Articles 41 and 42 of the Cuban Constitution (1976) penalise any discrimination based on race, gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, nationality, religious belief and other aspects relating to human dignity.
1 Constitute Project, ‘Cuba 1975 (rev. 2002)’, Oxford’s Constitutions of the World, 2002; https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Cuba_2002 [accessed 6 November 2020]. Yet, these forms of discrimination have perpetuated in Cuba since colonial times. Let us start with racial discrimination. Under Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar’s military dictatorship (1952–59), education and social life were segregated by race and social class. In the years leading up to the revolution, segregation was used to prevent upward mobility in terms of labour relations and economic opportunities. Black people were underrepresented in the organs of government, only achieving about 9% of the seats in the house and senate, and the access to democratic processes for Afro-Cubans was limited.
2 Mark Q. Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 50. Domínguez writes that while lower-class black and white people lived and worked together, there was a white middle- and upper-class elite. The precarious balance that held Batista in power waned as the upper and middle classes turned against him, as well as peasants and workers in Oriente Province, many of them Afro-Cuban.
3 Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (London: Belknap Press, 1978), p. 49.In
Castro, the Blacks and Africa, Carlos Moore states that Fidel Castro addressed the race issue vaguely in his famous ‘History Will Absolve Me’ manifesto (1953).
4 Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles, CA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1991), p. 7. Moore documents how the regime systematically attacked black leaders and suppressed their culture and accuses Castro of positing racial equality as a gift granted by the revolution, rather than a goal to be attained through a fair process of empowerment of the black and mixed-race community. Castro presented capitalism as the origin of the racial problem and promised that the 26th of July Movement would implement measures in education and legislation against it. However, Cuban society remained racist in revolutionary times, as ‘most of the old and new racial attitudes and assumptions are perpetuated by Cubans of all walks of life in their daily lives’.
5 Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, p. 210. Clarence Lusane argues that black leaders, intellectuals and citizens responded differently to the regime’s paternalistic tone towards them.
6 Clarence Lusane, ‘From Black Cuban to Afro-Cuban: Researching Race in Cuba’, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 1.2 (1999), 73–79, p. 75. The regime’s policies, rhetoric and practices on racial discrimination were erratic. For example, the exaltation of the Afro-Cuban roots that led to military interventions in Angola and Congo was soon abandoned, mainly due to the financial constraints caused by the US embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
7 Edna M. Rodríguez-Mangual, Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 18–19. Guerra wrote about this war intervention: ‘Nobody clarified the real reason behind our participation in that war in Africa’.
8 Spanish original: ‘Sobre el verdadero por qué de nuestra presencia en esa guerra de África nadie habla’; Guerra, ‘Cuba, una historia de necrológicas’. Since the early 1990s, many have highlighted the resurgent racism associated with further economic shortages due to the Special Period. In the words of Juana M. Cordones-Cook in her study on Nancy Morejón, the myth of racial equality in Cuba has become ‘a collective self-deception fostered by adherence to the ideology and egalitarian discourse of a redemptive utopia. The racial prejudice in fact, although it is denied, is manifested in the distribution of power, work and housing’.
9 Spanish original: ‘un auto-engaño colectivo fomentado por la adhesión a la ideología y al discurso igualitario de una utopía redentora. El prejuicio racial de hecho, aunque se niegue, se pone de manifiesto en la distribución de poder, de trabajo y de vivienda’; Juana María Cordones-Cook, Soltando amarras y memorias: mundo y poesía de Nancy Morejón (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2009), p. 55. She is referring to how the structural forces that determined the daily actions and policies in favour of the revolution’s ideology and equalitarian discourse operated for the benefit of the white elite only.
In Negra, Nina suffers discrimination for being black and for being a woman with a provoking understanding of freedom. I mentioned in Chapter 3 that Cuba has been a regional leader for women’s rights since the 1970s, hosting the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC) first Regional Conference on Women in Latin America in 1977 and remaining a presiding officer country since then. Cuba was the first country to sign and the second to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1980. Therefore, Cuba has formally agreed with international norms around gender equality.
While on the surface Cuba has good women’s equality compared to other countries in the region, traditional gender norms attached to
machismo remain strong in some areas of life. Women in Cuba do most of the cooking, cleaning and childcare,
10 Candace Johnson, ‘Framing for Change: Social Policy, the State, and the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas’, Cuban Studies, 42.1 (2012), 35–51. while men take more responsibility for earning income. Women are highly sexualised and objectified and are judged on their appearance. These traditionally gendered social issues conflict with the empowerment and formal gender equality that (some) lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans and other women experience.
Let us halt for a moment on the long and complex evolution of the feminist movement throughout the 50 years of the Cuban Revolution. A short review of the improvements in women’s rights since Fidel Castro came to power can help us understand the current situation for women on the island and Guerra’s critical view on the matter.
11 For a detailed account of the feminist movement in Cuba, see Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro’s Victory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Michelle Chase, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).Only a few hours after Fulgencio Batista fled, Fidel Castro referred to ‘women’s problems’ as requiring tenacity, firmness, perseverance and effort.
12 Fidel Castro Ruz, ‘Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, en el Parque Céspedes de Santiago de Cuba’, República de Cuba, 1 January 1959; http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f010159e.html [accessed 6 November 2020]. When Castro came to power, more than 10,000 primary schools were created as part of the education programme on the island, causing a dramatic increase in access to education for women. Castro also supported the creation of Vilma Espín’s Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) in 1960 and expressed his belief that this new organisation would improve women’s chances to succeed on all fronts. It is worth noting that almost 50 years after his arrival to power, Castro published a book dedicated entirely to ‘women’s problems’, titled
Mujeres y revolución.
13 Fidel Castro Ruz, Mujeres y revolución (Havana: Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, 2006).The rejection of moral Catholic values led to advances that guaranteed women’s self-determination. For example, abortion was legalised in 1965, and the government launched a campaign against prostitution that affected nearly 100,000 women. At present, the National Centre for Sexual Education (CENESEX) plays an important role in female sexual liberation.
14 National Centre for Sexual Education; https://www.cenesex.org [accessed 6 November 2020]. The centre, which is directed by Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of former President Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín, has become a referent in the battle for sexual freedom and works against the increase in prostitution as a labour option for young women on the island.
Despite the improvements made, Guerra indicates that the patriarchal military model in Cuba relegates women and the feminist movement to the background. Guerra wondered in the newspaper El País:
Why in the socialist world were there never presidents? Could the world pronounce the name of a Cuban minister? Would they recognise a heroine as easily as the famous revolutionary leaders? Why is there not a feminist movement in Cuba? Is feminism contrary to the revolutionary, Marxist, socialist precepts?
15 Spanish original: ‘¿Por qué en el mundo socialista nunca hubo presidentas? ¿Podría el mundo pronunciar el nombre de alguna ministra cubana? ¿Reconocerían una heroína tan fácilmente como a los famosos líderes revolucionarios? ¿Por qué no hay un movimiento feminista en Cuba? ¿Es acaso el feminismo contrario a los preceptos revolucionarios, marxistas, socialistas?’; Wendy Guerra, ‘La liberación de la mujer en Cuba’, El País, 1 August 2016; https://elpais.com/cultura/2016/07/31/actualidad/1469988393_601545.html [accessed 20 November 2020].She argues that, at present, the government perceives the feminist movement as a destabilising element against the State forces and perceives cultivated and independent women as subaltern individuals. In Negra, Nina’s double discrimination for being black and a woman culminates in her murder.
The North American theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw referred to the discrimination against black women in Cuba from an intersectional perspective that is sustained by the interrelation of separate categories of social existence, such as gender, race and social class, among others.
16 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140 (1989), 139–67. Crenshaw’s intersectional approach is in line with the decolonised and feminist approach to the dynamics of male power and control of institutional forces over women in the region. It considers the intertwining systems of sexism, racism, heterosexism and capitalism as the matrix of domination.
17 See, for example, Daisy Rubiera Castillo, ‘La mujer en la Regla de Ocha: una mirada de género’, Revista Revolución y Cultura, 2.3 (1999), 72–75; Daisy Rubiera Castillo, ‘Género y mitología en la Regla de Ocha’, Revista del Caribe, 35 (2001), 49–53. This view questions the approach from white, Eurocentric and heterosexual feminism and recognises instead the thoughts of the subaltern.
18 Ochy Curiel, ‘Descolonizando el feminismo: una perspectiva desde América Latina y el Caribe’, Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano sobre Praxis y Pensamiento Feminista, 2009; http://feministas.org/IMG/pdf/Ochy_Curiel.pdf [accessed 20 November 2020].On the other hand, Guerra poses a question to the reader: is migration the solution to political repression in Cuba? Despite her strong criticism of the Cuban State, she does not find the solutions to the problems for Cubans in exile. Others have presented a similar account of migration and exile. For example, in her study on Reinaldo Arenas, Negrín refers to migration as a process through which the individual ‘loses his value and honour’.
19 Spanish original: ‘pierde su valor y dignidad’; María Luisa Negrín, El círculo del exilio y la enajenación en la obra de Reinaldo Arenas (Lewiston, ME: E. Mellen Press, 2000), p. 42. Padura uses the term ‘conflicto de perternencia’ (‘belonging conflict’) to refer to the inability of the exiled community to disengage from Cuba’s fate and the nostalgia and fantasies about their life experiences on the island.
20 Cited by Luis Manuel García Méndez, ‘Cuba es un país que mira al pasado’, Cuba Encuentro, 19 December 2008; https://www.cubaencuentro.com/entrevistas/articulos/cuba-es-un-pais-que-mira-al-pasado-i-140519 [accessed 20 November 2020]. For Guerra, migrating can be liberating at first, but it also impacts your identity, as you must ‘accept, allow, lower your head and try to move forward by cancelling yourself to become part of something else’.
21 Spanish original: ‘aceptar, permitir, bajar la cabeza y tratar de avanzar anulando el yo para volverse parte’; Negra, p. 145. In this way, she indicates that the answers to the problems of Cubans lie within the island, and that is why Nina returns from France, which is presented as a chauvinist country dominated by social tension between ethnic minorities, nationalities and social classes.
How does Negra represent racism in contemporary Cuba? How does racist discrimination increase Nina’s Afro-Cuban identity? Let us try to answer these questions in the next section.