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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 2001)
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| BETWEEN 1868 AND 1959 Cuba had four revolutions. There were two anti-colonial wars for independence against Spain, the first from 1868 to 1879, and the second from 1895 to 1898. There were two more revolutions in the 20th century, one in 1933, and the other in 1959. Most of the existing literature discusses how these revolutions influenced the process of Cuban state formation and political economy. Yet until recently the scholarship on how the meanings of race have changed within the larger processes of national formation has been remarkably weak. This gap in the literature is surprising given the powerful influence of the African heritage in Cuba's history. Alejandro de la Fuente's A Nation for All goes a long way to fill this gap in Cuban historiography. The author's thoughtful, well written, and sophisticated analysis of the shifting meanings of race, class, and politics in 20th-century Cuba makes this book essential reading for Cuban specialists, Latin Americanists, and for anyone working on the problems of race and class. |
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The author begins his discussion with the years 1902 to 1933, which were the formative years of the Cuban republic. It was at this time that Cubans debated and literally fought over the interwoven meanings of race, citizenship, and democracy in a nominally independent country under US hegemony. A powerful rhetoric of racial equality had emerged during the wars for independence and Afro-Cubans demanded that an independent Cuba end racism. Such a demand made the political implications of independence frightening for the white upper-classes and for the US. Nationalist and anti-racist rhetoric insisted that there should be no whites, blacks, or mulattos, but only Cubans. Yet this sentiment existed precisely because Cuban society was so deeply divided along class, race, and regional lines. De la Fuente does an excellent job in showing how the nationalist myth of racial equality clashed with the day-to-day realities of systematic and institutionalized racism. |
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The book's central argument is that the myth of racial equality was not simply an élite – generated idea that served to demobilize or co-opt Afro-Cubans. The author convincingly demonstrates that Afro-Cubans appropriated the same myth to fight against racism, class oppression, and neocolonialism. The élite interpretation of racial equality saw any race-based demands, organizations, and sentiments as racist and anti-Cuban. In contrast, a subaltern popular nationalism of mostly Afro-Cuban origin saw the conscious struggle against racism as an integral aspect of the fight for social justice and national independence. Thus race relations in Cuba were characterized by ambiguity more than rigid social dichotomies, by contestation and accommodation more than violent confrontation, and by competing notions of national identity that shaped Cuban political transitions and culture. |
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The book discusses how the problems of racial inequality influenced the labour market, education, and social mobility. Afro-Cubans were excluded from higher-paid jobs and from higher-status professions. Unlike what happened in the southern US or in South Africa, nationalist and anti-racist rhetoric was powerful enough to make systematic state- sponsored segregation untenable. Afro-Cubans got the vote at a time when it was being sharply restricted in the southern US, Brazil, Venezuela, and South Africa. Yet in the private sphere of élite clubs, private beaches, company hiring practices, and higher education, segregation was widespread. Racialized labour markets permeated Cuban society, as did racialized notions of "culture" and social status. In general, to be "cultured" meant to be white. |
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The third part of the book focuses on the years 1933 to 1959. These years witnessed a strong reformist and nationalist impulse within Cuban political culture, a process that culminated in the Constitution of 1940. The revolutionary upheaval of the early 1930s created a political opening where the long-standing popular demands for workers' rights, women's rights, and racial equality were incorporated into the constitution. The importance of the 1940 consensus was not found in what it actually accomplished but rather in what it promised and it certainly provided a political opening for Afro-Cubans to carry out legal struggles against racism in public spaces and at work. One of de la Fuente's main contributions is his analysis of the role of the Communist Party in the struggle for racial equality. The Cuban Communist Party (CP) has been the subject of much controversy over the years, not least because of its relatively cordial relations with Fulgencio Batista up to the 1950s. What has often been overlooked is the party's record in fighting for Afro-Cuban workers. No other single group in pre-revolutionary Cuba fought for the interests of Afro-Cuban workers as hard as the communists. While it was true that the CP's rigid class analysis of Cuban reality meant that they underestimated or openly opposed any Afro-Cuban attempt to form autonomous racially-based political groups, their recognition that most blacks were doubly oppressed as workers and as blacks was a direct challenge to the dominant nationalist myth that racism was a nonissue in Cuba. |
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The final section of the book examines the politics of race since the Cuban revolution from 1959 to the present. The socialist state confronted institutionalized racism head-on and the lives of Afro-Cubans and mulattos improved dramatically. No serious scholar challenges the idea that the socialist revolution has improved the lives of Afro-Cubans. De la Fuente's book supports this view. Equally important is the author's balanced, yet critical, evaluation of the revolution's failures on the race issue. One of the great paradoxes de la Fuente analyzes is how the revolution's explicitly anti-racist drive contradicted the leadership's official silence on racism in daily relations and in the private sphere. The revolutionary government continued to promote the idea that any race-based demands were anti-Cuban and even counterrevolutionary. The language of the revolution was nationalist and class-based; racism would end when class oppression ended, and the idea that revolutionaries could be racists was simply not discussed. As early as 1962 the government claimed to have eradicated racism and many foreign supporters of the revolution supported this claim. A political space for specifically Afro-Cuban voices was not provided, but nor did most Afro-Cuban leaders demand one. |
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Yet it was also the revolution's official silence on race that allowed for the continuation and reproduction of racism in the remaining private spaces of revolutionary society. This situation became alarmingly clear with the arrival of the social and economic crisis of the "Special Period" after 1989. The dollarization of the economy has benefited whites more than Afro-Cubans, first because more whites than blacks get money from relatives abroad, and second because blacks are frequently denied access to the tourist sector. The supposedly eradicated racist stereotypes about the Afro-Cuban propensity to participate in crime, the black market, and in prostitution reemerged with remarkable speed. De la Fuente's book does not pretend to provide answers about how these contradictions can be resolved, but he has written an invaluable book that helps us understand how complex the social construction of race can be and how antiracism and racism can coexist and even fuel each other within the same society. |
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Robert Whitney
University of New Brunswick, Saint John |
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