Abstract
Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality is a unique and timely collection of writings by and interviews with the prominent Afro-Cuban scholar Esteban Morales Domínguez on race and racialization. Edited and translated by Gary Prevost and August H. Nimtz, political science professors at St. John’s University and the University of Minnesota respectively, Race in Cuba compiles Morales’s most important writings over the past decade, the period when his work became most prominent, especially after the publication in Havana of Desafíos de la problemática en Cuba (2008) and La problemática racial en Cuba: Algunos de sus desafíos (2010).
Race in Cuba works both to expose continuing antiblack racism in postrevolutionary Cuba and to defend the 1959 Cuban Revolution against criticism from the U.S. government and other anti-Castro detractors. Morales’s general argument is that Cuba has a racism problem (specifically an antiblack problem) that stems from a structural failure in the revolution, a failure he terms the “error of idealism” (80). This error is the assumption by the architects of the socialist revolution that “by eliminating the basis of capitalism and deploying an egalitarian social policy, the racial question would be settled” (80–81). Actions and inaction by the Cuban government based on this error have led to a climate in which racial discrimination thrives. For Morales this racism, if not addressed, can undermine Cuban national unity.
Through polemic engagement and scientific elaboration, Morales outlines the nature of the race problem in Cuba—both its historical and its contemporary manifestations—–and offers a detailed program of solutions. Chapter 3, “A Model for the Analysis of the Racial Problem in Contemporary Cuba,” is a case in point. In it Morales “proposes a theoretical-methodological model” to help social scientists and humanists gain a better understanding of Cuba’s racial complexity. The chapter synthesizes the three key historical moments (or “macro-periods”) of Cuban national history and racial formation—colonial society and slavery, emancipation and neocolonial society, and socialist revolutionary society—and presents the many “variables” impacted by such history, including the myth of a color-blind society alongside persistent antiblackness. What Morales demonstrates in this chapter and throughout the collection is that the race problem in Cuba has a legacy dating back to the days of slavery and colonialism. In effect, “racism is the fruit and inheritance of the old cultural hegemony of Spanish colonialization, originating in slavery and reinforced by the practices of the neocolonial Cuban Republic” (91). For Morales, the revolution did not anticipate that its policies of equal opportunity would be subverted by the unequal economic, social, and ideological conditions for nonwhite populations. Chapter 8, “Skin Color, Nation, Identity, and Culture,” makes similar points but stresses the relationship of race to class and the historical reality of Cuba’s racial and cultural mixture. What stands out in this chapter is the potentially controversial point that Cuba’s racism is not institutional; it “comes from neither the state’s institutions nor the government” (123). He reiterates this point throughout the essays, arguing that the Cuban government is not racist and that, despite the racism in society, “the black and mestizo population on the island is the healthiest and best educated mass of Afro-descendants in this hemisphere, and that no other country has done as much as Cuba to eliminate racial discrimination and injustice” (97).
Ironically, Morales’s solutions for the race problem in Cuba, though manifold, also challenge his claim that racism is not institutional. His recommendations for a better Cuban society are many and include open and honest public discussion about race; government and institutional support for the scientific study of racism and poverty; educational initiatives that allow for the teaching of race and black culture in high schools and higher education; fair racial representation in the media; and, importantly, racial consciousness among black Cubans and policy attention by the state (a form of affirmative action). It would seem, then, that various governmental institutions are indeed implicated in perpetuating a racial hierarchy with blackness at the bottom. But I am also sympathetic to Morales’s claim that the post-1959 Cuban state is not a “racial state” in the sense we may understand the United States, with its racism built into the fabric of its laws and structured into its social policies and quotidian experiences.
The claim that racism in Cuba is not institutional also works in ways that allow Morales to affirm the revolution, however incomplete its goals and projects. In a number of the essays in this collection, he makes the point that the issue of racial discrimination was of great importance at the beginning for leaders of the revolution. He cites Fidel Castro’s statement in March 1959 recognizing that racism was a “scourge to be extirpated from society’s body.” But he demonstrates that soon after, in 1962, the leadership proclaimed at a mass meeting that the problem of racism in Cuba had been solved. This he considers a grave error, “the error of idealism,” because it pushed the discussion of race away from national discourse and allowed racism to flourish. According to Morales, Castro was not to speak publicly of the race problem in Cuba again until February 2003, 44 years later, when he proclaimed that “the same success in the fight to eradicate differences in the social and economic status of black people had not been achieved” (142).
That Morales both challenges and affirms the Cuban Revolution (and its leaders) is significant for much broader reasons than the national problem of antiblack racism. There is an undercurrent in the collection and the corpus of Morales’s work that speaks to the ways in which Cuba’s race problem has become a lightning rod in discussions about U.S. policy toward the island. The essays tackle this issue head on: “Not everybody concerned today about the race issue in Cuba shares similar political visions” (200). Morales outlines two positions. On the one hand, there are those who charge that antiblack racism is a symptom of the revolution itself, with racist leaders who deny human rights and democracy to the black population. Those who espouse this position, he argues, become “part of the political confrontation that the United States deploys in its quest for a regime change in the island” (201). On the other hand, there are those who begin with the claim that, while black advancement under the revolution has been limited, the alternative would have been far worse. Those who espouse this position “believe that solutions lie in deepening socialism, developing debate within it in which race problems are part of perfecting today’s Cuban society” (201).
It is not difficult to determine on which side Morales falls. The collection is a critique not only of the first of these positions but particularly of a specific event involving a group of prominent U.S. black scholars and activists in late 2009. This is recounted in the book’s foreword, in which the editors describe the open letter issued by this group, “Acting on Our Conscience: A Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba.” This open letter caused a furor among activists in both the United States and Cuba and paved the way for a different kind of discussion on race in Cuba.
I agree with the editors that Race in Cuba is a challenge to the open letter. In a published interview in the book, Morales responds directly to the group of African American intellectuals and activists: “The people, the African Americans who have issued this declaration, grab onto our difficulties to attack the Revolution. . . . I am convinced that some of the signers did not know what they were signing” (192). And his response to this is perhaps Race in Cuba’s greatest contribution: bringing to light the long tradition of intellectual and activist work by Afro-Cubans living in Cuba. Morales states that, with his essays and books translated into English, it will be known that “this issue [race in Cuba] has long been debated in Cuba” (185). He further argues, “We just cannot let others be in charge of our own history, because he who controls your past also controls your present and future life” (185). One of the more remarkable chapters of this book is “Cuba: Science and Race Fifty Years Later,” a brilliant review of the intellectual work on race in Cuba by both Cuban and foreign scholars. What quickly becomes clear is the extent of the domestic intellectual output on the race issue in Cuba. Morales traces this intellectual (and activist) output, particularly that of Afro-Cubans, to the early 1900s, and while he acknowledges the shortcomings of some of this early work he outlines a rich local historiography. In the process he demands acknowledgment from foreign scholars who would deny this tradition. The works produced by outsiders on the race question in Cuba, he argues, “are no different from what we have done in Cuba, except that we have been unable to publish ours . . . because of practical difficulties” (157). He ends the chapter with what is an indictment as much as a prescription: “Those of us who live in Cuba ought to be leading the way in writing about the reality of our life. . . . We should be forced not to waive our findings about domestic issues . . . nor let anyone tell our own story or explain our own reality to us” (158).
While the collection of essays in Race in Cuba brings to light the less well-known perspective of Afro-Cubans living on the island, it also provides us with a set of lessons on societies impacted by colonialism, slavery, and racism that extend beyond the borders of Cuba. In its explorations of the interrelated legacies of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism, of the success—and the (racial) contradictions—of the Cuban socialist revolution, of the need for racial consciousness and the fight for self-determination for people of African descent, and of the fact that racism does not disappear with the elimination of capitalism, Morales’s work opens the way for a new set of dialogues on race not only in Cuba but also in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora.