How Cuba Uprooted Race Discrimination
by Harry Ring

Pioneer Publishers, June 1961.
Scanned and web-posted by
Walter Lippmann, June 2007.

INTRODUCTION
by Richard Gibson

Draw a semi-circle on the map of the western hemisphere from Rio de Janeiro to Boston and within this semi-circle you will have vaguely outlined what might be called "black America." Within this area lies most of Brazil, the Guianas, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, the West Indies Federation, Martinique, Guadalupe, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the southeastern portion of the United States.

Here is to be found the largest concentration of persons of African descent outside the continent of Africa itself. In only a few places do black men and women make up the majority of the population, but almost everywhere they form a substantial portion. And their labor power is essential in agriculture and industry.

Black has almost become synonymous with poor, and these descendants of African slaves in many cases have been left practically as impoverished as their forefathers. They are landless peasants who make up a rural proletariat or, where there is some industry, they are only permitted to occupy the bottom rungs of the ladder of the industrial hierarchy. They are the people with the highest amount of illiteracy, and no schools. They are exposed to every disease and social plague, and yet have no hospitals. They have no vote or, if there is some sort of formal democracy, their ballots mean little in the organized deceptions of electoral campaigns. Besides, they have far More serious problems — such as finding their next meal.

The Whites Suffer Too

Within this same area live many white people and many of them exist quite as miserably as their black neighbors. These whites also suffer from malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, economic exploitation and political oppression. Logically, they should be the natural allies of the blacks in the struggle for a better life, but that is rarely the case, even in Latin countries where racial discrimination is far more "subtle" than the North American variety, whether of the South or the Northern ghettoes.

Even a hasty examination of the contradictions of power and wealth in this part of the Americas will reveal that any profound revolutionary change can only be made by an alliance of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised of both races. But there

Printed in the USA by Pioneer Publishers (See back cover) is an enormous difference between paying lip-service to such a revolutionary unity — in the time-worn manner of many U.S. "liberals" — and actually forging that unity in action. It is not enough merely to combat racism; one must fight the vast social evil, the system which fosters racism as a means of perpetuating its domination of the economic, political and social lives of men, regardless of the color of their skin.

Cuba's revolutionary leaders, from the days of Jose Marti to Fidel Castro, have been well aware of this. And the history of their victorious struggle is the first record we have of genuine revolutionary unity being forged between white and black Americans.

Yet, during the revolutionary battles and in the first months after the triumph of the revolution, there were many who feared that Fidel and those around him were "going too far." There were even some who expressed the fear that Fidel himself might be sowing "racial discord" by declaring himself so passionately against all the vestiges of racism in Cuban life.

For their part, Afro-Cubans were cautious at first. A few slogans were not enough to prompt them to commit themselves to the revolution. After all, they could recall the early days of his regime when dictator Fulgencio Batista was boasting about his "mixed" blood. But Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement was concerned with people, not slogans, and it had the desire and the will and the ability to do something. And Afro-Cubans joined in that battle, as Harry Ring has authoritatively reported in this pamphlet.

In that struggle, as Harry Ring has stated, the Negro people of Cuba became "the first of any country in the Americas to win full economic, social and political equality." It is worth recalling that the white people of Cuba also won their economic, social and political freedom. Without one there never would have been the other. This is one of the most important lessons that the Cuban Revolution has for us in the United States, as well as demonsrating once and for all that the forces of racism and oppression in this hemisphere are not invincible.

RICHARD GIBSON

Richard Gibson is acting executive secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and secretary of the Liberation Committee for Africa.
 

How Cuba Uprooted Race Discrimination

During a visit to Cuba in the summer of 1960 I met a young woman who symbolized one of the most inspiring and dramatic accomplishments of the revolution there.

She was a Negro, in her late teens. We met on a bus tour into the countryside. During our conversation, I asked her what she did.

She replied that she was studying surveying and that when the course was completed that year she would go on to the University of Havana to become a civil engineer.

An obvious thought came into my mind: Could she pursue such a career if she lived in the United States?

In Cuba today the Negro people have entered a new era. Before the revolution Jim Crow flourished. It took a somewhat different form than it does here but the net result was just as vicious and degrading.

Yet in less than three years the revolution has wiped out racial discrimination almost completely.

The revolution is making remarkable progress in solving the basic social problems that beset the long-exploited Cuban people, both black and white. Under U.S. domination, the island had been converted into a vast sugar plantation that provided back-breaking, low-paying work three or four months of the year and widespread hunger the rest of the time. Now the new government is developing a diversified economy capable of providing both employment and the goods the people need.

Unemployment has been sharply reduced and within a few years the problem should be eliminated altogether. Thousands of dispossessed farmers are being given their own piece of land or the opportunity to join flourishing farm cooperatives.

Miserable slums are being rapidly replaced by beautiful, low-cost homes. Hospitals and clinics are being built on an adequate scale for the first time in Cuban history. Public beaches that ordinary people can afford to go to have been opened for the first time in the island's history.

Schools have sprung up like mushrooms and an army of teachers, professional and volunteer, are waging a dramatic one-year campaign to wipe out illiteracy.

Rents have been cut in half and soon the Urban Reform Law will eliminate the landlord-tenant system altogether. One of the aims of the revolution is to make every Cuban a home-owner.

The colored citizens of Cuba, who constitute about 27 per cent of the island's population of 6.5 million, have benefited immensely from this program of social progress. A whole new way of life has opened for a segment of the people who before the revolution lived with the same fate as the Negro people of our country — "the last hired and the first fired."

By the same token, Cuban Negroes generally lived in the worst homes, had the least opportunity for schooling and for careers for their children. They suffered the most from the absence of medical care.

In the new Cuba, the Negro has come into his own. I visited a beautiful new housing development in Havana and knocked at a door at random. The lady of the house was a Negro in her thirties. She spoke good English and told me she had lived in Brooklyn for several years. She had come to the United States because under Batista there had been no work.

After the revolution she returned home, married, and now has a baby.

In Brooklyn, she said, she earned $40 a week working in a laundry. For a tiny one-room "furnished apartment" in the Jim Crow Bedford-Stuyvesant district she had paid a rent of $95 a month.

Now she and her family live in a spacious, ranch-style, five-room house with a lawn in front and garden in the rear.

The cost of their lovely new home? Just $18.66 a month. And that's not rent. In 25 years it will belong to them.

Because they are sharing in the benefits of the revolution that they played a big part in making, the colored people of Cuba are solid supporters of the Castro government. But their devotion to the revolution springs from something even more basic than approval of the general gains it has achieved.

The Negro people of Cuba are the first of any country in the Americas to win full economic, social and political equality.

This wasn't a victory that came quickly or easily. The history of the struggle for first-class citizenship in Cuba has many parallels with the history of that struggle in this country.

Negroes were brought to Cuba as slaves at about the same time they were brought to this country and slavery was not abolished in Cuba until several decades after it ended here.

Like here, the Negroes played a decisive and heroic role in the abolition movement which was part of the long fight to win independence from Spain. Negro troops and leaders were in the forefront of that fierce, bloody struggle.

But like here, the end of slavery in Cuba did not bring full citizenship for the Negro people. The fight for equal rights had to be fought continuously on every front — the right to a decent job, the right to patronize public places on the same basis as whites, the right to equal political opportunity and representation.

The struggle was a bitter one and there were several armed uprisings of the Cuban Negroes. One of these uprisings, in 1912, was crushed with the aid of U.S. marines.

For the Negro people of Cuba, the revolution led by Castro was the climax of their long battle against racial discrimination. Their spectacular victory in breaking the back of the Jim Crow system, I think, offers much food for thought for the civil-rights movement in our country.

The Cuban victory over Jim Crow explodes the theory of "gradualism." Resolute revolutionary action in Cuba has accomplished more in 30 months than has been achieved by a century of "gradualism" in the United States.

At the same time, in my opinion, revolutionary Cuba also demonstrates the incorrectness of the Negro Nationalists who preach that Negroes must separate themselves from whites because they can never win equality in a country where whites are a majority of the population.

Cuba is also showing that the practical way to abolish Jim Crow is to strike directly at its social and economic roots. Jim Crow isn't being liquidated in Cuba by futile appeals to the "hearts" and "good will" of those who profit from the racist system.

The results of Cuba's revolutionary approach to the question of race relations has been strikingly apparent to those visitors concerned with the problem. (That's undoubtedly one of the reasons the State Department put a ban on travel there.)

Negro journalists who visited there have given eloquent testimony to the contrast between race relations in Cuba and here.

Reporting from Havana in the Jan. 16, 1960, Pittsburgh Courrier, William G. Nunn, Sr., wrote: "My impressions, and they must remain just that, are that I have seen democracy in action.

"I've experienced the thing which Negro Americans have dreamed about happening in their own country. . . . The Castro regime has pushed into the limbo of the forgotten past the hated color schism which has divided the people."

The distinguished foreign correspondent, William Worthy, had this to say in the Sept. 24, 1960, Afro-American:

"If I was a colored parent, eager to raise my children free of racial complexes and ingrained subservience, I would at any sacrifice treat them to at least one impressionable year in revolutionary non-discriminatory Cuba where the free and unself-conscious mixing of races and complexions is startling to an outsider. . . .

"If white Americans had brainwashed me to accept 'moderation and gradualism' in the fight for civil rights, if I believed that revolutionary steps against job and housing discrimination weren't feasible, I would test my theories against Fidel Castro's bold measures that overnight established equality as the law of the land, as the rigid policy of the government and as the day-by-day habits of the citizenry."

To undercut the effects of reports like these, supporters of the hate-Cuba campaign in the United States have tried to argue that the civil-rights stand of the Castro government isn't anything to get excited about because there never was any real race discrimination in Cuba.

They point to the fact that there has always been wide-scale intermarriage in Cuba; that Negroes weren't forced into segregated neighborhoods and schools; that they were employed in many skilled trades; and that a number of prominent politicians, including ex-dictator Batista, were of mixed ancestry.

What these people are really saying is that the Jim Crow system in Cuba wasn't identical to the one here. But the record shows that Jim Crow did exist in an acute form there.

For example, the Cuban Committee for the Rights of Negroes issued a report in 1934 which said: "There are industries where they cannot work; in commerce, in the great foreign enterprises, above all, Negroes are not employed. In certain industries they work where the pay is least: for example in the graphic arts they may be compositors, but seldom linotypers; in the tobacco industry they are cigar-makers and strippers, but not sorters or trimmers, who are the employees who earn the best wages."

Lip Service to Equality

In his book, Rural Cuba (University of Minnesota, 1950), sociologist Nelson Lowry wrote: "While orators on Memorial Day (Dec. 7) pay glowing tribute to one of the greatest national heroes of the War of Independence, the colored General Antonio Maceo, no man of color seems to have been appointed in recent years to the council of ministers, and only rarely to immediately subordinate positions. Some colored politicians get elected to the national Congress, although not in ratio which the colored population bears to the total. The governing class, in other words, is predominantly white and appears to regard affairs of state as a white preserve. . . .

"It cannot be denied that there is consciousness of color in Cuba, although it is true that color plays a less conspicuous role than it does in the United States. While the man of color pervades practically all of the occupations, he is predominantly in those which are further down the social hierarchy. The clubs which are so important in urban social life in Cuba are strictly on a color basis. The various yacht clubs are strictly white. If the colored people want club life they must provide their own, also on an exclusive basis."

A 1935 Foreign Policy Association report on Problems of the New Cuba offered this information:

"Negroes have continued to perform the manual labor to which they were accustomed under slavery. In the towns they are found in domestic service, in the ports many of them work as stevedores, in the sugar country Negroes cut a large part of the sugar cane . . .

"During the revolutions of 1868 and 1895 the white Cubans and Negroes were drawn closely together against Spain. . .

Because of this historic association and the general Latin attitude toward interracial relations, racial prejudice in Cuba has not been nearly so acute as in Anglo-Saxon countries. It seems true, however, that it has increased during the past few years. This is attributed partly to the unconscious influence of the American point of view and partly to economic distress."

Such reports do more than confirm that a Jim Crow system did exist in Cuba. They also offer a solid clue as to who was responsible for it.

When the Spanish imperialists were driven out of Cuba at the end of the last century a new colonial power began to ,move in. U.S. business interests — sugar, fruit, utilities, banking, gambling, tourism — became the dominant force in internal Cuban affairs.

And these interests brought with them a product "made in the USA" — the doctrine of white supremacy.

A wedge was driven between black and white to shatter the unity established in the struggle against Spain. Jim Crow began to reappear throughout Cuban society. The old game of divide-and-rule was played for all it was worth by the U.S. corporations and their Cuban political stooges.

Every Cuban that you talk to will explain that the worst job discrimination was that of the North American companies.

Social discrimination? How could Negroes be permitted access to hotels, clubs and casinos? That would be "bad" for the tourist trade!

The role of the U.S. companies in re-establishing Jim Crow in Cuba also helps to explain the present government's determination to wipe out racial injustices.

The aim of the Cuban revolutionaries when they organized their heroic — and integrated — rebel band in the Sierra Maestra mountains was to end the Batista tyranny and bring independence and democracy to the island.

To achieve this goal, they had to end the power of U.S. business interests over the country's economic and political life.

When the power of the North American corporations was broken in Cuba the basis of the Jim Crow system was shattered.

But that was only the beginning of a process that is still going on. The old Cuban politicians and the dollar interests that kept them in power had a vested interest in preserving the Jim Crow system. The revolutionary government, on the contrary, has no other source of power than the people themselves. Such a government can endure only if the people are completely united. (It was this unity of the Cuban people that smashed the CIA-sponsored invasion in April 1961.)

Castro and his associates came to power with deep anti-racist convictions. (Castro was already known in his student days as an outspoken opponent of Jim Crow.) But even more important than their personal sense of decency and fair play was their clear understanding that the revolution could survive only if- the people were united.

Four months after Castro came to power, the April 16, 1959, issue of Jet magazine reported:

"Already the bearded leader who led his integrated rag-tag rebel army out of the swollen Sierra Maestra mountains into Havana . . . . has called for an end to racial discrimination and urged fair employment practices regardless of color.. . .

"Castro told the nation in a radio address that racial discrimination is a scheme to divide Cuba against itself, warned that Cuba has enough enemies on the outside, then warming to his subject, Castro cited the part Negroes had played in the Revolution . . . . Then in the bluntest terms of all he told Cubans there was no such thing as a 'pure Caucasian.' Pointing to those proud of their Spanish ancestry, lecturer Castro said Moors from Africa dominated Spain for 800 years, added that all of 'us' have African blood."

Three-Front Campaign

The campaign of the Cuban government to abolish Jim Crow has proceeded on three major fronts — by example; by cracking down on those who practice discrimination; and by broad popular education to erase prejudice from the minds of the rank-and-file white citizenry.

The example has been set with the creation of a thoroughly integrated government. This hasn't been done by appointing a few Negroes to minor posts for the sake of "window dressing." Negroes have the unrestricted opportunity to rise in the government on the basis of ability and they are using that new opportunity.

These are some of the high officials in the new Cuba who are Negroes: Juan. Almeida, commander of the Rebel Army; Carlos Oliveras, deputy minister of foreign affairs; Antonio Gaucet, assistant secretary of labor; and Calixto Garcia, chief of the military district of Oriente province.

Government officials consciously work to educate the people by example. Author Julian Mayfield offered one such example in an Oct. 1, 1960, article in the Afro-American:

"At the climax of the carnival season in 1959 when the queen was chosen, the government was represented by the chief of the army, a black man, who placed the crown upon her head and, as tradition demanded, was honored by the first dance with her.

"The upper classes were astonished. But this year when the revolutionaries repeated their bold act, the event passed almost unnoticed."

Mayfield also explains how government and union hiring services have eliminated discrimination in employment:

"The proprietor of a barber shop in a lush hotel like the Havana Libre (formerly the Havana Hilton) would never have considered hiring a colored barber before the revolution. Now if he wants a barber he must hire from the top of a syndicate list, whether he is black or white.

"The plant manager in need of a technician, the personnel executive seeking a clerk or secretary — both must submit to the same process. Admittedly this is coercion, but it is necessary and it can be expected to disappear when the need for it no longer exists."

In dealing with holdouts, the approach of the Cuban government is the direct opposite of the "moderation" and snail-like "deliberate speed" which is offered to Negroes here.

If a Cuban Negro is denied a cup of coffee in a restaurant it's the restaurant owner, not the Negro, who goes to jail.

From the outset the Cubans have moved hard and fast against those who try to perpetuate racism. For example, the Feb. 12, 1959, issue of Jet reported:

"As the Castro government's first move to end segregation in Cuba, Gov. Morales Hernandez ordered the closing of private clubs in the province of Santa Clara unless the premises were opened to Negroes . . . . The action followed a rally protesting continued segregation of Negroes in the city of Santa Clara . . . . For years, the province, considered the most prejudiced area in Cuba, had upheld prejudice . . . . Gov. Hernandez ended an age-old segregation policy in the city park. Formerly Negroes were barred from walking in the central section of the city park."

Won't it be a wonderful day in this country when Jim Crow clubs and restaurants are told to desegregate or shut down?

One of the most inspiring aspects of the drive to wipe out all barriers between the races is the educational campaign. In healthy contrast to this country, where school books either slur over the subject or add their disgraceful bit to bolstering prejudice, the Cuban people are being taught to understand that both from a social and scientific viewpoint the myth of "racial superiority" is false and reactionary.

This educational material is spread across the country in books, articles and frequent nation-wide broadcasts by Castro and other government leaders. The educational material is designed for both adults and children. (For an example of what a book can and should say on the race question see page 13.)

This education by word and deed is already having a profound effect on Cuban life. This doesn't mean that prejudice has been erased completely yet. Notions ingrained over decades aren't wiped out overnight and there are still people in Cuba with notions of white "superiority."

I met one such person in my visit there. He was the librarian at one of the private clubs in Havana. An old man, he told me with a tremor in his voice that the public library across the street now welcomed Negroes, but his library did not.

The real significance of that episode, though, was that he felt the need to tell me this in a whisper. Whether he liked it or not, he knew he was living in the past and that the whole weight of Cuban society today is against him.

This tremendous achievement of the Cuban revolution has won the enthusiastic support of many civil-rights fighters in this country. I'm confident it will win even more support as the truth about Cuba becomes more widely known.

Rights advocates like William Worthy, Julian Mayfield, historian W. E. B. DuBois; actor Ossie Davis, Robert F. Williams, leader of the Monroe, N. C., NAACP, Richard Gibson of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and others, have declared their determined opposition to any move to crush the Cuban revolution. (See their public statement on page 15.)

In taking this stand they are motivated not only by support of the social gains of the Cuban revolution and their feeling of solidarity with the Cuban people. They correctly believe that every blow struck at the Jim Crow system in Cuba is also a blow at that system in this country.

They recognize that the dollar interests which fostered Jim Crow in Cuba also foster it here. Their statement boldly declares: "The enemies of the Cubans are our enemies, the Jim Crow bosses of this land where we are still denied our rights."

By the same token, the Jim Crow bosses are determined to crush the Cuban revolution because they understand that its successes threaten them at home. Cuba is providing an example of social progress and equality that strikes a chord of fear in the heart of every racist in this country.

That's one of the reasons the gang of anti-Negro counterrevolutionary Cuban exiles are receiving such powerful backing in this country. And make no mistake about it. The Cuban counter-revolutionaries are racist to the core.

Proof of their racist position comes from one of the very few Cuban Negroes working against the Castro government in this country. Dr. J. R. Betancourt lists his alleged grievances against the new Cuba in an article published in the May 1961 issue of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis. (One of his complaints is that the Cuban government now sponsors dances every weekend "in select places which had previously barred Negroes." The result, he says, has been loss of business by the old clubs that catered exclusively to Negroes.)

Despite his zealous attacks on "communism" in Cuba, Betancourt seems to be having a hard time getting accepted by the counter-revolutionaries. He writes:

"They have formed many organizations of exiled Cubans to work for the overthrow of Castro and his Communist regime. All are controlled by white Cubans, members of the upper or middle-class . . . . Yet they do not exhibit the slightest interest in the fate of the Cuban Negro . . . . None of these exile groups have committed themselves to a non-discriminatory program should they get in power."

It's no accident that these exile groups haven't committed themselves to such a program. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency isn't financing them in order to improve Cuban race relations. That would be bad for the business of the dollar-hustling tycoons who dream of re-establishing their domination of Cuba through these exile hirelings.

Those who are concerned with stamping out racism everywhere will take a different view of the matter.

Julian Mayfield, in the article previously quoted, put it this way:

"The important lesson in the Cuban experience is that great social change need not wait on the patient education of white supremacists. A government that is sincere can show it means business by imaginatively using its moral and legal weight to destroy racism . .. .

"I know it would be naive to say there are no racists left in Cuba. What matters is that the new government has snatched away their power to deny a man a job, a house to live in, or a chance to realize his best potential because of his color.

"That is why the Cubans of color are solidly behind the revolution and are willing to die to keep it."

Everything I saw in Cuba confirms what Mayfield , says. While visiting one of the new national parks (formerly one man's private estate), I talked with a bearded young Negro soldier who had fought in the Sierra Maestra with Castro.

He told me that he had always stood up against Jim Crow but it wasn't until he joined the rebel force that he felt he was really getting somewhere.

"It's a wonderful thing," he said, "to be fighting for something you have a stake in."

I think every civil-rights partisan in our country has a stake in that fight too. Not only because what is being accomplished is good for the Cuban people but, equally, because it helps to advance the fight for full equality in this country.

The need to speak up for fair play for Cuba — to demand that Washington adopt a hands-off policy — is urgent. Powerful forces in this country are still determined to crush the Cuban revolution even if it takes U.S. troops to do it and even if it brings the world to the brink of a new war.

If they are permitted a free hand to carry out their criminal plan it will strengthen the hand of racism and reaction throughout this country.

I don't think they will succeed in carrying out their plan. The tiny island of Cuba has unfettered a powerful force for social progress based on the unity of its people in a fight for the common good. The Cuban revolution will survive and will continue to provide a splendid practical example of the way to destroy Jim Crow.

More and more, people will realize: If the Cubans can build a rational society based on equality and brotherhood, there's no good reason why we can't do it here.

'The Brotherhood of Whites And Negroes is Indispensable'

(The following excerpts from the Cuban Civic Training Manual deal with the question of racial prejudice and discrimination. Published by the Ministry of Education, the civic manual is widely used in Cuba for adult education. It's treatment of the race question is a good example of what school text books and general educational material in this country could and should be.)

There are those who justify racial discrimination, persuaded that "Negroes constitute an inferior race." In other countries like the United States and South Africa, this racial prejudice, this tenacious idea rooted in the mind for so long a time, brings men to the most bestial crimes — lynching, mass assassinations per- secution of Negro students, terrorist acts against Negroes' homes, death sentences for insignificant crimes, sometimes falsely attributed to Negro citizens, etc.

But is there a scientific basis for believing that Negroes constitute an inferior race . . .?

The very concept of race is much discussed. In the past numerous authors have believed that different numbers of "races" existed. For one such author there are three such "races"; for another there is more, up to 34. According to Ferdinand Ortiz one can't properly speak of human races.

The most reasonable criteria is that there are human groups differentiated among themselves by a series of external physical characteristics which are transmitted by heredity. There are, therefore, various basic racial groups which are given the name caucasoid, negroid and mongoloid, the first corresponding to the people known as whites; the second to the Negro people; and the third to the Chinese and other Asian people, also to the primitive inhabitants of America, etc.

In any case, the problem in Cuba is reduced to the existence — to the separation — of whites and Negroes.

Whatever the racial groups being considered, the most interesting thing is that among human beings the similarities are more important than the differences . . . .

Science established with complete certainty that there are neither superior or inferior races; therefore, the Negro is neither superior nor inferior to the white.

In all times and places racism (and national hatred) have been the means to oppress people. To justify colonial oppression in Asia and Africa, the colonials invoked the "inferiority" of the people. The anti-national groups in our country, the great interests (foreign companies, large landholders, parasitic magnates) found racial discrimination and the persistence of prejudice beneficial and convenient, because they contributed to divisions among the people and permitted them to have at their disposal a reserve labor force for the most arduous work and creating fears that maintain distrust and weaken the Revolution . . . .

During the actual revolutionary process different forms of racial prejudice were taken advantage of to put the brakes on the Revolution. In the beginning, to split the Negro population from the struggle against the tyranny, the reaction circulated the story that a "revolution of whites" was being brought about; but after Fidel Castro's firm anti-discriminatory stand of March 22, 1959, the reaction, in order to split the whites from the revolution, said, "This is a revolution for the Negroes."

It is in reality a revolution for whites and Negroes, with all racial groups identifying themselves with the nation's progress.

As we have seen, humble white men and women don't benefit, but rather are immeasurably harmed, if they act in a prejudiced way and discriminate against their Negro brothers . . . .

Slaveholders' Weapon

Racial prejudice and discrimination in Cuba date from the slave period during which it reached its greatest height. It was necessary to proceed as if the slave was not a human being, or was an inferior being, and it likewise suited the slaveholder to make the slave believe this in order to dominate him more easily.

When slavery ended, there remained in society the same discriminatory venom that used to justify it, since the criteria of inferiority accumulated against those who were exploited as slaves continued to be used once they were free to oppress them and their descendants as Negroes.

The nature of the relationship of subordination that our country maintained until recently with the United States, where racial segregation has so much virulence, also contributed to the persistence in Cuba of discriminatory attitudes. This had a lot to do with the fact that when the War of Independence was over the foreign occupiers deprived humble Cubans, especially the Negroes, of the opportunity to participate in the development and enjoyment of the wealth of the country . . . .

Whites (Spaniards) and Negroes (Africans) arrived in Cuba at almost the same time. No factor contributed more vigorously to the wealth of Cuba than the work of the Negro slave. . . .

Whites and Negroes participated together in the revolutionary war against Batista and his foreign protectors.

The Cuban nation, then — its culture, its real independence — is inconceivable if the Negro is left out of the historic past and revolutionary present. The union and brotherhood of whites and Negroes is indispensable for the triumph of the Revolution. . . .

There is a lot to do — and it must be done — so that our revolution prevents racial discrimination and uproots racial prejudice from the minds of all citizens.
 

"Cuba A Declaration of Conscience"

This advertisement appeared in the Afro-American April 22 and 29 and in the New York Post April 25, 1961. *

Because we have known oppression, because we have suffered more than other Americans, because we are still fighting for our own liberation from tyranny, we Afro-Americans have the right and the duty to raise our voices in protest against the forces of oppression that now seek to crush a free people linked to us by bonds of blood and a common heritage.

One-third of Cuba's people are Afro-Cubans, of the same African descent as we. Many of our own forefathers passed through Cuba on their way to the slave plantations in the United States. Those who remained on the island knew the same brutality that their brothers suffered on the mainland; after emancipation, they too knew disenfranchisement, they too became second-class citizens, peons exploited on the huge U.S.-owned landholdings.

Today — thanks to a social revolution which they helped make —Afro-Cubans are first-class citizens and are taking their rightful place in the life of their country where all racial barriers crumbled in a matter of weeks following the victory of Fidel Castro.

Now our brothers are threatened again — this time by a gang of ousted Cuban political hacks who find segregated Miami more congenial than integrated Havana. This pack of mercenaries who hope to turn back the clock in Cuba are armed, trained and financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. But they know that by themselves they can never re-enslave the Cuban people, so now they are openly boasting that U.S. troops will go to their aid as soon as they land in Cuba.

This criminal aggression against a peaceful and progressive people must not be allowed to happen. But if it does, we are determined to do all we possibly can to hinder the success of this crime.

Afro-American correspondent William Worthy declared recently: "If Cuba is attacked, I and others who know the facts will denounce the attack as an evil, and wicked colonial war deserving of opposition and resistance by Afro-Americans." Worthy warned that, if such an attack took place: "In this country we would see civil rights setbacks from coast to coast. Our enemies would be strengthened and emboldened."

Afro-Americans, don't be fooled — the enemies of the Cubans are our enemies, the Jim Crow bosses of this land where we are still denied our rights. The Cubans are our friends, the enemies of our enemies.

If you would like to know more about Cuba, write: Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 799 Broadway, New York 3, N. Y.

This ad has been paid for by the persons whose names appear here. Your contributions, no matter how small, are welcomed.

Ronald Ballard, Dr. Emmett Bassett, Walter Bowe, Edward Clarke, John Henrik Clarke, Mrs. Odessa Cox, Dr. Lonnie Cross, Harold Cruse, Felix A. Cummings, Ossie Davis, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Gibson, Shirley Graham, Calvin Hicks, Leroi Jones, Mrs. Jane Kerina, Abby Lincoln, Conrad Lynn, Mrs. Maya Angelou Make, Julian Mayfield, Robert C. Maynard, John W. McDow, Mrs. Marion Metelis, Carlos Moore, Nanny Murrell, Clarence H. Seniors, John A. Singleton, Mrs. Pernella Wattley, Daniel H. Watts, Robert F. Williams, William Worthy.