Seattle Times, 11/24/02, by Jerry Large
Back in 1959, Cubans were celebrating their revolution, but it wasn't necessarily the triumph of Marxism that had people dancing in the streets.
For most Cubans, change was long overdue, and it didn't really matter what horse it rode in on.
The African-descended people who make up most of the island's population hungered for something that would shake up the social mix and allow them to rise from the bottom. They didn't just hunger for it, they'd been fighting for it throughout generations of African enslavement in Cuba.
Here in the United States it's simple; Cuba is communist and communism is bad, and Fidel Castro, in particular, is bad. But in Cuba it's not so simple.
In Cuba there is a longer, deeper struggle being reawakened by young people willing to talk about a taboo subject: race.
Pedro Perez Sarduy, a Cuban journalist, poet and novelist, has been talking about Afro-Cuban aspirations on his latest speaking tour of the United States. He gave a series of speeches in Seattle recently. I spoke with him after he talked to a group of students at Seattle University.
Black Cubans, he said, have to make things work in Cuba. "Black Cubans don't have anyplace to go into exile." White Cubans have made a home for themselves in Miami, and in Spain, but where, he asks, can black Cubans blend in?
Where can a people, whose culture is part European and part African and even a little Chinese, go and feel at home, except at home?
Sarduy said that when he first came to the United States, many people weren't quite sure how to classify a man with dark skin who speaks Spanish. They had a different image of who was Cuban. Of the 3 million Cubans who live abroad, 2.5 million are of primarily Spanish descent, he said.
On the island, as much as 70 percent of the population is black or mixed race. (The government says 62 percent, but that is widely considered to be too low.) Cuba, like the rest of Latin America, plays down its darker roots, he said, so it's not surprising people outside see Cubans as mostly white.
Sarduy, who speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish and English, was a BBC reporter covering Latin America in the 1980s and saw a widespread denial of racial issues. (See
www.afrocubaweb.com for more about Sarduy.)
The first time he visited Mexico City, he was very surprised to find that the people on the streets didn't look like the very European-looking people he'd seen on Mexican television.
Sarduy tried to give the Seattle University students some history, to tell them the troubles between the United States and Cuba didn't start with Castro.
It has been a long, shared history. Marc McLeod, an assistant professor of history at SU, said there was a lot of discussion in the 1800s about making Cuba a state, especially in the South, which wanted to add a slave state.
And the United States ruled Cuba through a military government from 1898-1902, and again from 1906-1909, and has intervened in the island's affairs on several occasions.
Castro is just the latest irritant in relations between the two nations.
In the United States, many people view Cuba through the eyes of people who fled the country in the wake of the revolution. They are mostly descendents of the Spaniards who ran the island.
They saw Cuba as a paradise before the 1959 revolution, Sarduy said. It was for them, but not for black Cubans, who after slavery mostly were limited to menial jobs and treated as social inferiors.
The revolution improved health care, education and employment for black Cubans, but it didn't erase the social order that has white Cubans on top.
Black Cubans, perhaps, put too much faith in the revolution. Sarduy was 16 and enthusiastic when the new government took power. And like other black Cubans, he expected racial inequality to be addressed. But, the revolutionaries said, be patient, class is the thing. Eliminate class differences, and racial discrimination would go away.
People in this country still say that, just like the communist revolutionaries; it's class, not race, that matters. But the truth is that both matter.
Life did improve tremendously for black Cubans after 1959, but race is still a card that favors light skin, and gets played every day. Played, but not discussed openly, until recently.
Young black people, especially through the medium of rap music, are saying things openly that would never have been voiced before. They denounce racism and demand to be treated as equals. The battle for Cuba continues.
Sarduy said whatever happens after Castro, black Cubans will not be pushed aside. "They will hold on to that island for the sake of their ancestors, who fought for this country. It was not given to them. It was not a handout. They fought for it."
Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or
jlarge@seattletimes.com.
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