Life
Black in Cuba
A barrier for Cuba’s blacks
Six-foot-two, brown skinned and with semi-curly hair, Denny walked confidently into a government warehouse for a recent job interview. Sitting across from the white manager, he rattled off his qualifications: high school diploma, courses in tourism, hard worker.
They were not good enough: He needed his white brother-in-law to vouch for him, Denny recalled.
“Black people tend to do everything bad here,” the manager said.
After Fidel Castro‘s revolution triumphed in 1959, he declared that Cuba would be a raceless society, banned separate facilities for blacks and whites and launched a string of free education and health programs for the poor, most of them blacks.
Many Afro Cubans still support Castro, saying that without him they would still be peons in the sugar cane fields. One Afro Cuban diplomat said he had no hope of an education, and his grandmother no medical care for her glaucoma, until the revolution came along.
But listen to some Afro Cubans, particularly those born after 1959, and the failures of the revolution also become clear.
“Everyone is not equal here,” said Ernesto, 37, as he dodged traffic on a Havana street. Tall and athletically built, he once hoped to be a star soccer player. He now gets by selling used clothing, and said he’s continually hassled by police just because he’s black.
