{"id":61805,"date":"2021-10-11T17:55:25","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T17:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61805"},"modified":"2021-10-11T18:03:39","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T18:03:39","slug":"confronting-anti-blackness-in-colorblind-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61805","title":{"rendered":"Confronting Anti-Blackness in \u201cColorblind\u201d Cuba"},"content":{"rendered":"

Confronting Anti-Blackness in \u201cColorblind\u201d Cuba<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sapiens<\/a>
\n2021-09-02<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Obreg\u00f3n<\/strong><\/a>, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology
\nUniversity of Illinois, Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
A man holds his grandson inside the doorway of a fruit and vegetable shop in Havana, Cuba<\/a>. Artur Widak\/NurPhoto\/Getty Images<\/em><\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 1960s, Fidel Castro\u2019s revolutionary Communist government<\/a> claimed to have eradicated racism in Cuba<\/a>. An anthropologist explores how racial hierarchies persist despite these official narratives, shaping family dynamics and significantly limiting opportunities for Afro-Cubans<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I sat waiting for Yudell*<\/sup> to finish his shift at the paladar<\/em><\/a>, or small-scale private restaurant, in the central Vedado<\/a> neighborhood in Havana<\/a>. I\u2019d already interviewed a few of the workers there. As I bided my time at a corner table on the outdoor patio, two of the waiters began to tease Yudell, yelling across to me, \u201cDon\u2019t believe what he says! He will probably tell you that he is Negro because he is a racist!\u201d<\/p>\n

Yudell timidly looked at me across the patio and chuckled. Growing up Cuban American, I had been to Cuba<\/a> on past occasions to visit family, but this time I was there to conduct ethnographic interviews on processes of racialization for my dissertation in anthropology. I knew from experience that I had to tread carefully when entering conversations about race in Cuba<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Cuba, a place where the revolutionary Communist government has claimed to have eliminated racial inequality<\/a>, directly speaking of race is more than taboo; it is counterrevolutionary<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When we sat down for our interview a little later, Yudell proudly described himself exactly as his co-workers had said he would: \u201cI am Negro\u201d (a Black man). We talked about the persistence of colorism<\/a> in Cuba, a system of discrimination based on skin color. Yudell chose not to self-identify as a Mulato<\/a> (a mixed-race person) or a Moro (a dark-skinned person with a thin nose and \u201cgood hair\u201d), since he saw such taken-for-granted racialized categories as a way for individuals to distance themselves from Blackness…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 1960s, Fidel Castro\u2019s revolutionary Communist government claimed to have eradicated racism in Cuba. An anthropologist explores how racial hierarchies persist despite these official narratives, shaping family dynamics and significantly limiting opportunities for Afro-Cubans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,21,8,26,394],"tags":[32114,240,673,32113,17839,32112],"class_list":["post-61805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","tag-afro-cubans","tag-colorism","tag-cuba","tag-elizabeth-obregon","tag-fidel-castro","tag-sapiens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61805"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61814,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61805\/revisions\/61814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}