In January of 2000, while waiting on a dilapidated bench in the direct sun for “la P-3,” the cross-town bus that ran through the tree-lined, once-posh Playa (Miramar) neighborhood blocks to the bustling streets of El Vedado in Central Havana, a man beyond my years slowly placed his tired body next to me with a sigh of relief. The temperature was in the lower 80s °F (around 26 °C), but coupled with a suffocating humidity, and the uncovered bus stop was the only place to rest in a several-block radius. On any other day in Havana, a queue of people would be waiting at this bus stop for sometimes hours at a time, calling for “el ultimo” (the last one in line) so they could secure their place and eventual canned sardine-like space on la guagua. 1 However, due to the notorious Elián González international custody battle, one that played out in the mass media like an overdramatic US cable television drama meets telenovela, thousands were assembled in front of the Cuban Interests Section on Havana’s malecon to call for the boy’s return. 2 The protest left the outskirts of the city virtually empty, buses and taxis running less frequently, and the rare instance of an empty bus stop in the Playa/Miramar section of Havana.
Upon nodding our heads in a mutual greeting, my temporary parada (bus stop) acquaintance and I sat quietly as we looked in the distance for the approaching guagua. By the looks of a dusty, dark-colored uniform and red eyes of tiredness, I could only assume he was headed home after a long work shift in one of the several hotel construction sites in Miramar’s then-burgeoning tourism zone. After a brief glance at my appearance, his curiosity peaked, as it did often during my stay on the island. In attempt to guess my origins, Inglaterra, Argentina, or España he posed, his eyes bulged with surprise when I declared Miami, Florida, as my birthplace; Louisville, Kentucky, as my place of more recent upbringing; and Cuba as the archipelago nation of my ancestral roots. Almost immediately, I received an emphatic query-response with eyebrows and voice slightly raised: “Y tu que hace’ aquí?” The contextual translation could only be nothing other than a friendly: “‘the hell you doin’ here?”
After several minutes of amicable exchange, la P-3 approached and we boarded into the sweltering heat of a bus designed for colder climates, one of the many recycled remnants left over from Cuba’s days of dependency on Soviet bloc countries. In a pool of sweat amidst a sea of mostly standing commuters, and now separated from my new compay, I contemplated the short but revealing bus stop conversation. Without exchanging names, we discussed the allá contra acá (here vs. there) comparisons, a topic of conversation I was incessantly told to avoid by family members in Miami who fled during the early days of the revolution, vowing never to return until el Comandante’s overthrow or death (as of publication date of this book, El Lider is still kickin’ it). Regardless of where I traveled on the island, once I revealed my background, the topic was imminent, almost inescapable, and contrary to the dogmatic warnings and outright hyperbole about the tyranny of life in Cuba as told through the lenses of el exilio and their Miami-born children (many whom refuse to visit and only know Cuba through their parents or grandparents’ memories), I was only met with respectful urges by resident Cubans to dialogue with me, the son of exiles, about life in la Yuma. 3
In this circumstance, the conversation revolved around the availability of jobs and prospects for higher education in the USA. Speaking in a prideful tone, my temporary bus stop mate revealed that he had a son, a skilled musician, who wanted to study at a prestigious music college in Boston. It was a pleasant coincidence, as I was a student myself in the greater Boston vicinity (Waltham, Massachusetts) at the time. I had traveled to Cuba to write an experiential paper on environmental education as the final requirement for a Master’s degree from the then-called Heller Graduate School for Social Welfare at Brandeis University. Cuban scientists, educators, and activists had long been studying the adverse effects of carbon emission–induced climate change before the latter became a popular buzzword and subject of reactionary and empirical denial, how could I not go? When I admitted lack of redes/conexiones (social networks) for his son’s potential ambitions in the Boston music school, but offered to be a local contact in case I would continue living there after graduation, I recall a look of confusion-meets-disappointment. His puzzled face apparent, I then asked if he had family in the USA, particularly in Miami, who could assist his son through the struggles of adaptation upon arrival.
It was in that moment that I received a profound and unforgettable retort that simultaneously opened the blinders of my own white privilege and peaked my curiosity: “tú bien sabes que nosotros, gente como yo, no vamos pa’llá” (“you well know that ‘we’, people like me, don’t move there”). 4 This was a “we” I had heard only days before—from an environmental educator I had interviewed, who in off-topic conversation declared that while fellow resident Cubans still hold serious racial prejudices about people like her, and that foreign and resident Cuban alike may take issue with Cuba’s one-party government, that this collective we fought and helped build a roof over people’s heads, put arroz con frijoles (rice with beans) on dinner tables and were an integral part in creating quality universal education and health care systems. Over there, in la Yuma, in her view, it seemed that people who “look” like her still struggle for that. 5
Estimated to comprise nearly 70% of the population, this “we,” it was clear, was reference to Cuba’s Afro-descendant population. With histories rooted in diverse societies in Africa and subsequent enslavement in 1517 to replace the nearly exterminated island Taínos, Ciboneys and Guanajatabey Amerindians also enslaved and diseased to death in the Spanish repartimientos and encomiendas, to their subsequent fight for emancipation from slavery during the bloody Ten Years War of the late nineteenth century, to surviving U.S. supported massacres and genocides (e.g. “race war” of 1912), blanqueamiento (whitening) movements, and subsequent violence and economic oppression under US-backed dictators like Machado and Batista and US corporate–backed pawns before and in between, Afro-descendant Cubans have consistently endured systematic campaigns to eliminate and undermine their self-assertion in Cuban society. 6 It wasn’t until the Cuban Revolution that this “we,” promised a more secure future by a nervous predominantly white revolutionary cadre, would become a burgeoning force of support during its developmental stages, at the same time that first wealthy and then middle-class whites, the latter including some of my own family members, fled the island in hopes to return once the young rebels and their new government would meet their demise. Such a political event never happened.
Instead, on this day in Havana in the year 2000, the long-term consequences of a divided migration where preexisting Latin American–style social stratification systems intersected with equally insidious US-style class, gender, and racial structures played out in an unusual circumstance. As the son of “white” Cubans who arrived among other white working class exiles in the mid-to-late 1960s, I am the perceived direct beneficiary of the initial arrivals’ economic and political ascension in South Florida, and likewise should mirror fellow exilic political hatred toward the Cuban government, rarely defying a US-imposed embargo to travel to the island. 7 Notwithstanding the few brave exiles who were ostracized and vilified for their support of cross-country “diálogo” and reconciliation in the 1970s, it is the latter waves of more heterogeneous emigrants (post-1980), many whom left for economic rather than strictly political reasons, that are more likely to return to see their loved ones, often bringing care packages or sending remittances in Cuba’s new age of socialism: one of limited enterprise and racially-segmented capital accumulation (see Farber 2015; Zurbano 2013; Eckstein 2009).
Yet while my presence on the island defied the above common perceptions, for many blacks, or Afro-Cubans, a different storyline unfolded. Again, a prevailing scholarly and popular narrative suggests that most black Cubans chose to stay behind, looking to take part in the social and economic reforms of the revolution and the promised demise of individual and systematic forms of racism. While this argument places the onus of migration on Afro-Cubans themselves on a uniform basis, as if they had an unfettered choice or equal means to migrate and decided against it collectively, it also ignores the extent of social stratification that existed prior to and subsequent to Castro and company’s arrival, further perpetuating a still-popular myth that Latin American countries are “racial democracies.” When applied to Cuba, this argument takes two dominant trajectories, each framed by those in power living in the privileged spaces of divergent political contexts.
One theoretical path holds that prior to the Cuban Revolution, hundreds of years of miscegenation between Africans, Europeans, what was left of the Amerindian population, and, to a lesser extent, Asians created a rainbow of phenotypes that leaves little room to explain one’s social position as a by-product of racial discrimination. Grounded in a celebrated mestizaje, or “racial and cultural mixture” (Román and Flores 2010), this thesis is upheld by a set of inter-twining beliefs: that slavery, as an institution, “was not that bad in Cuba” (as some of my Afro-Cuban informants for this book hear frequently in Miami, even to their faces); that Cubans are a “color-blind” people, thanks to an inclusive nationhood grounded in the late nineteenth-century collective uprising against Spanish colonialism (see Chap. 2); and that, unlike the USA, Cuba did not “officially” institute widespread segregation (Jim Crow) during the twentieth century, therefore, altogether, Cuba was either “not racist,” or in admission, “less racist” than the USA. Even in the presence of local Afro-Cuban Americans who would seek to challenge these assumptions through experience or critical knowledge of history, I learned through observation and testimony, these beliefs or a combination thereof are still shared by resident Cubans and members of the Cuban exilic community and their children in South Florida, even among Cubans who arrived during more recent stages of migration—myths that are central to the arguments presented in this book. Divergent narratives easily call out these prevailing arguments on their bluff, acknowledging the well-documented extent of anti-black racism that existed prior to Castro and company’s arrival rooted in a few-hundred years old sociedad de castas that afforded economic and social privileges to light-skinned elites, especially men, a reality further backed by the implementation of US-backed eugenics-based social policies of the early twentieth century that sought to violently blanquear (whiten) the population in fear of being outnumbered, but suggests that the redistribution of land and resources, and other universal social reforms implemented during the Cuban Revolution, essentially removed the vestiges of racism (for background see Hay 2009; De La Fuente 2001; Casal 1979; Moore 1989; Brock and Fuertes 1998). Such an argument has also been well challenged, simply because among other factors, it ignores the evidence that the upper echelons of the Cuban revolutionary government have been consistently white-dominated (note: in a majority black or “Afro-descendant” country) and that both “camouflaged” and direct acts of racism ran amok during the revolution, only to be accentuated as market reforms have been slowly introduced since the mid-to-late 1990s (see Farber 2006, 2015; Sawyer 2006, De La Fuente 2001; Dixon 1988; Aguirre 1976). These remnants of the past, suppressed in denial by over 50 years of one-party rule, now rear their ugly heads and thrive openly under highly regulated but increasingly predatory markets, given the overwhelming evidence that light-skinned and mulatto (mixed European/African ancestry) Cubans receive preferential treatment in all facets of Cuban life, especially in the tourism industry and “remittance-based” reality of transnational markets. 8
While the legacies of anti-black racism that currently operate in Cuba and Latin American societies continue to receive scholarly focus and serve as context (Telles 2012; De La Fuente 2012; Blue 2007; Wade 1997), the argument that Afro-Cubans collectively chose to stay behind so as to play a significant role in the revolution, however generally true, seems to absolve the US government from its central role in crafting a racialized refugee policy toward Cubans, one that would hold disparate consequences for the fewer Afro-Cubans who over time trickled into the US-centered Diaspora. No doubt, post-1959 Cuban immigration to the USA has yielded a largely “white” cohort of entrants, backing what scholars have observed as the epistemological dominance of a racially bifurcated immigration narrative (Pérez 2009; Gosin, 2010; Mirabal, 2005; Dixon 1988, also see Aguirre 1976). Census data analyses clearly show that over time, a majority of Cubans who self-identify as white settled in South Florida, while those more likely to identify as “black” or “other,” have settled in other states, primarily those in the Northeast (see for example Logan 2003, 2010; Hay 2009; Skop 2001). 9 While this bifurcated numerical reality should place the “wages of whiteness” (Roediger et al. 2007), retold in a Latinx-ethnic frame, as primary determinants in the group’s well-known economic and pol...