James Counts Early
Activist, formerly Director, Cultural Heritage Policy
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution

(Thanks very kindly to Luci Murphy in Washington, DC who forwarded these most important comments on Carlos Moore to the internet on Grupo Afro Descendiente e-mail list. As I've previously mencioned, Moore and others are part of a recent trend to claim that Obama's election is some kind of threat to Cuba because Obama is Black and because, supposedly, this means that Cuban government can no longer say that the United States is racist. As I've mentioned more than once before, Cuba DOES continue to have racial problems, but they are both nothing compared to the racial problem which are widespread in the United States. Their origins and nature are quite different and it's extraordinarly disingenuous to try to conflate them as the group of people such as Carlos Moore, the Miami Herald, and others, all of whom have a long history of hostility toward the revolutionary government in Cuba, have been trying to do.)

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Carlos Moore’s Outcast Vision and Dangerous Deceit, 12/28/08
But what about racism in Cuba – through what optics and context of change should we view and engage it?
By James Early of Transafrica
A response to “Obama Effect Highlights Racism in Cuba”

December 28, 2008

Carlos Moore has re-emerged with his usual ripe political opportunism in the form of highly selective and often misleading analysis of race, racism, and of anti-racist achievements in Cuba. His mischief is compounded by misinformation about the status of the unfinished agenda and the growing engagement between Cuban citizens and the Cuban government about remaining obstacles to full achievement of social equity in race relations in Cuba.

This time Moore’s tour of the U.S. to promote his new book Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba and to ply his racialist prescriptions to overcome racism in Cuba comes at a transformative juncture of change in the Americas. Among the social equity topics in the change process under regional integration in Latin America and the Caribbean is a significant discourse, although not fully satisfactory in practice, about racism and discrimination. This includes the one initiated by Cubans inside Cuba, a dialogue that is debating why there is an unfinished agenda, the stakes for the country, and policy steps to eradicate racism.

Of course claims touted by Louis E.V. Nevaer that the “Obama Effect Highlights Racism in Cuba” – more on this later – is an unsubstantiated stretch about positive reverberations of Barack Obama’s election in Cuba. Nevaer and Moore’s anti-Cuba, or better labeled anti-Castro, bias obscures the fact that the Obama election spur to racial discourses in the Americas is but the most recent presidential election stimulus, after the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, about racism and social justice in the Americas. Nevertheless, Moore and Nevaer’s tendentious critique about race in Cuba affords an opportunity to focus U.S. public attention on a subject that many in Cuba and the U.S. are reticent to fully engage.

Despite serious debates and widespread organizing among Afro-Descendants in the Americas about what change means for them and their countries, Carlos Moore and Louis E.V. Nevaer, citing some significant data researched and published in Cuba, make a subjective analysis and draw faulty conclusions as they skirt and therefore undervalue the scope, scale, impetus and synergy among civil society organizations inside Cuba and elsewhere advancing the promise of change sweeping the hemisphere. In doing so they delink civil society actions from the diverse ideological and political leadership in the Caribbean and Latin America (Evo Morales, Lula da Silva, Hugo Chavez, and Raul Castro among others) implementing policy changes as a result of intensified dialogue, debate and give and take between citizens and their governments.

Latching on to the “Obama Effect”, Moore and Nevaer close their minds and try to turn reader’s eyes away from the more fundamental regional dynamics of Latin American and Caribbean integration and the pivotal participatory democracy discourses and practices20useful to identify, analyze, and evaluate the long and diverse country-specific and regionally connected struggles against racism. Juxtaposing Cuba to the U.S. does not provide realistic context or rational historical measures with which to more accurately evaluate the status and policy approaches of citizens and government to yet unfinished agendas to defeat racism in Cuba, Latin America or in the U.S. And with respect to post-1959 history, evolution, and status of racial dynamics in Cuba, Moore and Nevaer seem to be trapped in a time-bubble and an anti-socialist feud qualifying the matter as they do on the socialist revolutionary leadership persona and decision making of now retired President Fidel Castro.

Cuban national debates and compromises and evaluation of internal progress on racial discrimination and other policy issues and Cuban-determined solutions to Cuban social problems and national development opportunities are maligned and dismissed by Moore and Nevaer. Rather than inform readers at least about the current generally positive trend of policy debates and new directions within the Cub an government and between Cuban citizens and the government about the media, race, sexuality, healthcare, and renewal and commemoration of ethnic and culture-specific histories and institutions, among other policy matters directed to rectification and revitalization of Cuban socialism, Moore and Nevaer retreat from debating the topic of race in Cuba in real-time developments and broader national development strategies. They arrogantly prescribe generalizations about affirmative action, revival of independent social and cultural institutions, and ‘effective power sharing between the island’s two dominant (racial) groups’. Sounds like a recommendation for the institution of a decidedly conscious systemic racially divided country.

In general and on issues of race in particular Americans are still too uninformed about current developments in Cuba. Cuban and U.S. sympathizers and solidarity activists who are justly concerned about racism anywhere in the world, Cuba included, must become better acquainted with how Cubans inside of Cuba have proposed and are acting upon some of the civic recommendations Moore masquerades about.

Not only do Carlos Moore and Louis E.V. Nevaer misrepresent the primary reason for Cubans speaking out about racism and discrimination inside of Cuba today. They clearly disregard and thus disrespect the obvious cause of the new racial discourse inside of Cuba: Cuban citizens capable and desirous of individual and group uplift and of contributions to national and regional development in the Caribbean and Latin America exercising their own agency in regards to national understanding and policy making with respect to race. In an attempt to distort what is really happening regarding increased discourse and policy making about race in Cuba they make the groundless claim that one of the more recent in-depth book length critiques and policy discourses Desafios de la Problematica Racial en Cuba (Challenges of the Racial Problematic in Cuba) about racism and the advances and the limits of racial progress in Cuba was “banned by the government.” The author of the book is Esteban Morales Dominguez, a prominent Afro-Cuban scholar. With little effort those who read Spanish can find on Cuban websites and in numerous Cuban publications essays and interviews by and with Cuba nationals about the topic of race, discrimination, and racial progress and challenges in Cuba today and compare insider perspectives with external evaluations.

I was in Cuba late January/early February 2008, a few days after the launch of Esteban Morales Dominguez’s book, and I spoke extensively with him at his home and when I formally addressed 30 plus members of the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) about the anti-racist struggles in Latin America in the context of national and regional struggles against neoliberalism and the search for alternatives including 21st Century socialism. I made several references to Esteban’s book, and I had substantial exchanges about racial concepts and policies in Cuba and Latin America during the UNEAC meeting with the Cuban Vice Minister of Culture in attendance.

When in early December of this year, almost a year after my last visit to Cuba, I received an e-mail copy of the article “Obama Effect Highlights Racism in Cuba”, I immediately e-mailed a copy to Esteban Morales with a request that he respond specifically to accusations about his book made by Nevaer (read below) in support of Carlos Moore.

He wrote the following e-mail response to me on December 16 which I have translated:

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Dear James.

My book was published in January of this year and it was distributed without any difficulty with a formal presentation organized by the Fernando Ortiz Foundation (introduced by Fernando Martinez*). Also seven articles have been published on the subject in the following magazines: Catauro No. 6, Temas, Caminos (Martin Luther King Center, Havana), and two articles in the Jiribilla, one in Alma Mater (periodical of university students) in the October edition. One additional article is now in publication, the subject of which is “Cuba: Skin Color and Statistics”. Also, I just participated in a documentary entitled “Race”, which has been shown in several theaters and promoted on television.

So, I have not had any difficulty in publishing nor in promoting the subject. Also, I have a second book that is already accepted for publication by the Institute of the Book and promoted by the Juan Marinello Center. My book (Challenges of the Racial Problematic in Cuba) was accepted for publication in Venezuela.

So, those that say that my book has been banned should be well informed, because they are mistaken and dis-informed. If they want, they can request how to get my articles electronically. Challenges of the Racial Problematic is sold out because there were only funds to publish 1000 copies, but it has been circulated widely, and people loan it to others, etc.

In addition, no one has interfered with me about the book.

I hope that this information is useful to you.

Un abrazo,

Esteban Morales

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*Fernando Martínez Heredia, a noted Marxist author and essayist and winner of the 2006 National Social Sciences Award

WHAT ABOUT THE “OBAMA EFFECT” AND THE STRUGGLES FOR SOCIO-ECONOMIC, RACIAL, CULTURAL AND POLITICAL EQUALITY IN CUBA, THE AMERICAS AND AROUND THE WORLD?

In exposing Carlos Moore’s disingenuous analysis of race and racism in Cuba and his whacky but dangerous call for dividing the Cuban nation into separate races, people who are seriously committed to defeating racism suffered by the 150 million Afro-Descendants in this hemisphere should avoid wrapping themselves smug solidarity with Cuba or other Left-Progressive governments and social movements. Positive reception of the “Obama Effect” in regards to racial aspirations and struggles in the Americas should not be blithely dismissed.

A U.S. president with dramatically fresh and hopeful ideas of change in contrast to exploitative, law breaking, war making politics of George Bush and cautious Clinton-era liberalism has been voted in as a representative of U.S citizen’s disgust, fears, and critiques, but not outright rejection of Neo-Conservative and Centrist-Liberal politics and polices at home and abroad. Barack Obama is the vessel in which a majority of U.S. citizens have deposited their hopes for change from recent past Republican and Democratic presidential leadership.

And, President-Elect Barack Obama is Black! And we as a nation – most of us across the ideological and political spectrum – and around the world are in high spirits about what progress his election represents in the yet unfinished struggle to overcome the legacies of U.S. and global racism.

Indeed the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the U.S. is herald around the world and embraced by peoples and political leaders of all ideological stripes. Obama’s call for restorative change in the declining delivery of rights and material wellbeing in U.S. domestic politics and in restraints to its imperial foreign policies which have violated the protocols by which the majority of nations negotiate interest and differences reflects the hopes and aspirations of many across the world.

In this wider policy context Obama’s election is also an important optic for amplification of unfinished struggles against racism in the U.S. and around the world. In the case of Cuba, my friends and acquaintances, ordinary citizens, artists and intellectuals, and political officials including some in the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, have over the last year welcomed the possibility of racial progress in the U.S. that the election of a Black president would represent. Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Lula da Silva of Brazil and other leaders and citizens in Africa and in Europe have expressed the significance of a Black American rising to the presidency of the United States.

In a recently published interview Ricardo Alarcon, President of the Cuban National Assembly acknowledges the positive racial effects of Obama inside of the U.S., while offering a more sobering analysis of the “Obama Effect“ with respect to Cuba:

“I saw the images and recognized many friends in tears, people who were part of the New Left of another era. They felt a special kind of emotion in gathering there, not the kind one feels when one is beaten but rather in celebration of the election of a black man as President, who has promised to change the country. I am not naïve, I know that we cannot expect much change with respect to U.S. policy towards Cuba, but I understand their sense of hope.

To Carlos Moore, his supporters, and to his critics, I genuinely urge that we become more diligent in pursuit of information and evaluation about progress, or lack thereof in defeating racism in Cuba, the Caribbean, Latin American, and in the U.S.

Honest debate among us can lead to improved solidarity with progressive Afro-Descendants and their nations in the Caribbean and Latin America in pursuit of racial progress in the context of national self-determined development. And, our ability to make productive critiques and contributions about world affairs, including civil society organizations and government policies to overcome racism will be enhance d through informed, honest debate and ethical compromise with Afro-Descendants and their governments in the Caribbean and Latin America.

In regards to matters of race and policies inside of Cuba and throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, we must locate our critical concerns and our solidarity activism in the context of the integration process in Latin American and the Caribbean (CARICOM countries included). Despite many differences in their ideological outlooks and political and economic practices they find common ground against imposed neoliberal policies. And those of us outside of the region can best be informed and responsibly active by engaging the collaborative and plural searches in the region for socio-economic and cultural and political alternatives apparent in a growing wave of participatory democracy notably inclusive of a pronounced maturation among racial and ethnic civil society movements among the 150 million Afro-Descendants throughout the hemisphere and among millions of Indigenous peoples.

In this momentous context of change we should not be surprised that Carlos Moore and other narrow-minded ideologues will attempt once again to enlist the naïve, the willingly unknowing, and the stubbornly reactionary to try to co-opt and to over and under dramatize what is a genuine “Obama Effect”. Hard conservatives and many liberals will debunk the larger American hemispheric movements for change. Narrow Black Nationalists will tend to skew change towards a racialist and market-driven ideology in the name of fighting racism. And many leftists and progressive Black nationalists will champion indigenous rights and their struggles against racism, but lightly, if not studiously avoid the struggles and achievements of Afro Descendants against racism in Latin America.

But none of those visions of a more democratic and racially equitable hemisphere are in sync with the new moment of changes among progressive citizen movements and strategies of progressive political leaders for new democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the internal renovation of Cuban democracy underway in new discourses and policies among Cuban citizens and their political representatives.

DEBATE AND RESPONSE BEYOND CARLOS MOORE Many U.S. liberal and progressives, and Cubans too, all too quickly either avoid or deny that racial issues exist in Cuba and quickly assume a defensive posture often in very offensive tones while casually reciting like a catechism “the primacy of class over race; or by responding with the perplexing but evasive question-like statement: But don’t Cubans have State power? And the Cuban government despite repeated petitions by many whom claim to be ideological and political comrades listens patiently but responds sparingly to requests to say more in detail about the Revolution’s accomplishments, failings, and continued challenges in the struggle to defeat racism and its negative consequences to Afro-Cubans, Mestizos, and to the Cuban society and nation at large.

So, at this point in time of great hope and anticipation of change throughout the Americas, racism against Afro-Descendants and indigenous peoples wherever and however it exist must be placed squarely on the agenda and the faulty optics of gloom and doom or rosy progress must be corrected with facts, sound analysis, and clear cut policies.

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‘Obama Effect’ Highlights Racism in Cuba
by Louis E.V. Nevaer
New America Media, News Analysis
Dec 15, 2008

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7b4ef8e52790034e043a37d170243f0f

Editor's [ie New America Media] Note: Barack Obama's victory has made Cubans more willing to speak out against the institutional racism that exists half a century after Fidel Castro established a "color blind" egalitarian society.

MERIDA, Mexico – As Cuba prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, U.S. President–elect Barack Obama’s victory is raising disturbing questions about the institutional racism in the so-called egalitarian society, where racism is said to have disappeared along with capitalism.

In Cuba, signs in windows have begun to appear that read, “Si se puede, coño” or “Yes we can, damn it.”

“Cuba, I am inclined to believe, is nervous about the impact that a black president in the White House could have upon its own black20population,” writes Carlos Moore, a black Cuban of Jamaican ancestry and author of “Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba,”>/>; in the Miami Herald.

Since the first days of the revolution, Fidel has been aware of the racism that permeated Cuban society. “In the daily life of defense, loyalty, brotherhood, and shrewdness,” Fidel wrote in January 1959, “there has always been a Negro standing beside every white man.”

Castro envisioned a “color-blind” society, an aspiration that dated back to the 19th century liberator Jose Martí who fought to end the vestiges of slavery as part of severing ties with Spain. But there was paradox in Castro’s declarations: Castro, the son of European immigrants from Galicia, Spain, was a white man who had overthrown the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned mulatto born to parents who were both of mixed race.

In the decades that followed, Castro’s vision of giving Cuban blacks equal opportunities was thwarted by the realities of race outside the island nation: Soviet and East European allies preferred white Cubans, and these were granted scholarships to study for advanced degrees throughout behind the Iron Curtain. The growing disparities between white Cubans and black Cubans remained a lingering problem throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

It was the official policy of the government to deny the existence of racism, arguing that Communist “egalitarianism” made discrimination based on race “an impossibility,” simply because it was incompatible with a socialist state. This was a polite fiction. As Alejandro De La Fuente wrote in his authoritative book, “A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba,” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) the color of one’s skin determines the life one leads in Communist Cuba.

“(A) strong correlation between race, the regional distribution of the population, and the quality of the housing stock persisted through the 1980s,” De La Fuente wrote.

“A traditional geography of race and poverty had not been dismantled, largely because of the government’s failure to provide adequate housing to the entire population. No neighborhood was racially exclusive—this was true, for the most part, in pre-Revolutionary Cuba also—but in the most dilapidated areas of the big cities, the proportion of blacks and mulattos was greater than that of whites.”

This was considered slander against socialism. Castro shot back, and Cuban authorities offered statistical analysis to bolster their view, which revealed the lengths to which Havana was prepared to deceive others even as it deceived itself. Of Cuba’s population of 11.2 million people in 2002, officials declared, 65 percent were white, 10 percent were black, and 25 percent were mulatto. This racial breakdown matched exactly the breakdown of members of Cuba’s parliament: 65 percent white and 35 percent people of color.

The implication was as obvious as it was ridiculous: Cuba had achieved “perfect” racial representation between the people and their representatives. Europeans scoffed at such claims. In fact, most independent census reports of the Cuban nation puts the number of “whites” at anywhere from 20 to 35 percent; everyone else is black or mulatto.

The European Union recently dispatched anthropologists to study racism in Cuba. Their findings were shocking: Not only was racism alive and well in the workers’ paradise, but it was systemic and institutional. Blacks were systematically excluded from positions that involved coming in contact with foreign tourists (where they could earn tips in hard currencies), they were relegated to poor housing, complained of the longest waits for healthcare, were excluded from managerial positions, received the lowest remittances from relatives abroad, and were five times more likely to be imprisoned.

The report, “Race and Inequality in Cuba Today,” by Rodrigo Espina and Pablo Rodriguez Ruiz, published in the anthropological journal TEMAS in 2006, infuriated Cuban officials.

But the findings were irrefutable, and they reflected an acceleration of racism in the 1990s.

The collapse of the Soviet Union only exacerbated the problem, particularly as Cuba now competed with Cancun and San Juan for European vacationers. As Democracy Now!>/>; reported in 2000, Cu ban officials continued to exclude blacks from tourist-related industries.

When Maria Carrion of Democracy Now! interviewed a black Cuban identified only as Victor, he told her that the only jobs black Cubans have access to are in construction and cleaning. Blacks are randomly stopped on the street by police, he said, and are unable to denounce racism in Cuba for fear of going to prison for being anti-Communist.

This is why Cubans are dizzy with excitement at Obama’s victory. “I still feel my heart skip a beat,” Victor Fowler, a black Cuban, told Spain’s El Pais newspaper last month. “I listen to Barack Obama … I look at my skin, I look at my children’s skin, I cry and I smile.”

Obama’s ascendancy has emboldened Cuban blacks in their criticism of the racism in Cuba. “The bottom line is that racism is Cuba's most intractable problem,” Carlos Moore wrote in the Miami Herald. “Only an arrangement implying effective power sharing between the island's two dominant groups can prepare the ground for a reversal of Cuba's socio-racial conundrum. This would call for an entirely new institutional framework that includes the reinvigoration of civil society, the implementation of robust racial affirmative action policies in all spheres, the revival of independent cultural and social institutions, an independent media and free press and the existence of autonomous political movements, associations and parties.” In other words, when it comes to racial progress, blacks in Cuba complain that their nation resembles the United States circa 1963, the year before the Civil Rights Act was passed.

This was precisely the point that Esteban Morales Dominguez, an economist, political scientist and essayist made last year in his book, “The Challenges of the Racial Problem in Cuba” (Fundación Fernando Ortiz, 2007), which was promptly banned by authorities. [Actually, not true]

Yet there is rising anger among Cuban blacks who view Obama’s victory as a sharp reminder of the racism that still exists in Cuba. In a country where few dare to post messages in public view that are not in support of the government, signs in windows have begun to appear that are startling: “Si se puede, coño” or “Yes we can,” with a Cuban twist – “Damn it.”

Addendum Author Bio
Louis E. V. Nevaer is one of the nation's leading authorities on Hispanics in the United States. He has authored more than 10 books on economic and business management, including the critically acclaimed The Rise of the Hispanic Market in the United States, Nafta's Second Decade, and The Dot-Com Debacle. He is director of Hispanic Economics, which analyzes Hispanic consumer behavior. A contributor to Pacific News Service and New America Media, his op-ed pieces appear in newspapers throughout the nation. He divides his time between New York and México.

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For some context to this story, see The Discourse on Racism in Anti-Castro Publications, 2008-2009

For materials on recent Cuban interest in race & identity in Cuba, see:

The 1912 Massacre and the Independents of Color

Cuba: Race & Identity