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Talking About Race in

Cuba

class and gender in Cuba and the world

Jorge Duany
Director of the Cuban Research Institute and Professor of Anthropology
Florida Internacional University
Cuban. Resident of the United States

I

n this essay, I would like to briefly review Cuban
thought about race and national identity during
Cuba’s colonial, republican and post-revolutionary periods, my basic purpose being to sketch out how
different generations of Cuban intellectuals have interpreted the island’s race relations from the early
nineteenth century till now. The persistence of certain
repeating themes through time is noteworthy, for example, the idea that Cuba is a racial democracy that
has overcome differences between whites, blacks and

mulattoes. A significant amount of historical and social research contradicts this prevailing racial rhetoric
in Cuban society.
The colonial era
Initially, most Cuban writers and artists restricted their
definition of national identity to include only descendants of immigrant Spaniards, white criollos. It is also
true that the majority of the Cuban nation’s founding
thinkers were white, upper middle-class men. Exam-

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