Is Cuba A “Racial Democracy?”
by Hishaam Aidi
The ongoing tug-of-war over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy refugee, has rekindled a longstanding American debate on living conditions in Cuba, as family members, activists and pundits argue about whether the 6-year-old would be better off back home or in the U.S. Long intrigued by Cuba and its political history, African Americans have taken a particular interest in the status of Afro-Cubans in Castro’s Cuba, and last month a delegation of nine African American newspaper columnists traveled to the Caribbean island to study “the status of Afro-Cubans compared to that of white Cubans, their relationship with the Castro government, [and] the issues currently facing this group of people,” according to a press release. The nine journalists’ reactions reflect a range of opinions on the racial climate of a country that is 51 percent mulatto, 37 percent white, 11 percent black, and 1 percent Chinese. But most of their accounts provide a generally positive assessment of the achievements of the Castro regime in the realm of race relations.
According to DeWayne Wickham, a columnist for USA Today and the organizer of the trip, “Cuba is no paradise, but it is also not a hellhole. Most live here comfortably by Caribbean standards. … Ask average Cubans what they like most about their system, and they will talk about the universal health care, quality schools and safe streets.” In a Washington Post op-ed column on March 5, Michelle Singletary wrote, “Riding and walking around Havana, with its dilapidated apartment buildings and treacherously pothole-riddled streets, it would be easy to pity the people … [but] I can tell you it is just as wrong to equate deprivation with misery as it is to equate prosperity with contentment. … What I see are sweet-faced children – and intangibles that transcend all foolish materialistic arguments about who’s better off where.” Similarly, Barbara Johnson of The Las Vegas Review-Journal observed, “Cuba has a housing problem, but not a homeless problem. Many people live in overcrowded housing, but no one is living in the streets.”
Ruben Remigio Ferro, the president of Cuba’s Supreme Court, boasted about Cuba’s racial progress to Sheryl McCarthy of New York Newsday. “We’ve created a society in which black and white live together peacefully,” he said. “Mestizos and black people are the majority of the population and we take part in all aspects of society.” But McCarthy remained unconvinced. “It’s refreshing to be in a country whose citizens truly believe that they are not hindered by racial prejudice. But peek under the skirt of the Cuban ideal and disturbing things do emerge,” she wrote following the trip. McCarthy was particularly skeptical of Ferro’s claim that white Cubans constitute 60 percent of the island’s prison population because she didn’t see blacks working in the country’s booming tourist sector, but did see blacks selling handicrafts and panhandling. “Since crime follows poverty, I suspect that a much larger number of Cuban prisoners are people of color,” she concluded. “Psychologically, Cubans have escaped the narrow confines of racial thinking. But as Cuba rebuilds itself, its biggest challenge will be maintaining a system where race doesn’t define one’s opportunities.”
Last month’s visit came a year after representatives from TransAfrica and the Congressional Black Caucus traveled to Cuba on a fact-finding mission and later called for an immediate end to the U.S. embargo in “The Cuba Report,” a document subsequently released by TransAfrica. Randall Robinson, the head of the organization, reiterated the delegation’s position in a July 1999 Essence article. “Why is our country – alone in the world, against the judgment of the entire family of nations – crucifying this large Black country of 11 million with a cruel embargo?” he wrote. “Clearly, the answer is not simply that Cuba is Communist … China is a communist country, and the U.S. not only declines to punish it for its communism, or its deplorable human rights record, but our government even grants China most-favored nation status. … Our delegation unanimously agreed that the embargo is inhumane and should be lifted forthwith.”
Since Castro’s rise to power, debates have raged within the African American community on the benefits of the 1959 Revolution for Cuba’s blacks. Columbia University historian Manning Marable visits Cuba frequently, meeting with Afro-Cuban leaders and American expatriates like former Black Panther Assata Shakur, who sought asylum in Cuba after escaping from prison on the United States. “Since Afro-Cubans have been at the bottom of the social and class hierarchy before the revolution, they have gained the most from the vast societal changes which have occurred,” Marable says. “A quarter-century after the revolution, employment, infant mortality, and life expectancy rates were better off for Blacks in Cuba than for Blacks anywhere in the world, even in the United States.” Although supportive of the Revolution’s progress, Marable is aware that it’s difficult to eradicate “old habits and attitudes” in a society in which slavery existed for centuries. “The struggle to destroy racism still remains a central challenge in Cuba,” he admits. “But on balance, the Cubans are far more honest about their shortcomings, and have achieved greater equality for Blacks than we have in the U.S.”
In addition, Marable says, “Cuba has developed a special relationship with Black people throughout the world. Castro has personally and politically identified himself and his entire nation with the cultural heritage and legacy of Africa.” Since the 1960s, Castro has supported numerous black anti-colonial struggles around the world. In 1970, Cuba mounted Operation Carlota, named after a black woman who led a 19th century slave rebellion in Cuba, to support the MPLA liberation movement against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola. When the independent Angolan government was later confronted by the South Africa-supported UNITA rebellion, Operation Carlota was expanded to include 50,000 troops – 75 percent of them blacks.
Many have argued that Cuba’s strong Soviet-supported intervention in Angola helped bring about the independence of Namibia and the gradual dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid system. As Nelson Mandela puts it, “Cuba came to our region as doctors, teachers, soldiers, agricultural experts, but never as colonizers. They have shared the same trenches with us in the struggles against colonialism, underdevelopment and apartheid. Hundreds of Cubans have given their lives, literally, in a struggle that was first and foremost not theirs but ours. As southern Africans we salute them. We vow never to forget this unparalleled example of selfless internationalism.”
Critics dispute this so-called “selfless internationalism,” calling Castro’s “pan-Africanism” a public relations ploy, and contending that while blacks rarely serve as high-ranking government officials at home, they dominate representative missions abroad. Moreover, critics note that black Cubans are eager to leave Cuba to escape poverty, repression, and likely military service in Africa. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, these critics say, the Castro government suppressed Afro-Cuban religious groups, Afro-Cuban intellectual organizations, and black consciousness movements. Black Cubans who adopted “Afro” hairstyles were regularly harassed by the police, and risked detention on one of the island’s numerous “rehabilitation camps.”
In Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (a book Maya Angelou praises as “a brave analysis of racism in Cuba [which] throws light on the conditions of racism everywhere in the world”), historian Carlos Moore calls the Castro government “a decidedly Negro-phobic Marxist regime.” Moor argues that “since the aborted black insurrection of 1912, a very rigid taboo on the issue of race” has existed in Cuba, and says “the starting point [to a racial democracy] may be simply the sincere recognition by Cuban whites that they are racists: the products of many generations of an insidious system of white supremacy premised on an ‘amiable,’ paternalistic attachment to multiracialism … so long as the whites are on top.”
Moore relates how the late Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Touré), who was warmly welcomed to Cuba by Castro in 1967 (“This is your house, Stokely!”), soon left with serious doubts about the island’s so-called “racial democracy,” saying Cuba’s top leadership was all white and that blacks were in no positions of real power. Similarly, Moore describes how Eldridge Cleaver arrived secretly in Cuba in 1968, but soon left for Algiers after complaining of racism.
Like Moore, Emilio Carril, a Cuba-born New Yorker, disputes the notion that blacks have fared well under Castro. “Cuba is not a racial democracy, he asserts. “The demographics of the population are not reflected in the power elite. Americans go to Cuba thinking they can transfer their experiences to Cuba. The racial trajectory in Cuba is different. Racial categories in Latin America are different. … Castro’s pan-Africanism is simply anti-Americanism. He supported the monstrous regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia.”
Many anti-Castro Cubans in Miami share Carril’s view, and reject the idea of Cuba as a “racial democracy.” Commenting on the frequent defections of Cuban athletes to the U.S., Miguel Angel Martinez of the Cuban National Movement noted, “Castro, an enthusiastic sportsman who considers sports as a public relations, saw opportunity in Cuba’s sea of black flesh. He sent his sports scouts – his modern-day slave merchants – throughout Cuba looking for … strong athletic young blacks. They were sent to military-regimented training camps until they learned their sports trade. They again became, after more than 300 years, slaves in their own country.”
Black conservatives like Sidney Brinkley are also very critical of the Castro regime. Brinkley likens Cuba’s “white minority rule” to South African apartheid, and points out “there are virtually no Afro-Cubans found in the hierarchy of the Cuban government. … Racism is racism, wherever it is found.” He scorns those black leaders who defend Cuba, saying, “Castro has played [them] like a fiddle.”
Responding to African American conservatives, Lisa Brock, co-editor of Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution (1997) says that blacks do occupy leadership roles in Cuba.”The Communist Party Secretaries of two key provinces – Havana and Santiago – are Black,” she writes. “And many other leaders of Cuba’s Trade Union Federation, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the Peoples’ Power Assemblies, the union of Young Communists, the Women’s Federation – have always been Black.” She also notes that $13,500 of Cuba’s 64,000 doctors are black … [while] we in the U.S. only have 17,000 black doctors. Thus Cuba with a population of 11 million has nearly 13,500 black doctors, while we here with a population of 290 million have only [a few] thousand more.”
Whatever one’s political stance, according to the New York Times, after four decades of Castro’s Revolution and despite the loss of a $5-$8 billion subsidy from the former Soviet Union, Cuba still offers free education and health care, and the highest literacy rate and lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America. The average life expectancy is now 75, up from 60 in 1959. The number of university graduates has quadrupled under Castro, and Cuban doctors are pioneers in new research in biotechnology and vaccines. However, as Carril insists, “What’s the point of high literacy rates if the government controls what you read? All Cubans can read is [the state newspaper] Granma, with Castro’s interminable speeches.”
Noticeably absent from this far-from-settled debate about the status of Afro-Cubans are the voices of Afro-Cubans themselves, and for this reason Afro-Cuban poet and author Pedro Perez-Sarduy’s forthcoming Afro-Cuba Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (University of Florida Press) is highly anticipated. In his book, Perez-Sarduy draws on interviews conducted in the mid-1990s with Afro-Cubans of different generations, who “reflect on their lives and experiences of race in both pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba, and the broader issues of race and racism … they constitute eloquent and moving testimony to the tremendous opening provided by the revolution, and also its contradictions.”
Clearly, Afro-Cubans themselves are best able to assess their lot in Castro’s Cuba, and best positioned to appreciate its complexity, as Paloma Dallas of the Committee to Protect Journalists discovered on a recent trip to Cuba, where she spoke to a number of Afro-Cubans. “I asked one Cuban man in his 90s about the situation in Cuba, the benefits of the Revolution and so forth,” she recalls. “And all he would say was, ‘I’m a revolutionary, but I’m not blind.’”
[First Published: March 10 2000]