Pedro Pérez-Sarduy
poet, author, journalist

Habaneras, and proud to be black. Havana 2009

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy

Race and Identity

According to the 2002 census figures released late in 2005, 65% of the population on the island of Cuba is white, 10% black, and 24,9% mulato or mixed. The previous figures were generally held to be: Ethnic groups: mulatto 51%, white 37%, black 11%, Chinese 1%.  

As a result, white Cubans have been saying “I told you, we're the majority”; others celebrate the growing mulato population. The 'one drop' rule obviously does not apply in this Caribbean nation, as blacks are becoming more of a minority. What does this mean? Are blacks being rendered invisible? To what extent has the revolution made a difference? To what extent is that difference true today? What is it like to be black Cuban? 

These are some key questions addressed by Pedro Pérez-Sarduy in his multimedia presentations.

“The pervasiveness of racism should not be underestimated. The problems facing blacks in revolutionary Cuba cannot be ignored, pretending that they will go away. Neither should blacks’ own revolutionary history be underestimated; blacks have in the past taken history into their own hands. Today Cuba has a blacker population than it had in 1959, a more educated black population, and one with a growing  sense of pride in being black as being Cuban.  No matter what happens in Cuba, no matter what sort of government comes to power, black Cubans are a force to be reckoned with and will not easily tolerate their own perceived gains from the Revolution being taken away. Rather they will want to see those gains extended.”

“The Rite of Social Communion", Introduction to Pedro Pérez-Sarduy's book AFROCUBA: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture,  1993

AfroCubans in the Arts

-The last forty years and beyond: Poetry Reading by Pedro Pérez Sarduy
-An Evening of film screenings - viewing clips of Cuban feature films and documentaries made in the Island by national and foreign visitors about race, politics and culture.
-Workshop on chapters of his first novel Las Criadas de La Habana (The Maids of Havana, forthcoming Spring 2010)

Pedro Perez-Sarduy is an Afro-Cuban poet, writer, journalist and broadcaster resident in London. He was 2004 Charles McGill Fellow in International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.  He co-edited with historian Jean Stubbs AFRO-CUBA: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (Ocean Press/Latin America Bureau, Melbourne/London, 1993. The original Spanish version was published in 1998 by Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, San Juan.

He co-authored AfroCuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, a book based on interviews with Afro-Cubans currently living and working in the island and discussing race issues (University Press of Florida, 2000). He worked with Jean Stubbs the entry CUBA in Gates and Appiah’s Africana Encyclopedia (1999). He co-authored the Introduction to No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today (London 1995). 

He has completed Journal in Babylon, a series of chronicles on Britain (unpublished) and his first novel, Las Criadas de La Habana -The Maids of Havana-, Puerto Rico, 2001 and La Habana, 2003). Malecón Sigloveinte (La Habana, 2005) is his latest book of poetry. His work is also featured in The Oxford book of Caribbean Verse (Oxford University Press 2005). He was awarded Le Prix du Livre Insulaire, Ouessant 2008, in fiction for the French version of his novel Les bonnes de La Havane. In June 2009 Pedro Pérez Sarduy received the UNESCO Victor Hugo medal in acknowledgement of his writings, ‘which contribute significantly to the protection and promotion of the rights of man/woman and the oppressed’.

Contact:  perez-sarduy at afrocubaweb.com
Just replace the " at " with a @ (no spaces).

Back in 1959, Cubans were celebrating their revolution, but it wasn't necessarily the triumph of Marxism that had people dancing in the streets.

For most Cubans, change was long overdue, and it didn't really matter what horse it rode in on.

The African-descended people who make up most of the island's population hungered for something that would shake up the social mix and allow them to rise from the bottom. They didn't just hunger for it, they'd been fighting for it throughout generations of African enslavement in Cuba.

Here in the United States it's simple; Cuba is communist and communism is bad, and Fidel Castro, in particular, is bad. But in Cuba it's not so simple.

In Cuba there is a longer, deeper struggle being reawakened by young people willing to talk about a taboo subject: race.

Pedro Perez Sarduy, a Cuban journalist, poet and novelist, has been talking about Afro-Cuban aspirations on his latest speaking tour of the United States. He gave a series of speeches in Seattle recently. I spoke with him after he talked to a group of students at Seattle University.

Black Cubans, he said, have to make things work in Cuba. "Black Cubans don't have anyplace to go into exile." White Cubans have made a home for themselves in Miami, and in Spain, but where, he asks, can black Cubans blend in?

Where can a people, whose culture is part European and part African and even a little Chinese, go and feel at home, except at home?

Sarduy said that when he first came to the United States, many people weren't quite sure how to classify a man with dark skin who speaks Spanish. They had a different image of who was Cuban. Of the 3 million Cubans who live abroad, 2.5 million are of primarily Spanish descent, he said.

On the island, as much as 70 percent of the population is black or mixed race. (The government says 62 percent, but that is widely considered to be too low.) Cuba, like the rest of Latin America, plays down its darker roots, he said, so it's not surprising people outside see Cubans as mostly white.

Sarduy, who speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish and English, was a BBC reporter covering Latin America in the 1980s and saw a widespread denial of racial issues. (See www.afrocubaweb.com for more about Sarduy.)

The first time he visited Mexico City, he was very surprised to find that the people on the streets didn't look like the very European-looking people he'd seen on Mexican television.

Sarduy tried to give the Seattle University students some history, to tell them the troubles between the United States and Cuba didn't start with Castro.

It has been a long, shared history. Marc McLeod, an assistant professor of history at SU, said there was a lot of discussion in the 1800s about making Cuba a state, especially in the South, which wanted to add a slave state.

And the United States ruled Cuba through a military government from 1898-1902, and again from 1906-1909, and has intervened in the island's affairs on several occasions.

Castro is just the latest irritant in relations between the two nations.

In the United States, many people view Cuba through the eyes of people who fled the country in the wake of the revolution. They are mostly descendents of the Spaniards who ran the island.

They saw Cuba as a paradise before the 1959 revolution, Sarduy said. It was for them, but not for black Cubans, who after slavery mostly were limited to menial jobs and treated as social inferiors.

The revolution improved health care, education and employment for black Cubans, but it didn't erase the social order that has white Cubans on top.

Black Cubans, perhaps, put too much faith in the revolution. Sarduy was 16 and enthusiastic when the new government took power. And like other black Cubans, he expected racial inequality to be addressed. But, the revolutionaries said, be patient, class is the thing. Eliminate class differences, and racial discrimination would go away.

People in this country still say that, just like the communist revolutionaries; it's class, not race, that matters. But the truth is that both matter.

Life did improve tremendously for black Cubans after 1959, but race is still a card that favors light skin, and gets played every day. Played, but not discussed openly, until recently.

Young black people, especially through the medium of rap music, are saying things openly that would never have been voiced before. They denounce racism and demand to be treated as equals. The battle for Cuba continues.

Sarduy said whatever happens after Castro, black Cubans will not be pushed aside. "They will hold on to that island for the sake of their ancestors, who fought for this country. It was not given to them. It was not a handout. They fought for it."

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

FOR FIDEL CASTRO, RACE MATTERS AND IS NOT DIVISIVE

At the Third Congress of the Communist Party in 1986, it was acknowledged that racial discrimination and racism had not been eliminated. Cuban President Fidel Castro challenged the political structures and the entire society to address the issue, declaring: 

"The hypocritical societies that promote racial discrimination are afraid to talk about this, but revolutionary societies are not."

In February 1999, on the occasion of the Congress on Education, Fidel Castro began to be more specific when he said that after 40 years of Revolution, there still existed in Cuba some aspects of discrimination inherited from slavery which can be observed in the entrance of the young into universities. Remembering the first years of the 1959 Revolution, he observed:

"We thought that if we decreed absolute equality of rights, that should have been sufficient to abolish these remnants, however today, we can see that the poorest sectors are still those of the descendants of those slaves."

In our first volume  AfroCuba: an anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture, we were dealing with the "non-topic" for quite a few years before it became an acceptable topic.

In September 2000, during a visit to the United Nations, Fidel visited the Riverside Church, in Harlem, one of his favorite sites of the Big Apple. In one of his marathonic speeches he delighted the crowd with this words:

"I am not claiming that our country is a perfect model of equality and justice. We believed at the beginning that when we established the fullest equality before the law and complete intolerance for any demonstration of sexual discrimination in the case of women, or racial discrimination in the case of ethnic minorities, these phenomena would vanish from our society. It was some time before we discovered that marginality and racial discrimination with it are not something that one gets rid of with a law or even with ten laws, and we have not managed to eliminate them completely, even in 40 years.

There has never been nor will there ever be a case where the law is applied according to ethnic criteria. However, we did discover that the descendants of those slaves who had lived in the slave quarters were the poorest and continued to live, after the supposed abolition of slavery, in the poorest housing.

There are marginal neighborhoods; there are hundreds of thousand of people who live in marginal neighborhoods, and not only blacks and mixed race people, but whites as well. There are marginal whites, too, and all this we inherited from the previous social system. I told you that our country is on its way to a new era. I hope someday to be able to speak to you of the things we are doing today and how we are going to continue to do them."

And he and his team began to work in that direction. In his speech at the inaugural of the Curso de Formación Emergentes de Profesores Integrales de Secundaria Básica, in September, 2002, the leader of the Revolution announced that after graduation, a large number of those graduates would be supporting a new program for accelerated teaching of junior high school teachers. Focusing on the race topic in Cuba again, he said:

The diverse social and ethnic composition of the student body at this new institution is exemplary. We are pleased to be advancing towards a society of full equality, equity and justice, in which any remnants of the objective discrimination inherited from centuries of slavery and poverty, allowing only a part of the population to enjoy the fruits of education, are being definitely eradicated.

Fidel Castro affirmed that in 5 years, Cuba would have more than 30,000 graduates with this new educational concept. He meant that these steps are of enormance import for Cuba's educational revolution.

"President Salvador Allende School, is a genuine pedagogical institute, will serve as a model that will make a profound mark on the history of education in Cuba."

Cuba is working on a kind of second educational revolution. Lecture halls and university level specializations are opening up even in the towns, with free tuition and books. Africans, Latin Americans, and even low income North Americans are studying in Cuban Universities.

It was a few months before, in Durban, South Africa where Fidel Castro make another profound analysis on racism: 

"Racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia are not naturally instinctive reactions of the human beings but rather a social, cultural and political phenomenon born directly of wars, military conquests, slavery and the individual or collective exploitation of the weakest by the most powerful all along the history of human societies.

Cuba speaks of reparations, and supports this idea as an unavoidable moral duty to the victims of racism, based on a major precedent, that is, the indemnification being paid to the descendants of the Hebrew people which in the very heart of Europe suffered the brutal and loathsome racist holocaust. 

However, it is not with the intent to undertake an impossible search for the direct descendants or the specific countries of the victims of actions occurred throughout centuries. The irrefutable truth is that tens of millions of Africans were captured, sold like a commodity and sent beyond the Atlantic to work in slavery while 70 million indigenous people in that hemisphere perished as a result of the European conquest and colonization. The inhuman exploitation imposed on the peoples of three continents, including Asia, marked forever the destiny and lives of over 4.5 billion people living in the Third World today whose poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and health rates as well as their infant mortality, life expectancy and other calamities --too many, in fact, to enumerate here-- are certainly awesome and harrowing. They are the current victims of that atrocity which lasted centuries and the ones who clearly deserve compensation for the horrendous crimes perpetrated against their ancestors and peoples."

President Fidel Castro voting, college 4, district 7, Santiago de Cuba

On the occasion of  the 1/18/03 television Round Table concerning the elections for National Assembly, Fidel Castro mentioned the race and gender issues when he observed that among the candidates for delegates there was on this occasion a number of graduates of the university and of higher education, there were more women, and there were more blacks and mestizos, the fruit of the educational and social justice effort developed under the Revolution.

In the 1993 National Assembly, the percentage of blacks and mestizo delegates was 28,36%, in the one resulting from the 1997 – 98 general elections, this proportion was 28,29, and now in 2003 they are 32,84% of the candidates.

The most recent of his speeches, Fidel Castro Ruz, at the closing session of the Pedagogy 2003 Conference, 2/7/03, contains a remarkable discussion of this topic, one which Mr. Sarduy will be covering in his Spring Tour. The BBC's Fernando Ravsberg declares in Advierten sobre racismo en Cuba : "Many blacks think that this is a historic speech and that the Cuban press has not given it the same exposure as they have the president's other speeches."

So, for Fidel Castro since coming to power in 1959, race matters and is not divisive, contrary to what many have said in Cuba and abroad on this topic.

AFRO-CUBA, AFRO-CUBANS AND AFRO-CUBANÍA: 'HOW BLACK IS CONTEMPORARY CUBA BECOMING?

For some critics the Cuban revolution, far from being a model of racial tolerance and inclusion, is racist at its core. Others says the Island needs an affirmative action program.

Out of his regular visit to Cuba, Perez-Sarduy argues provocatively that Afro-Cubans (by far the largest racial group out of more than 11 millions inhabitants) in the Island are articulating the need for a race-specific agenda as key in countering exclusionary (Hispanic/Latin rather than African/Caribbean) with inclusionary (island and overseas) definitions of nation and nationalism - this refers to his published works. At the same time, the vitality of Cuban "popular culture", with its strong ingredient of (negrura) blackness, pushed cultural authorities on the island to re-appraise its preservation and commercialisation. 

Even so: How far are Afro-Cubans defining themselves as black before Cuban? Culturally, the nation and its nationals are torn about definitions of Cuban and Afro-Cuban, some seeing this as irrelevant, others seeing it as the issue of an identity threatened -- and not for the first time.

Fifty minutes Multimedia presentation about his finding in the Island among "una nueva generacion de cubanos negros" proud to be Cuban and revolutionaries, but also worshipping openly their African background. 

Originally this was an informal chat with his informant, but later it became Las Criadas de La Habana (The Maids of Havana), a novel whose point of departure begins with a narration of the life of Marta, Pedro's mother, a black servant whose lack of formal education does not prevent her from developing a sophisticated understanding of life. This unschooled woman starts writing about the two worlds of wealthy whites and poor black women in their service, with the latter's dignity. 

They were years of great upheaval: the rich were leaving (mostly to the US), the poor were being given new opportunities. For Marta, the main character and many friends, it had become a thing of the past that they had been maids in homes in Havana's elegant residential districts, that they had paid extortionate rates for their wretched slums, and that neither they nor their children could harbor hopes for the future, much less a college education.

The fresco of various periods -since a teenager in the 1930's, a wife and then a divorcee through the early years of the revolution, to a widow and grand-mother in the mid nineties - are narrated from the optic of these women, in a series of separate yet inter-related stories linking new generations of maids.

Immersed in the upheaval of the early years of the Cuban Revolution, Perez-Sarduy has been following the main racial development in his birth country since 1959, where at the age of 16 he participated in the dismantling of the racial barriers in the segregated Parque Vidal (Leoncio Vidal city Square) and other venues in his home town of Santa Clara, capital of the former Las Villas province. This prolific poet, journalist, art critic and novelist Perez-Sarduy will be back in the US for 5 weeks visit this Spring 2003.

 MARGINALIZATION AND REPRESENTATION IN AFRO-CUBAN HIP-HOP

 A week in August/02: 8^th Havana Hip-Hop Festival. While hip hop has been assimilated and globalized by mega-record companies, toning down wit banality their message, Art is a different business in Cuba. Cuban ‘raperos’ sings what they want to say. They’re talking about Cuban sociedty from the perspective of people who were born and raised in Cuba during the socialist revolution.

With a multimedia Power Point presentation, I will open a window through which contemporary and innovative artistic expression will allow us to see what politics hides about the dynamism that characterise Cuba in the twenty-first century. 

Certainly, this dynamism incubates the anguish which accompanies alienation brought about by changes in living conditions, generation differences and inevitable global connectedness, which continuously buffets the Island in the Tropical sun.

Cuba, a danceable population, where people still dance in and by couple, in outdoors ballroom, street parties, and private gathering where blind dates take place, is open again to new trends in rhythm with a kind of Afro-Cuban ritual Hip-Hop expression geared to be danceable with politically African correctness. Their message is about awareness and worshipping the African ancestors and denouncing racial profiling and stigmas in their socialist country.

What follow is an excerpt of song 53 7 CUBA (Phone code of Cuba + Havana) by Paris resident Hip-Hop group, ORISHA (deity in the Yoruba language of Santeria, one of the main Afro-Cuban religions practised in Cuba):

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy  is a poet, writer, journalist and broadcaster living in London. He is the author of Surrealidad (Havana 1967) and Cumbite and Other Poems (Havana 1987 and New York 1990), co-editor with Jean Stubbs of Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993) and co-author of the Introduction for the anthology No Longer Invisible/Afro-Latin Americans Today (1995). He has finished two unpublished works, Journal in Babylon, a series of chronicles on Britain, and a first novel, Las Criadas de La Habana (2001, The Maids of Havana), based on his mother's life stories about pre-revolutionary Havana.  He has written numerous articles, some of which we present on this site.

Together with Jean Stubbs, he has finished Afro-Cuban Voices on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, (University Press of Florida, 2000) a book based on interviews with Afro-Cubans (living in the Island. This book is the first treatment of racial issues in contemporary Cuba that gives Afro-Cubans a voice.

He has been the recipient of a number of awards, including:

Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Resident in Humanities, Caribbean 2000 Program. College of Humanites, Universidad of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras,   August-December 1997

Rockefeller Scholar in Afro-American Identity and Cultural Diversity,  Center for African Studies and Center for Latin American Studies,  University of Florida, Gainesville, August-December 1993.

Visiting Fellow, CUNY- Caribbean Exchange Program, Hunter College,  City University of New York, March-June 1990.

Writer-in-residence, Center for American Culture Studies, Columbia University, New York, October-December 1989.

In 1999, he did a tour of the US in April and presented at TransAfrica Forum in Washington, DC and at "Race and the 21st Century at Michigan State University" in Lansing.

He has been a radio journalist since 1965, beginning with Cuban national radio as a current affairs journalist and with Cuban television on the first African and Caribbean music show. He was then with the BBC Latin American Service from 1981 to 1994.

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy and Jean Stubbs also co-edited "No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today," covering Central and South America, with each chapter written by a country specialist.