Identidades in English No 3, September 2014 | Page 9

The New Cuban Revolutionaries:

Authentic Anti-Racists?
class and gender in Cuba and the world

José Hugo Fernández
Writer and journalist
Havana, Cuba

F

idel Castro asked a black man who was a
member of the contingent that had disembarked at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to challenge the incipient revolutionary government’s
army: “What are you doing here?” Castro’s
“joke”, which provoked laughter all around him,
would be filmed for posterity in a documentary
that salvages for history his review of the ranks
after defeating the invaders. It actually is possible
that it didn’t occur to those who laughed or smiled
at that time (the black man, included) that the
joke’s nature was horribly racist.
They also didn’t realize that the revolutionary
leader—a man who was already convinced that
he was the savior for Cuban blacks—had expressed himself arrogantly because it was inconceivable to him that any black people would oppose him.
Afterwards, time passed and an eagle crossed the
ocean. So many are the grim revelations that are
being discovered that perhaps Fidel Castro’s inheritors, those who are in the leadership, could
formulate the very same question, but in an opposite sense, about the few, ever diminishing number of Cuban blacks that still support his failed
and obsolete regime. “You! What are you doing
here?”
Of course, it is not only bad that time has passed.
Given the intrinsic racism we inherited from our
European colonial adventure, it served well to
show that the revolutionary elite of 1959 was not
going to be more radical than the patriarchs that
started the nineteenth-century independence
wars. It also helped the new Cuban fighters to embrace modernity, which meant understanding

how urgent it was for them to undertake the deconstruction of the old psychological and cultural
legacy of slavery from a civilized stance.
Even though observers and analysts of Cuba’s reality today have not yet given the situation all the
attention it