other privileges that were once only accessible to white Cubans, the Cuban revolution opened the way for Afro-Cubans to access professional jobs and a level of dignity that their forebears could only dream of.
“My schoolmate, Roberto Knight, and his family were like mine,” Alberto Jones, 75, an Afro-Cuban who immigrated to the U.S. during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, once told me. “They were brought from Jamaica to Cuba to work on the sugar plantations near Guantanamo. But in that same family today you can find four doctors and three engineers…Before that [the Revolution] we had never known anyone who had gone past the sixth grade.”
But Castro couldn’t eliminate the racist attitudes that were ingrained in much of Cuban society. And, at least at that time, he didn’t have to. The images of black demonstrators being beaten with billy clubs and savaged by police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses that played out on the nightly news in this country during the 1960s proved to be a potent distraction. Seeing that, Cuban blacks could associate U.S. racism with our capitalist system and be grateful they had not followed the white Cubans who fled to this country after Castro came to power.
Using those brutal images as the ultimate definition of racism, Castro – who like Marti, believed that discussing race hindered the goal of creating a national identity – decreed that the problem no longer existed in Cuba.
That meant that to discuss it was tantamount to committing a counterrevolutionary act.
At least for awhile, for many black Cubans, it was easy to not talk about racism. They were, after all, enjoying opportunities they hadn’t had before. According to a 2011 report by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs titled, “Revolutionary Racism in Cuba,” Castro did more for Afro-Cubans in 50 years than the country’s previous leaders did in 400 years.
The Special Period –and the
reemergence of racism
In 1994, the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trading partner and subsidizer, crumbled. Without the foreign aid it had given the Castro regime, the Cuban economy plunged into a depression that the government euphemistically dubbed “The Special Period in the Time of Peace.”
To pull itself out of that economic tailspin, Cuba shifted back to the industry that fed its racist divisions before the Castro-led revolution – tourism. And it quickly became Cuba’s most profitable industry.
But with tourism came the re-emergence of a racism that favors whites over blacks in the competition for the best paying jobs in Cuba’s tourism industry. White Cubans also began to amass more of an economic advantage because of the remittances they received from relatives who fled to the U.S. in large numbers after 1959, and as government jobs and handouts that black Cubans disproportionately relied on dwindled.
Also, another irony emerged: The expanded access to education that Afro-Cubans received from the Castro government didn’t help them to get the higher-paying service jobs in tourist hotels and resorts, because the foreign companies managing them put a higher value on skin color than education when choosing their workers.
The Cuban government also began legalizing private businesses, such as home-operated restaurants, called paladares, during the Special Period. But few paladares were operated by Afro-Cubans because, according to the COHA report, the quality of housing wasn’t addressed in Castro’s original anti-discrimination reforms.
Because black Cubans are disproportionately concentrated in overcrowded and crumbling housing, it was next to impossible for them to operate a restaurant out of their homes.
Yet for a long time, many Afro-Cubans remained silent – mostly because they saw themselves as Cubans going through a difficult period, and not as black Cubans being made to bear the brunt of the country’s economic troubles.
For example, in 2000, during a meeting of black U.S. and Cuban journalists, some of the Cubans were amused to hear us talk about how racism impacted the way we did our jobs.
Each time we tried to get them to talk about what we saw as racism in their country, ranging from the black Cubans who were begging and peddling black caricatured statuettes and trinkets on the streets compared to white Cubans earning middle class wages working as waiters and housekeepers in tourist hotels, they still recited to us what their Constitution had imbedded in the hard drives of their minds: Discrimination ended with “the triumph of the Revolution.”
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