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AfroCubaWeb
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Amalia Dache GerbinoAssociate professor, University of Pennsylvania School of Education. Areas of interest: Postcolonial studies, Community and student resistance, Urban geography, College access, AfroLatina/o/x studies. Featured as the voice of AfroCubans on J11 in Politico, Foreign Policy, NPR, MSNBC, and Slate. Advises several democratic politicians. Advocates a tightening of the embargo, which most Cubans reject as very harmful to their health and wellfare. "What does this have to do with race? Biden is thinking about doing remittances again. Well, [studies have] demonstrated that Afro-Cubans have less access to remittances, because they have less family in the United States. And they're in the most marginalized neighborhoods, which means they’re farther away from food, they’re farther away from medical sources. When you think about policy, like remittances, you have to think about the racial question, because darker Cubans won’t have access, like light-skinned Cubans do, to remittances. So hence, that’s not a good policy to put in place right now." www.politico.com/newsletters/the-recast/2021/07/30/amalia-dache-afro-cubans-justice-493788 "¿Qué tiene que ver esto con la raza? Biden está pensando en hacer remesas nuevamente. Bueno, [los estudios han] demostrado que los afrocubanos tienen menos acceso a las remesas, porque tienen menos familiares en los Estados Unidos. Y están en los vecindarios más marginados, lo que significa que están más alejados de la comida, están más lejos de las fuentes médicas. Cuando piensas en la política, como las remesas, tienes que pensar en la pregunta racial, porque los cubanos más oscuros no tendrán acceso, como los cubanos de piel clara, a las remesas. Así que, por lo tanto, esa no es una buena política para poner en marcha en este momento ". www.politico.com/newsletters/the-recast/2021/07/30/amalia-dache-afro-cubans-justice-493788
"Amalia Dache is an associate professor at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. She studies the complexities
of the role race plays in Cuban culture and speaks out against what she
sees as a perpetual “invisibilizing” of Black Cubans’ contributions to the
island’s justice movement.
"Amalia Dache es profesor asociado en la Escuela de Educación de la
Universidad de Pennsylvania. Estudia las complejidades del papel que
desempeña la raza en la cultura cubana y habla contra lo que ella ve como
una "invisibilización" perpetua de las contribuciones de los cubanos
negros al movimiento de la justicia de la isla.
Amalia Dashe is reputed by colleagues to be an intelligent person and she
has valid things to say about the current Cuban educational system and
about the Cuban Census, which our research
validates but which many scholars do not get right. However calling
for a tightening of the embargo is clearly extremist and highly dualistic,
characteristic of European colonialism. She
blames communism for the shutting down of the many AfroCuban organizations
that existed prior to 1959, when in fact this was
republicanismo,
something hard for people brought up in the American world view to
understand. |
Don’t Let Cuba’s Protest Momentum Evaporate 7/30/2021 Foreign Policy: by
Amalia Dache - "What do protesters want? They want an end to food shortages,
which the regime has weaponized, delaying the distribution of staples like
bread. They also want access to COVID-19 vaccines. The regime has so far refused
to join the COVAX program providing shots for developing countries, and the
rollout of Cuban-made vaccines has been significantly delayed. They want access
to routine health care. I found the regime’s selective rationing of care has
meant only those with U.S. dollars can be sure to get the treatment they need.
This leads to women regularly giving birth without anesthesia and people dying
of preventable deaths."
Afro-Cubans on the brink 7/30/2021 Politico: by Amalia Dache - "The Cuban
census states that its population is about 35 percent of African descent [Black
and Mulatto combined] and that its population of whites is about 65 percent. But
U.S. stats and folks who have researched Cuba, say that it’s actually the
opposite. In painting your country as predominantly white, it allows people
outside of the [the island] to think that the leadership is representative. We
know the people in power in Cuba, in the military elite, are predominantly
white. [In the U.S.] we still have these conversations, like, Cuban Americans
are all white, they all look like Marco Rubio, Gloria Estefan and Andy Garcia.
But it invisiblizes people like myself and people, like Celia Cruz for example."
Internet crackdown in Cuba frustrates families, friends in the U.S. 7/28/2021 Florida
Phoenix: "The Cuban government’s curtailment of internet access —and thus social
media—is what helped fuel many protests across the island, which were led
predominantly by Afro-Cubans, said Dache. The protests, first sparked by
shortages of food and COVID-19 vaccines, began July 11 in one of the most
marginalized Afro-Cuban neighborhoods in Cuba, San Antonio de los Baños. From
there, the protests rapidly spread to 62 cities across the country and by the
end of that day it was 100, Dache, who conducts research on the Afro-Cuban
experience, said. “These are predominantly Afro-Cuban areas that have high
poverty,” she said."
Afro-Cubans Come Out In Droves To Protest Government 7/25/2021 NPR: by
Amalia Dache - "So I've been working on a study since 2018 talking to Cubans in
Havana. I collected narrative history interviews. One of the main things that
came out was how race plays a role in how they access education, for example. So
Afro Cubans would mention that, you know, they live in poor - the poorest areas.
They really can't access higher education because they have to have access to
American dollars or tourism in order to buy food to go to school. And this came
out, of course, for white Cubans. But Afro Cubans were the ones who mentioned
the living conditions where they were worse off, especially in Havana."
‘We need to focus on the Cuban people’s struggle’ 7/17/2021 MSNBC: "Cubans
and Americans protesting in solidarity are entering their second week calling
attention to the need for basic necessities for Cubans and demanding an end to
the communist regime. Amalia Dache, Associate Professor for the Graduate School
of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, joins American Voices with
Alicia Menendez to discuss the humanitarian crises fueling the movement and
explains why this moment is different from the past."
Fear of a Black Cuban Planet 7/17/2021 Slate: by Amalia Dache - "Listen to
this: Afro-Cuban people, Black people in Cuba, have not been able to engage in
their own history since 1959. Since 1959, the Cuban government, the Communist
government, has wiped out, off the face of the Cuban planet, all Black political
associations, all Black organizations. Cuba before 1959 had 200 Black societies.
These Black societies survived colonialism. You hear me? Colonialism. They were
completely disbanded in the early 1960s because the Communist government said
that it had eradicated racism. So you can’t even engage in Black history in
Cuba. The Cuban curriculum cannot engage in these conversations because it’s not
part of the revolution. It’s counterrevolutionary to talk about Black history in
Cuba, to engage Black history. Black Cubans don’t know their history. They don’t
know about Black resistance. They don’t know about how Black Cubans and
Afro-Cubans during the Republic, between 1901 and 1959, were a part of changing
the Cuban society, the young Cuban society."
Mysteries at the Bottom of
the Ocean: Afro- Cubanismo and Highter Learning 4/13/2021 Vimeo, Penn
Alumni
Dr. Amalia Dache -
Critical Internationalization Studies Network Meeting 5/15/2020 Critical
Internationalization Studies Network: "In this geographic study, I will explore
the educational trajectories of Cubans living in Havana. Employing an Afro Latin
American hemispheric analysis (Hooker, 2017), theories on Latin American and
Black American political thought on racial equity will be explored through
qualitative data. How political and racial ideologies contribute to the economic
and educational trajectories of Havana Cubans, is under researched in the field
of higher education. During the Cuban Revolutionary period - 1959 to present -
Cuba’s higher education system has been widely recognized as a leader in equity
and opportunity as well as having one of the best postsecondary educational
systems in Latin America. Yet, very little research has been conducted on
Cubans’ educational experiences during this period. Cuba is a country of
predominantly African descendants; this inquiry may provide data on the
intersections of racialized and politicized educational experiences of Cubans
living in Havana."
Teaching a transnational ethic of Black Lives Matter: an AfroCubana Americana’s
theory of Calle 7/8/2018 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in
Education: by Amalia Dache - "The material conditions of populations in the
Global South are interconnected with the material conditions of Black
working-class urban communities in the U.S. Through this multi-scalar
construction, I put forward a theory of Calle – a transnational ethic of
ethno-racial-spatial solidarity. Set within stages of dual geographies, my
AfroCuban American cultural and familial history are paramount to understanding
the landscapes that shaped my scholarly identity and pedagogy. As a researcher
of the Ferguson movement while at the University of Missouri, I learned that
Ferguson student-activists led several campus movements: Occupy SLU at St. Louis
University (fall 2014), University of Missouri (MU) for Mike Brown (fall 2014),
and Concerned Student 1950 (fall 2015) both at the University of Missouri. This
residential foundation served as a site of liberation, inquiry, and pedagogy. In
this article, I aim to disrupt the binaries of community/classroom,
teacher/student, and engage in dialectics centered on the literal and figurative
streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This rooting of a racial bone memory aligns with
Black Lives Matter (BLM)'s tenet of globalism, which elevates a solidarity
between all people of African descent on the continent of Africa and in the
diaspora."
www.gse.upenn.edu/academics/faculty-directory/dache Areas of Expertise: Postcolonial studies, Community and student resistance, Urban geography, College access, AfroLatina/o/x studies
Citations on Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=1SSGUPkAAAAJ&hl=en
www.pica.org/artists/Amalia%20Dache