisited. The Wonderful Real: A Caribbean Anthropology?”, among others.
A sensitive loss for Cuban culture, and in particular for the social sciences.
Rest in peace.
