CARLOS MOORE: Putting context to Cuba's racial divideImages of the first batch of Cuban-Americans arriving at Havana's international airport, since the United States' lifting of restrictions on travel and remittance-sending to the island, were clear: teary-eyed, Spanish-speaking cousins, laden with gifts and money for their relatives in Cuba, were all – white!
Such a startling visual puts a partial face on an issue that will increasingly challenge the US government's latest policy shifts aimed at coaxing Cuba to the negotiating table.
The spectacle of the white Cuban returnees, however, reveals even more by highlighting what – or rather who – is missing: dark-skinned Cuban faces.
How does one explain such a dramatically white homecoming in a country where 62-70% of the population is estimated to be non-white [1]; one where, besides their desire to dismantle the Castro dictatorship, black and white Cubans may have far less in common politically than the world has been led to believe? And what is one to make of the 1.5-million strong Cuban-American community, mostly South Florida-based, which is 85% Caucasian, and is only now begrudgingly relinquishing its dream of re-empowerment, as a predominantly white force, in Cuba?
What do these two differing racial realities – largely unacknowledged inside and outside Cuba – portend for the United States' emerging Open Door policy? In purely human terms, the warming relations between "cousins" on both sides of the Florida straights may be laudable, but certainly not devoid of long-term political implications inside Cuba.
To understand why, a new map of Cuba – the real Cuba – will have to be drawn.
From Myth to Reality
When Fidel Castro triumphed fifty years ago, Afro-Cubans were 35-45% of the total Cuban population. Four years later, fear of the new regime's sweeping socialist reforms caused 15-20% of the island's white population to flee, leaving Castro at the head of a black majority country.
From 1959 on, the steadily darkening face of Cuba created unanticipated problems for the social reformers who launched the Revolution. Yet, for half a century, Cuba hid this racial reality behind a carefully crafted image where the Revolution had eradicated racism, abolished discrimination, and established a unique "racial democracy."
Cuba's myth as a non-racial Nirvana has long been well-served by either a dearth of information or disinformation so patently biased (pro- and anti-Castro) that it was neither credible nor useful by the time it reached U.S. residents. Safely inside this information vacuum for half a century, Cuba has brilliantly manipulated the race issue to its political advantage, specifically targeting African-Americans with its message.
Now, however, that race has become real in Cuba, its citizenry is being forced to confront its own history as amassed by its own researchers, its own writers, artists, scholars, citizens and even some of its own leaders.
Having thrown their lot behind the Communist regime for half a century, precisely because of the racial and economic oppression experienced in prerevolutionary days, Afro-Cubans themselves were slow to come to terms with continuing discrimination and their growing impoverishment as a result of it; the latter was recently aggravated by the collapse of world Communism, with its negative effects on Cuba's economy.
Castro's claims of racial equality, however, were disproved as long ago as 1994 when, in the overwhelmingly black area along the seafront in Central Havana, thousands of angry, rock-throwing protesters took to the streets, shattered windows, and attacked the police in what was baptized the maleconazo. The regime shuddered; this was the closest thing to a race riot Cuba had seen since the Revolution. Fourteen years later, Cuba has even greater reason to fear the threat of racially-motivated violence.
Brought to light in 2008, the first comprehensive, officially-sanctioned document addressing the issue of race in Cuba under the Revolution, The Challenges of the Racial Problem in Cuba [2], paints a stark picture of the situation that exists even now in 2009 for the blacks. This graphic, 385-page document, supported by a bounty of hitherto unpublicized statistics, speaks of neglect, denial, and forceful resurgence of racism in Cuba under Communism.
The publication shows a growing impoverishment of the population as a whole, but it emphasizes that black Cubans are disproportionately affected. The old segregationist Cuba is gone, according to this document, yet, somehow the country's leadership continues to be predominantly white (71%). A majority of the country's scientists and technicians are white (72.7%), even though both races have equal rates of education.
The same whitening process affects Cuba's universities at the professorial level (80% at the University of La Habana).
In the countryside, the land that is privately held is almost totally in the hands of whites (98%), and even in the State cooperatives blacks are almost nonexistent (5%).
A robust percentage of able-bodied Cubans with jobs are white, whether male (66.9%) or female (63.8%). In contrast, the overall employment rate of blacks who are fit to work is startlingly low (34.2%). We are left to conclude that most able-bodied black Cubans are unemployed (65.8%).
How, then, does one explain what caused such racial disparities, from top to bottom, after five decades of radical change?
According to the document, Blacks overwhelmingly blamed "racial discrimination" in hiring and promotion (60.8%) for these stark contrasts, and an overwhelming majority of Cubans of both races agreed that "racial prejudice continues to be current on the island" (75%). However, among whites the disparities were attributed to blacks being "less intelligent than whites" (58%) and "devoid of decency" (69%). Tellingly, a whopping majority of whites in Cuba oppose racial intermarriage (68%), the document said.
The publication concluded that, "These asymmetric phenomena of social differentiation, as expressed, primarily, in profound cleavages in regards to differential levels and degrees of access to material and cultural wealth, to the best jobs, to positions of leadership, etc, are evidenced in every aspect of the social and spiritual life of the racial groups that compose Cuban society..." [3]
We may surmise that these "asymmetric phenomena" – as the document calls them – are responsible for the growth of a new Civil Rights movement in Cuba, fueled by growing opposition to racial discrimination and demands for racial power-sharing.
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http://www.kansascity.com/2009/04/21/3044555/carlos-moore-putting-context-to.html#ixzz1TmOLD3U1
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