Trinidad, Cuba. Image via Wikipedia
The first episode offered some promise. The second left me completely unsatisfied.
I just sat through an hour of the second part of PBS‘ Black in Latin America documentary series, hosted by Henry Louis Gates. It was supposed to document how the Cuban Revolution of 1959 affected race relations on an island that has had a tumultuous history with its own identity.
Instead, I got a whole lot of pap about cultural phenomena I already knew about, and very little information on what I wanted to know.
I will grant Dr. Gates one handicap: since he was filming directly in Cuba, there is little doubt the authorities were controlling his footage. There was little chance he was going to capture–nor did he seem to want to capture–the real essence of Cuban society today. If you wanted to get a snapshot of the Afro-Cuban experience before 1959, this was a good start. Then again, most of it wasn’t new to me.
Cuba had been a port of entry for African slaves since the 17th century, although the brunt of Cuban slavery would come in the late 18th and early 19th century, as the island surpassed Haiti as the main supplier of sugar in the Caribbean. Slavery was abolished late, in 1886, and independence would come after two long wars and a stifling US intervention (1870s-1902). During that time, the plantation economy translated into society as well, as a caste system kept African culture in the background.
In the 1920s, Cuba began to accept its African heritage, first among intellectuals and then among the populace through music such as son–the forerunner of mambo and other Latin musical forms. Yet society, the economy and the government had grown largely segregated, in the typical pattern: whites had a lot, blacks not so much.
Then came a bunch of white guys–two of them really white (one had a Spaniard father and one was a quarter Irish)–who decided to start a revolution.
It took 40 minutes of a one-hour program to finally get to the good stuff–you can guess how well it was covered.
Since 1959, the Cuban government under the Castros, Fidel and Raul, had declared racism to be non-existent in revolutionary Cuba. On paper, at least, there was no distinction between white and black for housing, jobs, education, health care, etc. Gates interviewed two Afro-Cuban participants in the Revolution who lauded its egalitarian spirit with regards to education and health care. To be sure, these are advances (though possibly superficial, as I implied in my earlier study of Cuba) would make any Cuban proud, especially those of color who were on the outside looking in.
Today’s Cuba, where tourism and the “double currency” of the CUC and the Peso Nacional rule the roost, has caused a re-emergence of latent racist tendencies that are supposedly “illegal”, since even acknowledgement of racism in Cuba is seen as counterrevolutionary. Gates interviews young artists and musicians who are trying to bring these concerns to the Cuban public. The tourism industry, they acknowledge, has pushed darked Cubans back into the background. Furthermore, the double currency creates a rift between state workers and those in tourism,who often make up to 20 times more.
I could have told you this in my travelogues on Cuba.
So why was I unsatisfied? Apart from social programs to lift up the Cuban masses, Gates did not address the one issue I had with the Revolution: how “white” is the ruling elite of Cuba now?
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos: the main actors of Cuban revolutionary history were as white as Robert E. Lee. Have any blacks come anywhere close to such positions of power and influence? In the 53 years since the triumphal march into Havana, how many blacks have sat on the Politburo of the Cuban Communist Party? How many have sat in the Congress of People’s Power, the rubber-stamp legislature? How many sit on the Council of Ministers? Are there any black Cubans in real positions of power in government, in state industries, in diplomacy, or in the armed forces?
In short, how far down the totem pole do we have to go from Fidel and Raul to find a powerful, influential Cuban of color?
As much as the rhetoric says so, there clearly still are haves and have-nots in Cuba. Gates seemed so caught up in the rah-rah of the social agenda that he neglected to investigate whether a black person in Cuba had any chance of real political or economic power.
Maybe it was too sensitive a topic to fly in the face of Cuban censors. To have Cubans acknowledge a lack of blacks in power, especially on record, is tantamount to admission of racism, which leads to charges of treason and all the fun activities that come with it. At the very least, he showcased a black commander in the armed forces and discussed the “whitewashing” of independence hero Antonio Maceo (Did they tell you about the reason his statue’s turned around, Skip?).
Nonetheless, in a place where power is paramount–especially political and military power–to not research African entry into the machinations of the revolutionary state is a grave omission on Gates’ part.
Next week, Gates will be covering the African experience in Brazil. Although he gets only an hour, I sincerely hope it’s a more prudent use of time.
Mr. D's Neighborhood 
Review of PBS’ “Black in Latin America”: Mexico/Peru
An 18th Century Casta Painting from Mexico, showing different racial combinations.
In my mother’s home country of Ecuador, there’s a province that is unlike any other.
Where the majority of the population is of either pure indigenous or mestizo (mixed white-indigenous) extraction, Esmeraldas appears as a stark contrast to the norm. The province, located on the northern coast abutting Colombia, appears better suited to the Caribbean than to an Andean country. Even with large white and native populations, Esmeraldas is dominated by Africans imported during the Spanish conquest of the 16th Century. Its culture and traditions point farther east than the Andes, towards the coasts of West Africa from which their ancestors were taken.
Athletes from Esmeraldas are especially successful. A glance at Ecuador’s soccer team would have one think they were from Cuba, Trinidad or Jamaica—anything but a South American mountain republic.
There are enclaves like Esmeraldas in many countries in Central and South America. In the last chapter of PBS’ Black in Latin America, Henry Louis Gates looks at two such areas: the black peoples of Veracruz and the Costa Chica in Mexico and the enclave outside Lima, Peru.
Unlike the Caribbean, Central and South America’s native population was too vast and too concentrated to be wiped out. The cultures of these areas, thus, carried a more Amerindian hue. The exception is the Southern Cone, where marginal native populations, as well as Africans, were absorbed into large European immigrant communities.
Yet according to Gates, the African influence is much larger than we realize—especially as African influences were absorbed or subsumed into the larger Hispano-Amerindian community.
More Africans were imported into Mexico and Peru than the United States. Almost half of all enslaved Africans imported to Spanish America came to Mexico. Cities such as Lima and Veracruz contained a distinct African hue, in contrast to the Spanish-native hybrid culture that surrounds them. Many Mexicans and Peruvians contain some African blood, even those that look mestizo. Furthermore, cultural aspects such as music, dance, and food contained as much African influence as from Europe and the Americas.
So apart from a few enclaves, where did all the Africans go?
In Mexico, the slave boom was early and brief, through the 17th century, and emancipation came sooner (in 1829). Blacks intermarried earlier and more vigorously, and by the 1920s it was difficult to even tell who was of African descent. Officially, scholars and politicians extolled the multi-racial “brownness” of Mexico’s people—a homogenization of all cultures that pushed black identity into the background.
A similar pattern occurred in Peru and other South American nations. Although emancipation was more gradual in South America, the overwhelming native and mestizo populations mixed just as vigorously into African families, creating a similar “brownness” to the Mexican experience.
The most dramatic—and tragic—example is on the Rio de la Plata in Argentina, where black populations were almost entirely integrated into either mestizo or, more commonly, European immigrant populations. In effect, this did in fact wipe out the African influence on the Southern Cone, with the exception of Uruguay, where blacks and mulattos from neighboring Brazil buttress their own communities.
So in looking at these groups, and the series in a whole, I’m left with one question: Is racial intermingling and color-blindness necessarily a good thing?
A common theme in this chapter, and in the series, is the mistaken benevolence of color-blindness. For many in Latin America, especially places like the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil, it was thought that the mixing of races would create a new pan-racial harmony that transcended labels and heritage. Gates himself points out that this benevolent “openness” is in itself a form of racism, in that it refuses to deal with the realities of culture and especially domestic social problems.
To be honest, Gates has a point. People are not ingredients in a soup, where different flavors and textures get blended together to make one uniform concoction. There will always be shades of color among us, and whenever there is difference, there is usually some form of discrimination be it overt or subtle. Otherwise, the enclaves of Afro-Latin Americans in Esmeraldas, Veracruz, Lima and the Costa Chica would not exist.
Yet I also get a sense—and I think Gates feels it also—that even though it may be merely a pipe dream, “racial democracy” is something worth striving for. There is hope that in the future there can be a time where all people are treated equally and fairly—while at the same time acknowledging and celebrating the different cultures that have shaped the American continent.
That hope was seen in the universities in Brazil, among young people in the Dominican Republic, in the activists striving in the Costa Chica in Mexico, and even the underground rappers and artists in Cuba that fight for their identity even when official policy condemns them as treasonous.
Whatever the future holds, this much is certain: the cultures of Latin America would not be the same if it weren’t for the millions of Africans kidnapped and brought to these shores. They gave far more than they ever got in return.
In acknowledging their contributions, it goes a small way to repaying that debt.
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