Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 25

Regionalism
as a Political Strategy
José Hugo Fernández
Writer and journalist
Havana, Cuba

T

here is a question that one hears persistently and regularly on the streets and in
the homes of Havana: “From where have
so many orientales [Cubans from the eastern
provinces] come, taking over Havana, without
any indication of a dramatic population decrease
in the island’s eastern region? It would be difficult to answer this question definitively. There are
no reliable statistics (or none that are publicly
available) about the internal migratory patterns in
our country. Yet I believe that this is neither the
first nor the foremost question we should be asking about the issue. Of course, it is natural that
poverty and lack of opportunity should drive
Easterners to the capital. Yet, although Havana is
also overwhelmed by the economic crisis, conditions there are not as desperate as in the interior.
And it is no less natural that rural populations are
growing faster than wildgrass, given the precarious circumstances in which people live. It might
be more useful to question why the exodus from
the provinces to the capital has gone from being
seen as a common and reasonable phenomenon—
as it was prior to 1959 in Cuba and is today in
many other places around the globe—to becoming a veritable national tragedy. This is a tragedy
that not only greatly affects the housing situation
and sources of income for residents of the capital,
but also situates the émigrés from the interior
(Easterners, blacks and mestizos, particularly) in
a position of impoverished subsistence and marks

them with a double stigma: they become pariahs
- lacking legal protection and any guarantees
whatsoever for their survival - and are rejected by
their fellow countrymen, for whom the migrants
are a threat to material problems already at a critical level.
Havana has been growing disproportionately and
dramatically for decades. The infrastructural
shortcomings as well as social and economic
problems increase concomitantly with the city’s
expansion. Poor people from the interior, and orientales in particular, face the worst of fates:
forced to emigrate, they leave behind their native
soil and must fend for themselves - from the
depths of poverty and vulnerability - in the face
of regionalist hostility and selfishness in a city
that is also poor and offers little or no opportunities. Hostilities may seem logical and even expected - although unfair - from residents who see
the newcomers as the very reason for their own
worsening misfortunes.
One would not need to consult an urban map to
know that these emigrant waves end up settling
mostly on Havana’s periphery, where today there
are hundreds of settlements, communities and
shantytowns created in open defiance of the authorities.
Blame for this calamity lies with only one entity:
the revolutionary government. And the current
situation has a clear origin, with specific events
that can be described in detail, despite the fact

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