"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."
The concept of a unified African-Caribbean community or identity is a modern construction in that it emerged in its present guise during the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to this, the identity politics of the ‘black’ people from this region were largely polarized. They were frequently divided along lines of island identities (Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts etc.). Focusing on the period between 1970 and 1979, this article sketches out the ways in which the black experience within local-level football also contributed to identity change among a particular group of young sportsmen in Leicester.
"This article investigates the efficacy of community organizing by African Caribbean migrants in Toronto, Ontario. The author argues that community organizing was an instinctive initiative of African Caribbean people. Historically, Black community organizational agenda, although owing much to its own resourcefulness and fortitude, was intimately connected to the influence and strength of the larger White population. Racism and social exclusions were the major external factors influencing the majority of African Caribbean institutional building." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Cobas,José A. (Editor), Duany,Jorge (Editor), and Feagin,Joe R. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Boulder: Paradigm
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
254 p., Includes Jorge Duany's "Racializing ethnicity in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean : a comparison of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in Puerto Rico."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
410 p, Contents: Erotic autonomy as a politics of decolonization : feminism, tourism, and the state in the Bahamas -- Imperial desire/sexual utopia : white gay capital and transnational tourism -- Whose new world order? : teaching for justice -- Anatomy of a mobilization -- Transnationalism, sexuality, and the state : modernity's traditions at the height of empire -- Remembering This bridge called my back, remembering ourselves -- Pedagogies of the sacred : making the invisible tangible
This article focuses on the process of "encolouring" social reality in the Caribbean. This is done by investigating how connections between status and colour were created in the Danish West Indies by using certain strategies and techniques of power. Essential to the regulatory efforts of planters and officials were three variables: time, space and body. By the manipulation of these phenomena colonial masters managed to make skin colour represent something other than itself. It came to be associated with a web of ideas concerning the constitution of society and its subjects--their status, condition and opportunities in life. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Examines how a Caribbean thinker, Theophilus Scholes, used the figure of the "white Negro" to expose the linkages between ethnological preoccupation with black bodies and an imperial network of power that held implications for political equality.
