The Center for Latin American Studies and and Wittenberg University are pleased to welcome Esteban Morales Domínguez to Ohio State University. As a young militant in the Student Youth movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context.
Morales is one of Cuba's most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question. A member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, Morales has held numerous academic posts and has been awarded three times by both the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Higher Education. He is the principal or co-author of 15 books and has published more than 100 theoretical articles; his 2007 book, Desafios de la problemáticas racial en Cuba (Challenges of the Racial Question in Cuba) was the first book-length academic publication on this subject by a scholar based in Cuba since the 1959 revolution.
Morales will give a talk about his recent book, Race in Cuba: Essays on the revolution and racial inequality, in which he argues that the revolution must be an ongoing process and that to truly transform society, it must continue to confront the question of race in Cuba.
