Blowback - S2 Bonus 3 - "Watch Out For That Boy"

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

We talk to activists and historians about Cuba, black radicalism, and how the Revolution attacked the problem of racism. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn, and this is the third bonus episode of our second season. Now, toward the end of the fourth episode of our main story, we talked a bit about the visit of Fidel Castro and the Cuban delegation to Harlem in the fall of 1960. In this bonus episode, we're going to return to that moment as part of the theme of this episode, examining the links between the shared struggle for black liberation in both Cuba and the United States. Now, if you've already listened to the main story episodes, you'll have already heard the voices of people in this episode, Martin Junio Sarmiento, Rosemary Meeley, and others who will get fuller introductions before you hear from them. After a bit more introduction and some deeper Cuban African American history, we'll talk a little bit more about radical black politics globally during the time of our story. We'll add more context in color to the visit of the Cuban delegation to Harlem in 1960 and how black radicals, in the 1960s were involved in the Cuban cause and vice versa. And then we'll talk about successes and failures of the Cuban Revolution as they relate

to issues of race. And all of these will be explained directly by our guests. So now, Fidel's visit to Harlem in 1960 was just one moment in a longer history between black radicals in the United States and in Cuba. The historian Rosemary Mealy, in our main narrative, pointed out how it went back many years and how Jose Marti, the hero of Cuban independence at the turn of the 20th century, developed ties with African-American radicals during his own time in the United States. Bill Fletcher Jr. is a racial justice, labor, and international

activist, and he's the author of the books, They're Bankrupting Us and 20 Other Myths About Unions and Solidarity Divided. And he talked with us about this longer shared history of Cuban and African-American radicalism. And so, Bill, just to start this off, I wanted to ask a little bit about, you know, what was the relationship between Black America and the Cuban people prior to the Cuban revolution? You know, was there one, economically, culturally, and so on. Well, yeah, I mean, the relationship goes back to the 19th century.

And I'm leaving aside that Cuba was a stopping off point. one of the stopping of points and bringing slaves to what is now the United States. But in the 19th century, in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, Cuba fought its first war of independence against Spain. And one of the issues that was going on at the time was around the issue of slavery.

and the the first Cuban Revolution or Cuban War of Independence was inconsistent on this whole question of slavery, which was something that hurt the movement. The first war was defeated in effect. So that

was point number one. Point number two is that baseball emerged in Cuba and in the United States around the same time and there ended up being a very very interesting, long relationship between Cuba and Black America when it came to baseball.

Baseball players from the so-called Negro leagues that were the black players that had been segregated out of the white so-called major leagues would go to Cuba and play in Cuba. They'd play off-season. They'd play on Cuban teams as they did with Mexican teams. Then the Second War of Independence of 1895, and you had black Cuban leaders of great note like Antonio Maseo. And so you had this relationship between Black America and Cuba that was very interesting, both politically and culturally, with the growth of jazz. Cuba developed its own jazz industry and U.S. artists like Dizzy Gillespie, very influenced by Cuban music. Dr. Rosemary Meeley also talked to us about the ties between Cuba and black

Americans. There's quite a few black abolitionists who were linked to the struggle the Cuban people were having against Spain, and then later on, in later years, the U.S., there were also ties where doing Bookerty, Washington's era, black Cubans came to study, even though, you know, there's, we have criticism of Bookerty's philosophy, but black women and men came to study at Tuskegee Institute. And black women were trained as maids and maids to go back, of course, to work in white Cuban families' homes. And then the black men were taught trades, you know. Then, you know, when Jose Marti lived in New York, he had ties to the black radicals. And so those are some of the historical ties. There's that kind of history, you know, and the Cubans know this. And so the revolution happens in Batista's government falls, you know, how did black Americans initially, you know, perceive the revolution?

And what did they think of Castro himself? And I guess, let's say, put this, you know, perhaps a bit like prior to his visit in the fall of 1960. Well, there was a lot of favorability in part because there had been this long-term relationship. But the other part of it was that U.S. African Americans were keenly aware of the way racial segregation played itself out in pre-revolutionary Cuba, that is before Castro and the M26-1, that there were hotels that black Cubans and black Americans could not visit. There were other forms of racist discrimination. And so one of the things that meant a lot to black America was the immediate stand that the revolution took against racism. The other thing which I remember, an uncle of mine who was a theologian in Johnson C. Smith, he in the early years of the revolution, when Cuban exiles were coming to the United States, made the comment that he, looked at the pictures on TV of who was coming here and he said that he noticed that they were white. He didn't see any black faces. And that told him a lot about what was going on

in Cuba. And I think that that was true with other African Americans that they saw in the development of Cuban Revolution something that was different, different from anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. So, yeah, there was a latent sympathy. When Fidel, my father, I recall my father telling us, he was listening to radio and he said, you better watch out for that boy. They'd better watch out for that boy. And that's how he was referring to Fidel. And so I knew about Fidel and I had some knowledge, you know, about the Cuban revolution. long current in black America of what has come to be called black internationalism.

And you could, in many respects, dated around the 1840s and 50s with the development of the Negro Convention where there were these annual or semi-annual gatherings of black Americans who were free at the time, who were addressing various issues facing black America, most particularly slavery, but not just slavery. So the Negro Convention Movement, among other things, was noted for its stand on Irish liberation and freeing Ireland from the British. And there's actually a very long history of African Americans

speaking up about Irish liberation. Yeah, and Noel Ignatius' book, How the Irish Became White is a great chapter and how the Irish stuck the knife in the back of blacks. Yes, indeed. But the support for Irish liberation continued despite that, which is interesting. The other thing that I think is important in terms of your question is that part of black internationalism has focused on the situation of Latin America.

So if you look at Mexico, which eliminated slavery, and black America had a particular relationship there, looking at what happened in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and a number of other places, there was, this black internationalism was not simply about locations where there were large numbers of people of African descent, although those were included, but also this recognition of the racist and imperialist operation of the United States, and that it was really important for us to speak out. So the fact that the fair play for Cuba Committee would have suggested this and probably was tapping into or attempting to tap into this current of black internationalism, and it was very successful.

The British historian Simon Hall, author of 10 Days in Harlem, noted that the African-American community was hardly monolithic in its perspective toward Cuba and the Cold War more generally. I mean, I think that it needs to be careful not to generalize about the African-American view of Cuba or of Castro because, you know, there were a number of very high profile supporters. But there's also a large group of the African-American opinion and of the civil rights movement that is not supportive of the Cuban Revolution or is nervous about association with with communism. You know, when Fidel stayed at the

Teresa, the NWACP's national leadership, were very, very keen that their local leaders have no involvement with Fidel because their politics were more moderate, but also their strategy was very much about aligning the demand for black freedom

in America with America's Cold War leadership. So, you know, by the time you get to the mid and later parts of the 1960s, it's really the more radical wing of the black movement, which is in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. It's the black power activists. It's members of the Black Panther Party. But I think there is an interesting, particularly around the Cuban missile crisis in the Bay of Pixar, but there's a growing sense, I think, among some black leaders,

including people like Martin Luther King, actually, that somehow America has got itself on the wrong side of this anti-colonial question and that they need to really reassess their foreign policy from the point of view of trying to look at the world more from the viewpoint of the of people in the global south who've been fighting for their independence. Now, in a bit, we'll get to how black leaders, in particular Malcolm X, understood the Cuban revolution and the cause of third world liberation more generally. But just before Fidel gets to Harlem and meets Malcolm X in the fall of 1960, that summer, before Fidel and the Cuban September visit to the UN, a group of black activists and intellectual

from America took a trip to Cuba. Joe Kay, an educator and activist, was among the participants on that trip. Now, Joe is not African American, but his late wife, the novelist and activist Sarah E. Wright, was for what was effectively their honeymoon in 1960, Kay accompanied his wife and other African Americans on that delegation. The first thing that struck me was the absolute delirium of the people, the happiness, the spontaneous outpourings that took place at the drop of the hat when people were walking down suddenly burst out into chanting, chanting revolutionary chants. And this, of course, was in the face of the propaganda in this country about how the people had grown disillusioned in the revolution already.

and of course there were so many there were a number of Batista people who had fled and they were portrayed as the Cuban people they fled to Florida so when we came to Cuba we didn't see any of that what we did see as I say was this

extraordinary enthusiasm that I have never seen since anyway and then of course we went up to the mountain where the Oriente, in that Oriental province, where the revolution began in those mountains. And we slept on the ground. That was Saturday and our honeymoon day,

looking up at the stars. And that whole area was being converted into a school city, where for the first time in Cuban history, Cuban peasants were going to be given an education, three, of course, and they were breaking the ground for the construction of the schools. And we saw, we were in a stadium with Fidel in Oriental's, where Cuban peasants riding up on horseback to the foot of the stadium where Fidel was, where he presented them one by one with deeds to the land.

And you saw this with your own eyes? We were right there. Meeley, wrote an important book about Fidel's visit to Harlem and the links between black American and Cuban radicals called Fidel and Malcolm X, Memories of a Meeting. Well, as I've told people before, this infamous meeting between Fidel and Malcolm X, it was not the beginning of the Cuban nation's solidarity between African Americans and the people of Cuba. Now, as a historian, I've consistently told people and shared this, and you may have heard this, I don't know, in some of my comments, my lectures, and what have you, that this encounter

really represented a continuation of over a hundred-year-old history of a solidarity that was born in the enslavement of African people in Cuba and the United States. And that's what I tell people that the 1960 visit was just the continuum of that history and the meeting between Fidel and Malcolm solidified those bonds. And even though it's just a brief meeting upstairs in the eighth floor of the hotel today, so it's that symbolism and it's the importance of that meeting that we can't dismiss that. So then the Cuban leadership understood very early from even, you know, when you really understand this quote-unquote Cold War history, they knew from the early years of Eisenhower that the black movement really in the United States

provided a basis for the progressive and anti-imperalist forces and that we could be, we meaning the African-American community, the black community. In our work, we began to neutralize a lot of those draconian plans of the intelligence, agencies because, you know, the leaders, including Malcolm himself, and this is what I would tell people, he'd gone through the same thing that Seidel was going through and the country was going through regarding CIA intelligence. So Malcolm understood firsthand. And so that's why there was this kind of, and I tell people all the time, there was this mutual correlation. Now, what about the struggle against racism, against racial inequality inside Cuba post-revolution? We should mention here

as Bill Fletcher will in a little bit, that quantifying or measuring the racial makeup of Cuba can be a bit tricky. Official numbers tend to say a majority of the population is white, but this is often thought to be a major undercount of the population that is black or mixed race. Cuba, like the United States, was once a slave society run by European imperialists, and both countries today still suffer from that legacy. Sometimes, particularly among partisan, of the United States and critics of Cuba, the differences and context of the two nations in the 20th century and 21st century is flattened in an effort to perhaps conclude, Cuba didn't fix racism, so the revolution failed on any progressive terms. Implicit here is the suggestion an

American-style liberal capitalist regime change would produce better results in addressing, among other things racial inequality. Here is a brief but fairer assessment of the revolution's achievements concerning racism and inequality from scholar Alejandro de la Fuente, published not in a loopy lefty blog, but in the New York Times. Quote, according to research that I conducted in the 1990s for my book, A Nation for All, race inequality in politics in 20th century Cuba, the economic and social programs promoted by the Cuban government produced dramatic results. By the early 1980s, when reliable data to measure the impact of such programs became available, inequality, according to race, had declined noticeably in a number of key indicators. The life expectancy of non-white Cubans was

only one year lower than that of whites. Life expectancy was basically identical for all racial groups, A powerful indicator of social well-being linked to access to health services, nutrition, and education, the Cuban race gap in life expectancy was significantly lower than those found in more affluent multiracial societies, such as Brazil, about 6.7 years of difference, and the United States, about 6.3 years of difference. Racial differences in education and employment had also diminished, or in some cases, even disappeared. The proportion of high school graduates was actually higher among blacks than among whites in Cuba, whereas the opposite was true in both Brazil and the United States. Whites continued to enjoy an advantage at the college level, but it was minuscule. Advances in education translated into impressive gains in the occupational structure, particularly in comparison to other multiracial societies in the Americas.

The Cuban occupational structure was significantly less unequal, according to race. On top of that, salaries in the massive public sector, over 90% of employment at the time, were regulated by law, so income differences were also extremely low. In this section of his article Fuentes concludes, Cuba had advanced a great deal, dismantling key pillars of inequality and providing more or less egalitarian access to education, health, employment, and recreation. But the picture was not and is not a utopia. The attacks on these structural issues by the Cuban Revolutionary Government,

while effective to reduce inequality, did not address what you might call the persistent attitudes of racism in a country that had a history of race-based slavery. Racism, much like in the United States and European societies, could be found in the details of the law of the culture. These things could in effect trickle up in spite of the massive gains on the structural level. And then, quite to the contrary of the proponents of Cuba-American style, racial equality in Cuba suffered huge setbacks during the introduction of liberal market mechanisms

during the so-called special period of the 1990s. This, as we've mentioned, was the decade following the collapse of Cuba's trading network with the USSR and the socialist bloc. Economic hardship required the government to expand and nurture the private sector so that egalitarian social goals suffered. What's more, these effects combined with a seemingly positive policy

of allowing more remittances from Cuban's family members in Miami. But all that money being sent home was coming from mostly white, well-to-do families in the United States, creating more wealth in Cuba. for white people in turn. We also spoke with our guests about the successes and failures

of addressing racism and racial inequality in Cuba in the years after the revolution began. Here is Marta. We didn't have a plan, a progressive program, to fight against racism as comprehensive, as permanent as we've had with a women's advancement. If we had it from the beginning, things would be different now in terms of racism in Cuba.

We still have racism. How would you describe the successes and shortcomings in terms of the Cuban Revolution's political program to deal with race? What was the initial promise of racial reparation that existed with the revolution? And how did it, as you describe, fall short? Well, the reparations were pronounced since the beginning.

For example, all people, no matter of the race, of their gender. Everyone had access to free universal education, to jobs, to housing, to everything, to health care, everything. But it's not enough. It's not enough. And maybe, maybe the problem of enough having a specific program to advance people of color in Cuba was because there was a sense of that would hurt the unity of Cuba.

that would hurt the unity of Q. Well, in terms of advancing women, that was not the problem because women were black, were Mistees, were Chinese, were everything, women were all. So everything that had unifying everyone had a program for advancement. And this program for advancement of women was very good, very well thought of. And the important thing that you could criticize the things with a very alert eye, you could criticize the things that were going wrong in that problem, fixing them, and continue to go forward. So that was a thing that made women so advanced and not the case of racism.

There's a perception in the U.S. that, you know, voicing these criticisms was like verboten or not allowed. Yes, but those debates were not from the beginning. Those debates started among the intellectuals in Cuba, among the Congresses of the Union of Writers and Artists, in the 80s, in the 90s, they were the ones who really started to open the eyes of the leadership of Cuba in terms of we need to deal with a question of racism. And you know when this really came out and popped out and really exploded during the special period during the 90s, we were in a crisis. When you're in a crisis, everything that hasn't been dealt with comes out. homophobia came out inequalities

came out, racism came out so these things that had to be decided what to do with them so that was good in terms of the crisis bringing out that problem but it's not from the beginning that we could deal with it

we should have dealt with it since the beginning we didn't so I think what we can say is that Cuba is probably the country with the most advanced approach to racial injustice in the hemisphere. But it's worth noting that there have been limitations. And I had the opportunity to visit Cuba in January 1999, in a delegation that Trans-Africa Forum put together under then its president, Randall Robinson. So we had an opportunity to visit Cuba. So we had an opportunity to meet with Fidel Castro, and we were there to look at the situation facing

Afro-Cubans. Now, by way of preface, because of the large amount of African blood in Cuba, it is the case that there's a lot of mixing. So defining people as Afro-Cuban is a complicated category generally, but also within Cuba. But anyway, we're looking at the impact of the blockade on Afro-Cubans. So we met with Fidel Castro, and he was sitting at the table with us, across the table, and he looked at us and he said, when we first took over in 1959, we thought that the resolution of racism would be handled by making racism illegal. And that's what we did.

we made it illegal and we ended segregation and we took those other steps and then he looked at us and said but we were wrong we were wrong because we said what we underestimated was the impact of 500 years of Spanish colonialism and U.S. neo-colonialism on the culture of our people and that racism was not simply going to be resolved by making it illegal and making segregation illegal, that there were additional steps that had to be taken. And what was interesting about this very astute comment was that Castro was very undefensive in making it, whereas there were many of the Cuban leaders who did not really want to talk about racism, in part because they seemed to feel.

that any revelation for problems of racism would imply a criticism of the Cuban revolution and would provide aid and comfort to the enemy. And so what that meant was that you would encounter

levels of denial about problems that really continue to exist. And Castro was not defensive at all about that. That is one of the challenges. And one of the challenges. And one

the things that was happening during the so-called special period was that remittances, money from the Cuban exiles that had gone to the United States or Spain or wherever else that was being sent back. Because of the disproportionate number of exiles who we would call white, they were sending money back to their families that increased or created a greater wedge within the Cuban population along racial lines. So after the fall of the Soviet Union in the special period, these economic liberalization measures had the effect of enhancing racial inequality on the island. I think it's important for U.S. audiences to analogize the situation in Cuba with our

current situation of COVID-19. that Cuba has been under siege since 1960. The United States has done everything it could to undermine Cuba, to undermine the Cuban society, to cut off resources, to make trade more and more difficult, etc. In 2020, we in the United States are under siege. The siege just happens to be a pandemic. but it's a siege that is

wearing at the very fiber of society it's created an economic collapse it has created levels of fear and panic and when these things happen the fissures any fissures in society become more glaring

and tend to be and tend to broaden so we see in a our current siege with COVID, what this is doing in terms of the greater polarization of wealth. So Cuba went through this, but it wasn't a natural phenomenon. It was the direct result of what the United States has done. And so, yes, during the 90s, there were a number of retreats and it was very unfortunate, but there was a country that has, excuse me, well, I'll put it as Fidel put it to us. He said, he said to us, when the Soviet Union,

collapsed, the United States predicted that Cuba would be finished within 90 days. And then he looked at us in the eyes and then said, it's been nine years, right? And he had this sort of grin on his face, right? That they were despite this able to sustain themselves, but there was an admission that there were retreats, absolutely. Now, as Bill Fletcher said just a bit ago, the special period and the following years saw reversals of gains that had been made by Cuban society in the fight against racism. But not even the New York Times can deny the substantial strides made by the Cuban political system in recent years. For example, a 2018 headline reads, quote, more black officials in power in Cuba as leadership changes. And the story below it

notes that, quote, while inequality persists in the country, the Castro Revolution did make important strides for black people. And in a future episode, Brendan will be speaking with Oscar Oramas Oliva, the former Cuban ambassador to Angola, about Cuba's commitment to independence movements in Africa and Cuba's support for Angola, specifically in the 1970s,

against South Africa and the apartheid regime's critical ally, the United States. See you later. I don't know.