RIGHTS-CUBA: Prejudice Prevails Despite Laws against Discrimination

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Sep 12 2001 (IPS) - A black ancestor can be found under even the lightest-toned skin in Cuba – or as the popular saying goes, “he who has no Congo, has some Carabali”, an allusion to two of the main currents of African slaves brought to the Caribbean.

But María Soledad’s grandmother does not believe in truths hidden under the skin or popular adages. At first, she staunchly opposed her granddaughter’s marriage to Pedro Valdés, protesting that “there has never been a black person in our family.”

“At first she wouldn’t even look at me,” said Valdés, 28, who drives a three-wheel bicycle-taxi in Old Havana. “But now she tells me: ‘son, you’re only black on the outside; on the inside you are white. You are good to my granddaughter’.”

The story of Valdés and María Soledad is a common one in Cuba. Many other couples have faced similar resistance from parents and grandparents when they announced their plans to get married. Unfortunately, prejudice and stereotypes are alive and well in today’s Cuba.

A National Survey on Fertility carried out in 1987 found that Cuba’s population, which now stands at over 11 million, was 66 percent white, 21.9 percent mixed-race, 12 percent black and 0.1 percent Asian.

“Before the revolution [in 1959] it was much worse. My parents would have thrown me out of the house if I had come home with a black man,” commented Feliciana García, 60, who used to work in the tourism industry.

“The revolution eliminated racial discrimination, at least in the constitution. But removing prejudice from people’s minds is another thing,” she added, before confessing that in her youth she fell in love with a dark-skinned young man, but did not dare defy her family.

Statistics on marriages are among the clearest indicators of the extent to which racial prejudice persists in Cuba, according to the governmental Anthropology Centre.

In a poll in which the Anthropology Centre interviewed 116 people in three Havana neighbourhoods, two-thirds of those classified as white, nearly one-third of those categorised as mixed-race and one-quarter of blacks said they disapproved of mixed marriages.

“The stronger rejection by whites to mixed marriages is totally linked to stereotypes about each racial group,” said Anthropology Centre researcher Juan Antonio Alvarado.

According to Alvarado, the stereotype of blacks in Cuba depicts them as prone to trouble-making and crime, eccentric and rowdy.

“Popular sayings like ‘all birds eat birdseed’ and ‘the toti [a dark-feathered bird common in Cuba] is blamed for everything’ reflect the sensation that if something goes missing, blacks will be the first suspects,” journalist Georgina Torriente, 36, commented in conversation with IPS.

After Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, discrimination based on race, sex or national origin was prohibited and made punishable by law.

Article 41 of the Cuban constitution stipulates that “state institutions educate everyone, from the earliest age, in the principle of equality.”

“I’m a black woman from a very poor family, but when I finished prep school, I was the top student in the entire province of Havana, and I earned a scholarship to study in the Soviet Union,” said Torriente.

Free access to beaches, clubs and hotels, as well as equal rights in education, health, work, and equal access to middle and high-level posts, were among the first measures decreed by the Castro government.

However, eliminating institutionalised racism “did not mean the eradication of all of its expressions, as some initially believed would happen,” wrote the Anthropology Centre’s Alvarado in an article for the magazine Temas.

The Cuban nation, its population and cultural identity, was created by people of indigenous, Spanish and African origin, as well as – to a much lesser extent – people of Asian descent and immigrants from other European nations, who created what ethnologist Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) described as the “Cuban stew”.

In the colonial era, that complex and diverse population coexisted with racism, the ideological basis of the slave-owning regime imposed by whites of Spanish origin on Africans and their descendants.

That system and its discriminatory practices left deep marks and survived slavery, taking shape after independence in the exploitation and segregation of non-whites.

The lowest-income sectors of the population, where blacks and mixed-race people have always been disproportionately represented, thus found themselves at a disadvantage when it came to access to the new possibilities and prospects opened up by the revolution.

Some experts say things have become even more complex as a result of the economic crisis gripping Cuba throughout the 1990s, which was triggered by the disappearance of the east European socialist bloc and the break-up of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trading partner.

María del Carmen Caño Secade, a researcher at the University of Havana, said the recession and the measures adopted by the government to tackle the crisis widened the gap between those who faced social disadvantages and the rest of the population.

The crisis has reproduced and accentuated “social inequalities – and, in consequence, racial inequalities as well, given the historic links between race and social class,” said Caño Secade.

In her view, that could have negative repercussions on the self- esteem and possibilities for full integration of those who entered the crisis years with already low living standards.