The Root is reporting that Roberto Zurbano, a top editor at Cuban publishing house Casa de las Americas has been demoted over an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times about discrimination against blacks in Cuba.
Caroline Bankoff of New York Magazine writes:
A couple weeks ago, Roberto Zurbano, a top editor at Cuban publishing house Casa de las Americas, wrote a New York Times opinion piece criticizing Cuba’s long history of discrimination against black citizens. “Racism is alive and well,” he wrote, though saying so is “tantamount to a counterrevolutionary act,” since the island’s revolutionary leadership claims that their 1959 takeover lead to equal treatment for black Cubans. On Friday, Zurbano announced that he had been assigned a new, lesser analyst job at Casa de las Americas, implying that the demotion had something to do with the article.
While Zurbano refused to comment on his employment situation when contacted by the Times, he did say that an editor altered the piece’s headline without asking him. “It was a huge failure of ethics and of professionalism,” he said. The headline, which was translated from Spanish, read, “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun”; Zurbano claims that it should have been “Not Yet Finished.” However, he told the AP that he did not wish to retract anything in the body of the piece: “I continue to think the same ideas. There is still much to discuss about racism.”
Read more at The Root or New York Magazine.
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