When he arrives at his office in the morning, Rio de Janeiro Police Chief Rita Salim knows that throughout the course of the day, two or three people will come in to report having been a victim of racism. Some will do so after having lived a life of discrimination based on the color of their skin. “Many victims come when they can’t take it any more, the drop that made the cup overflow,” she says in an interview at her office. It’s a sorry state of affairs — but at the same time, there is hope. The veil of silence and shame that historically covered up this kind of discrimination is lifting. Brazil documented more than 7,000 complaints of racism in 2025, 67% more than the year before.

Specialists see this as the beginning of the end of underreporting, and attribute the rise to a combination of factors: strong laws, a better-trained police force and above all, greater social awareness. Brazil, which was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, now has the most advanced anti-racism laws in the region.

This takes some tourists by surprise. Argentinian Agostina Páez was detained after yelling “monkey” and imitating the animal to offend a Black bar employee. “There is a law in Brazil that is quite severe,” she said upon returning home after serving two months of preventative prison in an apartment and paying a $20,000 fine to return to Argentina. She is now awaiting a verdict in her case.

In recent months, the number of foreigners incarcerated for racism has multiplied. The latest was another Argentinian, who photographed a child on a tourist train, joking that he wanted to take the youngster home as his slave. He has now spent two weeks behind bars. In light of Brazilian laws, such words can be punished with between two and five years in jail. Punishment can be double that if the crime is committed by a group, or shared on social media.

Salim’s station, which specializes in crimes of racism and other kinds of discrimination (against the LGBTQ+ community, disabled people, or based on religion), opened eight years ago and is staffed by around 20 officers. Others like it are becoming more common, and are already operating in states like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Bahía. They are among the key factors helping to increase the number of complaints.

Their officers are better prepared, participate in workshops, courses, and conferences, and have direct contact with non-profits and anti-racist organizations. But anyone can report a racism-related crime in any neighborhood police station, where the goal is for there to always be an officer on duty who specializes in the subject. Salim says that many people are afraid of registering complaints due to fear of being re-victimized by the officer who receives them. “They are afraid of getting to the station and being discriminated against, again. Here, we work to eradicate that kind of intimidating behavior.”

Victims come from all walks of life, and are not restricted to a single age group or social class. Nor are their aggressors, though the commissioner explains that on many occasions, older people are unaware of the seriousness of their acts. “Sometimes we interrogate them and they use extremely discriminatory words, corroborating their beliefs without realizing it. Then they try to fix it by alleging that their best friend is Black, that they have a Black family member… but one thing has nothing to do with the other.”

Something similar takes place with the foreigners who say they were unaware of the situation in Brazil. In their case, they are more likely to be placed in preventative detainment, due to the fear that they will flee the country. When a person is arrested in fraganti (typically with the help of witnesses and smart phone recordings) it’s very common that a judge will authorize preventative prison, because there is a sufficient level of proof.

Brazil is the Blackest country outside of Africa; 56% of its inhabitants identify as Black or mixed, according to the latest census. The number of Brazilians who cite their African heritage in the definition of their racial identity has risen over the years alongside anti-racist awareness and affirmative policies. Little by little, Brazil is taking down the myth of “racial democracy” that had been installed in the collective consciousness, that of the tropical paradise where the mix of Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous communities had created a harmonious society in which segregation did not exist, in contrast to South Africa and the United States.

This new consciousness of a Brazil taking on its own structural racism has slowly reshaped its legal framework. One decisive step was the country’s updated racism law, which was first created with the 1988 Constitution. In 2023, the crime of racial slurs was added to the law. What before was an offense against an individual’s honor is now an attack on an entire community. In consequence, punishments became harsher. While before, a racial insult was resolved though community service or paying a fine, offenders are now more likely to wind up in prison. Plus, the crime of racism cannot be resolved by paying a fine.

“From a legislative point of view, Brazil is out in front of all the countries in the Americas,” explains Adilson Moreira, a Harvard-educated doctor of law who was one of the leading specialists on anti-discriminatory law in Brazil. He was one of the pioneers in legal approaches to the concept of “recreational racism,” in which humor is used as a form of racial discrimination. Such situations are explicitly included in the legislation, as is racism committed in sporting environments.

On paper, Brazil looks good when it comes to anti-racism — but things appear a bit different at street level. Complaints, investigations and detentions have grown significantly in recent years, but there have been few sentences handed down. At the end of March, there were more than 1,000 racists serving sentences, 309 of whom were in prison.

The biggest challenge, says Moreira, is a mentality that is still common among prosecutors and judges: “They try to employ all kinds of subterfuge to keep white people from being convicted for crimes of racism. Judges demand a much higher level of proof of the intention to discriminate than they do for other crimes,” says the specialist, who notes that the large majority of Brazilian judges are white and have had little training on racial issues. Commissioner Salim also believes there would be more results if prosecutor’s offices and courts were inspired by the police to create specialized units, like those that already exist for organized crime, for example.

Despite that, optimism prevails, because social change is on the move, and there is no sign of its retreat. Quotas for Black and Indigenous individuals, as well as public university students, have been making historically white law schools more diverse, and for a little over a decade, the anti-racism movement, always present in the country’s history, has occupied a central position in the media, academy, soap operas, and books. Djamila Ribeiro’s Pequeno manual antirracista (Little anti-racist manual), for example, has spent six years on the nation’s bestseller list.

President Lula’s administration has made the fight against racial discrimination a priority, particularly in especially sensitive cases, like that of the insults and threats hurled at Real Madrid player Vinícius Júnior that nearly led to a diplomatic conflict with Spain. “It really depends on the racial awareness of the police chief, the prosecutor, and the judge, but things are making good progress,” sums up Moreira, who takes his leave before going to give a talk to a group of judges interested in the topic.

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A century has passed since the day that forever changed the life of Salvador Dalí: his second dismissal, this one permanent, from the Special School of Drawing, Sculpture and Printmaking at Madrid’s prestigious San Fernando Fine Art Royal Academy. In such a rigid, rule‑bound environment, Dalí felt out of place — and perhaps for that reason, this academic period has been overshadowed in scholarly writing. What dominates the narrative of those years in Madrid — which he described as the happiest of his life— are his escapades and artistic exchanges with Federico García Lorca, Maruja Mallo, and Luis Buñuel, his companions at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a pioneering cultural and academic residence, and a circle of mutual inspiration.

But thanks to the archives of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) — in 1970, the Royal Academy was converted into its School of Fine Arts — EL PAÍS can now reconstruct Dalí’s student years through grade certificates, letters from his father, and an almost‑unknown disciplinary file. These documents have circulated very little. There are records of occasional consultations by students or researchers —including the Hispanist Ian Gibson — a request from the Museo Reina Sofía art museum for an exhibition, and even an inquiry from a group of Korean filmmakers working on a movie about the artistic genius.

Dalí’s file (AGUCM 136/06-17, 40) and grade records (AGUCM 107/09-08) are preserved in the UCM’s historic archives, while the enrollment books, one of his father’s letters, and the expulsion ruling can be consulted in the Historical Archive of the Faculty of Fine Arts Library. Both archives operate with minimal staff, which means no one can devote full time to digitizing or promoting this extraordinarily valuable material. The inquiry made by this newspaper about Dalí prompted the digitization of the documents, which will now be displayed on the archive’s website.

“We provide a cross-functional service. We have an administrative role, but also a historic one. Not as many people come here to request materials as at a museum,” says Ana Rocasolano, director of the UCM’s general archive, which is located in the law department. “This university has an enormous, overwhelming heritage because of the importance it has always had; but its primary mission is not heritage — it’s education.”

Dalí moved to the Residente de Estudiantes in September 1922. Once there, he applied to the art school. Preserved today are the letter in which he requests to take the entrance exam, a chiaroscuro drawing of a sculpture, and the receipt for the application fees. Until about 30 years ago, the Faculty of Fine Arts kept an identical entrance exercise. Since 2008, there has been no specific exam, but the university entrance cutoff score is very high: 9.9 out of 14 this academic year.

At the time, Dalí was 18. His mother, Felipa Domènech, had died the previous year. That was why he had traveled to Madrid accompanied by his father, Figueres notary Salvador Dalí i Cusí — who plays a prominent role in this story — and his sister Anna Maria. Recognizing his artistic talents and hoping for his son to have a rewarding career, his father encouraged him to enroll in the school so that he could become an art teacher in the future. Dalí passed the entrance exam and enrolled in five first-year courses.

In 1920, two years before Dalí arrived at the school, female students had signed a protest letter which led to the recognition of their right to enroll in all courses. Up until that point, they had been barred from taking life drawing classes over concerns about nude models, and from painting outdoors because they were not allowed to leave their homes without being accompanied by a family member. Mallo was enrolled in the school at this time.

Dalí spent his first months in Madrid coming and going from the San Fernando Academy at Calle Alcalá 13, where the museum, no longer a school, remains to this day. At the time, he had next to no social life. His peers at the Residencia would later remember how the extremely reserved, nearly mute young man would shut himself up in his room, searching for his own painting style. He shifted between cubism, futurism and metaphysics, and in addition to self-portraits, created several still lifes, like the ones he presented at his debut solo show in the first exhibition of the Iberian Artists’ Society in 1925.

Dalí was becoming heavily influenced by what he was reading in books, catalogues and magazines, and his carefully crafted appearance ensured he never went unnoticed. Extremely thin, he wore his hair long with sideburns, oversized shoes, a trench coat, stockings, and gaiters — all in the style of Victorian painters. Later he would cut his hair and, after discovering Diego Velázquez, El Greco, and Hieronymus Bosch at the Prado Museum in Madrid, he began growing his signature mustache.

After a few months, he began socializing with his peers, and school faded into the background. “At the Residencia, Dalí and Maruja Mallo discovered many things, and many of the people they spoke with led them to rethink their situation,” says Estrella de Diego, who has been a member of the Academy for the last decade.

“At this time, even the most traditional painters complained that the school was overly academic. The Residencia offered them a sense of camaraderie that the Academy, which must have been dull, did not,” says de Diego, a contemporary art professor at the UCM. “However, the school gave them some very important tools for drawing. They taught the basics to [Pablo] Picasso, Maruja and Dalí.”

Raquel Monje, dean of Fine Arts, agrees. “The school was a very conservative space,” she says. “It took many years for that to change! Our greatest strength is that academia now coexists with what’s happening in the outside world.”

Dalí easily passed his first year (1922-1923), except for his printmaking course, which he was forced to retake. He even earned top honors in ancient and medieval art history. What the records do not mention is his failed assassination attempt on Alfonso XIII on March 3, 1923 — the day the king inaugurated the school’s library. Gibson asserts in two books that a tragedy could have occurred. According to his account, Dalí — who had been anti-monarchist up to that point — planned with his friend Josep Rigol to make a “bomb to protest, not to kill” the king, as Rigol recounted, by filling an empty milk container with gunpowder. They placed the explosive in a vase on a staircase banister, but fortunately, the fuse did not ignite. Estrella de Diego says this account is questionable: “There is no evidence.”

The Prado Museum in Madrid has a photograph of Dalí and Maruja Mallo’s class visiting the art gallery alongside the king. If the bomb did indeed exist, no one found out about it at the time, and in March 1923, Dalí was neither sent to jail nor home. But by September, his academic progress had stalled out. He was suspended for one year for leading a student revolt against the school’s decision — a very conservative one — to reject painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz for a professorship on the grounds that he was too avant‑garde.

A furious letter to the director from Dalí’s father is preserved in the archives. “Dear Sir, and with the utmost respect. After speaking with the students, teachers and staff at the school, I have confirmed my entirely favorable opinion of my son,” he begins. “Unable to abide by the Disciplinary Council’s decision, I have no choice but to accept his punishment with resignation.” He then predicts: “His conduct in school and his academic performance will be so impeccable that they will come to regret having punished him so severely.”

Dalí carried out his year-long suspension in 1923-1924, but he did not stop studying entirely, and continued learning at the Academia Libre, an independent art academy, directed by Julio Moisés. In September, he once again enrolled at the Academy. His grades were better than they had been during his first year. He earned a “diploma of merit” (outstanding) in color theory and for the second time, honors in art history.

One course strained Dalí’s relationship with the school to the breaking point. According to the disciplinary council, the painter had been “proclaiming around the artistic center of Barcelona” that his professor Rafael Domènach i Gallisà had failed him and that given this “injustice,” a new panel had been convened that passed him and awarded him a prize of 700 pesetas (around $250 in today’s money).

But according to the council, Domènach i Gallisà had not examined Dalí (and therefore, failed him) because the former had been in Paris organizing the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. The rumor came to the attention of the teacher, and he was supported by the school. But Dalí’s insolence did not end there. He studied the 1925–1926 year independently while completing his military service in Girona, and he registered in April to sit the exams.

There are two versions — one, predictably embellished — of what happened on June 14, 1926. As Dalí later recounted in his writings, after dodging the question of his fine arts theory exam, he replied to the examining board: “I know more about Raphael than all three of you put together. I refuse to answer.” And, as his friend Antonio Pitxot claimed in his book Sobre Dalí (On Dalí), examiners replied: “Well, then, come back another year, because this one is already a fail and moreover, you’re expelled.” Pitxot wrote that Dalí always ended this anecdote with: “Imagine — asking me about Rafael…” A characteristic bit of bravado.

But the minutes of the examination board and disciplinary council, as well as the ruling by the general directorate of fine arts, describe a highly tense confrontation that culminated in a permanent expulsion, not a temporary suspension. Dalí’s first offense was failing to show up for the first exam session — students only had two chances at the time — and he was informed of the next date via telephone. Domènach i Gallisà, despite being the subject’s professor, chose not to examine him so as not to be accused of bias following their previous confrontation. Three other professors made up the examination board. According to their minutes, Dalí stated, “No. Since all the professors at the San Fernando School are incompetent to judge me, I am withdrawing.”

The Faculty of Fine Arts safeguards “hundreds of thousands of documents” that librarians Javier Pérez Iglesias and Laura Bomati would like to digitize, given the volume of inquiries — especially about little‑known local artists and, increasingly, women artists. If they could, they would start with the registry books.

“What we accomplish in this department is thanks to people who are passionate about it,” says the dean. “For example, a professor and a group of students might get involved in a small project. But as always, we’d need funding to do more.”

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It’s quite possible that the Cuban Revolution will soon die. Just over 67 years ago, it burst forth laden with hopes and redemptive promises. Biblical parallels abounded: there were 12 survivors of the Granma — the yacht that transported the fighters from Mexico to Cuba — and a messiah (Fidel Castro) triumphantly entered the new Jerusalem (Havana). A dove landed on his shoulder as he recited the divine word for hours on end, foreshadowing paradise on earth. Meanwhile, on the other side of the water — the Straits of Florida — the Yankee devil threatened this paradise from hell.

After 1959, a large part of Latin America’s Christian population adopted liberation theology. The most gifted philosophers, poets, painters and novelists placed their talents at the service of the good news. Countless creators exchanged their pens, instruments, or brushes for shovels, plows, or trowels, in order to bring their fantasies of social justice to life.

On April 17, 1961, two years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion took place. The day before Brigade 2506 landed at Playa Girón, Fidel Castro declared the movement’s socialist nature: “Those who fear the revolution because it is socialist… let them not come asking us to kneel before imperialism.”

Ten days later, the author Norman Mailer published an open letter to Fidel Castro, in which he wrote that the Cuban leader was “the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War.” He later suggested that Castro ask Ernest Hemingway to mediate for a better understanding between Cuba and the United States. But it was already too late: in 1962, Cuba allowed the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles on the island, aiming them at its enemies.

If the 1960s are known as the romantic period of the Cuban Revolution, the 1970s ushered in the so-called Quinquenio Gris (“the gray five-year period”). The Padilla Affair, in 1971 — referring to the imprisonment of poet Heberto Juan Padilla — ushered in an era of cultural control and persecution of any expression that was considered “ideologically deviant.” Novelists, poets, filmmakers, artists and members of the LGBTQ+ community who didn’t adhere to the behavioral norms established by the regime were sent to forced labor camps, known as the UMAPs: Military Units to Aid Production. Authors such as José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera and Reinaldo Arenas were also silenced. Many of the Latin American Boom writers who still harbored sympathies for Cuba definitively lost them during this period.

The tightening of totalitarian controls on the island, however, coincided with a series of U.S.-backed coups in the rest of the region. Cuba provided refuge to thousands of people persecuted by the military dictatorships. Had this not been the case, it’s likely that the democratic forces of the West would have more quickly become aware of the macabre atrocities that the Caribbean country concealed (there was no shortage of grateful leftists).

The 1980s, according to Cubans, were a rather happy time. There was a certain general prosperity thanks to Soviet aid. And, while the state security services exerted control, there was no shortage of spaces for relaxation. Recreational drugs were present in cultural circles, civil liberties were limited, but this was largely accepted without major conflict, and the country guaranteed good‑quality healthcare and education. Access to material comfort — despite not being luxurious — allowed for a certain carefree attitude.

Nearly 2,000 Cuban soldiers died in Angola supporting the MPLA, a social democratic party that fought for independence from Portugal. And, although many returned traumatized, the intervention was a source of national pride. At least, until some of its heroes — General Arnaldo Ochoa, Colonel Tony de la Guardia, Captain Jorge Martínez and Major Amado Padrón — were accused of drug trafficking and treason. Collectively known as “Case Number One,” they were sentenced to death: the four high-ranking officers were executed at dawn on July 13, 1989.

The most widespread interpretation of the trial, however, suggests that it was a political purge. At the time, the regimes of Eastern Europe were beginning to collapse. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had visited Havana that same year with his message of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). And Ochoa — given his popularity at home and possible sympathy for the reformist winds in the USSR — represented a potential threat to Castro. In the absence of serious journalism, all that remains is speculation.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the so-called Special Period began, a euphemism coined by Fidel Castro to describe the catastrophic situation that gripped the country after losing the USSR’s economic support. Cuba ran out of oil and blackouts began. Lacking food, people were even eating cats. From this era came the term resolver (“to solve”), used to describe that quintessential Cuban occupation: finding unheard-of solutions to everyday needs… usually outside the bounds of the law.

When talking about Cuba, there’s something that’s rarely emphasized: everyday corruption. State salaries aren’t enough to afford anything, so truck drivers steal fuel, food distributors sell a portion on the sidewalk, while traffic cops negotiate fines. Much of survival is “resolved” informally.

According to some, the Special Period never really ended. Most Cubans, however, agree that it ended with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who was elected in 1999. Although Cubans often looked down on Venezuelans, they welcomed the oil and dollars that flowed from Caracas — money that fueled opaque schemes few could fully explain.

On the island of the Revolution, nothing is produced at this point. Not even sugar. In its most fertile fields, there’s a proliferation of marabú, a highly-aggressive shrub.

The government has sold an idea, with no concrete product. It seems that Cuba’s leaders believe the world should pay them to preach a way of life which they don’t know how to sustain.

A few years ago, very few people still bought into this scam. Today, practically no one does.

The U.S. embargo exists, certainly. And that scoundrel Trump has tightened it by putting Cuba back on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, without considering how cruel this is for the vast, innocent majority. And, since January 30, he has prevented the arrival of ships carrying fuel.

But the failure of the Cuban Revolution is an undeniable fact. It was never capable of providing for the material well-being of its population on its own. When Fidel Castro was alive, what should have been a government by the people only served to glorify one individual.

If the Revolution has developed any expertise at all, it’s been in controlling its inhabitants through state security, intelligence and counterintelligence. During the Cold War, this made some sense, but at this point in time, it’s absurd.

Cubans are starving. They cook with charcoal. No one collects the garbage piling up in the streets; infections and stench are rampant. The population lives in darkness, while few young people remain. And, beyond those who work for the regime, it’s practically impossible to find a government supporter. If you want to find one, you have to look among foreign communists. Only ideological blindness justifies such indifference.

The Cuban Revolution — once the illusion of a new world where things could be different — has just received the CIA director and accepted a bribe from the empire, which may allow it to survive for another couple of weeks. Acknowledging the project’s resounding failure is not only urgent in order to rescue the suffering population, but also to return to an alternative where the idea of community regains its value; where not everything is about arrogance and force. The invitation to come together shouldn’t sound like empty rhetoric; rather, it should be an intelligent, credible and trustworthy proposal.

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