Although discussions of race disappeared from Cuban literature after the revolution of 1959, they reappeared as a result of Cuba's difficult economic situation in the 1980's
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
311 p., Focuses on conflict and convergence among African Americans, Cuban exiles, and Afro-Cubans in the United States. Argues that the racializing discourses found in the Miami Times, which painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald, which affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness and superiority of whiteness, reproduce the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., Describes how black Cubans experience racism on two levels. Cuban racism might result in less access for black Cubans to their group's resources, including protection within Cuban enclaves from society-wide discrimination. In society at large, black Cubans are below white Cubans on every socioeconomic indicator. Rejected by their white co-ethnics, black Cubans are welcomed by other groups of African descent. Many hold similar political views as African Americans. Identifying with African Americans neither negatively affects social mobility nor leads to a rejection of mainstream values and norms.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
365 p., As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late 19th Century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Observes the people, places, legislation and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
292 p., Definitive information on the identity and status of the emancipados who were a special group of Africans in Brazil, Cuba and Latin America. The author establishes that the peculiar nature of the introduction of the emacipados into Brazil and America made them free Africans, both de jure and de facto, thereby setting them apart from freed Africans or slaves in Brazilian and Cuban societies. Emancipados held a much better status within these societies.
"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?"
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.
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.
Brock,Lisa (Editor) and Castaneda Fuertes,Digna (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p, The relationship between two peoples of color, their similar experiences with slavery, their struggles for political power, and their parallel race consciousness.
Marable,Manning (Author) and Agard-Jones,Vanessa (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2008
Published:
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
366 p, Includes Brian Meeks's "Reinventing the Jamaican political system"; Joseph Jordan's "Afro-Colombia: a case for pan-African analysis"; Ricardo Rene Laremont and Lisa Yun's "Mutual inspiration: radicals in transnational space: The Havana AfroCubano movement and the Harlem Renaissance: the role of the intellectual in the formation of racial and national identity"; and Asale Angel-Ajani's "Out of chaos: Afro-Colombian peace communities and the realities of war";
Rolando,Gloria (Author), Grupo de Video "Imagenes del Caribe" en colaboración con "Videoteca del Sur" (Editor), Monse Duane, Sonia Boggiano, Zoraima Segón, Renny Arozarena, Luz Ma. Collazo, Jorge Prieto, Aimeé Despaigne, Nora Rodríguez, Manuel Oña (Series Editor), and Maria Josefa Gómez (Translator)
Format:
Video/DVD
Publication Date:
2001
Published:
Arlington, MA: AfroCubaWeb.com
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
DVD video 1 videodisc (49 min.)
Notes:
This drama follows a young Cuban woman investigating her family history, and discovering disturbing revelations about the 1912 genocide, in which over 6,000 members of the Independents of Color were killed by the Cuban Army
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
270 p., Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to US imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, the author traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
284 p., Explores Cuba's hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island's ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), the author examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalization and long held perceptions of Cuba as a non-racial nation.
