The following analysis of Cuba's growing racial tensions by journalist Tom Carter originally appeared in The Washington Times.

It was forwarded to the Mid-Ocean News by a reader from Warwick with the accompanying letter:

"Last week's Mid-Ocean News presented readers with a fascinating object lesson in official hypocrisy.

"You carried a front page story about the Bermuda Government's decision to secretely negotiate a treaty of friendship with Cuba despite the fact that, among other unsavoury activities intended to prop up his crumbling dictatorship, President Castro has recently taken to executing black people by firing squad for non-capital crimes.

"Inside the paper, in an article about the Black Berets, I see that paramilitary organisation was stridently calling for Bermuda to uniltarally declare Independence from Britain in 1971 when the UK sold weapons to South Africa because those guns would most likely be used to kill black people.

"Since several former members of the Black Berets are now in positions of leadership in the current Government, I wonder what has happened to their thinking in the intervening 30 years.

"A white fascist regime like apartheid South Africa executes black people and Bermuda, as a point of principle, should declare Independence to protest Britain's accommodation of that regime; a white communist dictatorship executes black people and these self-same people think it's time for Bermuda to formalise previously non-existent relations with Fidel Castro and draw our island into the last remaining Communist sphere of influence in the Western world.

"Forget the potentially devastating impact this move may have on Bermuda's economy because of knee-jerk US opposition to the Castro regime

"Just look at this scenario from a strictly Bermudian point of view for a moment: What our Government is telling us is that it's OK for communists to torture, jail and shoot black people but not for fascists do the same.

"The leadership of the Cuban opposition to Castro is largely black; the majority of those anti-communist/pro-democracy dissidents sentenced to lengthy prison terms by Castro in April are black; the three men executed by firing squad following a trial by kangaroo court were, of course, black. Bermudians should be shaking their heads in disgust.

"In April 2000, the former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares told students at Duke University: 'All of the dictatorships are the same; to characterise that some are worse than others is a mistake. If we are going to justify the dictatorship because of all the schools and hospitals that Castro built, then we have to justify Hitler, Stalin and Pinochet because they also built schools and hospitals. How do you justify that when a Cuban finds anything that can float, they leave Cuba?'

"Armando Valladares is a poet. He is a Christian. He is also what we would have called in the old days in Bermuda 'coloured' - of mixed black and white heritage.

"I would much rather that my Government reach a 'memorandum of understanding' with Cuban heroes like Valladares, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet - the black prisoner of conscience whose photo appeared on the front page of the Mid-Ocean News this week - and others have stood up against Castro rather than with their oppressor.

"Frankly, we already understand as much about Castro and his culture of fear as we need to; to sign a treaty with him is somewhat redundant."

The note is signed "Black & Proud (but not of my Government)."

THE execution of three blacks by a Cuban government firing squad in April for attempting to hijack a boat to Miami is raising questions about racism on the communist island. It was the first time anyone, black or white, had been executed for trying to flee Cuba. Cuban President Fidel Castro justified the executions of Jorge Luis Martinez Isaac, Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo and Barbaro Leodan Sevilla Garcia as a deterrent to another mass exodus.

But some Cuba watchers, on and off the island, doubt that the three would have been put to death had they been white. "By executing (three young blacks), Castro was sending a clear message to the Afro-Cuban population" that dissent will not be tolerated, said Jaime Suchlicki, director of Cuban studies at the University of Miami, in a report on Cuban racism released this week.

"I was a Fidelista. I love my nation," Ramona Copello told wire service reporters in Cuba on April 11, the day her son was executed. "I no longer love Fidel. He assassinated my son. Now I have no faith in the revolution."

On March 18, two days before the beginning of the US-led war with Iraq, Cuban officials began a crackdown by arresting 35 opposition figures. A day later, six men hijacked an airplane to Key West, and less than two weeks later, a second plane was hijacked. The three Afro-Cuban men tried to commandeer a Havana ferry to take them to Florida days before the Castro regime jailed 43 dissidents.

The ferry hijackers were executed April 11, nine days after their capture.

Cubans of African descent, who make up 62 per cent of the island's population, live in the worst, most dilapidated Havana neighbourhoods: Cerro, Luyano and Guanabacoa. Afro-Cubans have the worst jobs and are increasingly disenfranchised, according to the University of Miami report.

In 1997, the Cuban government passed laws preventing citizens from moving to Havana in search of high-paying tourist jobs, but according to the State Department, the law "was targeted at individuals and families from the poorer, predominantly black and mulatto eastern provinces."

The report notes that none of the top ten generals or senior military leaders in Cuba is black. None of the 15 presidents of provincial assemblies is black. Two of the 40-person Council of Ministers is black, and three of the 15 provincial heads of the Cuban Communist Party are black.

Cuban blacks, according to government reports, have five per cent of the lucrative tourism jobs, but Afro-Cubans constitute 85 per cent of Cuba's prison population. Afro-Cubans and black tourists increasingly complain about "racial profiling" by state security officials, according to the report.

Mr. Castro, a white revolutionary from an upper-class background, overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt leader of mixed race, in 1959. One of the pillars of faith in the Cuban revolution is that Mr. Castro freed poor black Cubans, giving them schools, jobs and health care.

Today, Afro-Cubans who turn their backs on the "gains of the revolution" are considered unappreciative.

"There are a growing number of black Cubans in the opposition movement. The leadership is almost entirely black or mulatto," said Frank Calzon of the Centre for a Free Cuba, noting that the ferry hijackers could not have been executed without Mr. Castro's specific order.

"No white Cuban has ever been executed for trying to leave. The message is clear: If you are white and speak out, it is bad. If you are black and speak out, you are ungrateful and watch out."

But Wayne Smith, at the Centre for International Policy, though acknowledging that racism exists in Cuba, said it did not play a part in the executions.

"It was wrong. They didn't harm anyone, but the Cuban government said they had to do it to prevent a mass exodus. My sense is that they were not executed because they were black," said Mr. Smith, who has extensive contacts within the Cuban government.

A spokesman for Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute disagreed. "There is racism in Cuba; I think if they were white, they would not have been executed," he said.