Life
Black in Cuba
Movement
On a recent Sunday at a Havana park, a group of mostly black Cubans in their 20s and 30s, including some dreadlocked Rastafarians, carried on an intense discussion on reggae icon Bob Marley, whose songs depicted the black struggle.
“He understands what we are going through,” said Omar, 31, proudly showing off a life-size portrait of Marley tattooed on his back.
Such talk can be scary to Cubans who know their history. While blacks made up a good portion of the mambises who fought against Spanish colonial rule, they remained poor and ill-treated after Cuba won its independence. A black revolt in 1912 was brutally crushed, leaving behind hundreds of dead and a deeply ingrained fear.
“Their rights and protection from potential genocide and violence depended on them never trying to organize politically as blacks,” said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA professor who spent 11 months in Cuba researching his recently published book, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.
That kind of talk also likely scares the Castro government.
“There is an unstated threat,” Moore said. “Blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead.”
Yet something of a black movement is indeed growing, he added.
“It’s subterranean, and taking place among intellectuals and people in general,” said Moore. “The government is frightened to the extent to which it does not understand Afro Cubans today. You have a new generation of black Cubans who are looking at politics in another way.”
But the government still has a hold over Afro Cubans — the fear that the collapse of the communist system would make their lives even worse.
