Following are excerpts from two older articles on race relations in Cuba, as well as the full text of two more recent articles from the Dallas Morning News and Reuters on this subject. While in the the Reuters article, "Cuban Rap Festival," (with introduction by Walter Lippmann), the rap singers present a bleak picture of Cuban society, it does the belie the "totalitarian" stereotype of Cuba so often put forward in the corporate media--legitimate protest is not only being tolerated, it is being nourished by the Cuban state.
[Cuba] is populated mostly by people of Spanish ancestry, with a large minority of blacks and mulattoes, whose ancestors were slaves. There are few mestizos, as in many other Latin-American countries, because the Indian population was virtually wiped out in colonial times. In the era before Fidel Castro came to power, the city was economically and ethnically divided. On the one hand, there was the minority of the wealthy, educated elite, together with a developing and expanding middle class, and on the other was the working-class majority. This division was largely based on ethnic background: whites tended to be more well-to-do, while blacks and mulattoes generally were poor. The economic structure did not provide much opportunity for blacks and mulattoes except in the more menial occupations. There was also little opportunity for them to obtain an education.
Under the Castro government that came to power in 1959, this system changed. Educational and employment opportunities were made available to Cubans of all ethnic backgrounds. In housing, the government follows an official policy of no discrimination based on ethnic background, and independent observers tend to believe this policy has been more or less faithfully carried out. Where there were few black or mulatto Cubans in middle- to top-level national and local government posts before 1959, there are now many, although still not in the same proportion as in the population. However, many blacks and mulattoes throughout the island are still in a struggle to lift themselves out of poverty.
Source: Britannica Online
"..I am not claiming that our country is a perfect model of equality and justice. We believed at the beginning that when we established the fullest equality before the law and complete intolerance for any demonstration of sexual discrimination in the case of women, or racial discrimination in the case of ethnic minorities, these phenomena would vanish from our society. It was some time before we discovered that marginality and racial discrimination with it are not something that one gets rid of with a law or even with ten laws, and we have not managed to eliminate them completely in 40 years..."
Source: Eugene Godfried, "Reflections On Race & The Status Of People Of African Descent In Revolutionary Cuba," AfroCubaWeb
08/11/2002
HAVANA – Elsa Chon is 60, with gray-flecked hair and a kind face, and these
are her golden years.
But she measures life by the month.
Each month brings her a $3.81 retirement pension, plus the usual government
rations – 6 pounds of rice, a pound of beans, 8 ounces of cooking oil, some
sugar, coffee and cigarettes.
"You think I can live well on that?" she asked. "The truth is,
I can't. It's impossible." Mrs. Chon is among the island's many blacks who are struggling to make it in
a changing economy where U.S. dollars, not Cuban pesos, are the currency of
choice. In trying to wrest the island from economic crisis, Cuba legalized possession
of dollars in 1993, but experts say that in doing so, the government unwittingly
put blacks and other mixed-race Cubans at a disadvantage.
That's because blacks have a much harder time getting their hands on dollars. Legalization of the dollar meant that Cuban exiles could begin to openly send
their relatives money. But that helped whites more than blacks since most
Cuban-Americans, 84 percent, are white.
Today, exiles send their relatives an estimated $700 million to $800 million
– a windfall in cash-strapped Cuba, which received just $68 million in foreign
economic aid in 1997, U.S. officials say. Many blacks who don't have relatives abroad look for jobs where they can make
dollars – such as the tourism industry, the country's biggest dollar-earner.
But even then, because of discrimination and other factors, they say, jobs
are hard to get.
As a result, black Cubans have fallen behind whites economically since 1993,
undermining Fidel Castro's dream of creating a raceless society, said Alejandro
de la Fuente, a University of Pittsburgh history professor who has studied race
in Cuba. "The evidence is all anecdotal," he said. "But it is
overwhelming, and all of it points in the same direction." Dollars are vital in Cuba because many essentials – socks, underwear,
shirts, shoes, dishes – simply aren't available for pesos. Other items –
including diapers, toilet paper, toothpaste, soap – are distributed to the
populace, but Cubans say the supplies don't last.
Not only that, what can be had for dollars is usually of much higher quality. The government grudgingly embraced the dollar after its chief sponsor, the
former Soviet Union, collapsed in 1989, ending aid of nearly $6 billion a year.
And it made tourism its main cash source, building scores of hotels and
restaurants to lure sun-loving travelers. Jobs in tourism became among the most coveted. But both blacks and whites
complain that applicants with government or family connections are sometimes
pushed ahead of better or equally qualified candidates. Money can also make a difference. The job that seemed unattainable can often
be had for a bribe, some Cubans say. Payments of $100 to $500 go to employment
agency workers and tourism school instructors. "Where am I going to get $500?" asked Alexis, 34, a black
electrician from the eastern town of Baracoa. "I don't have any relatives
in Miami. I'll probably never see $500 in my entire life." He and others also say employment agencies favor whites and light-skinned
blacks, an accusation officials deny. An estimated 11 percent of Cubans are black, 51 percent are of mixed race, 37
percent are white and 1 percent are Chinese, the CIA reports. Authorities moved to correct the inequities, setting up racially diverse
labor pools and requiring hotels and restaurants to pick workers from those
pools, Ms. Rojas said.
Cubans are at odds over whether the strategy worked.
Critics say the hiring system still isn't perfect and racism isn't gone. Even so, black Cubans are much better off than they were before the
revolution, poet Nancy Morejon said.
As a black child growing up in pre-revolutionary Cuba, she said, she imagined
toiling away in some low-paying job for the rest of her years.
Instead, rebels swept the country in 1959, and blacks began moving up the
ladder. Ms. Morejon, 57, got a university education, started writing poetry and this
year won Cuba's national prize for literature. Castro loyalists say the socialist government has always supported blacks and
that hasn't changed. "Before Fidel came along, the situation was much worse," said
Gabriel Molina, editor of Granma International, a Communist Party
newspaper. "I would have had a different life without the revolution." Mr. Molina pulled out a 1949 black-and-white photo of Mr. Castro posing with
a university committee to fight racism. "Fidel has defended Afro-Cubans for his entire life," the
68-year-old editor said. The Castro government passed laws outlawing discrimination just months after
the rebels took power. "Virtue, personal merit, heroism and generosity should be the measure of
men, not skin color," Mr. Castro said then. In the decades that followed, Cuban blacks progressed more than they had in
the previous four centuries, some say. "Blacks had to wait 400 years to achieve some dignity," said
Alberto Jones, a Cuban-American activist who has studied the race issue. Some of the most striking achievements came in education. And by 1981, blacks
were on a par with whites in obtaining high school diplomas.
Advances in education led to better careers for blacks and mulattos, said Mr.
de la Fuente, author of the book, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and
Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. "This was not merely rhetoric," he wrote in a briefing paper.
"For the most part, the government's social policies were color-blind and
did open significant opportunities for all sectors of the population, regardless
of race." Many blacks decided to go into medicine, and by the 1990s, the nation of just
11 million people had more black doctors than the United States. "Blacks don't have access to dollars and have to work a lot harder to
survive," said Ramon Humberto Colas, an Afro-Cuban dissident who recently
settled in South Florida. "It's true that blacks in Cuba have the same
rights as whites. But in practice, it doesn't work that way." As he sees it, the government demands blacks' political support while
persecuting them at the same time.
Police, for instance, continually associate blacks with crime and what the
authorities call "dangerousness," a vague yet punishable offense, Mr.
Colas said. And they often single out blacks on the streets, stopping them for
no apparent reason and checking their identification papers. It's a vicious cycle, Mr. de la Fuente said. Many blacks are shut out from
tourism, the economy's most dynamic sector, "on the grounds that they are
unfit and inferior." So they adopt other survival strategies, such as
selling bootleg cigars, knock-off CDs or marijuana. Critics then say these strategies are proof of blacks' "inferiority,
laziness, lack of morality and propensity to commit criminal acts," the
professor says.
"Racism is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy." Castro supporters say racism is not a problem in Cuba.
Even so, they say officials have taken steps to aid the poorest and most
disadvantaged blacks.
One way they're doing that is by opening schools for social workers in many
cities. Most of the students are blacks who didn't have the grades to get into
college and don't receive dollars from abroad or from state-run enterprises.
But if they work for two years at the schools – studying and doing
community work – they're given a direct pass to study law, medicine, hotel
management and other professions at college. The Cuban government ought to be recognized for its efforts, said Mr. de la
Fuente, saying most of the negative economic trends affecting blacks were
"clearly unintended and beyond government control."Seed money
Whites use the cash remittances not only for food and other necessities, but to
get ahead. They fix up their homes and rent them to tourists. They repair old
jalopies and turn them into unofficial taxis. They convert living rooms to
restaurants.
Imported bias
Whites were favored when the government first began developing tourism in the
early '90s, said Marta Rojas, a respected Afro-Cuban author.
The government allowed foreign partners from such countries as Spain to have
control over whom they hired, and many chose whites, she said.
The secret weapon
Blacks clearly benefited the most from the revolution, experts say. And that has
led some to call them Mr. Castro's "secret weapon," his source of
unconditional political support.
But now that dollars are the currency of favor, some blacks question that
assumption and say they are rethinking their allegiance.
Most of the asylum seekers who hijacked a bus and crashed it into the gates of the Mexican embassy in February appeared to be young blacks, witnesses said later. Cuban authorities arrested the men, calling them delinquents and saying that almost all had previous criminal records.
The problem, some say, is that despite Mr. Castro's quest for a raceless society, blacks have never caught up to whites. Many live in the same dilapidated tenement houses that have stood for more than 200 years.
Inside one house, Mrs. Chon, the retiree, said she gets by as best she can, selling cigarettes and homemade tomato sauce to neighbors. She also collects her late husband's $3.81 pension – much lower than the average $10-a-month wage. Still, she hangs on to it.
"No way am I getting married again. Not even if I were crazy. I'd lose my pension."
One wonders if Anthony Boadle has ever seen Cuban
movies like Guantanamera, Muerto de un Burocrata or any of the others which
express social and political criticism and are produced, paid-for and
distributed by the Cuban government. However, unlike the AP's Vivian Sequera,
Boadle gives a more complete picture when he adds information on the ways in
which hip-hop has been brought into Cuba's mainstream.
--Walter Lippmann
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - Black youths whistled and jeered at police on Thursday night
at a concert of Cuban rap, a cultural movement that has grown explosively in the
economically run-down Communist-ruled island.
As rapper Papa Humbertico belted out criticism of racial discrimination and
police harassment, the open air theater in the dormitory town of Alamar, packed
with several thousand youths, filled with catcalls. Behind the rapper stagehands
unfurled a banner that said "Social denunciation," a rare expression
of protest in Cuba.
"Police, police, you are not my friend; for Cuban youth you are the worst
punishment," rapped Humbertico.
At the concert opening the Habana Hip Hop 2002 festival, rappers voiced their
frustration with police repression, government corruption and a harsh economic
reality that forces Cuban girls into prostitution with foreign tourists.
The vibrant rap movement emerged in the economic crisis that followed the
collapse of Cuba's ally, the Soviet Union, a decade ago as mainly black youths
adopted the aggressive lyrics and gestures of American inner city
rappers.Economic reforms have led to growing social differences between Cubans
who have access to dollars and those who do not, and many young Cubans feel they
have few prospects.
The ruling Communist Party at first censored rap
music but then sought to assimilate the rapidly growing social phenomenon by
allowing rap on radio and television, and organizing an annual festival. Many of
Cuba's more than 500 rap groups originated in Alamar, a town of 300,000 mostly
Afro-Cubans who live on the outskirts of Havana in concrete high rises built for
Soviet workers and technicians in the 1970s.
Cuban rap has become an international hit in the last two years with the success
in France of the Alamar-born group Orishas, named after Yoruba deities venerated
on the Caribbean island where Africans were brought as slaves centuries ago.
Cuban rappers say their music has spread fast because young blacks identify with
their lyrics of frustration of a generation that has not seen the benefits of
the socialist revolution led by President Fidel Castro, in power since 1959.But
they maintain their critical music is aimed at gaining space for black culture
and improving social conditions within the Cuban revolution.
"We used to be seen as black upstarts, but now there has been a change of
attitude toward rap," said Alexei, 30, of the popular rap group Obsesion.
"We want to improve the revolutionary process, to change what is
wrong," the rapper said.
Cuban rap songs include anti-American lyrics, such as protests against the U.S.
Navy's use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for bombing exercises, and
against the four-decade-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba.
"Cuba rap has grown so fast because it is getting government support,"
said Vanesa Diaz, a student from New York who performed in the rap festival.
"The black youth are trying to create space for their own identity. They
are critical, but they are not bashing the revolution," she said.