Profiles an Asian-Caribbean-American on American racial politics. Dr. M. Godfrey Mungal, born in Trinidad and now teaches at Stanford University, was an Indian laborer brought to the Caribbean by plantation owners after the abolition of slavery.
Reviews several books regarding Cuban history which focused on the areas of race, identities, ideology and nationhood. Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution, by Lisa Brock and Digna Castaneda; `El Directorio Central de las Sociedades Negras de Cuba, 1886-1894,'by Oilda Hevia Lanier; Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940, by Robin Moore.;
Except for inroads made in the first 10 - 15 years after the revolution, what is black has been heavily stereotyped; and nowadays there are no black actors to speak of on Cuban television, which is easy to see by tuning in. [Alden Knight] is best - known for his performance poetry - especially that of Cuba's mulatto National Poet, the late Nicols Guill'en our kind of Langston Hughes, the two of them having been contemporaries and friends. He regrets that it makes little sense in 1995 to perform Guill'en's classic 1964 poem of social redemption for the black Cuban: "Tengo [I have] is the sum total of what was achieved in this country for blacks, for the poor... and now it's been lost. I have said that when that poem can be read again in all honesty. We shall have regained what we had won by the end of the 1960s. When we were poor but equal. She and her sisters - three doctors and a philologist who specializes on Africa - were known since they were little as the daughters of Lilliam and Unan Emilio. The four were born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second and most Caribbean city, renowned for its history of rebellion, heroism and hospitality, as well as its more predominantly black population.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
422 p., A study of the politics of race, culture and identity among Garinagu in Honduras. Garinagu are a people of African and Amerindian descent deported by the British from St. Vincent to Central America in 1797. Within Honduras, they have been racially interpellated as “black” in contradistinction to the dominant mestizo, understood as the product of the racial-cultural fusion between the European and the Indian. Anthropological studies have failed to substantially investigate the relationship between Garinagu and the mestizo-dominated society and state. They have also neglected the construction of racial-cultural identity among Garinagu themselves.
