Palestinians in Cuba or the weight of a stigma

For several decades, practically half of the Cuban people have been derogatorily called

Palestinians

.

The elements that have been installed in the popular Cuban imagination for the creation of this meaning are diverse, but they are based on the stigma that the Palestinian people carry.

Attributing stereotypical traits to ethnicities, nationalities or regions of origin is a very common resource, from Galician to Catalan, English and Japanese.

And what are the Palestinians?

Beyond its use as a demonym, what other referential value does this word contain?

What traits are included in this stereotyping?

And, no less important: what do Cubans have to do with all this?

Social psychology has defined stereotypes as generalizations based on the simplification of reality based on the selection of one or several traits.

They can refer to nations, religions, languages, but also to sexes, to age groups;

We are all susceptible to being categorized and, therefore, stereotyped: that if the French are romantic, women are intense, Muslims are terrorists and the best Spanish is the one spoken in Spain.

As can be seen, the stereotype may or may not be negative, but it also leads to the conception of a prior judgment in any assessment of the other or even of oneself;

In short, it leads to a prejudice that, when negative, can translate into negative attitudes.

That is, discrimination and stigma.

Language as an instrument of communication is the bearer of these judgments and perpetuates them, for better or worse.

In this perpetuation, referentiality is lost in many cases.

If not, remember the association that has been established between the black and the marginal, the illegal, the politically incorrect -

black sheep, black market, black list, black humor -

, when in reality the triggers of these associations are nothing more than the implicatures cultural aspects of the black race that we speakers have made throughout history.

Something similar has happened with the term

Palestinian

in Cuban Spanish.

In recent decades its use has expanded to refer to those who are natives of Eastern Cuba.

There is no exact moment that can be identified as the origin of this name, but it can be said that it has been in widespread use at least in the last 30 or 40 years.

The

Cuban Spanish Dictionary

of 2000 records

Palestinians

as “inhabitants of the interior, especially of the eastern part of Cuba, who come to live in Havana.”

This definition reflects what may have been the first meaning it had in Cuba, but currently

a Palestinian

is anyone who was born in one of the easternmost provinces of the country, from Las Tunas to Guantánamo, regardless of whether they have emigrated to the West or not.

Logically, the name is activated when the denigrated subject bothers, which is when he emigrates, when he invades territories that are foreign to him, when he comes to marginalize even more the marginalized, to be part of the periphery of an urbanity that does not belong to him, but not This means that the meaning associated with migration has not been expanded and this name has changed its geographical position: it does not matter if it has emigrated or not, not only those from the Middle East are Palestinians, but also those from the Cuban East

.

Migration from East to West in Cuba is a complex issue that dates back to the 19th century, but intensified after 1959. Since the 1960s, the flow of national migrants to Havana has come mainly from the eastern provinces. and reached the highest rates in the nineties.

All of this led to the taking of measures to regulate migration that consisted of authorizations to move to the capital and impediments to hiring people who were not Havana residents in the workplace.

These decrees came to legitimize discrimination and, with it, the name of

Palestinian

and everything it entails.

The consequences have been illegal settlements in the capital's peripheral municipalities, evictions, improvised slums called “arrive y pon”, in which these migrants, mostly oriental, live without electricity, without water, without paved streets and without the right to supply book.

The police force – ironically made up mainly of young orientals brought to the capital – has authorization to ask citizens for identification and arrest anyone who considers them to be not officially residing in Havana.

Even today, those who reside in Havana without government approval for the change of address continue to be described as “illegal” and the siege of these citizens continues.

The question still remains: why, among all the possible references, is the name

Palestinian

activated to refer to the easterners of Cuba?

Between Palestinians and Cubans, contact has not been close, precisely.

Yes, there has been sustained support from the Cuban government to the Palestinians, from Fidel Castro to the current president Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Cuba has supported the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Popular Marxist-Leninist Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), with intelligence training and financial support.

It has also received Palestinian students at the Latin American School of Medicine since 2005 and has graduated 104 Palestinian doctors.

Today, 200 students are studying in Cuba, many of whom come from the Gaza Strip.

Beyond this and the war conflict to which Cubans, as part of the world, are no strangers, there are no other links that have activated the Palestinians in the popular imagination.

The associations that are established must be notions linked to displacement, armed conflicts, refugees, Islamism, terrorism;

These associations intensify with each ups and downs of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, so widespread and systematic that it leads speakers from a place as far away as Cuba to use

Palestinian

as a derogatory adjective to refer to a human group from the eastern zone that perceived as inferior in many ways and as an unwanted migrant.

To the condition of the Palestinian people as a wandering, displaced people, negative elements have been added that include issues of race, language, cultural level, social type, and purchasing power.

And

Palestinians

have become in Cuba the insult that half of a people makes to the other;

the symbol of the discrimination that Havana, the Atlantic city, the Gulf city, does to the Caribbean, because the Caribbean is the others, the blackest, the ones who speak the worst and because “Cuba is Havana and the rest are green areas.” ;

It is also the parody of a people divided by a historical feud that opposes the two Cuban capitals, Havana and Santiago;

It is the caricature of one of the most terrible conflicts in history transferred to the “wonderful real” of a Caribbean island, where the bombs that detonate invasions and refugees are legislation that marks territories, illegalities and superiority by place of origin.

These Palestinians, like the others, in some way also seek refuge.

With the new escalation of the conflict that has taken place in 2023, Cuban President Díaz-Canel, a Palestinian, originally from the province of Holguín, has called for a pro-Palestinian march.

Obviously it is a march in favor of those who are being massacred on the other side of the world.

Discrimination against Palestinians in Cuba is part of the

status quo

, of the immovable reality of a stranded island, of a stigma that is so entrenched and is no longer perceived.

Perhaps it is time to empathize with Palestinians inside and outside.

Perhaps it is time to question this designation.

Maybe it's time to ask for their forgiveness.

Although this is the least of the apologies the world owes them.

Roxana Sobrino Triana

is a doctor in Linguistics and professor at the University of Bergen (Norway).

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