Questions of Racial Identity, Racism and anti-Racist Policies in Cuba: The View from Havana
December 19, 2011 | Report
Elizabeth Newhouse summarizes an Oct. 2011 delegation to Cuba that focused on the issue of racism in Cuba.
“The problem is that the Cuban people want to ignore racism, because our history is a history of integration,” said economist and author Esteban Morales at an October 10, 2011 meeting in Havana hosted by the Cuban Commission Against Racial Discrimination. Attended by a group of activist African-American leaders organized by Wayne Smith, CIP’s Cuba Project director, and James Early, director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Smithsonian Institution, this first in a series of meetings followed up on CIP’s June 2 conference in Washington, D.C., which also brought Cubans and Americans together on the subject of racism. The purpose of the Havana trip was to better understand the Cubans’ view and to learn more about measures underway to deal with the problem, as well as to foster respectful U.S. civic and government engagement with Cuban citizens and the Cuban government.
The Cuban commission was established two years ago by UNEAC (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) to identify measures to help eradicate inequalities based on color in this 60 percent non-white country. For many years, Cuban officials, and even many Afro-Cubans, not only denied the existence of racism—asserting that the revolution made everyone equal—but also discouraged others from confronting it.
