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.
"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?"
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.
