Vol. 75/No. 27      July 25, 2011

Participants from groups in Colombia and Venezuela, as well as academics, political activists, and government figures, came from more than 20 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. The largest delegation, some 80 people, came from Colombia.

Some 25 percent of the population of Latin America is of African descent.

In response to demands for an end to discrimination by workers and farmers of African descent in Venezuela, the government designated May the Month of Afro-Descendants. This year activities were organized to discuss an anti-discrimination law now before the National Assembly, as well as modification of the questionnaire for the upcoming census to get a more accurate count of Afro-descendants. In Bolivia a nationwide debate broke out earlier this year in the wake of the signing of a law by President Evo Morales prohibiting discrimination against both indigenous and black peoples.

Aristóbulo Istúriz, vice president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, welcomed conference participants. Other speakers included Fernando Soto Rojas, president of the National Assembly; Piedad Córdoba, a former senator from Colombia; and Norma Romero, who spoke on behalf of Afro-Venezuelan groups. “Our heritage is not a cultural one. It’s a political heritage, a heritage of struggle,” said Romero.

Present at the opening session was a large group of Haitians studying medicine at the Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM), a sister school run by the Venezuelan government to the ELAM in Cuba. The school in Cuba was set up in 1999 by the revolutionary government there to train thousands of students from around the world at no cost for tuition, room, or board.

Close to 150 speakers addressed sessions and panels on topics from pressuring governments and institutions to end discriminatory practices, to high joblessness among blacks, to the disproportionate number of blacks in prisons. During informal discussion, several participants described the situation of Afro-Colombian communities forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands by developers and mining companies.

Among the featured speakers were Jerry Rawlings, former president of Ghana; Jesús “Chucho” García, an Afro-Venezuelan activist and Venezuela’s ambassador to Angola; Cuban journalist Pedro de la Hoz; and Ali Moussa Iye, coordinator of UNESCO’s “Slave Route Project.” A solidarity message was read from Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African American activist and journalist framed and imprisoned 29 years ago on charges of murdering a cop.

Róger Calero, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, spoke on the panel “Challenges and Opportunities for Afro-Descendants in the National and International Labor Movement.” The consequences of the deepening capitalist crisis, he said, “are creating an openness among workers and farmers in the United States to an explanation about the need to end the dictatorship of capital and replace it with the power of workers and farmers. That new state power is the most powerful weapon to fight every form of exploitation, including Black oppression.”

Many at the conference were drawn to a display of books published by Pathfinder Press and to discussions with communist workers from the United States about the class struggle there. Participants bought 180 books and pamphlets, and six subscriptions to the Militant. Among the best sellers were Spanish translations of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, speeches by revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara from the African country of Burkina Faso, and titles on the fight for women’s liberation and the Cuban Revolution.

Most speakers advocated reforms within capitalist social relations as the road to fight racism. In a discussion on including more people of African descent in government agencies, María Alexandra Ocles from Ecuador warned of the tendency of these institutions to become just one more level of bureaucracy that cannot advance the struggle.  
 
‘First step was revolution’
“We have created government institutions in Cuba to deal with the question of racism,” said Heriberto Feraudy, “but the first measure we took to combat racism in Cuba was the Jan. 1, 1959, revolution.” Feraudy is head of the Commission for the Fight against Racism and Discrimination of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

He explained how Cuban workers and peasants overthrew rule by capitalists and big landowners and used their state power to uproot racist institutions and practices. He pointed to discussions in Cuba today on how to overcome vestiges of the centuries-long legacy of chattel slavery and capitalist oppression.

The week before the Caracas conference, a weeklong seminar took place in Havana on Cuba and Peoples of African Descent in the Americas.

The conference here was seen by organizers and many participants as a political counterweight to a gathering set for August 18-21 in La Ceiba, Honduras. Billed as the “First World Summit of Afro-Descendants,” the event was announced in Washington, D.C., May 26 by the Pan American Health Organization and UN World Health Organization. Speaking at the news conference were representatives of the Inter American Commission of Human Rights of the Organization of American States, long a tool of U.S. imperialism’s drive to subjugate the Latin American people, and the Honduran ambassador to the United States.

The final conference resolution included proposals to create a ministry-level council of Afro-Venezuelans; allocation of funds to aid Afro-descendant communities in Latin America; a solidarity fund for Haiti; and an end to NATO bombing of Libya and military intervention in Africa.  
 
 
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