By: Oreidis Pimentel Pérez
According to Miguel Barnet “multiculturalism is the only way to a better world, a multiculturalism that is a source of wealth and not pasture from the other, as a process, as a helmet against globalization that crushes identities.” This diversity is the essential characteristic of humanity, a date consecrated every May 21st to give visibility to the plurality of human legacies.
Since November 1994, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) tried to recognize cultural diversity as a heritage of humanity, but the universal ratification occurred in May 2001 with the approval of the UNESCO Universal Declaration.
Several countries, one of them Cuba, signed in Paris in 2005 their affiliation to the convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of human legacies, from which multiple scientific and informative actions occurred on a global scale, including within the so called Millennium Goals.
If we were talking about concept
As a definition, the concept could be qualified as the set of expressions that distinguish a community and by the way in which people, groups, among themselves and their collectivity dialogue with each other; therefore we find demostrations through language, architecture, music, dances, beliefs, food customs, trades, oral memory and traditions, among others.
Towards these studies, many intellectuals from Cuba and the world integrate research on ethno-anthropological roots, especially in a Third World marked by slavery and colonialism. For centuries the centers of power used anthropology as a political and hegemony tool, that is why the “South” needs to study and know itself from its own eyes, without tainted bibliography in European languages that indigenizes and minimizes us.
Racism, emigration due to conflicts, ethnic cleansing, the imposition of customs and languages on native peoples, the theft of lands and destruction of habitats through mining and oil exploitation are some themes that echo from Myanmar, the massacres in Palestine , the fratricidal conflict in Darfur, the Mayan Petén, the Brazilian Amazon, the Christian communities of Syria or the Mapuche areas of Chile as contemporary examples of how much the human diversity can be lost due to intolerance to diversity.
Cuba as an example
Cuba is one of the nations whose political will promotes increasingly inclusive socio-cultural development and favors participation in the conservation and enrichment of identity and cultural diversity. A good example can be found in Camagüey, where in its Office of the Historian, through an institution called Cultural Diversity House, a scientific conference is promoted that just in 2021 reaches its ninth edition.
Every May 21st should serve to prioritize different words in the midst of globalization and new technologies, to make discriminated minorities and expressions in danger visible.
Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García
