Event debates racism in Cuba and Haiti

Two Caribbean countries marked by a history of colonial exploitation, slavery and international blockade, and transformed by revolutions led by the people. That is the scenery of Haiti and Cuba, two nations that, despite many similarities, appear quite different with regard to racism. And it was to discuss these differences that the IEA held the panel ‘The Place of Race: Contemporary Caribbean Debates’ on June 27.

The event was organized by the IEA and RACA (Global Collaborative Network ‘Race and Citizenship in the Americas’) with the support of the Dean of Research (PRP) and the Dean of Culture and University Extension (PRCEU) of USP. The panel is part of the schedule of activities of the strategic partnership agreement signed by USP and Princeton University. The purpose of it is to allow teachers and students to develop collaborative activities of teaching and research with the institutional support of both universities.

The panel featured exhibitions by Nick Nesbitt and Rachel Price, both professors at Princeton University, who spoke about the issue of race in Haiti and Cuba. The coordination was handled by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH), which also served as a discussant.

The Haitian pioneering

Nesbitt discussed the relationship between race and citizenship in Haiti from a historical perspective. According to him, the issue of racism in the country has always been treated as a political struggle, whose greatest example would be the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), which resulted in the first territory in the world to abolish slavery and the first state to conquer independence by slave hands.

Also known as the Black Jacobin Revolution, the Haitian Revolution turned against France and colonial slavery, but was ironically influenced by the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité of the French Revolution and strengthened by the uncertainty generated by the French revolutionary period .

According to Nesbitt, the black Jacobinism began as a slave revolt of local character, but became a revolution by a broader scope of the fight and two objectives: the creation of a social structure in which racial discrimination and hierarchical system based on subdivisions of skin colour ceased to exist, and the universalization of the struggle, that no longer focused solely on the slavery of Haitians and went on to defend the end of the enslavement of all humans.

Post-racial Haiti

The Haitian pioneering had a cost: the revolutionary leaders needed to create a republican state governed by human equality from scratch, something unprecedented hitherto. According to Nesbitt, on that basis, Haitians faced unanswered questions: ‘How to create a society in which popular sovereignty is not alienated by a social and racial hierarchy and in which there is a general situation of justice and equality?’.

To enable the construction of the new post-racial republican state, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), greatest leader of the Haitian Revolution, decided to formulate a constitution at a time when the country was still struggling for independence. According to Nesbitt, this was the first document of its kind to declare that all men had the right not to be property of other men.

After the deposition and death Louverture by the French, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758-1806) took the lead, and with the end of the revolution promulgated a new constitution, in the context of an independent state. Nesbitt said that this second constitution was also marked by originality, because it declared that all Haitian citizens, regardless of color, were black. ‘From this inventive gesture everyone became black, so that racial categorization, instead of being deleted, was expanded, universalized, and converted into an attribute of political citizenship’, said the researcher.

For Nesbitt, the Haitian case deserves attention because the tradition of black Jacobinism addresses the issue of race in a very specific way, trying not to erase the marks of racial differences, but making them irrelevant in the social hierarchy and the scope of political rights.

The Cuban controversy

Price addressed the current situation of racism in Cuba concentrating her speech on the controversy generated around the article ‘For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun’, by the Cuban writer Roberto Zurbano, published on March 24, 2013, in The New York Times.

Referring to the opening measures of the Cuban economy, Zurbano says in the article that ‘the private sector in Cuba now enjoys some economic freedom, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We have inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial period. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it’.

The article generated intense international debate around the issue of race in Cuba and resulted in the publication of numerous other articles in response, some supporting the Zurbano’s point of view, others criticizing what would be the non-recognition of the gains that the Cuban Revolution had provided to the blacks. According to Price, this is a debate that happens outside Cuban official spaces and is mainly driven by the young, bloggers and artists engaged in the topic.

A global issue

Given the severe consequences of the article, Zurbano stated that the title has been changed in the last minute without his knowledge, the original being less controversial: ‘For Blacks in Cuba, The Revolution Is not Over’. Still, he defended the decision to publish the text in the NYT, as this would be a way to reach an audience beyond the Cuban academy.

According to Price, the writer claimed that to renounce international debate would mean reducing the impact of the article to old nationalist concepts and not taking the process of unequal exchange generated by tourism, the new information technologies, the migration and the transnationalization of cultureinto account.

The researcher also pointed out that in making his reply Zurbano stood Cuban racism as a global phenomenon: 'He said he did not want to review the history, but to ask questions about the future, and when he put in debate both historical advances of revolution and what lies ahead, he made ​​it clear that there is not a specific Cuban case, because the race issue would be global, not merely local'.

Racism in Cuba

For Price, the controversy generated by Zurbano's article brought up important issues related to race in Cuba. One is the idea of the the country not having the need to talk about race because, as what is believed to have been declared by José Martí (1853-1895), hero of the Cuban independence, Cuba had a post-racial aspiration. Another aspect highlighted in the discussion is the interference of the United States after the Cuban independence, which would have strongly influenced the conduct of racial politics in the new republic and led to the extinction of the Independent Party of Color in 1912.

Moreover, according to Price, both Zurbano's text and the elicited answers drew attention to aspects of race in Cuba that should be discussed, including: the history of inequality between whites and blacks, the persistence of racial discrimination, the black disadvantages to face the economic opening of the country, the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on blacks, which would have been the biggest losers, and the concentration of blacks in the suburbs.