Castro’s Cuba and the African Diaspora

On December 31, 1958, the revolutionary 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro , overthrew the military dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista and replaced it with a revolutionary socialist state. The Cuban Revolution had global repercussions, transforming the country’s relationship with the United States in particular. While diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States remained strained, African Americans had a unique relationship to Cuba and its leader, Fidel Castro. Activist Harold Rogers remembers that Castro often said, “ If you scratch me, I'm Africa unde rneath. ” [1] Castro’s commitment to African liberation struggles and human rights appealed to African Americans. However, African Americans were not without criticism of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Rogers describes his perceptions of the state of Afro-Cubans after the revolution: “Over half the population is of African descent…. After the revolution, they announced some special programs on this issue of race in Cuba. One was to give the dark-skinned Cubans double pay for twenty-five years in terms of their pay... Then they went on a 25-year span to build the schools, hospitals, daycare centers, first in the black areas for 25 years because this was a material condition.” [2] He goes on to describe Castro’s attempts to end racism in Cuba and its relative success: “They passed a very strict law against racism. I think, life imprisonment if you show any signs of racism. So, yes, you still have racism in Cuba. That does exist in Cuba. I'm not denying that. But it is very, very different… They admit it's still there, but it is a whole lot better than here.” [3] Physicist Carlos Handy , also the son of the famous “Father of the Blues” W.C. Handy was born in Havana, Cuba in 1950. In his interview for The HistoryMakers , he notes that his mother, Leonor Maria Cartaya, “ loved Fidel...She grew up at an age when there was a lot of anti-American imperialist feelings because they felt that America would go out there, buy out the beaches, exclude the local population, try to impose segregation… There's a romantic aspect to her in terms of Castro.” [4]

The Cuban Revolution was not only significant for Black Cubans, it was significant for Black people. In his interview for The HistoryMakers, cultural activist James Early explains: “Cuba comes in '59, two years after [Kwame] Nkrumah starts the decolonization movement. It comes two years after the big movement in Montgomery, the Montgomery Improvement Association and all before Southern Christian Leadership Conference moves in more formally in the light. So the anti-colonial movement, the anti-racist movement and then this socialist revolution that does not start out clearly as a socialist revolution and where their construct is a development of the New Man.” [5] Given this context, Early continues: “Cuba spurred the imagination. And then you had these iconic, romantic figures, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. This was exciting. It gave us hope and it stimulated our imagination and the sense of what we, too, could contribute to changes in society. So Cuba alone was very, very large for a lot of us, you know, coming out of that '60's period.” [6] Jerome W. Mondesire, who published the Philadelphia Sun newspaper and acted as president of Philadelphia's chapter of the NAACP, remembers “when Fidel Castro came to New York in '59, he wasn't allowed to stay at a downtown hotel. He had to stay at the Hotel Theresa ” and New York dentist Dr. Carol Morales remembers the “ excitement that generated in the community .” [7] During his visit, Castro met with Malcolm X , who wrote in his autobiography that Castro “achieved a psychological coup over the U.S. State Department when it confined him to Manhattan, never dreaming that he’d stay uptown in Harlem and make such an impression among the Negroes.” [8]

Castro’s Cuba was more than a symbol in the Pan-African movement; Cuba was active in the anti-colonial battles on the African continent. In his interview with community leader Edward “Buzz” Palmer describes Cuba’s military assistance: “The Angolans and Mozambicans came to him [Fidel Castro] and said, ‘Listen you always talking a good game about how you want to support people, but you're not supporting us.’ So, what Castro did he said well I'll send some troops over, all black. They insisted that they be all black.” [9] In an article for the Jacobin, Jorge Tamames adds, “Cuba’s role in Angola should be looked upon as an example — perhaps the only one in recent history — of a foreign policy that was proudly interventionist, genuinely committed to emancipation, and in many ways successful.” [10] Cuba also supported African Americans in the United States. Rogers recalls that in the early 2000s, “The Congressional Black Caucus asked [Castro] about medicine in Cuba. And Fidel said that the government would finance 500 Americans a year, minorities, to study medicine in Cuba, and they would pay the costs. The only requirement was that they have to come back here and serve in under-represented areas…Now, the Cuban medical system is recognized as one of the best in the world. So all they have to do is take the foreign entrance exam when you come back here, because the American Medical Association recognizes the Cuban Medical Association.” [11]

Also, Cuba’s contribution to the human rights struggle abroad was undeniable. Castro was also known for his support of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and his relationship with Nelson Mandela was famously close, causing Mandela to face harsh criticism. Rogers remembers: “On the Ted Koppel Show, Ted Koppel asked [Mandela], why he supported Fidel. And he said, in our struggle, we first came to the United States and asked for help. And the United States did nothing. We went to Cuba, we went to Libya, and they supported us. And then he said, in so many words, why should now I speak out against them, my old friends, when I got a new friend like you? I would not be a liberation fighter if I dissed them. … And Ted Koppel was speechless. He didn't know what to say.” [12] Despite the United States’ disdain for communism and Cuba’s policies, Castro was committed to global liberation, winning over African Americans who were unwilling to reject Mandela solely for his association with Castro. Real estate entrepreneur R. Donahue Peebles in his interview explained: When Nelson Mandela came here to [Miami, Florida] after being released from his South African prison, he was at a ceremony that was to be attended by the mayor of Miami and Miami Beach and the county, and he was snubbed… The African American community basically felt that that was enough, and the straw that broke the camel's back. The disrespect that was given to a world black leader by this community was intolerable.” [13] In response, Andrew Ingraham , president of the National Association of Black Hotel Owners, Operators and Developers remembers how H.T. Smith and Marilyn Holifield “led a group to ask the city to reverse their snubbing of Mr. Nelson Mandela and to give him the welcome fitting of a visiting head of state or dignitary. The powers that be refused. And so, they looked around to see how could they make them pay?” [14] The African American community in Miami organized a national boycott, discouraging conventions and groups and businesses from coming to Miami Dade to do business or for tourism. Peebles spoke to the impact of the boycott: “the estimates I've heard publicized were about $50 million in economic impact to the community and …I would think that that's a very conservative estimate. And I would measure the economic impact in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” [15]

African American support for Castro’s Cuba was not without critique, however. Broadcast journalist Jose Griñan noted that his father, a native Cuban, “knew [Castro] was Communist, knew he was a Socialist. But he also knew how he grew up. And he was of the mind that Castro was going to make things better for people who had the worst lives in Cuba. And to a certain extent, he did. But in the process of doing that, he did things that did not go along with what we in society think. Some were executions--someone pulled out of a home, put on the street--boom, dead--because they had some tie to either a casino, the mafia, the U.S. government, or something of that nature.” [16] Performer and songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr. described his dismay with the state of Cuba: “I just was in Cuba, and, you know, you saved the people forty-one years ago. When do you put down the guns? When can the people go, be free to go? When can everything just be cool? Yeah, I was for socialism. I was a communist. I was glad when Castro came on. But when I looked at that, Jesus, what is the plan here? What is the program?” [17] He adds, “When you're young, you think you know. Ah, yes, if we just had the socialist revolution; if we just overthrow the ruling class; but the older you get, some of that seems still to some appeal, but then on the other hand, you can see, man, I don't know how this is ever gonna be solved. I mean they're so mixed up here.” [18] Scholars agree that Fidel Castro’s legacy must be analyzed within the global and historical context. In an NPR interview, political science and African-American studies professor Mark Sawyer states, “I think we need to look at Castro's mistakes of not allowing black pressure groups, not pursuing more rigid anti-discrimination policies as failures, but that he came as close as anybody has ever come to eliminating racial inequality in a place that had had plantation slavery.” [19]

After the passing of Fidel Castro on November 25, 2016, columnist DeWayne Wickham reported, “While his American critics took to the streets of Miami to celebrate Castro’s death, blacks throughout Africa and the Northern Hemisphere remember him as a man who, Mandela said, ‘destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.’ ” [20] The successes and failures of Castro’s Cuba and its legacy in the collective imagination of the African diaspora will continue to be an important point of study as we work to push our country and world toward racial equity. 

Lynching: Its Role and Impact - Mea Culpa - We Erred 

Last week, The HistoryMakers wrote about the history of anti-lynching movement in response to the recent Emmett Till Antilynching Act. We made a serious error with our omission of one of the nation’s most tireless advocates and influential leader in the anti-lynching movement: Ida B. Wells.

In her groundbreaking book Ida: A Sword Among Lions, journalist and former Smith College’s Elizabeth Woodson Professor Paula Giddings explored in depth the life of Ida B. Wells. Giddings writes , “Wells believed that lynching was the central issue that defined blacks as the nation lurched toward the twentieth century, and one that demanded new strategies that included self-defense and civil disobedience.” [21]

In 1892, Wells began writing anti-lynching editorials that called on black people to leave Memphis after three Black men were lynched, one of whom was a close friend of Wells’s. Her campaign was successful, resulting in about twenty percent of the city’s black population leaving. She also was later forced to leave the city after a mob burned down her office and threatened to lynch her if she returned. While in exile, Wells wrote an exposé for the New York Age which was later turned into a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: “It was the first study of lynching and Wells’s initial attempt to show how this particular form of racial violence said more about the cultural failings of the white South than of blacks; how not only race, but attitudes toward women and sexuality, instigated it; and that lynching represented the very heart, the Rosetta Store, of America’s troubled relationship with race.” [22]

A leader in the anti-lynching movement, Wells was also a trailblazer in the suffrage movement, a civil rights pioneer, a wife, and a mother. 

Piano Keys No More: McCoy Tyner (December 11, 1938 – March 6, 2020) 

On Friday, March 6, 2020, we lost renowned jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. His creativity, innovation, and musical backing left a lasting impact on the world of jazz. In his 2004 interview with The HistoryMakers , Tyner spoke of his journey that began with his school’s choir, but changed when after watching his teacher, Ms. Addison, play the piano. He remembers, “I used to walk by and watch her hands. I said, ‘How in the world is she doing that?’” [23] His mother, Beatrice Stevenson Tyner, offered him the choice to pursue singing or piano, and when he chose the piano, she set him up with their neighbors’ piano teacher, Mr. Habershaw, who Tyner described as “an older Afro American gentleman” who “was perfect for children because he was very patient.” [24] Although Tyner did not have a piano at home for about a year, many of his neighbors did. He recalls, “My mother was a beautician…and a lot of [the neighbors] were my mother's clients. And I was never refused a chance to practice on their piano. So from thirteen to fourteen, I was going from one neighbor to a next neighbor, and I would alternate…I'd practice every day after school. I couldn't wait to get home to practice. I mean piano just took over.” [25]

Tyner’s mother herself loved music, particularly Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Tyner recalls, “My mother would always say if we would go to somebody's house who had a piano, she'd touch it. And I thought that she had this feeling of maybe if she wasn't a beautician, she would have played piano.” [26] She supported her son as his passion for piano grew. Tyner remembers, “My father worked hard. And when he heard I needed a piano, he was a little reluctant to buy a piano. But my mother said ‘No, we got to buy him one, so he won't have to go from one neighbor to another.’” [27] Tyner began playing music for her clients: “I had a console spinet and it was situated in the beauty shop. So when my mother would have clients, and I called a jam session, and it happened to overlap, she would say, ‘Come on in.’ And it was a lady sitting under the dryer with a saxophone player right next to her, patting her foot…We'd have a big band in the shop, be jamming right in the shop, when the people would be in there getting their hair done, getting a shampoo. I mean who's gonna ask for more.” [28] He remembers his mother once asked him to give a concert in church shortly after he began playing. He put his tux on and played a small concert, distinctly remembering how happy it made his mother. Before touring with Bennie Golson and Art Farmer or joining John Coltrane’s quartet, Tyner had his mother. With her encouragement, Tyner was able to nurture his love of the piano and grow to become a true jazz legend.  

Women of Power Summit 15 ^th Anniversary

Black Enterprise President and CEO Earl Butch Graves and Black Enterprise Women of Power Chief Brand Officer Caroline Clarke presided over Black Enterprise ’s 15 ^th Anniversary Women of Power Summit March 5 ^th through March 8 ^th in Las Vegas. Over 1,000 women in attendance for a thought provoking and powerful gathering. Previous Legacy Award recipients were also honored, including The HistoryMaker ’s Founder and President Julieanna Richardson , who was a 2014 Legacy Award recipient. Of the other eleven former recipients honored, nine are HistoryMakers: educator and clinical psychologist Beverly Daniels Tatum , university president Ruth Simmons , professional golfer and educator Renee Powell , fashion show guru Audrey Smaltz , actress and stage director Phylicia Rashad , former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman , and Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie .  

Notes:

We're here to help!

Please direct questions about The HistoryMakers Digital Archive to: digitalarchive@thehistorymakers.org