Ruminations of an Expatriate

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Thursday, July 5th, 2007...1:58 pm

Racism in Cuba

Legally speaking, in Cuba, like in the USA, racial discrimination is illegal. In fact, here in Cuba it is unconstitutional. None-the-less, like in the USA racism is common here. I have often heard folks, of lighter skins hues, slurring those with darker skins. It seems that ignorance, which I equate with racism, does not respect international boundaries. Additionally, if one views photos of top Cuban government officials one will encounter few darker skinned officials.

Cuba is the most racially diverse place I have visited, though admittedly I haven’t visited many places. Folks here appear completely European to completely African, with every imaginable combination between. As one travels further East in Cuba one encounters more and more folks of African origins. Santiago de Cuba, for example is home to many more folks of African origins, I suppose owing to its proximity to Haiti, then one encounters in the province of Pinar del Rio, in the West. Though racial diversity, to one degree or another, exists everywhere here, including here in Playa Baracoa.

Unlike the USA, communities in Cuba are not segregated racially as are many in the USA, with neighborhoods predominated by one racial group or the other. I suppose that is because here the buying and selling of property is more tightly regulated by the government in the USA.

Here, as little as I understand, one owns property that one owned before the revolution and folks are free to trade their legally owned properties. There are also very many folks who lives in homes and apartments that they do not owned, but are owned by the state which has assigned them the quarters in which they reside.

During the late 1800s the Spanish colonialists here actually ordered the end to the African slave trade because the proportion of the population of folks of African origin was approaching fifty percent and the Spaniards feared a slave revolt such that occurred in Haiti, I believe, in the 1850s (there were similar fears amongst slave owners in the USA. . It was the Haitian slave revolt, incidentally, which precipitated the movement of French colonialist planters to Eastern Cuba, where they planted coffee and imparted a definite French influence to the architecture of Sanitago.

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