PRESENTATION

Right after the book Desafíos de la problemática racial en Cuba (The challenges of the racial problem in Cuba) was published in 2007, I decided to complement it with some of my previous essays to enrich its contents and cover a number of closely related topics that I deemed very important.

Aware that many people could not get a copy because it was a limited edition, I chose the title Desafíos de la problemática racial en Cuba (II) to make it easier for anyone to realize it was a sequel and likely to be as interesting as the first part.

I share the views of many of my friends about the promotion of reading to take care of one major task we have ahead: keep trying to make this topic better known and understood.

As I have said before, there is as much concern about our race issues as there is reluctance to own up to them, let alone lack of knowledge about it. Those who come into contact with the topic can’t be expected to look at it from the same perspective. Some feel surprised, others go cynical, and still others are terrified at the thought, not to mention, but many simply choose to deny its existence and or have anything to do with it. It’s perhaps the most avoided subject in today’s Cuba.

Therefore, a crucial goal of my work is to make all Cubans aware that we still retain racial stereotypes, discrimination and even racism, a fact we can’t just overlook because, like it or not, it has fallout on our daily life and our integrity as a revolutionary society.

Our revolutionary process has made it possible to go deeper into this topic, given that Cuba is no longer the racist society it was before 1959 and has managed to clean the atmosphere of great racial tension that prevailed then. This is thanks to the Revolution’s extraordinarily humane social policies, which have taken all forms of discrimination and racism to levels well below those so commonly found in nearby countries, and especially in the United States.

These evils are no more institutional than the stereotypes underlying them, but the triad of  racial stereotyping / discrimination / racism still are on a sound footing in our social milieu and try to stand their ground, not just as a remnant of the past but as phenomena that our as yet flawed society is capable of reproducing. Simply put: unless strongly opposed, racism threatens to reinstate itself in the macro-consciousness of today’s Cuban society.

Hence the importance of understanding this issue, so we can counter its effects and banish them from our institutions, communities, homes, individual consciousnesses and culture, as an indispensable condition to do away with a situation that prevents progress at all levels of our social, cultural, economic and political life. As long as we fail to root out of our way of living all forms of racial stereotyping, discrimination and racism it will be simply impossible to say Cuba is a truly cultured, democratic and functional society.

That’s why the essays included in this book are intended to increase public awareness of a problem suffered by all Cubans, be they white, black or mestizo, that puts us all, the discriminated and discriminators alike, on a disparaging moral spot which stops us from moving toward a more just, cultured and truly revolutionary society.




 

RACE AND REPUBLIC

There’s no such thing as a scientific concept of race: it’s just a social construction. That is, unless you ask any honest citizen who happened to live in republican Cuba.

These issues cannot be overlooked these days, and especially when it comes to digging up our past, because they could affect our present and shape our future behind our back. The exploitative classes and groups removed from power by our victorious 1959 revolution have tried too hard to change Cuban history as it is, as evidenced by the praise heaped on March 10, 1952 and the biography of a Fulgencio Batista by no means reflective of the dictator we knew in our Island.^[1]

Cuba proved to be a key setting to bring together the Old and the New World and played a crucial part in the rise of a social model that gave us the latter without losing the forms of exploitation developed by the former. Consequently, the so-called new world was in many respects more backward than the old one, as clearly shown by the long time that it took to replace slave with wage labor in sugar production and Spain’s remarkable reluctance to give up what they called the always faithful Island of Cuba.

All the prejudice, negative stereotyping and discrimination against non-white and, particularly, black people moved, unhindered, from the colony into the Republic despite the latter’s notable role in the bloody battles of the independence war. To be sure, the blacks were already suffering from marginalization by the time the Republic was founded, among other reasons because racists from both sides of the Florida Stratis had joined forces to that effect, especially in the wake of the U.S. intervention. In order to understand Cuba’s racial issue, it’s necessary, if not indispensable, that we take into account three highly significant factors: first, slavery and its many psychological and other consequences; second, racism’s economic, political, social, cultural, ideological and even demographic effects –the “black scare” syndrome left by the Haitian Revolution– and third, the long time gone by before slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886, the second to last country to do so in the western hemisphere. This particular fact made a great short- and long-term impact on the Cuban black’s status and the racist culture they inherited, which even today keeps rearing its ugly head.

Furthermore, so ill-fated a transition as the one from a colony to a republic was marked by the fact that it was not the pro-independence progressive and revolutionary forces, but the U.S. interventionists and their allies in Cuba who brought down the curtain on the conflict and laid the foundations of the new Establishment imposed in 1902.

The protectorate years leading up to the Republic served to relocate and ideologically convert most of the radical political forces and launch what proved to be Yankee imperialism’s first experimental neocolonial republic in our hemisphere, bound to develop into the longed-for model of representative democracy that stretched over to 1958.

Such was the U.S.’s plan when they demanded Spain to let go of the Island: use its so-called autonomy first and then set up the protectorate that would “shape” Cuba until the time was ripe to take hold of it, thus putting paid to everything that whites, blacks and mestizos alike had done until then for the sake of Martí’s idea of a Republic forged “with all and for the good of all”.

Since the Cuban blacks and mestizos in particular had no other source of inspiration but the liberation project led by Martí, Gómez and Maceo, they saw their expectations smashed to pieces. Unlike those in the U.S., blacks in Cuba had always fought for what they considered as their homeland and no intention of going back to Africa, much as they were fully aware that they would still have to fight tooth and nail to be recognized as Cuban, or else risk being sent there anyway.

Racism and discrimination gained momentum following the Yankee intervention in 1898, and not even the powerful members of the criollo bourgeoisie who stood behind it could escape their effects, since by American standards they were Hispanic, and therefore non-whites.

Leonardo Wood wrote to President McKinley: “We’re dealing with a race which has been decimated for hundreds of years and must be taught a new life, new principles and new ways to do things […]”.^[2]

As Wood said, it was the only way, because “after being swamped for centuries by the castoffs of Spanish society, there’s too much ‘mixed blood’ in the Island to join successfully the group of civilized nations”.^[3] Accordingly, Cuba could only be accepted for membership at the U.S.’s behest and only after being “whitened”.

To Charles Davenport, a famed geneticist at the time, “the mulattos combined ambition with intellectual deficiencies, which makes them unfortunate hybrids prone to alter society’s harmonic order”.^[4] This appraisal was the racists’ warning to the mulattos that for all their closeness to the whites, they were also blacks and hence unreliable.

Even many of those whose views on the Island’s population were not so negative agreed that the Cubans were lazy, childish, incompetent, and encumbered by an acute sense of inferiority. Small surprise then that the teachers sent to Harvard University in 1901 for training on how to shore up the “American way of life” in Cuba were seen as “grownup children unable to grasp the meaning of whay they saw”,^[5] in other words, nearly stupid.

As stated in Article 11, Section IV of the Constitution of the Republic, the blacks were granted citizen status as of 1901, but in practice this right was at odds with the class interests and racial prejudice that were so common during the colonial period and prevailed thereafter.

Ergo, the non-whites, who accounted for the poorest and lowest strata of Cuban society, remained markedly ostracized by the emerging bourgeois capitalistic society. Besides, together with the myth of racial equality inherited from nationalism, the foreign masters and the ruling Cuban whites used racism to subjugate and repress the blacks and mestizos while striving to twist, manipulate and blot out from their mind the glorious past that had brought them together during the war.

On top of that, the new master’s ideological work was made easier by the fact that those who had sided with the U.S. military intervention were not really sure that Cuba, once freed from Spain, could become by itself a sovereign independent nation.

It was thus very difficult for the non-whites and especially the blacks to voice their frustration and make their white countrymen understand that their outcry over their situation did not mean they were racist, anti-white, anti-patriotic or enemies of the nation, as they were just claiming their right to enjoy white Cuba’s power, wealth and job opportunities on equal terms, highly unlikely in a context where the social elite treated the smallest complaint as an assault on the atmosphere of peace and racial coexistence they advocated.

Based as it was on the Anglo-Saxon notion of white supremacy, this approach to the Cubans lived on throughout the Republic as a major hallmark of the way the U.S. treated Cuba, and maybe the reason why the American diplomats in Havana referred to the Cuban politicians who shared with them the administration of the Island as follows: “They have the superficial charm of astute children pampered by nature and geography, but beneath the surface they combine the worst traits of the unfortunate mixture of Spanish and African culture, laziness, cruelty, fickleness, lack of responsibility and innate dishonesty”.^[6]

All of the above highlights the fact that Cuba and particularly its black population had to submit to the Republican white power, a perfect complement to the cultural, economic and political order that the U.S, imposed on the Island with the help of their local subordinates.

Controversial as it was, the racial issue has always drawn the attention of many black, mestizo and white intellectuals who wrote about it in the media, although many journalists leveled fierce criticism on the efforts of this group to find a niche for them in Cuban society. A good example of this fight was the angry campaign launched between 1908 and 1912 against the Independent Party of Color and blacks in general, and the massacre of their members that took place that last year.

At its turn, the U.S. occupation and interference in Cuba’s internal affairs paved the way for the inculcation of American “scientific” ideas about race, based on the concept of “biological racism” concept that put forward the so-called “laws of heredity” and were applied through sterilization programs as the only viable solution to a growing crime rate ascribed –of course– to the non-whites and blacks, your typical “witches” fond of human sacrifices and rapists of white girls. The smear campaign was so intense that not a few innocent blacks paid for it with their lives, and the concept soon became part of conventional wisdom.

Only through selective immigration could the desired radical change in the Cuban people’s racial composition be achieved, whereas the low birthrate among the black population was expected to eventually lead to their natural disappearance. Then, as in José A. Saco’s time, the blacks had no place in the Island and were somehow expected to pass out of sight so that the overall population could get whiter.

Paradoxically, the survival of the blacks and mestizos who had been willing to die for Cuban independence was often threatened by the same people they had fought against during the war just because, as planned, a long-awaited white and Catholic immigrats from Spain were steadily stripping them of the lands and best-paid jobs.

It was only under pressure from U.S. sugar companies that the Cuban government took in seasonal farm laborers from the Antilles. After all, business is business, and cynicism suits its purposes fine.

Indeed, as far as many whites were concerned, what was at stake with regard to the “racial” issue was no less than Cuba’s social and cultural future, since in their view the great tragedy was the Island’s increasing “Africanization”. Thus all things African, a major source of sustenance to our identity, had to be culturally and physically removed from Cuba.

Two features that the ruling powers ascribed to non-whites ultimately justified the existing contempt for West Indian immigrants: their alleged criminal nature and primeval religious beliefs. It was racism at its best.

Gerardo Machado’s speeches often referred to the Cuban fraternity of races. He signed the bill declaring December 7 a day of mourning in commemoration of Antonio Maceo’s death; honored Juan Gualberto Gómez with the Order Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Cuba’s highest; and opposed and decreed to disband a Ku Klu Klan chapter in the province of Camagüey. Nothing but clever steps, in collusion with the domestic non-white middle class and with the support of Club Atenas, to pass for a President who sympathized with the blacks.

On September 5, 1928, representatives of 186 “color societies” across Cuba gathered at Teatro Nacional to hail the President while popular opposition was on the rise. The outcome was an alliance of all parties that gave further recognition to an increasingly authoritarian regime.

It was all a sham: other than a certain political visibility, the blacks remained very poorly represented in the power structure, could only hold so many positions in civil service, were shut off from private companies and seldom found a job in industry, because Machado never really did anything for most black people. While he was honored by the Club Atenas on the eve of the Wall Street Clash of 1929, most blacks were going to great lengths to cope with deprivation, as they were hardest hit by the Great Depression and the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930, when the Cuban economy nose-dived and the country’s social problems piled sky-high. What followed was a wave of popular appeals spurred by a new political front ready to overturn the status quo and whose actions put an end to Machado’s tyranny.

By then the racial issue had taken so deep roots that it could hardly go unnoticed, which led to strong claims in the 1940s.

Barring a few cases on both sides, black people were banned from whites-only public places and vice versa, while some societies were solely for mestizos. On the other hand, the famous Havana Yacht Club was for the exclusive use of upper class whites, whereas the Club Atenas was only for the well-off and prestigious, be they black, mestizo or white. That’s where social and class problems between –and among– the whites and non-whites were more patently obvious.

Yet, there was a marked contrast between the said elitist societies and another kind of social groups, as those described by researchers like Carmen Victoria Montejo, Lucila Bejerano and Edita Caveda Román, whose work speaks of a wide range of educational, recreational and other associations that catered to individuals of any origin and race.

Another scholar, Tomás Fernández Robaina, points out that although the social movement of Cuban blacks and mestizos made countless demands for equality, they were not exactly intended to favor black people over the other racial groups.

Furthermore, the State’s scant attention cleared the way for racial discrimination. When it did get involved, however, its corrupted ways would only fuel dissension and discord among racial and ethnic groups –mainly in the employment sphere– and nothing to bridge the gap.

The blacks would leave, or rather escape in secret, from the sugar estate and the countryside in general and find shelter in the worst urban neighborhoods.

Much remains to be studied and put in writing in order to chronicle black people’s social history and their role in Cuban society.

We saw them arrive in slave ships, where they traveled in subhuman conditions only to be sold as human merchandise in public squares, treated as farm or domestic slaves, punished in the stocks, work like horses to either earn their freedom or buy it from their owners, become runaways, join the mambises and fight for freedom, gather in town councils and other social institutions of the Republic… They were lucky to get a job in the city, and those who had the skills became craftsmen, engaged themselves in trades that the Spaniards deemed unworthy, or were hired as longshoremen in the docks. In short, they would always swell the ranks of the worst paid laborers.

Some of them would land themselves a good position in politics and journalism, but there’s very little information and gaps in our knowledge about them, especially when it comes to family history and lineage. And it’s much worse in the case of black women, because even if the husband held an important position, say, in the army or in politics, the wife could not attend any event with them, as it happened to the black wives of Batista’s army officers.

Racial inequality persisted in Cuba for the whole Republican period and, following the trend in Latin America, extended from the massive sectors of the economy to the most desirable fields of employment.

Race continued to be an obstacle to gain access to many professions. Very few blacks made it to the University, and those who did had a hard time to find jobs after graduation. Many of them became teachers –mostly the women– since the training course was actually short and therefore they could start making money soon. Furthermore, given that education was not forbidden to anyone, there were plenty of students whom the black teachers could attend to.

Salary scales based on skin color were not too different among manual workers, but quite unbalanced in the professional field, where the number of blacks was considerably smaller as they could hardly compete with the middle-class whites who hogged those jobs.

At this juncture, education became a tool in the permanent struggle for racial equality. Still, learning was not enough: other means were needed which black people didn’t have, such as the social and political connections one could only develop in the high- and middle-class clubs unavailable to overwhelming majority of blacks.

Meritocracy, the chief constituent of the Republican society, would be regularly invoked to keep to a minimum the presence of blacks and poor whites in civil service or the private sector.

In brief, pre-revolutionary Cuba was profoundly racist, a place where society’s hierarchical pyramid rested on the blacks and the poor whites –even if the former were usually the worst off– and where black and poor were all but synonymous: not all poor people were black and not all white people were rich, but far and away most blacks were poor. Poverty could certainly be white, but wealth was very seldom black. In this scheme of things, the mulattos were a little bit better off.

Black were almost invariabley the poorest among the poor, a status the very few of them managed to evade. Figures have it that white people, almost without exception, would take the higher seats, with mulattos in the middle and blacks mostly at the bottom. And even in today’s Cuba, despite so much effort and progress, very little has changed.

Not that the non-whites had resigned themselves to the ongoing racial discrimination; it’s just that they lacked the means to change anything.

During the Republic many studies on race were conducted which shed light on the life and political or military career of black leaders, mainly those who had fought in the independence war. Most of this research was done by blacks, so criticism of their place in Cuban society was easily inferred from their works. Others acknowledge black people’s role in culture, even if only as part of domestic folklore.

After 1920 there was a boom in studies about the “black roots” and the African presence in Cuba as an effort to redefine our nationality. The Island can be said to have lived through a stage of new awareness, which is why the 1920s have gone down in history as the period when Cuba rediscovered and tried to look at itself as a nation. At the same time, our own modernity was called into question and redesigned from a cultural viewpoint.

One very important aspect addressed by this movement was related to the controversial topic of national identity, more than once the starting point for widespread intellectual discussions, for instance, about the racial issue. This process is far from being over, as even now in the early 21st century there still are sufficient grounds for analysis and debate, notwithstanding the many obstacles yet to be overcome.

With the appearance of a section called “Ideales de una raza” (Ideals of a race) in the publication Diario de La Marina –as a weekly column and a full page in the Sunday edition– the late 1920s and early 1930s were the heyday of the polemic about race and racism in Cuba. This debate took place from 1928 to 1931, right when Gerardo Machado’s government was most repressive. Promising though he had seemed to the Cubans, among other reasons because he had been a General in the war against Spain, his mandate proved to be one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the history of the Republic, earning him the nickname “The Clawed Donkey”.

Until it ended in 1933, “Ideales de una raza”, led by Gustavo Urrutia, played a key role in the struggle that the blacks and mestizos put up for recognition of their civil rights. This cultural project has not been sufficiently studied, even if it’s likely to be an inexhaustible source of knowledge useful to understand the Cuban racial issue.

Despite the U.S.’s intention to promote a policy of apartheid in Cuba, the independence war, nationalism, the popular struggle during the Republic and José Martí’s idea of a republic “with all and for the good of all” stopped racial segregation from becoming as firmly entrenched as some people wished.

In principle, the Constitution of 1901 and universal male suffrage made Cuba unique among the countries with a population of African descent in early twentieth-century America.

Our non-whites were granted their voting rights thanks to their long-lived revolutionary traditions and the fact, impossible to ignore, that they accounted for 30% of the electorate. Every party wanted the blacks and mestizos on its side, which gave these ethnic groups an opportunity to succeed in their demands. However, no sooner had the state of political ferment caused by the elections faded than everything became water under the bridge: all promises went forgotten and most blacks were back in the gutter.

Since no racial group was banned from education, the blacks and mestizos made the most of it and many of them became professionals, and even if it was still difficult for them to find good jobs, their status was a far cry from that of other blacks whose situation remained very precarious. A black person who managed to escape from poverty or inherited an advantageous social level from family felt compelled to move away from both the tenement house and other poor blacks, and eventually join societies where the latter were not allowed.

As intellectuals, they addressed issues that concerned all blacks and mestizos, but they would steadily grow apart from the bulk, absorbed by the Republic’s capitalistic dynamics that subtly forced them to stick to their exclusive clubs, estranged from their non-white countrymen.

For this reason, what usually sounded like black discourse was in fact the position of a non-white middle class and views that were but the downright expression of the fight waged by these societies of black and mestizo professionals on the systematic exclusion imposed on them by the white elite, whose members kept an imperceptible “cordon sanitaire” around the vast majority of poor non-whites to prevent at all costs the radicalization of the middle class, whose connivance with the status quo was inherent to its very nature as a subordinate stratum.

Accordingly, the Republic never saw a unified movement of race relations bring to fruition the social demands of the most exploited non-whites. From the standpoint of race, what the poorest blacks and mestizos did achieve, if anything, they did it as members of workers’ organizations and labor unions.

Although these clubs kept working hard to make it clear that an openly racist and exclusionary speech was out of the question, the non-white middle class was still the object of endless manipulation and contempt by the officialdom. Suffice it to read [then presidential candidate] Carlos Prío Socarrás’s opportunistic and demagogic speech in Club Atenas on May 5, 1948, in which he sold out as a radical in favor of black people’s rights. Once elected, however, he did nothing to improve their situation.

Even if racial discrimination had been declared illegal and punishable in both the 1901 and the 1940 Constitutions, never in the Republican period was any individual or official entity convicted of discrimination by a court of law. There was a twofold reason for this: first, racism usually worked in disguise, and second, neither the blacks and mestizos nor their organizations and structures were strong enough to demand justice, let alone see to it that it was done.

Favored by the atmosphere created by World War Two, a number of general anti-discrimination principles and even certain promises of equal employment opportunities for blacks and mestizos were included in the 1940 Constitution, but all specific actions by the government to be considered for future legislation were postponed, and for all the efforts made by communists like Salvador Agüero, everything but a few simple declarations by the parliamentary bureaucracy of the moment fell on stony ground.

Finally, with the expulsion of the communists from the Cuban Trade Unions in 1947, the debilitation of the labor movement and the ban on the Communist Party in 1952, the cause of racial equality lost its top political allies. This situation was made even worse by Batista’s decision to appoint some blacks to high posts in the Army to fool them into believing that at long last they had a government behind them.

Of course, as in the day of Martín Morúa Delgado and Juan Gualberto Gómez, no black army officer could not bring his wife to any reception, and the white elite took good care not to yield the highest positions in the military hierarchy. Much was achieved under Batista regarding the presence of blacks in the ranks, which was a first, but no progress was made as to their access to the power structure.

In spite of the fact that the Republic had been created for all people, it was actually held in place by the great mass of poor blacks, whites and mestizos, and only a few derived any benefit from the Establishment. This put paid to the supposed coherence of the elite’s stance on racial equality and democracy in general, as well as their stated need to build a true Republic. The harsh reality was that the forthright, deliberate exclusion of non-whites, and especially of black people, was a regular feature of everyday life.

Equality was a concept defended as one by radical white, black and mestizo intellectuals as well as by the labor movement, but the reins of power held by a classist domestic oligarchy that kowtowed to the U.S. capital and counted on a permanent basis on the U.S. government thwarted any plan for real change. It was thus impossible to design a Republic where the poor had better opportunities, much less if they were blacks and mestizos.

Most black people were poor in the Republican period and had no civil mechanisms to defend their interests as the most discriminated sector. And it was even worse for those of Haitian and Jamaican extraction, who were deemed second-class blacks and discriminated against even by other blacks.

Awareness of the racial origins for which so many progressive scholars from every ethnic group fought so hard was paramount to overcome the existing state of affairs. Throw in the fact that permanently attached to racial discrimination was another factor that resulted not only from racial stereotyping and prejudice but also from conceptions with deep roots in the Cuban ruling elite and reinforced by the U.S. intervention: the practice of using racial discrimination as an instrument of power, which it is, after all.

Thus, the said racial stereotyping and prejudice could still be fueled in any social context, no matter how highly educated and cultured. So it happened in our Republic, more knowledgeable and learned. Racism is not merely a product of ignorance or lack of culture; it comes into being in a social milieu where racial and particularly sex discrimination and its byproducts are used as means of domination, social control, favoritism and exploitation of individuals whom the racists always try to confine to a level of economic, political, social, ideological and cultural disadvantage.

In this framework, racism and culture never contradict one another, as from a classist viewpoint those with the highest education are precisely the most racist, above all else for reasons of power rather than culture. And when these learned elites practice racism, they just intend to take any cultural merit away from their victims on grounds that they are “culturally inferior” and therefore easy to control and exploit, without it being ethically and culturally reprehensible in a context of classist confrontation. Exploitation is structurally designed to such ends.

All of the above is also caused by our failure to overcome a number of traits bequeathed to us by the colonial society that the republican capitalism worked hard to protect and develop in the form of prejudice and stereotyping for the benefit of the ruling classes and groups, who provide the necessary feedback. Being in power is precisely what turns them into racists in the first place, not their lack of culture. They can be said to be rather “perversely cultured”, because those elites are fully aware of the importance of using racism to hold on to their power.

Hence the significance of maintaining and strengthening our racial identity within a context of universality and anti-racism, which is airtight evidence that without class consciousness racism can be neither understood nor opposed, and the absence of class differences is not enough to abolish it. We also need race consciousness.

The Europeans arrived in America as part of a colonial expedition, not a scientific mission, and brought with them black slavery, the effects of which are yet to disappear. On the contrary: our society, flawed as it is, sometimes nurtures those effects.

Racial discrimination went unsolved in the neocolonial republic, as it was a society kept in place by a bipolar development of wealth and poverty and in which inequality was necessary so that the ruling class could use all forms of discrimination –particularly racial discrimination– as an instrument of power essential to support the social, economic and cultural structures needed to preserve their regime of exploitation.

As shown by Cuba’s experience, putting an end to such regime is not enough to abolish racism. The task we have ahead is way longer and much more complicated than that.

October 15, 2007