{"id":222707,"date":"2020-06-11T17:59:16","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T21:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=222707"},"modified":"2020-11-13T11:31:50","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T16:31:50","slug":"racism-is-not-a-vestige","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/our-life\/racism-is-not-a-vestige\/","title":{"rendered":"Racism is not a vestige"},"content":{"rendered":"

Help us keep OnCuba alive here<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In 1909, in Camag\u00fcey, a U.S. citizen refused to attend to a \u201ccolored\u201d Cuban. The event, which generated public discussion, took place in a barber shop open to the public. The report on the case affirmed that \u201cwhatever concerns exist in the United States, regarding the differentiation of races in the social order, those concerns, which undoubtedly have also existed among us as painful reminiscences of slavery, have been disappearing\u2026.\u201d1<\/sup><\/p>\n

The report cited as causes of this disappearance the \u201cgradual but effective\u201d result of the Cuban wars of independence and the development of the culture of the so-called \u201ccolored race.\u201d Such a \u201crace,\u201d both by \u201cmandate of law\u201d and by its \u201cpersonal effort,\u201d would have achieved \u201caccess to the highest positions in the Republic, based on equal rights in relation to other citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another act committed by an American, former police officer Derek Chauvin, has now sparked great discussions in the world, also among Cubans, about the legitimacy of the forms of protest, as of the murder of George Floyd in the United States. Ironically, some of the expressions from that distant report also appear in the discussions of the present.<\/p>\n

On the social media, we have seen compatriots\u2014identified with the \u201chard exile\u201d in Miami, but not only\u2014questioning the protests against Floyd\u2019s death, demanding exclusively peaceful forms of response, and ensuring that African Americans should take advantage of the exercise of their rights and apply themselves with greater effort to enjoy the possibilities of improvement and social advancement that American capitalism would provide.<\/p>\n

Racism has its history and particularities in every context, but it is a global phenomenon that has shaped the world in which we live. For the analysis of that world, as Stuart Hall has said, race is not a \u201csubcategory.\u201d Rather, it structures a \u201ctotal social formation that is racialized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cuba has its history with racism and its forms of protest. Part of the criticism of the reactions to Floyd\u2019s death also has a history among Cubans.<\/p>\n

Personal effort and civil disobedience<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Proveyer was a young Cuban, a university student, who practiced journalism. For his family, and for the social environment in which he lived, his career represented the hope of inclusion and social advancement through professional training. His anti-racist activism involved the peaceful struggle in favor of Cuban blacks\u2019 intervention in the life of the country.<\/p>\n

Proveyer was a \u201cmulatto,\u201d a racial hierarchy \u201chigher\u201d than that of blacks in Cuba at that time, which maintained exclusive \u201cmulatto\u201d societies, forbidden for blacks.2<\/sup> In 1934, in an act of vindication, together with a group of \u201ccolored\u201d people, the student \u201cinvaded\u201d the white area of \u200b\u200bthe park of the city of Trinidad.3<\/sup> As a consequence of the brawl the act generated, Proveyer was lynched.<\/p>\n

His crime was crossing the \u201ccolor line\u201d of a park. He had not set fire to a sugarcane field, looted, or stolen.<\/p>\n

Certainly through his personal\u2014and collective\u2014effort, a significant number of Cuban blacks and mestizos had managed to become, by that date, professionals, businessmen, and organized workers. However, racism remained a daily affront. Days after Proveyer\u2019s murder, several of those who had lynched him attacked one of the black Cubans who had protested the student\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Proveyer\u2019s \u201cpersonal effort\u201d collided with the ironclad limit of the place\u2014physical and social\u2014reserved then for Cuban blacks. It didn\u2019t matter that Proveyer practiced a non-radical way of protest: peaceful civil disobedience. An illustration representing his death shows him being forced to swallow a newspaper, that is, his anti-racist voice.<\/p>\n

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A representation of the death of Proveyer, that accuses in fact the responsibility of the ABC political movement, later constituted as a party. In: Juventud Obrera, March 28, 1934.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Social justice and racial protest<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Independent Color Party (PIC) represented, like no other Cuban political party in the first two decades of the 20th century, the demands of Latin American popular nationalism.<\/p>\n

Betting on \u201cthe popular\u201d against an oligarchic state is a radical challenge. PIC\u2019s nationalism understood that the \u201cpopular\u201d in Cuba was classed by race. They observed that they were excluded as poor as well as black.<\/p>\n

They understood that being black was a substantial condition of the origin and maintenance of their poverty.<\/p>\n

The PIC reacted to the exclusionary nationalism that the possible framework of protests in Cuba presented in this way: (need) \u201cNothing as black: everything as Cuban.\u201d In 1912, the newspaper El Triunfo<\/em> put it this way: \u201cHere in Cuba it is not said that \u2018the best black is the dead black\u2019 (in reference to a U.S. saying); no, here in this land fertilized with the blood of its heroes what is said is: \u201cHe is the best black, the most Cuban black.\u201d4<\/sup><\/p>\n

Before saying that it is a good idea, it is necessary to explore what it hides. Hubert de Blanck composed a Hymn to the Republic, dedicated to Jos\u00e9 Miguel G\u00f3mez when he won the presidency (1908), which states: \u201cAll of Europe and America applauds and at the same time the United States\/your children who divided yesterday\/are joined today by brotherly love.\u201d 5<\/sup><\/p>\n

Cuban popular music collects in various ways the 1912 massacre. Researcher Yorisel Andino mentions the following themes: by Juan de la Cruz, \u201cEstenoz e Ivonnet\u201d; by Pepe S\u00e1nchez, \u201cIvonet\u201d; and Manuel Corona, \u201cIvonet y Estenoz.\u201d (Transgressive discourses: breaks in the Cuban musical canon, Santiago publishers, 2015.) As Crist\u00f3bal D\u00edaz Ayala has said\u2014in personal correspondence with the author of this text\u2014, mentions of 1912 are used as intertextual quotes in several songs. The best known of these quotes are those referring to La Maya and Alto Songo, which can be found, for example, in Antonio Mach\u00edn (\u201cFuego en La Maya\u201d), the Septeto Nacional (\u201c!Mam\u00e1, se quema La Maya!\u201d); the Conjunto Chappott\u00edn with Lil\u00ed Mart\u00ednez Gri\u00f1\u00e1n (\u201cAlto Songo\u201d)\u2014with versions such as that of Johnny Pacheco and Pete El Conde Rodr\u00edguez\u2014, etc. By courtesy of Ren\u00e9 Esp\u00ed Valero, the song \u201cIvonet y Estenoz,\u201d a clave by Miguel Companioni (Cuarteto Nano with guitar, Odeon Record A 88000) is reproduced here, perhaps for the first time. I appreciate the generosity of Esp\u00ed Valero, one of the most diligent scholars of Cuban music, for giving this piece from his personal collection to accompany this text.<\/em><\/p>\n

The PIC reacted against this notion of racial brotherhood, which unified everyone within the homeland, but left racialized inequality intact. According to the PIC, \u201cthere are phrases [\u201cnothing like black….\u201d] that have killed the just and legitimate aspirations of the black element to the point of having cowed it in such a way that it feels incapable of claiming what in fact and right corresponds to it.\u201d6<\/sup> For its members, they were both black and Cuban. There was nothing antagonistic about both identities.<\/p>\n

The PIC launched into a (badly) armed protest in 1912. In 1910 several of its members had been subjected to a legal farce for an alleged \u201cblack conspiracy.\u201d Before, they had been cannon fodder in the 1906 \u201crevolution.\u201d Before, they had integrated a very powerful interracial army, which had challenged the racist notions established at the time, both in the United States and in Spain.7<\/sup><\/p>\n

Its uprising in 1912 took place on May 20, to denounce their exclusion from the Republic, which many of its members had decisively contributed to founding. The protest was put down by a very violent state crime, which until today is still only known as \u201cla guerrita del 12\u201d, or the \u201cwar of races.\u201d That same State had previously closed the doors to the self-organized political participation, by legal means, of Cuban blacks against their exclusions from their interests and needs.<\/p>\n