Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 46

able to meet for the first time in 54 years with a Florida
congresswoman, Federica Wilson. She is a member of
the Black Caucus and prominent defender of rights
and works specifically in a racial context.
This prominent and unique congresswoman, a teacher
by trade and definition, had months earlier held a
meeting with other Cuban civil leaders residing on the
island. She demonstrated complete support for and
solidarity with those who suffer doubly on account of
their civic activism: pro-democracy and black activists.
This event set a good precedent; it took place precisely
because and when African-American politicians began to pay attention to Cuba’s racial problems. What
was unique about our particular meeting, in contrast
with the earlier one, was that she revealed in her own
words and thoughts her acknowledgement of the organized, black, Cuban struggle regarding this problem. It was a public gesture of supreme importance,
given the value of the African-American struggle for
civil rights globally and as a reference.
This is absolutely new. In the year 2000, I visited the
United States and met with African-American members of Congress. Yet, the focus of these meetings was
democracy, in general, U.S.-Cuba relations, and what
they could do to get our cause included in the Congressional agenda.
Any treatment of the subject of race was tangential,
and I recall it was difficult to get our discussion of it
beyond the notion that there was a certain degree of
dysfunctionality in the Cuban system. To propose the
structural nature of racism would have been less
strange. At that time, African Americans assumed that
the so-called Cuban Revolution had taken on all those
struggles as well as the old race problems that were
still plaguing the United States in many ways. There
are now many fewer African Americans who believe
this.
I confess that many of the African Americans I saw in
2000 thought it somewhat strange to see an Afro-Cuban in disagreement with the Cuban government, a
disagreement that could be seen as the political and
civil differences African Americans had with a large

part of the white elite. I recall that one of those congresswomen who had visited Cuba on some other occasion and met with Fidel Castro told me everything
would resolve itself regarding democracy in Cuba and
U.S.-Cuba relations if people like me—progressives
and moderates—managed to convince Cuban-American Congresswoman Ileana Ros Lehtinen. She had become the mortal enemy of Castroism in every possible
corner of U.S. politics.
This notion tha