AS Bermuda's Cuban connections continue to cause controversy in some quarters, recent statements made by some Opposition figures and commentators have revealed how little is known locally about the culture and politics of the Caribbean country.

While it is true that Cuba is a totalitarian society which does not tolerate the existence of organised political opposition, there are some aspects of the Cuban revolution that are more constructive. One of these relates to how black Cubans have fared since the revolution in 1959.

One of the arguments made against any type of relationship with Cuba is the supposed oppression experienced by black Cubans. Indeed, parallel examples have been made between Cubans of African descent and black South Africans in their struggle against apartheid. But is this a valid comparison?

The early history of Cuba under Spanish rule was one of a slave-owning society. When Cuba revolted against their Spanish overlords, the struggle was led by two of their most admired historical figures: Antonio Maceo, a black Cuban who had raised an army of ex-slaves to wipe out slavery in Cuba, and Jose Marti who, more than any other Cuban of the time, was the main force behind uniting Cubans in their struggle against Spain.

It was he who taught Cubans to be suspicious of the United States ? or, as he put it "the monster in whose entrails" he said he lived. Marti had travelled up and down North America on his trips out of Cuba to gain support from the many Cubans who lived in Mexico and the United States.

So Cubans, with an unhappy history of political repression at home, have been going into exile long before Fidel Castro's revolution. Interestingly, concerning these two early Cuban national heroes, there have been suggestions that Cuba's racial history resulted in the role of Antonio Maceo, a black Cuban, in the country's struggle for Independence being downplayed in favour of the contributions of Jose Marti, who was a Cuban of Spanish ancestry.

In fact, before the Cuban revolution, Cuba was a very racist society, a situation that was exacerbated when a pre-Civil Rghts America began to gain influence in Cuba beginning in the 1920s. It is an irony that the South African situation is so often invoked as a reason for Bermuda shunning Cuba because Fidel Castro was an honoured guest at Nelson Mandela's inauguration as that country's first black president.

Mandela will never criticise the Cuban government and its leader in public because he is well aware of the role Cuban troops played in pushing back the then apartheid-ruled South Africa when it sent troops across the Angolan border. This military defeat contributed to the apartheid state coming to terms with the idea of a black-ruled South Africa and an Independent Namibia ,once ruled by Pretoria and known as South West Africa.

The Cuban revolution had an almost immediate effect on its black Cuban population. Socialist Cuba has claimed that it eliminated racism from the country. And on the surface it did seem that this was so.

Cuba began to celebrate its African heritage, which had been there since the country's foundation in its music and its art as well as other aspects of Cuban life such as the influence of African religions that had survived the Middle Passage and are still practised by in Cuba today.

, despite the claims of Fidel Castro that Cuba has eliminated racism, still at the very top of the Cuban leadership there was until relatively recently a conspicuous shortage of black Cuban faces. During the Angola/South African war, there were complaints that black Cubans made up a disproportionate number of the Cuban military forces being sent to help the Angolans fight off the South Africans and anti-Communist rebels in the south of that country.

What we do know is that despite some shortcomings, black Cubans under the Communist revolution enjoy greater civil rights than was previously the case. Today blacks find themselves making up at least half the population of Cuba.

This demographic reality had at one time concerned the Americans when looking for potential weak spots in the Castro regime. A CIA report had found that the black population had become major supporters of the Cuban revolution in the 1960s and '70s. The major reason that black Cubans have been able to increase their demographic advantage is the fact that it was mostly white Cubans who opposed the revolution and fled to the United States to form the Cuban exile community now based in Miami.

This is not to say that black Cubans have not taken advantage of the special refugee privileges that the United States grants all those fleeing the Communist state but it is a safe bet that many of those who leave are, in fact, economic refugees leaving the consequences of America's economic boycott of the island.

If Castro's socialist system were to be overthrown, then we could be faced with the prospect of perhaps a million or more Cuban exiles returning home. Such a turn of events could bring renewed conflict for the Cuban black population and we could see racial conflict raised to an entirely new level in Cuba.

The conflicts that have taken place between the white Cuban exile community in Miami and the African-American community there gives little hope that the racial situation would be any better if they returned to Cuba in any numbers in a post-Castro era.

Much has been said of the dissidents that the Castro regime has imprisoned and I agree. The positive benefits of the revolution ? like free education from kindergarten to the university level ? are still overshadowed by the lack of a democratic political system and the ban on organised opposition.

And it is not that Castro's Cuba does not have legitimate concerns about what America and their Cuban exile allies are prepared to do to overthrow the regime. Long before terrorism became a daily watchword for the Western World, Communist Cuba suffered state-sponsored terrorism with major US-backed attacks on its infrastructure.

burning of sugar cane fields, for instance, damaged Cuba's major export crop. And in one infamous act of terrorism, a Cuban airliner was blown up in mid-air, killing everyone on board. And don't forget the CIA-sponsored efforts in the 1960s and '70s to assassinate Castro himself. Cuba believes it has sound reasons for cracking down on some of the dissidents.

Ultimately, to avoid another violent tragedy in the Caribbean a dialogue must take place. But this dialogue should not necessarily take place between the rulers of the United States and Cuba but between the Cuban people themselves ? those inside the country and those outside.

And for the sake of the future, it must not begin on the premise of winner takes all. For that way leads to a path of destruction which can only make the Cuban people as a whole the losers.