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Chronicle of Higher Education October 14, 2013
To Be Black in Cuba
By Antonio López
In March, The New York Times published a commentary by the black Cuban
intellectual Roberto Zurbano, For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn't
Begun. Written in Spanish and translated for the newspaper, the essay
fit a tradition going back to the early 19th century of Cuban literary
and political works published or produced abroad in hopes of creating
change on the island. Zurbano's reasons for why people of African
descent fare worse than whites in a contemporary Cuba beset by informal
and structural racism rang true: the legacy of slavery; lack of
resources to participate in the growing private economy; cuts in the
social-welfare system; discriminatory hiring practices in a state
tourism industry that pays in valuable American dollars; remittances
that go only to white Cubans from a majority-white Cuban diaspora; and
the related underrepresentation of Afro-Cubans among the elite and
overrepresentation among the incarcerated.
All that is largely off limits in public discussion, Zurbano reminded
us, a fact not unrelated to the omnipresence of racist discourse in
everyday, private life in Cuba. Change is needed. Some of Zurbano's
readers might even call it a revolution.
And therein lies the problem.
Soon after the appearance of his essay, Zurbano was demoted from editor
of the Casa de las Américas, the famous state publishing house. His
essay was repudiated by Cuban critics in La Jiribilla, an online,
state-sponsored magazine about culture. Zurbano defended himself, taking
the Times to task for apparently changing his title without his
consent—from For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Isn't Over. The
change impugned the Cuban revolution's record on racial justice, a
sensitive matter for Zurbano, who, while commenting on Cuban race in
compelling ways, hews to the official line in intellectual and cultural
matters of working always within the revolution—which is to say, of
ultimately endorsing, rather than opposing, the seemingly
untranscendable horizon of the state.
A black Cuban intellectual was punished by the Cuban government for
writing in the mainstream American media about racial injustice in Cuba.
But that's only the beginning of the discussion of how racial categories
that were forged during plantation colonialism mark the economic,
political, and cultural supremacy of the elite blancos criollos (white
Cubans) on both sides of the Florida Straits, from the watershed of 1959
to the seeming wane today of both reactionary Miami exiles and the
regime of the Castro brothers.
What if Zurbano's essay had been published in its original Spanish in
Granma, the state newspaper, with the title that Zurbano originally
submitted, before many rounds of changes? El país que viene: y mi Cuba
negra? (The Country to Come: And My Black Cuba?) would have provided
a mood of possibility. Or what if a white Cuban intellectual writing
within the revolution turned the public conversation about race in
Cuba to how the inherited, undemocratic power of whiteness is reflected,
for example, in the state's heir-apparent, Miguel Díaz-Canel? Or if the
Times, emulating such earlier Latino newspapers in New York City as El
Gráfico and Pueblos Hispanos, had run side-by-side Spanish-English
versions of For Blacks, calling attention to, rather than erasing, the
twists and turns of Spanish in its relations with English?
Such thoughts hover over the fact that, with Havana's new travel policy
easing departures from the island this year, the arrival of For Blacks
in the Times coincided with the remarkable visits to the United States
of dissident Cuban activists and intellectuals, white and black.
Critiques of the regime by such thinkers as Yoani Sánchez, Berta Soler,
Guillermo Fariñas, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and Manuel Cuesta Morúa
have appeared on social media, in newspapers in the United States, and
in lectures on college campuses, and they have often condemned racism.
For years many people in the United States either ignored Cuba or viewed
the island through a familiar prism: the U.S. intervention in the war
for Cuban independence in 1898, the missile crisis, the rise and
influence of post-1959 expatriate communities, or the mass migrations
from the island. Beneath the headlines, intellectuals and writers in
Cuba and the United States have long been interested in the island,
though often through a lens of evasion and contradiction when it comes
to race and, in particular, the situation of Afro-Cubans. That was the
case despite the efforts of some critics who looked at racism in Cuba.
Now, in the last decade or so, scholarly attention has coalesced on the
culture and
