Race in Cuba: Essays On The Revolution And Racial Inequality
by Esteban Morales Dominguez
(Monthly Review Press, £14.95)

Race issues in Cuba can puzzle regular visitors to the island. All around is evidence of the revolution’s achievements of civil equality and of Cuba’s great cultural ajiaco (stew).

But racist attitudes persist, while public debate on racism is rare.

In this book Esteban Morales — black, one of Cuba’s leading public intellectuals and a communist — addresses the causes and consequences of such contradictions. 

When George W Bush’s regime change plans highlighted black consciousness as fertile ground for subversion in Cuba, Morales became the most effective demolisher of Cuban-American race “experts.” Within Cuba, he is the most effective critic of the limited political responses to the legacies of racism.

Morales insists that there is no institutional racism, although he — like Cuban rappers — highlights police attitudes and the disproportionately black prison population It’s the “definitive proof,” he argues, that the revolution has failed to eradicate social inequality based on race.

He locates the sources of racism in the evolution of Cuban nationality. Whites came to the island freely as settlers, while black Cubans came overwhelmingly as slaves.

Five centuries of social poison, he insists, cannot be eradicated in five decades. But he is harsh on the treatment of racism as a taboo political issue.

Early post-revolutionary claims that the race issue had been resolved created long “years of silence” which limited the revolution’s extraordinary drive to equality. And, he laments, because Cuba’s national census excludes race questions the revolution cannot show just how much has already been achieved.

This silence also prevents social policy from tackling objective race disadvantage by rebalancing the pre-revolutionary distribution of social and material resources. The “special period” highlighted such disadvantages, prompting the interventions by Fidel Castro that Morales credits with reopening debate.

Morales offers several explanations for the taboo. One is the “pure and simple idealism” of the early years. Another is “dogmatic Marxism-Leninism,” that too readily subordinated identity politics to class analysis.

An obvious factor is the fear of creating divisions in the face of US hostility and here Morales’s position is strongly patriotic. Far from preventing division, he argues, official silence enables Cuba’s enemies to exploit racial inequality.

Debate has revived in recent years led, not least, by Fidel and Raul Castro. Morales wants more systematic work by the party, the institutions of popular power and by mass organisations. He especially identifies inadequate teaching of the histories of Africa and of black Cuban politics.

His book is a unique English-language resource in a field contaminated by US-sourced material and, as a revolutionary call for progress, it deserves a wide audience among Cuba’s friends.

This review by Steve Ludlam, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sheffield, appears in the autumn issue of CubaSi, magazine of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. The book is on offer at £14.95 + 1.50 p&p from its online shop at www.shop.cuba-solidarity.org.uk.