World News
Cuba
Colombia
Venezuela
Links |
Why black cubans support the revolution
Joe Ryan, September 1994 issue of Socialist Action newspaper
Despite all the propaganda about how hard life is in Cuba,
an article in the Aug. 21 Los Angeles Times revealed that there was
certainly one section of the population that unconditionally stands by the
revolution – Cuba’s Black population. And nearly 60 percent of the
population in Cuba today is either Black or Mulatto (self-defined).
“Everything I have, I owe to the revolution,” Andres Castillo told L.A.
Times correspondent Ingrid Peritz. “Blacks, especially of my generation,
know we were made by the revolution. So we’re willing to put up with
hardships now.”
Castillo, whose father was an illiterate country salesman, is the editor of
a Cuban science magazine. All the gains that Blacks have made in Cuban
society since 1959 – in terms of equality and an end to racial
discrimination – he credits to the revolution.
Even a superficial examination of the demographics of who leaves Cuba
confirms who the big winners were. Over 95 percent of Cubans who fled after
the 1959 revolution were white. For the rich elite, and the prosperous,
overwhelmingly white middle class, the revolution the curtain on a life of
privilege. For the overwhelming working-class Black population, the triumph
of the Cuban Revolution signified an end of centuries of racism,
discrimination, and repression.
The history of Cuba is basically a history of revolutions, and Black Cubans
played a decisive and influential role in all of them.
Similar to the historical experiences of Black Americans, race relations in
pre-revolutionary Cuba were based on the legacy of slavery, an institution
that was only abolished in 1886.
Blacks and Mulattoes played significant roles in the wars for Cuban national
liberation, constituting a large proportion of the fighters in liberation
armies that fought for independence from Spain in 1868-78, and later, in
1895-98.
After the United States intervened in 1898, robbing Cubans of what would
have been a military victory over their Spanish occupiers, the liberation
army was disbanded by U.S. authorities and replaced by the Havana police and
a Rural Guard. Both of these police organizations were strictly white in
composition.
Racism and repression institutionalized
In the ensuing years, Cuban homegrown racism would be nurtured, refined and
“improved” by the strong U.S. presence on the island.
Black Cubans were denied the equality they fought and died for during the
liberation war of 1895-98. Demobilized Black liberation fighters were
excluded from important administrative appointments, denied access to
government jobs, and became targets for discrimination and racism under the
new regime. Although they attempted to fight for their rights through the
existing political parties, they got nowhere. In 1908, they organized an
association of Black voters called the Colored Independence Party.
When an election “reform” law, enacted in 1910, prohibited the
organization of political parties along racial lines, Black Cubans were
forced to take up arms against the administration of Jose Miguel Gomez.
The ensuing race war in 1912 resulted in thousands of Blacks being killed in
pitched battles, race riots, and massacres. Known as the “Little War of
1912,” it led to a nationwide extermination campaign against Blacks that
reached near-genocidal proportions. The Cuban Black community never fully
recovered from its defeat in the race war of 1912.
This laid the basis that enabled Cuban capitalists to establish an insidious
pattern of job discrimination against Blacks that lasted right up to the
1959 revolution.
One Cuban historian gives a graphic description of the conditions faced by
Black working people in pre-revolutionary Cuba:
“Blacks could not be tramway conductors, salesmen in department stores, .
. . or employees of commercial and foreign (U.S.) enterprises. The found the
doors closed to jobs as nurses, typesetters, hat makers, etc. Even in
industries such as tobacco, the best paid jobs were closed to Blacks. For
him, the only jobs – such as dockworkers – and the most menial positions
such as bootblack, newspaper sales, . . . etc.”
However, the Black population was able to make some modest gains as a result
of the nationalist revolution of 1933. The law that at least 50 percent of
all jobs in commercial, industrial, service, and foreign-owned enterprises
had to go to Cuban citizens. Black Cubans used this new law to create some
cracks in the systematically-erected barrier of institutionalized job
discrimination.
Repression of Blacks also extended itself to political representation. While
Blacks and Mulattoes represented nearly 30 percent of the Cuban population
in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, they occupied only 5 percent of the seats
in the Cuban House of Representatives.
“Jim Crow” racism, enforced through unwritten laws, restricted Blacks to
specific beaches, parks, “walk-throughs,” neighborhoods and schools.
They were disproportionately represented at the bottom of the economic
scale, had a higher illiteracy rate, and a higher rate of unemployment.
Blacks, Mulattoes and poor whites were effectively excluded from a decent
education through underfunding of public schools and a proliferation of
private schools that catered to the educational needs of the rich. In
Havana, upper-class social clubs excluded Blacks as a matter of policy.
Like their counterparts in the United States, Cuban capitalists denied the
existence of racism and discrimination and conveniently avoided every
bringing up the subject. They would hypocritically point to the platitudes
of rights and equality in the Cuban constitution, and call attention to
individual Blacks who occupied official government and military positions.
Meanwhile, a brutally repressive police apparatus was always standing by to
make sure that the victims of racism were never permitted to organize
protests against institutionalized inequality.
All this changed with the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959.
One of the first symbolic acts that indicated a new day was coming in Cuba
occurred one the first day Fidel Castro’s army entered Havana – tanks
crushed the fences that had been erected on Havana’s hotelfront beaches to
designate where Blacks couldn’t go.
Making racism illegal
In March 1959, only two months after the conquest of state power, Castro
broke the conspiracy of silence on racism in Cuba by confronting it head on.
In a speech given in Havana, Castro stated:
“One of the battles we must prioritize more and more everyday . . . is the
battle to end racial discrimination at the workplace. . . . There are two
types of racial discrimination: One is the discrimination in recreation
centers and cultural centers; the other, which is the worst and the first
one we must fight, is racial discrimination in jobs.”
But Castro didn’t stop there. His speech was aimed like a dagger at the
old, racist structures of Cuba that had created two separate societies –
one white, one Black. His first step was to abolish the old private school
system and establish a well-funded public school system that was completely
integrated.
“There is discrimination at recreation centers,” Castro said. “Why?
Because Blacks and whites were educated apart. [But now] at the public grade
school, Blacks and whites are together. At the public grade school, Blacks
and whites learn to live together, like brothers. And if they are together
at the public school, they are later together at the recreation centers and
all places.”
Economic and social conditions for Blacks improved dramatically when the
revolutionary government decreed the Agrarian Reform and Urban Reform Laws,
which gave the land to small farmers, and lowered rents in the cities by 50
percent. Laws were enacted and enforced prohibition discrimination in jobs,
schools, housing, and medical care. In Cuba, race prejudice would be a
punishable offense.
A study by sociologist Maurice Zeitlin of industrial workers in Cuba in 1962
illustrates how quickly Black working people embraced the revolution. He
found that 80 percent of Black industrial workers expressed enthusiastic
support for the revolution versus 67 percent of white industrial workers.
Black workers, Zeitlin noted, frequently referred to the impact of the
revolution on race relations in spite of the fact that no question was
raised by the interviewer about this issue.
One outcome of the revolution has been the accelerated process of
inter-marriage between the races. As Los Angeles Times writer Ingrid Peritz
observed, “Cuba’s racial profile has turned several shades darker since
1959.”
Numerous inter-racial couples can be seen strolling the streets of Havana.
Observers see this as the “most foolproof index [available] of a
qualitative change in a society that in the past was based on a color-class
system.”
The Cuban government has also essentially conducted a campaign to increase
the number of Blacks, Mulattoes, and women in the mass organizations of the
revolution.
In 1977, Blacks represented 36 percent of the membership of the National
Assemblies, 400 percent increase over the level of Black and Mulattoe
representation in state institutions before the revolution.
In 1986, as part of a “rectification” campaign to combat bureaucratic
deformations, Castro launched an affirmative action campaign to increase the
number of Blacks, Mulattoes and women on decision-making bodies in the Cuban
Communist Party.
At a seminar of the London based Minority Rights Group, Black Cuban social
researcher Lourdes Casal presented a balance sheet of what was accomplished
in Cuba to end racism and discrimination.
“It can be unhesitatingly affirmed that racial discrimination has been
solidly eradicated from Cuban society. Nobody is barred from access to jobs,
education, social facilities of any kind, etc., for reasons of their skin
color.
“The egalitarian and redistributive measures enacted by the revolutionary
government have benefited Blacks as the most oppressed sector of the society
in the pre-revolutionary social system.
“This does not imply that all forms of prejudice have been banned or that
the consciousness of all the people has been thoroughly transformed. . . .
The difference is that there is a tremendous cost in expressing such
prejudicial opinions publicly.”
It should come as no surprise that Black Cubans are indeed the staunchest
supporters of the Revolution. For them, the socialist revolution in Cuba
represented a profound triumph for their democratic and economic rights.
They won’t relinquish these conquests without a fight to the finish.
Replying to a question about what it would be like if the revolution was
defeated, Andres Castillo told the L.A. Times, “It would be like it used
to be. More discrimination, more hunger. Blacks would simply be worse off.
And we don’t want to go backward.”
Blacks in the United States can certainly testify to what that would be
like.
This article was written by Joe Ryan, and first appeared in the September
1994 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
http://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/cuba4.html
|