By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Wednesday February 04, 2009 - 06:22:00 PM
Some years ago, I was part of a team asked by a progressive American organization to do a brief study of anti-black racism in the country of Cuba while we were there working on another project. During our tour of the country for about six weeks, we conducted interviews (as much as we could do with our limited Spanish) and made observations. While almost every Afro-Cuban we spoke with felt they were doing better economically since the 1959 Revolution, there were deep remnants of racism that Cubans seemed to neither acknowledge or even recognize. The country’s various beauty pageants, for example, all featured exclusively women of fair skin and European features and hair; women of visible African descent were not considered standards of “beauty.” And at one of the nation’s insane asylums—a system the Cubans are particularly proud of—the patients put on a minstrel show for the visitors, complete with blackface and buck-and-wing dancing. Our hosts could not understand why the African-American portion of the contingent was aghast.
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