No Blacks allowed at the top echelons of Cuban nomenclature. In The Longest Romance, Humberto Fontova calculates that between 65,000 and 85,000 people has died trying to escape Cuba, 30 times the number of Berlin Wall casualties. Cuba’s prison population is 90 percent black and includes Eusebio Peñalver, “the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner.” That wasn’t a sticking point for Barack Obama.