3) Spanish and other European immigrants that were encouraged to settle in Cuba as per attempts to "bleach" the island. This was the first time anything like this was seriously proposed since Haiti earned its independence. This is important to note because the "spectre" of Haiti loomed ominously over Spanish and Cuban whites for a century and most of their policies towards Cuba's Blacks were reflective of it. The following year, the Cuban Ward Connerly of his day, Martin Morúa Delgado was elected Speaker in Cuba's Senate. The year after that, Morúa introduced legislation that became known as the Morúa Amendment and it outlaws the PIC because is was based on race and racism was supposedly eradicated in Cuba. Just before the vote was taken to enact this bill into law, Estonez and other PIC leaders were imprisoned and were kept in jail until after the law was passed.
The benefit features Dr. Raul Ruiz Miyares, a professor of Afro-Cuban culture and history at Casa del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba. His lecture, "Cuba & Africanismo: The Making of Revolutionary Culture", will include slides and a video. The benefit also includes: spoken word, an Afro-Cuban folkloric performance, a Caribbean dinner, and a Latin, World Beat dance party, all on Friday, May 2.6 p.m.
The dramatic vision and delicate balance of composition found in Adona's photographic works were developed while working with painter Rozzell Sykes. Her vision was literally changed. The awareness of light, shadows, colors, textures, tones and balance had changed. Soon she began creating with paint, stark images with the feel of Japanese simplicity. [Alisa Adona]'s paintings showed a freshly textured view and an exciting new eye in the Los Angeles art world. Over time, she was compelled to capture what she saw through the lens of a camera, ultimately making photography her new love.
[Assata Shakur]'s comments highlight the long and continuing relationship between African Americans and Cuba. Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet had actively supported Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain over a century ago. After the revolutionaries seized power in 1959, [Fidel Castro] made a powerful impression among African Americans by staying in Harlem during his first visit to the United Nations. Castro's famous September, 1960 meeting with Malcolm X, to the great consternation of the U.S. government, reinforced the solidarity felt by progressive black Americans toward the revolutionary government.
Enrique Patterson, a columnist at Miami's El Nuevo Herald, recently spoke at Baruch College in New York City about racial discrimination in Cuba. Patterson, who is Cuban-American, said Cuban culture has a tradition of racism that developed before Fidel Castro and has not ended under Castro's reign. Patterson said racism is preventing a transition to democracy.
The news media showed pictures of the immediate family and family friends. What I found amazing is that it appears that only light-skinned Cubans are trying to escape from their homeland. I saw the Cuban basketball team in the late Olympics. I have also seen pictures of Cubans in a television special one by Harry Belafonte. What I saw were dark-skinned Cubans having the time of their lives. It made me wonder, in light of what I have been told by African people living in Florida, that the light-skinned Cubans are more racist that some southerners. What is really going on in Cuba, and what is this Elian Gonzales issue about? The more I got into thinking this way, the more questions were raised. Why are most of the people trying to escape from Cuba light-skinned? Why are the majority of the athletics in the Olympics dark-skinned? The women's basketball team and the volleyballs teams were the bomb. They were some big, pretty sisters. I also thought of the Haitians. Why are Haitians sent back to Haiti and Cubans allowed to stay in America? They are both supposedly oppressed people. The Haitians are dark and the Cubans, who are trying to escape, light. Is there something more than meets the eye?
Blacks have accused Cubans of taking advantage of their White complexions while simultaneoulsy being "minorities" when it is convenient for them. When opportunities for government contracts and grants for "minorities" are created, Cuban's apply as "minorities." When affirmative action policies are enacted for "minorities," Cuban's are also the beneficiaries. But somewhere down the line these police officers forgot they were "minorities." It took the two retired white officers, who cooperated fully with the FBI, to remind them.
At the recent Summit of the Americas, President [Barack Obama] suggested that the U.S. could learn a lesson of goodwill from Cuba. In 1998, Cuba's government began programs to send large-scale medical assistance to poor populations affected by natural disasters. Each year some 2,000 young people enroll at the school, which operates from a former naval base in a suburb of Havana. Cuba's 21 medical faculties all train young people of poor families from throughout the Americas, as well as hundreds of African, Arab, Asian and European students. The country sends teams of doctors all over the world to respond to natural disasters. Cuban doctors have provided medical services to the underserved in Africa for over a decade. Blacks' views of relations with Cuba differ vastly from those of most Cuban immigrants and Cuban-Americans. The former lily-white upper crust of Cuban society wield political clout in Florida and are dead set against normalizing relations with Cuba's government. Consequently most politicians have chosen to adopt Cuban-American views. From 1960 to 1979, hundreds of thousands of Cubans began new lives in the US. Most of these Cuban Americans came were from educated upper and middle classes and form the backbone of the anti-[Fidel Castro] movement. Cuban Americans are America's fifth-largest Hispanic group and the largest Spanish-speaking group of white descent.
"You must understand that we are very different in Cuba," insisted Gabriel Molina Franchossi, director of Gramma newspaper, the official organ of the communist party in Cuba. "To Afro-Cubans, big lips and big backsides are objects of beauty. To us, such images represent the feminine ideal." Afro Cubans also seem naive. Cubans are fond of saying that Fidel Castro abolished racism when he came into power 40 years ago, as though this can be accomplished by a simple decree. What they really mean, of course, is that Castro outlawed discrimination And again, who am I to say he hasn't? In the United States, discrimination didn't become illegal until the mid-60s when Congress passed a series of civil rights laws effecting voting rights, equal employment, and fair housing. By 1968, Richard Nixon was ending a wave of white backlash into power and the process of undermining those gains began. Blacks appear to have had a different experience in Cuba, where better than 40 percent of the population is either Black or mestizo (mixed) and where a fair percentage of those who are considered "white" acknowledge some degree of African or mestizo blood in their heritage. "We in Cuba are not so easily categorized as in the United States," said Reynaldo Calviac Lafferte, director of the International Press Center. He pointed to a wall in his office. "In the same family, there are some who are as white as that wall." Then he slapped his patent leathers. "And there are some who are as black as my shoes. For us, race is not an issue like it is for you."
"There are tens of thousands of roofless or windowless homes, schools, healthcare facilities, nursing homes, daycares and cultural centers that were partially or totally destroyed," Jones added.
"I don't want to look arrogant, especially with [Cornel West]. But I believe he sat on the side of something he doesn't actually know," [Nancy Morejon] said of the open letter West and 59 other African Americans sent to Cuban President Raul Castro late last year. In it, they accused his government of mistreating civil rights activists and a "callous disregard" for its Black population. "Yes, there is racism in Cuba," Tomas Fernandez Robaina, a prolific writer about the social condition of Black Cubans, told me. The country "engaged in romanticism" when Castro ordered an end to racial discrimination nearly a half-century ago, Fernandez said. "Now we understand it will take more than goodwill to get rid of it, something Americans should know better than Cubans."
"With the exception of the local corner bar, which they could patronize, Black Cubans did not share recreational activities with white Cubans. They were not hired as clerks or even as menial help in the restaurants. There were no Black Cuban entrepreneurs, except for a tailor, a barber and a very successful dry-cleaning establishment," Grillo says in the book. "In the main, Black Cubans and white Cubans lived apart from one another in Ybor City." While slavery may have been different in Cuba, Afro-Cubans wound up with a social status not much different from that of African Americans. Even Blacks who were financially successful had to deny their ethnicity in order to be accepted within Cuba's white society: "In Cuba, affluent Black Cubans moved within the society of the affluent. 'Es Negro, pero es Negro blanco' ['He is a Black man, but he is a white Black man'] was an expression I heard often."
HAVANA - A group of US lawmakers is working at easing dialogue between Washington and Havana, as President Barack Obama's administration weighs plans to drop its decades-old strategy of isolating communist Cuba. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's top Republican Richard Lugar, who in February said decades of US sanctions on Havana had failed, wrote to Obama in a March 30 letter that: "additional (US) measures are needed... to recast a policy that has not only failed to promote human rights and democracy, but also undermines our broader security and political interests." U.S. Congressman [Bobby Rush], left, and Rep. [Barbara Lee], D-Calif, second from right, attend a ceremony in front of Martin Luther King monument in Havana, Saturday, April 4, 2009. Seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus arrived in Cuba last Friday to discuss improving relations with the communist government amid speculation that Washington could ease travel restrictions to the island.
The political awareness of Afro Cubans remains exclusively tied to the Revolution. "And [Fidel Castro] is the one sustaining the Revolution: the reason Cuba is so strong is because of Fidel," said a prominent U.S.-based Afro Latino journalist who preferred not to be named. "After Fidel, the Cubans in Miami will simply pounce on the island," this journalist contends. "They have connections in Cuba; they have their people in place in Cuba already. When they take over they're going to be opening up the political arena to the U.S. again. Cuba has ostensibly been "independent" since Dec. 10, 1898, following decades of fighting between the nation's independence army, the Cuba Libre, and Spain. By 1898, the war was between Spain and the United States, but Cubans had declared their independence as early as Oct. 10, 1868. At that time, they'd also called for the island to end its enslavement of Black people, but emancipation from slavery was not made law until Oct. 7, 1886.
As if her precious life and freedom were a game of poker, the FBI upped the ante or bounty on [Assata Shakur] to $1 million two weeks ago. In a television address last Tuesday, Cuban leader Fidel Castro rejected calls to hand over Shakur, stating that she was not a terrorist but a victim of racial persecution. "They wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie," Castro said in his televised speech, while never mentioning Shakur's name. "They have always been hunting her, searching for her because of the fact that there was an accident in which a policeman died."
"Cuba has represented metaphorically the ability of an oppressed people to challenge imperialism and colonialism," Marable explained. "In the political imagination of Black America, Cuba represents the radical possibility of fundamental social change. One of the key questions now is -- what does Cuba represent for Black America in this period of political transition?"
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, have been taking it on the chin in some quarters for a fact-finding trip to Havana, Cuba, to meet with that nation's president. Since the Kennedy administration in the 1960s in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tiny island 90 miles off the coast of the U.S. has been embargoed and isolated.
Group AFROCUBA de Matanzas, one of Cuba's most acclaimed folklore groups, is one of the few troupes who showcase the wide diversity of African cultures that survive on the island. The group was founded in 1957 in the city of Matanzas, which is considered the prime repository of African culture in Cuba. AFROCUBA is comprised of 19 very talented drummers, dancers and singers, some of whom display talent in each discipline. Even their government representative, Ileana Hernandez, is a talented singer and dancer. Francisco Zamora Chirino, affectionately known as "Menini" has been the troupe's director for a number of years. The dancers include Julia Zulima Echeoana, Antonio Figueroa, Juan Carlos Golbelm, and Leniel Perez. The percussionists include Osmudo Barbaro Aldazabal, Franciso Dominquez Boada, Reynaldo Gobel, Enrique Mesa, Oluis Cancino Morales, and Pedro Abelle Torrente. The singers include Bertina Aranda, Sara Gobel, and Amparo Rodriquez. Of special note are Maria Dolores Perez and Regla "Pola" Perez, whose sister Ana is the featured dancer with Matanzas "other word famous troupe, Los Munequitos, dancer Reynaldo Gonzalez, and Rameses Zamora, "El Professor," who is a music professor at the University of Matanzas.
