Race, National Discourse, and Politics in Cuba

Abstract

Please, do not speak about races, a reader of the Miami Herald who defined himself as a mulatto requested. Comments like these do a lot of harm ... what you are doing is dividing us (Suairez, 1994). His was but one of a number of letters commenting on the publication of several articles about race in Cuba, a topic numerous readers found especially dangerous at a time when Cuban-Americans had to stay as united as ever to confront the real enemy, Fidel Castro. Not surprisingly, those who had dared to address such a delicate issue were black authors (Gonzailez, 1994; Patterson, 1994). This tension between the open acknowledgment of Cuban racial diversity and the convenience of avoiding, ignoring, or silencing it is far from new in Cuban national discourse and imagery. Cubans have been trying to find unity and common ground for at least a century and have frequently perceived race as an obstacle to reaching this goal. In fact, the situation and the arguments re-created by these concerned Cuban-Americans are not terribly different from those that Cuban emigres were confronting 100 years ago. Then, as now, they were struggling to achieve unity against their common, real enemy (Spanish colonialism). Then, as now, race was or could be used as a divisive issue, one that should best be silenced. None other than Jose Marti (1992: 205-207), Cuba's greatest ideologue and the architect of the fusion of anticolonial forces under a common, pro-independence banner, wrote in New York in 1893,