Achy Obejas: Yes, Virginia, There Is Racism in Cuba
[Achy Obejas is an author whose most recent book is Ruins, a novel about Cuba in the Special Period. She was born in Cuba and came to the United States by boat in 1963. Since then she has returned to Cuba innumerable times. She writes about Cuba for The Root and other U.S.-based publications.]
In 1998, when President Bill Clinton was allowing Cuban artists to travel relatively easily in and out of the United States, I invited a well-known Cuban visual artist to visit my graduate class at Columbia College in Chicago. I wanted her to show the students her work and talk a little about what it was like to create art -- such a personal endeavor -- in a society that focused on the collective rather than the individual.
The visit to Columbia, an urban school with a strong arts focus, went well until the question-and-answer session. An African-American student, eyes misty with hope, asked, "Is it true that there's no racism in Cuba?" My friend, a red-haired and white-skinned Cuban, nodded enthusiastically. "No, there's no racism," she affirmed, and there was a collective sigh in the class over the very notion that such a utopia could really exist.
Like my friend, I am also light-skinned -- white in Cuban society -- but unlike her, I didn't grow up in Havana hearing, and thus believing, in this human-relations miracle. I was born in Cuba but grew up outside Chicago in the 1960s and '70s; I'd lived through the U.S. civil rights movement and worked for Harold Washington's mayoral campaign. I'd struggled with racism all my life -- racism directed at me as a Cuban-Latina by white and black Americans, racism by Cubans and other Latinos of all colors directed at anyone darker, and, of course, my own racism. And instinctively, I rejected her assertion that racism had been vanquished on the island -- and I said so right there in class....
Read entire article at The Root
In 1998, when President Bill Clinton was allowing Cuban artists to travel relatively easily in and out of the United States, I invited a well-known Cuban visual artist to visit my graduate class at Columbia College in Chicago. I wanted her to show the students her work and talk a little about what it was like to create art -- such a personal endeavor -- in a society that focused on the collective rather than the individual.
The visit to Columbia, an urban school with a strong arts focus, went well until the question-and-answer session. An African-American student, eyes misty with hope, asked, "Is it true that there's no racism in Cuba?" My friend, a red-haired and white-skinned Cuban, nodded enthusiastically. "No, there's no racism," she affirmed, and there was a collective sigh in the class over the very notion that such a utopia could really exist.
Like my friend, I am also light-skinned -- white in Cuban society -- but unlike her, I didn't grow up in Havana hearing, and thus believing, in this human-relations miracle. I was born in Cuba but grew up outside Chicago in the 1960s and '70s; I'd lived through the U.S. civil rights movement and worked for Harold Washington's mayoral campaign. I'd struggled with racism all my life -- racism directed at me as a Cuban-Latina by white and black Americans, racism by Cubans and other Latinos of all colors directed at anyone darker, and, of course, my own racism. And instinctively, I rejected her assertion that racism had been vanquished on the island -- and I said so right there in class....