Black Cuban, U.S. ties need to strengthen: Cuban ambassador
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on January 16, 2024
Years before she became a professor at Morgan State University, Ellen Irene Diggs was employed as W.E.B. DuBois’s research assistant.
In 1942, Diggs traveled with DuBois to Cuba to work with him to document Black people’s lives in the Americas. While there, Diggs found herself so impressed with how Afro Cubans had preserved African culture that she decided to make it a point to return to the island. When she did, Diggs began studying with Fernando Ortiz, an anthropologist who was one of the first to point to the positive contributions African culture had made in Cuba.
“Irene Diggs was the first African American to earn a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Havana,” Patricia Pego Guerra, Cuba’s former ambassador to Botswana, told the AmNews. “So of course, it was a precedent. They made an exploratory trip in 1941 to Havana’s Club Atenas with Fernando Ortiz. Then she got Fernando Ortiz to be her mentor for her doctorate and she returned alone, without DuBois. She came back, did her doctorate between 1943 and 1945, and became the first African American doctor in anthropology to graduate in Cuba. Her thesis is in the national library.”
Diggs’s trajectory in Cuba—and her subsequent return to the United States to teach at Morgan State University (where her research papers remain on file in the Ellen Irene Diggs Collection (the Americas))––is an example of the kind of historic connections Afro Cubans and African Americans have had, Pego Guerra said.
It’s the kind of relationship she’s hoping to rekindle. As African Americans have broadened their cultural travel destinations (to nations like Benin, South Africa, Ghana, and Togo on the African continent, and to predominantly Black cities in countries like Colombia, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Dominican Republic, St. Martin, Mexico, and more), the Cuban ambassador is putting out a call for more people to visit Cuba and understand her nation’s contributions to the African diaspora.
Cubans visit the United States––Americans go to Cuba
Pego Guerra was in New York City this past December 2023 and was able to visit Harlem, meet with locals, and spend time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She was only able to spend three hours at the Schomburg, she said, but was thoroughly impressed with the site, where she found documented information about Cuban greats like Mambi Army of Liberation General Antonio Maceo and the poet/journalist Nicolás Guillén. The Schomburg even had an article about a Hotel Maceo, named in honor of the Afro Cuban general, that was once located in Manhattan at 213 W. 53rd Street.
Maceo remains a major connection point: Both Afro Cubans and African Americans carry the Maceo name. In the late 1970s, one of the groups that tried to bridge the political divide between Cuba and the United States designated itself the Antonio Maceo Brigade.
“We have many things in common, down to the blood that runs through our veins,” Pego Guerra said. “As a Cuban, you visit the United States––or an American goes to Cuba––and we start talking in terms of the things we have in common, and the miracle happens.”
Anti-Cuba propaganda keeps Black Cuban and Black American communities apart. Debates persist about whether Cuba’s socialist revolution, which overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista, has been beneficial for its population. Thousands have left the island since the Fidel Castro-led revolution was initiated in 1959. “And Cubans are still fleeing, as they have since the revolution’s inception,” the editorial board of the Miami Herald noted this past December 23, 2023. “In the past two years alone, 425,000 Cubans have migrated to the United States, more than during any previous exodus,” they wrote.
“Ironically,” the Miami Herald added, “the original promise of the revolution was to end poverty on the island by equalizing wealth. Now, most everyone is poor, all the buildings are decrepit, and few have plenty. International figures show 88% of Cubans live at the poverty level, a jump of 13% from the previous figures.”
Cuba’s government continues to point to the U.S.’s economic embargo on their nation—designed, according to an April 6, 1960, State Department memo, to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government”––as the main cause of their economic failings.
That means Afro Cubans are also not prospering…at least, not financially.
Cuba’s revolution and the reality of racism
AfroCubaWeb.com, the website with stories about Black life in Cuba, notes that the most recent census count in 2012 found Cuba’s population to be “white 64.1%, mulatto or mixed 26.6%, Black 9.3%.” But census counts tend to undercount Black Cubans, AfroCubaWeb states: “Since being Black in Cuba carries a social stigma to this day, anyone with a drop of white blood can and does consider themselves mixed or white, as is common throughout Latin America.”
Pego Guerra said, “The anti-Cuba narrative goes like this: Cuba is a racist country. Regardless of all the achievements that the Cuban revolution has in fact made on the racial issue, Cuba is still a racist country. We always use the premise that 60-odd years of Cuban revolution cannot be enough to put an end to a problem of slavery, of racism, of racial discrimination that dates back nearly 600 years. Both…the United States and Cuba have a common starting point, which is the arrival of the enslaved.”
Enslaved Africans arrived in Cuba in the 1500s and were brought to what would become the United States in the 1600s. The United States abolished slavery in 1865; in Cuba, it didn’t end until 1886.
In her own family, Pego Guerra pointed to a lineage that moved from the countryside to the city of Santiago de Cuba, where family members took on jobs as maids and servants. Her family was later able to move to Havana, where all the children were encouraged to value their education.
Before the Castro-led revolution, some Afro Cubans worked in prostitution: they saw it as a way to survive. But once they were able to attend school, which had been reserved for privileged white people, they believed they could achieve more and live in a different society.
Cuba’s revolution created doctors, literacy programs, access to culture, and access to sports. “The idea was to eliminate all the disadvantages, all the elements that divided society, with an inclusive integral social project that eliminated poverty,” Pego Guerra said. It took time before the government realized that racial discrimination was its own unique problem that had to be solved with precise programs.
Cuba is not perfect, Pego Guerra admits there are problems in today’s Cuba, but she wants to encourage more African Americans to travel there and disregard the myths about the island nation. Independent Afro Cuban organizations like the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, Lo llevamos rizo, Seccion de Identidades y Diversidad en la Comunicación Social (SERES), La Cátedra Nelson Mandela, and more have sprung up in the last few years to promote their own agendas about how race is dealt with in Cuba. The ambassador insists that these are organizations African Americans can communicate with on their own. They are all independent groups that receive no government funds and can be contacted by anyone.
“They are in the communities, in Black neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods. You go there and they welcome you with open doors and they take care of you. They offer you what they have. You don’t toast with whiskey, for example, but they offer you a tea or a Cuban coffee. They don’t treat you to a super-fancy lunch. They offer you what they have as poor, humble people.”
