A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba

Abstract

This book is an ambitious study of race and racial equality in Cuba during its twentieth-century process of national formation. It examines the impact of racial ideologies, government policies, and social and political mobilization in shaping Afro-Cubans’ opportunities and limitations in the labor market, education, and political representation during the republican and revolutionary periods.The book is organized chronologically, beginning with an analysis of race in the competing visions of national construction and electoral politics from the inauguration of the republic in 1902 to Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship. The second part focuses on the labor market and education as key areas of inequality from the 1900s to the 1950s. The author then turns to the complex politics of the three decades that preceded the revolution of 1959, in which race continued to be central in the struggle of unions and political parties as well as in the failed revolution of 1933, the constitutional reform of 1940, and the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The fourth part examines the ideology of the 1959 revolution and the attempts by Fidel Castro’s government to make Cuban society more equal without raising racial tensions. The book ends with a discussion of the increase of racism and racial inequalities prompted by the market-oriented reforms of the “special period” in the 1990s.De la Fuente’s study is impressive. His examination of the Communist Party’s integration of Afro-Cubans and struggle against discrimination in the 1930s– 40s is compelling. Most welcome is his analysis of race under the revolution (pp. 259–334). Although largely based on the secondary literature, it is the first general examination of the complex ways in which, until the 1980s, the revolutionary leadership aimed at reducing inequalities. As the author shows, in the 1950s Cuba was segregated in entertainment, sport, private education, and even public parks; the labor market discriminated against Afro-Cubans. After 1959, the task of the new government was enormous and risky, as it simultaneously needed to build unity behind the revolution. The leadership chose to launch vast programs in employment, education, and welfare that were mostly successful. However, if the government desegregated the public sphere, it decided not to intervene in the private sphere. No debate on race and racism was initiated. No mass organization was created to struggle against racism (but the Federation of Cuban Women was founded to help women’s integration). These omissions, de la Fuente argues, help explain the rapid resurgence of racism and inequality in the 1990s.Yet, disregarding his own conclusion about the revolutionary period, in the introduction and first part of the book, the author asserts that any autonomous organization of Afro-Cubans would increase racism and thus deter Cubans from forging a “nation for all.” With this in mind, he limits his brief analysis of the Partido Independiente de Color to the two years of 1908 and 1912, ignoring the recent Cuban and foreign scholarship that shows the rapid growth of the Afro-Cuban party between 1908 and 1912 and its ideological challenge: if racial equality really existed in Cuba, Afro-Cubans should be allowed to claim both their Cubanness and their blackness and to organize against racism. In other words, de la Fuente overlooks the fact that in a racially stratified society such as Cuba, there can be no decline of racism and racial discrimination without the empowerment and racial pride of the historically oppressed minority. Instead, he believes that the existence of a national rhetoric of racial inclusiveness has created sufficient opportunities for Afro-Cubans to appropriate and manipulate the nation-state project to their advantage. In his view, the state is the principal agent of social engineering and equality. The problem with this interpretation is that it posits inclusiveness as racially blind, when in reality inclusiveness occurs within a system of beliefs, cultures, and esthetics that pursue, explicitly and implicitly, whitening and westernization. This interpretation also assumes the Cuban nation-state as static and raceless, when in reality it was slowly forming under U.S. domination, fought over by rival parties, often embodied by one powerful man, and continuously controlled by whites.The study is based on a variety of sources in Cuba and the United States and the secondary literature. In addition, de la Fuente makes abundant use of statistical data to quantify increasing or decreasing racial equality, which poses several methodological problems. First, he always gives statistics in national averages, masking important regional differences in racial distribution and inequality. Second, he extends the racial categories of the earlier censuses (1899, 1907, 1919), derived from the U.S. model of white/“colored,” to the later censuses that used the categories of black, mulatto, and white without indicating whether racial (and other) information was provided by the census-taker or by the respondent and without recognizing the distortions caused by such a methodology. Third, he uses the 1931 census to show that Afro-Cubans made advances during the First Republic without considering that this census, taken under Machado’s dictatorship, had so many defects that the Cuban Congress never approved it. Finally, Cuba’s last official census was taken in 1981, after which any quantified data is questionable. Still, de la Fuente provides global statistics on the 1990s, often referring to a “1994 Havana/Santiago survey” on which he gives no details. For example, he writes, “76 percent of the population believed that blacks’ situation improved” since 1959 (p. 331). Why not tell readers that this survey, commissioned by him and Laurence Glasco, was only distributed to “a total of 200 respondents, not randomly selected … and not cover[ing] a representative sample of Cuban society,” as the two authors acknowledged when they first published it (see Toward a New Cuba? Legacies of a Revolution, ed. Miguel Angel Centeno and Mauricio Font [1997], pp. 55–56). In spite of these problems, readers will learn much from this book about race in twentieth-century Cuba. De la Fuente is to be commended for this generally comprehensive analysis.