1726. Remembering Celia Hart Santamaria

By Dmitir Prieto, Havana Times, September 10, 2009

Celia Hart Santamaría

The first year since the death of Celia Hart Santamaría is now being commemorated.  She died in one of those absurd automobile accidents that astonish us.

Celia was the daughter two legendary figures of the Cuban revolutionary struggle: Haydée Santamaría and Armando Hart.

Moreover, she was given her first name in homage to another revolutionary woman: Celia Sánchez.  The family Hart-Santamaría was itself a product of the revolution. 

 Haydée’s first boyfriend (anarcho-syndicalist Boris Luis Santa Coloma) was murdered after the attack on the Barracks Moncada, as was her brother Abel Santamaría, the second in command of the action (after Fidel Castro).

The Santamaría family has been marked forever by the deeds of July 26, 1953.  This was something you felt when you spoke with Celia, whose mother committed suicide on that same date in 1980.

She spoke to me as someone who shared the same principals by virtue of a blood duty with a tradition of fighting.  She liked to emphasize the libertarian-socialist militancy of her mother’s earlier boyfriend, as well as the similarity of the colors of the July 26th Movement’s flag with those of the anarchists.

Celia said she was a “Trotskera,” coming from “rockera”, meaning a female who is a rock-music fan, not a Trotskyist.  In fact, I met her at the Havana Book Fair in one of those stalls of Trotskyist publishers that I wrote about in a previous Havana Times article.  It was then that first began our bond of affection and friendship, reinforced by my role as coordinator of a cultural initiative that takes the name of Celia’s mother: The Haydée Santamaría Autonomous Collective.

Celia was never a member of the group, but we invited her to participate in an event that we organized at the conference room of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).  It was the first event organized in Cuba dedicated specifically to an analysis of the crisis and fall of “real socialism.”  It was titled “The Other Legacies of [the Russian Revolution of] October.” At this symposium, Celia presented the Trotskyist perspective on this subject.

Celia considered herself “Trotskera,” and not a Trotskyist, because Trotskyism as a unique movement no longer exists.  To be politically active in it one has to join one of the countless international organizations that are usually at odds with each other, and Celia was organically opposed to that.

Also, along with Trotsky, it was inevitable that Celia would refer to José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and other revolutionaries.  But Celia used to always speak about how her father had made her read the biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher after her return from studying in the German Democratic Republic, where Celia had lost confidence in Euro-Soviet model of socialism.

Thanks to Deutscher and Trotsky, Celia discovered the possibility that alternative models of socialism exist.  The biography that she had – according to Celia – was kept locked away, because in those times in Cuba you could not mention the name of Trotsky in public.  Today it is indeed possible – in certain venues in Cuba – to speak of various paths of socialism.

Celia had a contentious personality, but – incredibly – we did not get into heated arguments about issues, even when it was clear I didn’t share many of her ideas, opinions and assessments.

For me, the problems of Cuba have deeper roots than those Celia pointed out.  But it was pleasant to note that even beyond our ideological discrepancies we were able to maintain a healthy dialogue.  Likewise, we both perceived the black holes of the threadbare hypocritical and opportunist discourse that is clearly doing so much damage to Cuba.  In that Celia and I agreed.

She used to say, jokingly, that she was the “Princess of the Cuban Revolution,” and I sometimes referred to her as “Your highness, comrade Celia Hart y Santa-María.”  There was something of truth in that; the meetings at Celia’s house, the French wine and her readings out loud of e-mail messages from Cuban Five prisoner Antonio Guerrero are occasions things that will never again be repeated.

One of her writings that she shared with me in one of our last encounters was titled, “The Last Flight of the Santamarias.”  I asked her why such an apocalyptic tone concerning her family.  She responded with something related to the July 26th Movement and her mother’s suicide.  I didn’t quite get the point.  Those points are probably not for understanding.

When I returned from London, with no more delay I devoted myself to completing my Master’s thesis about how a revolution can become a new dominant system (the case study was on Haiti).  It was then – that fateful September of last year – that one night I received a call from my friend and Havana Times writer Armando Chaguaceda, who told me that Celia Hart Santamaría was no longer with us.

Celia believed herself to belong to the World Revolution.  She lived in a difficult period for Cuba and for revolutionaries.  Her last names protected her; but she was able to work beyond her last names, or better said, to make them authentic for a new generation. Now she is free.

1725. Trotsky, as Taught in Cuba

By Daisy Valera, Havana Times, August 17, 2010

Leon Trotsky as the leader of the Red Army standing to the left of Lenin

Lev Davidovich Bronstein —better known to the world as Leon Trotsky— died on August 21, 1940, in Coyoacan, Mexico.  One could think that the name of this Russian revolutionary would have come to my ears in my contemporary history classes in my first year of high school here in Cuba.

Nevertheless, the name Trotsky was not written in the history book that I carried around when I was 14 and 15.   From the classes of that period I can only remember the figure of Lenin, who was glorified by my teacher.

Like the more than 30 other students in my class, I knew of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as the primary and practically sole leader of the Great October Socialist Revolution.  The only other memory that I retained of those classes was the day we learned about the causes for the collapse of the USSR; for some reason, many of the students in the room looked at each other as if we had been double-crossed.

The history lessons concluded, as did my high school studies, without me ever learning that there had been a Leon Trotsky.  Only a few days before I began my program at the university —and by pure chance— I heard a song by a Cuban folk singer about how Trotsky had been one of the main figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The name of that revolutionary stuck in my mind, but any information about him was scarce in every place one could go to look him up.  It wasn’t until my third year at the university that the fact that I found myself among a very particular group of people allowed me to discover the full story of a part of history that no one had thought it necessary to reveal to me.

Finally the name of Trotsky stopped being just a name and for me turned into a person who had carried out actions of critical importance for the Russian Revolution.  He had been the principle representative of the St. Petersburg’s soviets (workers’ councils) as well as in the organization of the Red Army.

Perhaps the fact that I had never before known about Trotsky made me become an assiduous reader of most of his works, among which I have to highlight Permanent Revolution (1930) and The Revolution Betrayed (1936).

August 20th will mark 70 years since the fateful attack carried out by a Stalinist clique against a man who exhibited in his deeds and writings a love for the world proletariat.  He was confident that a social structure different from capitalism could free life of all wrongs.

Yet despite everything, this Trotsky still doesn’t appear in Cuban history books.  There’s no mention of the founder of the Fourth International, an organization committed to the struggle against bureaucracy, against those who sought to enrich themselves at the expense of other people’s labor, against those lacking scruples in accentuating the differences between classes in a society that aimed to construct socialism, and against those who did not allow the workers to either participate or decide.

So isn’t it important to reclaim him in the history taught on the island, a person truly committed until the final few days of their life to the non-degeneration of societies that are called socialist.

1724. Cuba Slows US Lawmakers’ Plans to Visit

By Bradley Klapper, The Boston Globe, February 6, 2015

WASHINGTON— A series of trips to Cuba by US lawmakers is in doubt amid questions about the Communist government’s eagerness or ability to accommodate a surge of new interest and possible investment from the United States.

American officials said the Cuban government has pushed off all congressional visits, including one by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, until at least mid-April. The Cuban Interests Section in Washington said some will go forward in the coming days, but others were postponed.

Several members of Congress had planned to go to the island country this month. They included Pelosi, a California Democrat, and Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, who has proposed ending the US travel embargo of Cuba.

President Raul Castro’s government has been scrambling to adjust to the possibility of new US travel and investment since he and President Obama revealed in December that the two countries would repair ties after a half-century of enmity.

Obama administration officials said they were informed by their Cuban counterparts earlier this week that no congressional visits would be allowed to travel to Cuba until April 15. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The Cuban Interests Section, however, rejected that account, saying some delegations would be arriving in the next days.

A spokesman, who demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly, said Cuba is receiving a large number of requests for visits. As a result, he said, the government is ‘‘arranging for the best possible dates for their visits so they get the attention they deserve in the middle of the many tasks we are facing at this moment in Cuba.’’

However, Senators Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, and Flake confirmed they wanted to visit at the end of the month but the Cubans denied the request.

Moran said the delegation was made up of GOP senators who are ‘‘open-minded about changing the relationship with Cuba’’ and wanted to get a better understanding of issues on the island.

‘‘At this point the indication is that they’re not ready for our visit,’’ said Moran, who still hoped to reschedule the trip. ‘‘We don’t know the reason. My staff has been told that the Cubans are not able to put together the necessary meetings that they would want to have for us. It could be just scheduling, but I don’t know.’’

Many of the trips aim to explore new business opportunities as part of the thaw in US-Cuban tensions. The administration last month significantly eased the 54-year economic embargo of Cuba, allowing US telecommunications exports for the first time and ending a restriction on US credit and debit card transactions on the island.

Cubans are still trying to gauge the potential effects of the changes. US companies also are still trying to make sense of the new regulations and much remains unclear.

Only Congress has the power to fully lift the embargo, a step Obama is calling for but GOP leaders in the House and Senate oppose.

The most immediate objective of US-Cuban diplomacy right now is reestablishing embassies.

The United States had been seeking to clinch an agreement before the Summit of the Americas in Panama. The meeting of Western Hemisphere nations takes place April 10-11 and could bring Obama and Castro together for a face-to-face meeting.

But the United States says Cuba must first end limits on US diplomats and on shipments to the current US Interests Section in Havana.

Cuba’s most pressing demand is an end to banking restrictions, many of which are linked to its US designation as a ‘‘state sponsor of terrorism.’’

The Obama administration probably will lift Cuba from that list in the next months.

1723. What Cuba Can Teach Us about Building a Culture of Health

By Maryjoan Ladden and Susan Mende, Culture of Health--Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, January 29, 2015

Ever since President Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba, there’s been growing excitement over the potential for new opportunities for tourism, as well as technology and business exchanges. Most people assume that the flow will be one-sided, with the United States providing expertise and investment to help Cuba’s struggling economy and decaying infrastructure.

That assumption would be wrong. America can—and already has—learned a lot from Cuba. At RWJF, we support MEDICC, an organization that strives to use lessons gleaned from Cuba’s health care system to improve outcomes in four medically underserved communities in the United States—South Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; Albuquerque, N.M.; and the Bronx, N.Y. Even with very limited resources, Cuba has universal medical and dental care and provides preventive strategies and primary care at the neighborhood level, resulting in enviable health outcomes. Cuba has a low infant mortality rate and the lowest HIV rate in the Americas, for example—with a fraction of the budget spent in the United States.

This past October we traveled to Cuba to see for ourselves how health and well-being are integrated into daily life. We wanted to learn firsthand about best practices that might be adapted to improve the health of residents in our own low-income communities. It’s important to recognize, though, that all is not ideal in Cuba. Poverty is widespread, the government is restrictive and many freedoms and access to information that we take for granted are not available to Cubans.

Our trip was focused on the health system, and there was a lot to learn. We visited schools, local health clinics, farms, and senior centers across the Havana area where we spoke with government officials, doctors, nurses, teachers, and Cubans of every age and many occupations. The journey was eye-opening: We saw how concerns about public health are deeply imbued in every aspect of daily life and play a part in every government decision. Staying healthy is considered a national responsibility, a message that consistently comes from the top, originating with Fidel Castro himself. If you keep fit and stay healthy you help your neighbors, your community, and Cuba.

How is this Culture of Health so deeply woven into Cuban society? For starters, the resources for maintaining health are free, universal, and available in every community. The central government views education, housing, public safety, and other national issues all through the lens of health. At a middle school, for example, students learn about nutrition and medicinal herbs along with physics and chemistry. Not far from our hotel in Havana, some streets were unpaved and buildings were in serious disrepair—yet the government had installed new pedestrian and vehicle countdown lights at crossings. When we asked why, we were told that there had been a lot of accidents on the road, so putting a system in place that lets pedestrians know they have 10 seconds left to safely cross the street is considered a good investment in public health.

Cuba’s health care system is not perfect. Medical records are still all paper, medicines are not always easy to come by, and people can wait a long time for dental and other care. But despite having few economic resources, the Cuban government has an effective system in place for offering its residents support at the community level for maintaining and improving their health.

Here then are some lessons we believe could hold the greatest potential for catalyzing innovations in health care and population health, especially in marginalized or poor communities in the United States.

Primary Care is local and comprehensive. A physician and nurse live and work in each community, and care for about 1,800 families. They make yearly home visits and keep updated records on each member of a household to see how they are maintaining their health. If a resident needs to see a specialist, his or her records are hand-delivered back to the primary care provider. Local doctors and nurses also understand the social situation of their patients—what their homes are like, their education level, the number of family members, and any particular challenges they face. In Cuba, prevention of such public health threats as tuberculosis, diabetes, hypertension and HIV is a primary goal for the country’s leadership. This kind of continuous, cradle-to-grave medical and social care goes a long way toward helping people stay healthy and avoid hospitalization.

There is a strong emphasis on healthy aging. Cuba has a rapidly aging population, and by 2025 one-quarter of the nation’s citizens will be over 60. Since almost all of the older people in Cuba live with their families, nursing homes are rare. To better care for older residents, local health workers educate families about how to prevent falls and how to recognize problems that need prompt care. Communities also have vibrant senior centers that offer activities that include visits to museums, dancing at local cabarets, and educational sessions where older people learn new skills and continually expand their knowledge. Since having several generations living in the same home can cause tensions, we heard about seniors taking classes on grandparenting, the challenges of intergenerational relations, elder abuse and gender equity. These senior centers are operated very much peer-to-peer, tapping the talents of the older people themselves to provide social, emotional and intellectual support. Maintaining the health of the body and mind through life-long learning is considered of upmost importance for the oldest residents of communities.

Community health is everyone’s concern. Clinical records are used to monitor the health of the entire community. If there is an uptick in the number of skin rashes, authorities will look at water quality. If an outbreak of food poisoning occurs, the community will make sure refrigeration is adequate. When red flags go up, there is a coordinated response and intervention. For example, if residents are concerned about increased use of alcohol among their teens, community members will get together and try to develop a strategy for dealing with the problem—perhaps providing more teen activities and a space for young people to socialize. The community then informs the central public health administration about their experience with teen drinking to help the government devise a national plan for dealing with the issue, likely to be impacting other communities.

In the end, our overall impression is that the government and the people of Cuba truly value health and well-being, and are effectively building a Culture of Health. What is astonishing to us is that they have done this with the scarcest of resources. With a life expectancy of 76.9 years, Cuba is just behind the U.S., yet its spending per person on health care is about 1/25th the spending of the U.S.

From our firsthand experience, we can see real benefit in identifying best practices in other countries, including poorer or less-developed ones, and adapting them to improve social determinants of health in underserved communities in the United States—part of our strategy for global learning. The Cuban emphasis on primary care, its integration of public health and health care systems, active engagement of families and communities, and building cross-sector alliances for health, are all key elements in RWJF’s own vision.

1722. Where Have All the Cod Gone?

By W. Jeffrey Bolster, The New York Times, January 1, 2015

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — IN November, regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shut down recreational and commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, that enchanting arm of the coastal sea stretching east-northeast from Cape Cod. 
They did not have much choice: Federal law requires action to rebuild fish stocks when they are depleted, and recent surveys revealed cod populations to be at record lows, despite decades of regulations intended to restore them.

It’s easy to imagine this recent drop in the cod population as a new phenomenon — a result, perhaps, of global warming, or some combination of climate change and overfishing by giant steel ships armed with electronic fish-finders and precise GPS navigation systems. And it’s just as easy to imagine that, after a season or two of belt-tightening, fish populations will rebound — it is, after all, a strategy that state and federal regulators have pursued for decades.

In fact, humans have been affecting the Atlantic’s fish stocks for centuries, beginning with technology so simple that people today would not even consider it “technology.” Forgetting that history, we opt for short-term fixes, which only compound the problem.

The fishery resources of the western Atlantic once seemed virtually limitless, with fish supposedly as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara. And yet the current emergency effort to restore cod populations is simply the latest chapter in a 150-year saga in which fishermen, scientists, industrialists and politicians have consistently confronted emptier nets and fewer fish.

As early as the 1850s, fishermen from Maine and Massachusetts began to pester their governments to do something about declining cod catches. Those men fished with hooks and lines from small wooden sailboats and rowboats. Fearing “the material injury of the codfishing interests of this state” by increased fishing for menhaden, a critical forage fish for cod, fishermen from Gouldsboro, Me., implored the Legislature in 1857 to limit menhaden hauls.

Yet annual cod landings in the Gulf of Maine continued to slide, from about 70,000 metric tons in 1861 to about 54,000 metric tons in 1880, to about 20,000 tons in the 1920s, to just a few thousand metric tons in recent years. There have been a few upticks along the way, such as one bumper year in the mid-1980s when the cod catch reached 25,000 tons (due, in part, to an unnecessarily large expansion of the fishing fleet), but for the most part the trend has been noticeably downward since the era of the Civil War. There have been plenty of warnings along the way. Maine’s fishery commissioner, Edwin W. Gould, spoke out plainly in 1892. “It is the same old story,” he said. “The buffalo is gone; the whale is disappearing; the seal fishery is threatened with destruction.” For Mr. Gould, the path forward was clear: “Fish need protection.”

In July 1914, after more than 40 years of reports on declining fishery resources by the United States Fish Commission and state fish commissions, The New York Times ran an article forecasting disaster. “Extermination Threatens American Sea Fishes — Cost to Consumer Has Risen between 10 and 600 Per Cent Because of Decrease in Supply.”

But that was right before a technological revolution in the fisheries. Sails and oars and hooks and lines were about to be replaced by steam and diesel engines, and massive nets dragged along the bottom that snared every fish in their path. Decades of well-founded concerns about depletion were overwhelmed by an avalanche of cheap fish. The new generation of draggers could fish faster, harder and deeper for the few fish that remained. Fishermen breathed a sigh of relief.

Twentieth-century cod populations, ravaged by draggers’ efficiency, declined further. In 1954 a fisheries economist from Boston charged fishing interests with continuing “to exploit recklessly the limited self-renewing stocks of these species.” That was just before the first factory-equipped freezer-trawler arrived at the prime fishing waters around the Grand Banks off Newfoundland from Europe. The size of an ocean liner, it could scoop up everything in its wake. Those ships made the steam-powered draggers from 1914 look positively quaint. And they caught lots of fish.

Overfishing has been the norm for a very long time, but the market has masked the mess in two fundamental ways. At every step fishermen confronting declining catches developed gear that fished more intensively, taking a larger percentage of the fewer fish that remained. Such a strategy was clearly not sustainable. Meanwhile, fishermen continued to earn enough to make fishing worthwhile, even if many encouraged their sons to pursue other careers because there would be little future in fishing. The Gulf of Maine cod stocks today are probably only a fraction of 1 percent of what they were during George Washington’s presidency.

If there is any lesson in this story of large-scale, long-term environmental degradation, it is not that fishermen were (or are) to blame, or that scientists were (or are) to blame, or that politicians were (or are) to blame. The system was (and is) to blame. Our system of exploiting nature’s resources, with its checks and balances, its desire for prosperity and security, its willingness to honor a multiplicity of voices, and its changing sense of “normal” is insufficiently nimble to stop the desecration of commonly held resources on which the long-term good of everyone depends.

The recent ban on cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine was an important step toward restoration, though clearly marine systems are very complex and subject to many variables. Considering that ban in light of history, however, is crucial. Historical perspectives provide a vital sense of scale for the sobering restoration challenges we face.

The fisheries story, however, also provides a heading into the future, revealing as it does the tragic consequences of decision makers’ unwillingness to steer a precautionary course in the face of environmental uncertainties. At every step of the way, decisions could have been made to exploit fish stocks more sustainably. That’s a tale worth pondering.

1721. Why Most of French Muslims Did Not Observe a Minute of Silence for Charlie Hebdo

By Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, February 2, 2015

Public housing in Clichy-sous-Bois, a largely immigrant suburb of Paris was the scene of weeks of riots 10 years

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France has begun a defensive but potentially decisive debate over what it means to be French — and whether that definition can make room for its vibrant, growing Muslim population.

At its core, the debate is about whether the French sense of identity has become so intertwined with secularism that the country is failing to honor its ideals as it becomes a multicultural society in which Islam is taking a more prominent place.

By law and tradition, citizens are meant to be judged as individuals without reference to race, religion or gender in the service of the republic’s ideals and its motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. That aspiration, dating to the French Revolution and deeply embedded in French life, was given a powerful voice in the large demonstrations of national unity following the January killings of cartoonists, police officers and Jews by homegrown Islamist radicals.

But these ideals, and the French Republic itself, can feel distant and empty to disaffected Muslims, who traditionally see little distinction between religion and public life. They often view the state’s values as foreign, even blasphemous, imposed on them like a form of cultural colonialism, and sometimes used as a pretext for racial and religious discrimination.

“What is really under challenge here is the notion of France as a totalitarian democracy,” said Andrew Hussey, a Paris-based professor who wrote “The French Intifada: The Long War between France and Its Arabs.” Republicanism here is “a totality, like Communism was, and also sacred,” he said.

France is a country, he said, of “enlightenment fundamentalists” demanding “the imposition of a whole identity.”

It is in places like Clichy-sous-Bois, a tough and heavily immigrant Paris suburb, where the gap is most visible between the French Republic of civics lessons and daily life for the mostly Muslim population.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls was criticized for describing the situation in ghettos like Clichy as “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid.” But in the 10 years since rioting against the police and the state started here, and then spread nationwide, prompting promises of reform, life has worsened: more crime, more unemployment, more poverty, more alienation and now, more radicalization among Muslim youth.

The young people here scoff at the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, calling them “du pipeau,” or hot air. They do not feel equal or fully free, and they have little sense of national solidarity.

As M’hammed Henniche, the head of the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis, which encompasses Clichy, said, “France is the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But that’s all it is, a declaration.” Muslims, he said, feel freer to pray, eat, dress and live as they please in Britain, a monarchy, than in the French Republic.

As in other banlieues, as the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs are known, many young people here refused to comply with a state-mandated minute of silence for the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, whom they regard as having offended Islam.

A 14-year-old who would give his name only as Louins said angrily: “They don’t respect us, and then during a minute of silence we’re supposed to honor them? How can someone render homage to someone who doesn’t respect us? We can’t.” He told his professor: “I’m going to make a minute of silence for Palestine.” His friend Burak agreed, then added: “Stop the hypocrisy.”

Mr. Valls and President François Hollande have announced new civics lessons in the public schools to reinforce republican values, including “laïcité,” which translates roughly as secularism.

But if you are a Franco-Algerian stuck in the banlieues, Mr. Hussey said, with a fractured identity that is neither French nor Algerian, and you speak a bit of Arabic but not much, Islam can become “the only part of your identity that seems real.”

He added, “It’s great to feel you’re a soldier in this larger battle, and what you’re fighting is the big republic that imposes all these things on you” — unemployment, non-halal school menus, a ban on the full veil and minarets, a paucity of mosques and a pervasive sense of being “écarté,” or rejected.

Mariam Cissé is deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois. Ten years ago, her cousin, Bouna Traoré, then 15, was one of the teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding from the police in a power substation, and whose deaths set off three weeks of rioting nationwide, with more than 9,000 cars burned, nearly 3,000 arrests and 56 police officers wounded.
Since the riots, “there are some new buildings and parks,” said Ms. Cissé, 29. “But after that, what? What?”

The unemployment rate is 40 percent in Clichy, one of the poorest towns in France, with half the population under 20; there is a housing shortage, and there was no unemployment office here until last year, she said. It is only about 10 miles from central Paris, but there is no major road and still no mass transit station, despite a decade of promises.

“In no other developed country one sees towns so close but at the same time so far away,” she said. “One can’t continue to be 15 kilometers from Paris as the bird flies and yet need at least an hour and a half to reach the capital.”

The separation and alienation of youth is inevitable, she suggested. Some French lawmakers said “these youngsters no longer deserve to be French because they no longer adopt the values of the republic,” she said.

“But France must assume its cosmopolitanism,” she continued. “One can’t welcome all sorts of people in the country without accepting their differences.”

Gilles Kepel is the great political scientist of the banlieues, having written three books about them, most recently “Passion Française — The Voice of the Ghettos,” as well as a report for the government. For him, the target of Islamic radicals is not France, per se, but Europe and its growing Muslim minorities. France, with the largest number of Muslims in Europe and the largest number of those traveling to Syria and Iraq for jihad, is an obvious focus.

But the effort to radicalize “nonetheless builds on things that are French,” Mr. Kepel said. Not just poverty and exclusion, he said, but the offense taken “even by Muslims who drink wine” over the cartoons of Muhammed, and then the French Republic’s full support for the cartoonists. As important, he said, is the unhealed wound of the French-Algerian war of independence and then of the Algerian war against Islamists.

Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist, said that the country needed a new clarity about its values. “We need a new enlightenment, to reinvent the republic,” he said, to better “correspond to the diversity of France.”

The fundamental question is “to accept and practice the values of the republic,” Mr. Moïsi said. “But what does that mean? Respect for the other, giving reality to liberty, equality, fraternity. Freedom yes, but within limits. Equality, yes, but with limits to inequality in France. And fraternity is really missing.”

Ms. Cissé, the deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, put the problem simply: “France has trouble changing,” she said.

“Integration, immigration — these are taboo, and at the heart of the program of the National Front and the republican right. Now they must become national issues,” she said. “We have to confront these so-called problems so that one can travel as one wishes, practice our religion when and as we want, just like the others. And have a job, truly, because work is important.”

Otherwise, she said, “France will be engulfed, in the years to come, in these same problems of 2005 and 2015.”

1720. White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times December 24, 2014

In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white.

The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.”

There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.

So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.

People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.

In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter. In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people.

The researchers were able to trace variations in our genetic makeup from state to state, creating for the first time a sort of ancestry map.

“We use these terms — white, black, Indian, Latino — and they don’t really mean what we think they mean,” said Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study.

The data for the new study were collected by 23andMe, the consumer DNA-testing company. When customers have their genes analyzed, the company asks them if they’d like to make their results available for study by staff scientists.

Over time the company has built a database that not only includes DNA, but also such details as a participant’s birthplace and the ethnic group with which he or she identifies. (23andMe strips the data of any information that might breach the privacy of participants.)

The scientists also have been developing software that learns to recognize the origins of the short segments of DNA that make up our genomes. Recently they used their program to calculate what percentage of each subject’s genomes was inherited from European, African or Native American forebears.

“This year we saw that we were in a great position to do the analysis,” said Joanna L. Mountain, senior director of research at 23andMe.

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. 

European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.

Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the resarchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin. One in five African-Americans, too, has Native American roots.

Dr. Mountain and her colleagues also looked at how ancestry might influence ethnic identification.

Most Americans with less than 28 percent African-American ancestry say they are white, the researchers found. Above that threshold, people tended to describe themselves as African-American.

Katarzyna Bryc, a 23andMe researcher and co-author of the new study, didn’t want to speculate about why people’s sense of ethnic identity pivots at that point.

“We can only take it so far as geneticists,” she said.

The scientists also linked geographical patterns to their subjects’ ancestries. Latinos in the Southwest had high levels of Native American DNA, they found, while Latinos in the Southeast had high levels of African DNA.

The genes of African-Americans varied strikingly from state to state. In Oklahoma, the researchers estimated, 14 percent of African-Americans have genomes that are at least 2 percent Native American. This high percentage is probably due to the unique history of the state.

Some Native American tribes in the South, such as the Cherokee and Choctaw, kept African slaves. When they were expelled to Oklahoma in the 1830s, they brought the slaves with them. In some tribes, Native Americans and African slaves intermarried, and their descendants continue to live in Oklahoma today.

Dr. Saunt was fascinated in particular by the genetic findings among people in South Carolina. Dr. Mountain and her colleagues estimated that 13.3 percent of European-Americans in South Carolina have genes that are at least 1 percent African in origin.

But the researchers also found that African-Americans in South Carolina have among the lowest percentages of European DNA of any African-American population in the United States.

At one point, Dr. Saunt noted, the percentage of South Carolina residents who were slaves was greater than in any other state. But there was also a large population of freed slaves in Charleston permitted to interact with whites.

“We know lots of planters had mistresses in Charleston, and they obviously had children together,” said Dr. Saunt. “So what happened to those children? Some remained in the African-American community, and some moved into the white community when they were able to.”

Jeffrey C. Long, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the research was not based on a random sample of Americans. 

Instead, Dr. Mountain and her colleagues studied only people who were curious enough about their DNA to pay for a test.

“Perhaps people who have mixed ancestry are more interested in their ancestry than people who don’t think they have mixed ancestry,” Dr. Long said.

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University and a co-author on the new study, acknowledged this was a reasonable concern. “It’s classic survey bias,” he said. But Dr. Reich also noted that the new results were consistent with smaller studies done in the past.

As genetic databases grow, Dr. Reich predicted it would be possible to get even more detailed insights into American history. DNA may be able to illuminate the movements of people across the United States, such as the Great Migration that took African-Americans from the South to Chicago.

“We’re in striking distance of that now,” Dr. Reich said.