The strong links between the people of this Caribbean Island nation and African Americans , which date back nearly 175 years , beckon us here .

In 1852 , Frederick Douglass , a runaway slave who was born in Maryland and escaped his enslavement to become a leader of the fight to end slavery in the United States , used his newspaper to call for an end to Cuban slavery and to agitate for the island ’ s independence from Spain .

Highland Garnet , another runaway slave who was born in Maryland , was a leader of a group that met in a Baltimore church to urge hundreds of Black men and women to sign a petition that asked President Ulysses Grant to pressure Spain to end slavery in Cuba . A few days later that petition was delivered to the White House .

When Cuba was occupied by U . S . forces from 1898 to 1902 , Black newspapers across the United States called for the withdrawal of American troops and an end to the discriminatory treatment of the Cubans of African descent who fought so valiantly for Cuban independence .

In 1900 , the Oblate Sisters of Providence , an order of Black Catholic nuns that is based in Baltimore , opened its first foreign mission in Havana .

From Langston Hughes to Nicolás Guillén ; from W . E . B . DuBois to Fernando Ortiz ; from James Baldwin to Nancy Morejón ; from the Harlem Renaissance to the Afrocubano Movement , African American writers have found kindred souls in Cuban authors .

Also , there has been a long relationship between Afro Cubans and HBCUs – higher education institutions in the United States that were mostly created shortly after the American Civil War to educate former slaves and others of African descent .

This connection between Afro Cuban students and African American colleges began as early as 1901 when Juan Gualberto Gómez , the great Cuban patriot and journalist , sent his son and three other Afro Cuban young men to the Tuskegee Institute , in Alabama . Over the next two decades , hundreds of Afro Cubans , including Luis Delfin Valdes , the architect of Havana ’ s famed Club Atenas , attended Tuskegee .

Today , Bethune-Cookman University , in Daytona Beach , Florida , has dozens of Afro Cuban students , and since 2016 , led by the School of Global Journalism & Communication , Morgan State

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