The racism behind the Cuban hardliner stance

Guest column by Arturo Dominguez

There’s a reason the loudest Cuban American voices are white while the majority of the island is non-white; the history behind it is ugly.

Every photo and video of modern-day Cuba features Black or Brown people. Afro-Cubans and mixed-race Cubans are everywhere. What’s harder to find in those images are white Cubans, most of whom live in the U.S.

Many are separated from the island by generations of white Cubans who severed ties with their Afro-Cuban and Mulatto sides of their families. Had they maintained them, a massive pocket of Cuban Americans would have had a better understanding of the realities in Cuba, not some propagandised stories.

My grandfather was one of the white Cubans who was openly racist. He isolated himself from our Afro-Cuban family, shunning them, and fled Cuba precisely because of desegregation. When my grandmother, who lived most of her life in Cuba, came to the U.S. to spend her final days with her grandkids and great-grandkids decades later, she opened my eyes. She was still connected to that side of our family and not only introduced me to them, but led me on a path of discovery. Learning about my ancestry and heritage. About our Afro-Cuban roots.

We have more Afro-Cuban family members than white family members in our family. How can anyone not want to acknowledge that part of our heritage and culture? When you look at history, you’ll see the root of that mentality. This part of our history has to be sought out because it’s largely hidden from us and rarely discussed. But an excerpt from “More Than Mothers: A Look Into the Lives of Reconstruction Ybor’s Afro-Cuban Women” by Sherri Hamade at Rutgers University provides some insight into such abhorrent thinking.

“While Cubans did not consider people to be abjectly African if they had one drop of African blood in their veins, as the hypodescent tradition did in the U.S., any African ancestry in one’s lineage was grounds for sangre impura, or “impure blood.” Similar to the “one drop rule” in the United States, African ancestry, to any degree, did “taint” a family’s lineage with the stigma of slavery, even after its abolition as a legal institution”.

While you can make plenty of arguments about why the Cuban government is bad or highlight its failures, the truth is, most of that is racially driven propaganda. Additionally, every negative thing you claim about the Cuban government is happening in front of your face right here in the U.S. One thing is certain: Cuba isn’t executing people on its streets. Does it track people? Yes, but so do we. Does Cuba arrest protesters? Sometimes, but so do we. Does Cuba suppress free speech? Yeah, when it becomes anti-government, but so does every country, including the U.S. Even without the comparisons, it still doesn’t justify starving 10 million people.

Rationalising such a depraved idea can only come from a place of hate. A hatred for the population that has refused to bend a knee to the U.S. Hatred for a population that has chosen to govern itself differently. Yes, chosen. For 65 years, Cubans have had every opportunity to overthrow their government with the backing of the U.S. military. For 65 years, they have refused to. The anti-Cuban propaganda suggesting all Cubans want to overthrow the Cuban government comes from people detached from the island.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has never been to the island. Hardliners like Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) have no connection to the island. Meanwhile, they disguise themselves as beacons of democracy and freedom for a population that isn’t interested in overthrowing their government, civil war, or further destabilisation of the island, or willing to cede control to a foreign power that has been trying to starve them for decades.

The truth is, these motivations are much more sinister. It’s an issue we Cubans tend to overlook because most of our grandparents have been hiding the truth. It’s an ugly truth attached to some of the worst historical events in Cuban history. One that seeks dominion over a people to exploit them and exact revenge for supporting the current government. It’s an issue steeped in outright racism and is using propaganda and the power of the U.S. government to weaponise colonialist intent at the behest of an imperialist nation.

During the Mariel Boatlift, 40% of the 125,000 Cubans detained were disproportionately Black or mixed-race and held for longer periods in military detention camps. While the vast majority of Afro-Cubans inevitably ended up staying in the U.S., they were few in comparison and were rejected by the white Cuban elites in Miami. When mixed-race and Afro-Cubans were more commonly being seen migrating, the Coast Guard began repatriating them. President Bill Clinton began holding them in detention in Guantanamo, rather than releasing them back to Cuba.

Haitians were also being treated poorly, which brought the preferential treatment of white Cubans into the fight for racial justice in the U.S. at the time. As Black people in the U.S. rallied to the defence of Haitians and Afro-Cubans, white Cubans remained silent. Instead, they helped feed the false narrative that they were migrants released from Cuban insane asylums and prisons. This was an era I lived through and remember well. A thesis by Alexander Maxwell Stephens titled “I Hope They Don’t Come To Plains: Race and the Detention of Mariel Cubans, 1980-1981,” covers this era in great detail.

“On the whole, scholars have not illustrated precisely how race shaped the lives of black and mulatto Cubans from Mariel. Nor have previous studies offered an adequate explanation for why so many of the new migrants with darker skin were detained in 1980 or locked up and ruled “excludable” from entry to the U.S. at some point over the course of the next decade.”

It’s not about “one-party rule”, as the country before Castro’s Revolution was under the one-party fascist U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, and every president before him. All of whom were installed by the U.S. government. It’s not about “communism”, as evidenced by the U.S. working with various communist countries around the world. And it sure as hell isn’t about dictators when the U.S. partners with them all over the world. So, what else is left?

For white Cuban hardliners, it’s quite simple: racism that has been festering for more than six decades. Many refuse to acknowledge that the initial waves of Cubans leaving the island after the Revolution did so before the country shifted to communism and was negotiating deals with the U.S. It wasn’t until the U.S. shunned Cuba that it would be forced to rely on partners like Russia. This was highlighted in “Owning the Revolution: Race, Revolution, and Politics from Havana to Miami, 1959–1963,” by Devyn Spence Benson.

Scholars explaining the multiple reasons Cubans went into exile often overlook the role of discourses about racial privilege. Instead, they argue that the post-1959 government enacted a series of changes that fundamentally altered society to the point that many chose to leave even before the revolution’s official adoption of a Marxist-Leninist ideology in April 1961.

For the U.S.’s part, the only threat Cuba poses is to its industries. For example, Cuba has created countless vaccines, including one for lung cancer, and they give them away. No patents. No barriers. Just free. When underdeveloped countries need help with manufacturing the drugs, Cuba obliges and helps get them started. Allowing Cuba’s biotech sector to operate in a free market would singlehandedly cripple and reshape the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S.

Billionaires would likely bail, leaving the government to pick up the tab and forcing a similar system to Cuba’s. U.S. corporate interests would never willingly let that happen. Cuba also considers housing, healthcare, and education fundamental human rights, and its government fully funds them. Even installing renewable energy in homes is free. Many industries would lose their profit motives instantly, crippling them and costing billionaires billions.

A free Cuba would force hemispheric change. That’s what likely scares U.S. corporate interests (which control our government) more than anything. For the U.S. part, it’s easy to weaponise the racial animus of white Cubans to get them to adopt false narratives born out of thin air at the Department of State. It’s not hard to do when bigots are looking for any excuse to justify their position and try to rationalise to you why starving people is necessary.

None of what Cuban hardliners or the U.S. wants with Cuba has anything to do with “freedom” or “democracy.” Once we learn the truth and the history, the real motivations expose themselves as a continuation of oppressive imperialist control. It’s about dominion and exploitation. One does not have to be a communist to see the reality. One only has to be human to know that the people you try to starve will never be your friends.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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