so uross o me oroden. Miss Puerto Rico - variously described as a model and a student - told reporters after her 'victory' in the Miss World contest: "This is an opportunity which 103- 0 IOC0B ABIMOL 30L COn an girls." She can say that again!
Perhaps she was referring to the fact that 71 per cent of the island's 3.3 million residents depend on US federal food stamps. Some 40 per cent are unemployed, with perhaps anther 35-40 per cent "under-employed". This is the result of more than 400 years of colonialist rule.
ane bresch pupper covernment ane its US imperialist backers have two basic One is to export thousands of Puerto Rican workers to the mainland every year to do the dirtiest, lowest paid jobs in America. The other is a mass enforced sterilisation policy to reduce the population. As a result one third of all Puerto Rican womGROSS AFFRONT What a gross and cynical affront to these women, chained down in poverty and oppression under the yoke of imperalism, that a pampered Puerto Rican 'stu dent or model' is proclaimed in the West as the world's ideal of beauty. Whose ideal, whose beauty - whose world?
Puerto Rico's neighbour Cuba, by contrast, has thrown off imperialist domination. The use of the title "Miss Cuba by an exile living in the USA was hotly condemned by the Cuban Government in a message to the organisers. Whatever shortcomings remain under Castroism, the vast improvements in the lot of both women and men brought about there since the revolution bear witness to the combined nature of the strugpie agamst imperialism and its related sexual and racial oppressions.
DEGRADING
But then that wouldn't interest Mecca boss Eric Morley. His only concern is to boost his profits through this degrading annua parade of female flesh. It that means elevating the occasional black woman, so be it. On a day-to-day basis, however, Mecca's position is quite different: the firm has recently been convic ted twice of racial discrimination - for turning away a black customer in Leices ter, and for refusing a black woman a job in Birmingham.