Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba

Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba
Author: Mark Q. Sawyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2005-11-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139448102

This book analyzes the triumphs and failures of the Castro regime in the area of race relations. It places the Cuban revolution in a comparative and international framework and challenges arguments that the regime eliminated racial inequality or that it was profoundly racist. Through interviews, historical materials, and survey research, it provides a balanced view. The book maintains that Cuba has not been a racial democracy as some have argued. However, it also argues that Cuba has done more than any other society to eliminate racial inequality. The contemporary outlook of the book demonstrates how much of Cuban racial ideology was unchanged by the revolution. Thus, the current implementation of market reforms and in particular tourism has exacerbated racial inequalities. Finally, it holds that despite these shortcomings, the regime remains popular among blacks because they perceive their alternatives of the US and the Miami Exile community to be far worse.

A Nation for All

A Nation for All
Author: Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2011-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807898767

After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and postrevolutionary Cuba, Alejandro de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education, and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and antiracism coexisted within Cuban nationalism and, in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation that was truly for all.

Race in Cuba

Race in Cuba
Author: Esteban Morales Domínguez
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1583673202

As a young militant in the 26th of July Movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales Dominguez, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context. Today, he is one of Cuba’s most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question. Available for the first time in English, the essays collected here describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward. Morales Dominguez surveys the major advancements in race relations that occurred as a result of the revolution, but does not ignore continuing signs of inequality and discrimination. Instead, he argues that the revolution must be an ongoing process and that to truly transform society it must continue to confront the question of race in Cuba.

Antiracism in Cuba

Antiracism in Cuba
Author: Devyn Spence Benson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 146962673X

Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Spence Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality. Drawing on Cuban and U.S. archival materials and face-to-face interviews, Benson examines 1960s government programs and campaigns against discrimination, showing how such programs frequently negated their efforts by reproducing racist images and idioms in revolutionary propaganda, cartoons, and school materials. Building on nineteenth-century discourses that imagined Cuba as a raceless space, revolutionary leaders embraced a narrow definition of blackness, often seeming to suggest that Afro-Cubans had to discard their blackness to join the revolution. This was and remains a false dichotomy for many Cubans of color, Benson demonstrates. While some Afro-Cubans agreed with the revolution's sentiments about racial transcendence--"not blacks, not whites, only Cubans--others found ways to use state rhetoric to demand additional reforms. Still others, finding a revolution that disavowed blackness unsettling and paternalistic, fought to insert black history and African culture into revolutionary nationalisms. Despite such efforts by Afro-Cubans and radical government-sponsored integration programs, racism has persisted throughout the revolution in subtle but lasting ways.

Cuban Revolution in America

Cuban Revolution in America
Author: Teishan A. Latner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 146963547X

Cuba's grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba's multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.

Afro-Cuban Identity in Post-Revolutionary Novel and Film

Afro-Cuban Identity in Post-Revolutionary Novel and Film
Author: Andrea Easley Morris
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2011-11-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611484235

Afro-Cuban Identity in Post-Revolutionary Novel and Film examines the changing discourse on race as portrayed in Cuban novels and films produced after 1959. Andrea Easley Morris analyzes the artists’ participation in and questioning of the revolutionary government’s revision of national identity to include the unique experience and contributions of Cuban men and women of African descent. While the Cuban revolution brought sweeping changes that vastly improved the material condition of many Afro-Cubans, at the time overrepresented among Cuba’s poor and marginalized, the government’s official position was that racial inequities had been resolved as early as 1962. Although a more open dialogue on race was cut short, the work of several novelists and film directors from the late 1960s and 70s expresses the need to explore what was gained and lost by Afro-Cubans in the early years of the revolution, among them Manuel Granados, Miguel Barnet, Nivaria Tejera, Sara Gómez, César Leante, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sergio Giral, and Manuel Cofiño. Their works participate in the process of redefining Cuban national identity that took place after the revolution and, more specifically, they explore the place of Afro-Cuban identity within a broader notion of revolutionary “Cubanness.” This occurs through an emphasis on Afro-Cuban cultural practices that have constituted forms of resistance to colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This book examines the identity conflicts portrayed in these works and takes into account the artists’ negotiation of their own status within the revolutionary context by looking at the narrative strategies used to address racial issues within the constraints placed on cultural production in Cuba after 1962.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958

Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958
Author: Lillian Guerra
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 030023533X

A leading scholar sheds light on the experiences of ordinary Cubans in the unseating of the dictator Fulgencio Batista In this important and timely volume, one of today’s foremost experts on Cuban history and politics fills a significant gap in the literature, illuminating how Cuba’s electoral democracy underwent a tumultuous transformation into a military dictatorship. Lillian Guerra draws on her years of research in newly opened archives and on personal interviews to shed light on the men and women of Cuba who participated in mass mobilization and civic activism to establish social movements in their quest for social and racial justice and for more accountable leadership. Driven by a sense of duty toward la patria (the fatherland) and their dedication to heroism and martyrdom, these citizens built a powerful underground revolutionary culture that shaped and witnessed the overthrow of Batista in the late 1950s. Beautifully illustrated with archival photographs, this volume is a stunning addition to Latin American history and politics.

Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959

Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959
Author: Samuel Farber
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2011-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608461661

“Frequent insights, stimulating historical comparisons, and command of the data relating to Cuba’s economic and social performance.” —Foreign Affairs Uncritically lauded by the left and impulsively denounced by the right, the Cuban Revolution is almost universally viewed one dimensionally. In this book, Samuel Farber, one of its most informed left-wing critics, provides a much-needed critical assessment of the Revolution’s impact and legacy. “The Cuban story twists and turns as we speak, so thank goodness for scholars such as Samuel Farber, an unapologetic Marxist whose knowledge of Cuban affairs is unrivalled . . . In this excellent, necessary book, Farber takes stock of fifty years of revolutionary control by recognizing achievements but lambasting authoritarianism.” —Latin American Review of Books “A courageous and formidable balance-sheet of the Cuban Revolution, including a sobering analysis of a draconian ‘reform’ program that will only deepen the gulf between revolutionary slogans and the actual life of the people.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

Insurgent Cuba

Insurgent Cuba
Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807875740

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.