The Great Equalizer? Education, Racial Exclusion, and the Transition from Colony to Republic in Cienfuegos, Cuba

Abstract

Over the final decades of the nineteenth century, black activists across Cuba demanded compliance with integrationist laws, including the desegregation of public schools. Although some scholars have argued that education gradually expanded over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article calls attention to the ongoing racial segregation that permeated public education in the central Cuban city of Cienfuegos. Structured chronologically, the article traces two distinct historical moments in which black children faced exclusion from public education in Cienfuegos—the final third of the nineteenth century, when Cuba tenuously remained a Spanish colony, and the first four years of independence from Spain, when the US military occupied the island. In each of these moments, local authorities used different coded languages to limit black children’s access to education, without referencing race, but they ultimately perpetuated similar outcomes of racial exclusion. I argue that the historic exclusion of people of African descent from formal education perpetuated the colonial racial hierarchy well after Spanish legislation declared outright racial segregation illegal, laying the foundation for new forms of racial discrimination under US rule.