How Cuba recognizes Blackness through laws and science

According to Anayansi Rodríguez Camejo, Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, any talk about race in Cuba has to look at the work done by Color Cubano. Created by the country’s government in 2019, it is Cuba’s official National Program Against Racism and Racial Discrimination. It was implemented in 2021.

Run by a National Commission that promotes affirmative action-style anti-discrimination laws and educational programs, Color Cubano has also become a new way to understand the island’s identity: It recognizes Cuba as an Afrodescendant nation and acknowledges that the majority of its people can trace their ancestry to Africa, Spain, and Indigenous peoples.

“It’s something even scientifically proven that we –– all Cubans –– we are, after all, the same, because we have a lot in our genes, including in our blood,” Rodríguez Camejo said. “We come from Africa and we come from Spain. That has been scientifically demonstrated, genetically demonstrated — that almost 100% of our genes, mainly in Cuba, have some Afro-descendance. That is why we consider ourselves Afrodescendants in general and in total in the Cuban population.”

Rodríguez Camejo cited findings from a 2014 genetics study, which found that out of 1,019 people, the average Cuban had ancestry that was 72% European, 20% African, and 8% Indigenous. Cubans in the southeast provinces of Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba had higher percentages of African ancestry, and there was higher Indigenous Taíno ancestry in the nation’s eastern provinces. Another study, in 2018, found that out of 860 people, patterns showed that Cubans have a mixed genetic heritage.

Cuban officials say that these scientific studies pointing to the nation’s diverse genetic heritage help shape the ideas behind Color Cubano and the way the government’s laws, its inequality measurements, and its public policy are being designed.

In a one-on-one interview with the Amsterdam News at Havana’s Fidel Castro Centro, Rodríguez Camejo –– one of Cuba’s senior diplomats –– described racism in Cuba as a problem with historical roots that the Revolution outlawed but has yet to fully erase.

What is ‘Color Cubano’?

Rodríguez Camejo said that Cuba inherited institutionalized racism, which she termed a form of exploitation related to colonialism. Racism was officially abolished after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a decision that was upheld in the nation’s revamped 2019 Constitution. “What the Revolution did, since the very beginning, since the triumph on the 1st of January in 1959, it eliminated — abolished — the structural process of racial discrimination by law, and it criminalized it,” Rodríguez Camejo said. “Even with the new constitution adopted in 2019, all human rights were introduced in the whole constitution, including the equity and including the dignity of all human beings. [Language against] racial discrimination, among other discriminations — because we address other discriminations, [is] included in our Constitution and is totally provided for in our Constitution.”

Still, problems like colorism continue to divide Cuban society.

Afro Cuban scholars and educators at a May 28 Casa de África museum gathering in Havana asserted that racism has not been fully eradicated in the country: race-based disadvantages, cultural prejudice, and economic crisis continue to hit Black and Afro Cuban families hardest, they said.

“The people who say [about racism], ‘Hey, everything is all right, we are all Cubans,’ don’t take into account the generations of racism and racial bias,” said writer/researcher Zuleica Romay Guerra at Casa de África. “The Cuban Revolution inherited an economic structure and a social structure that is five centuries old. Unfortunately, racism not only exists, but it reproduces itself.” The issue isn’t that the institutions in Cuba are racist, she said, but because the Revolutionary government has often had to bring in segments of private ownership, structures that support racism have been able to remain in the country and continue to reinforce social biases.

Cuban journalist Rolando Julio Rensoli Medina pointed to the early-20th-century history of racism in Cuba, after the establishment of the Second Republic on May 20, 1902. When Cuba was declared independent after the end of the Spanish-American War, the Cuban Liberating Army, National Navy, police, and principal institutions that had worked to free the country –– which had all been racially integrated –– were disbanded. “These new bodies did not reflect the population’s actual skin-color composition, nor did their officer corps resemble the people,” said Rensoli Medina. “Even though the Assembly of Representatives of the Revolution in 1899 had recognized everyone’s citizenship and dignity, they were not recognized as equals in this new, uncertain era.

“The institutions that emerged in 1902 under the new Republic did not reflect the diversity of the population in their leadership. There were Black generals who ended up sweeping streets and others who became tenant farmers; they operated at the absolute bottom. Ten years into that Republic, in 1912, when a group of Black and Afro Cuban officers protested these conditions, they were massacred, crushing their early enthusiasm.

“This racism persisted as a form of structural racism until 1959,” Rensoli Medina added. “The Revolution overthrew that old Republic, but although it targeted those structures, we still have not fully resolved certain structural problemsn—nand above all, we have not yet resolved the deep psychological prejudices.

“While we have managed to reform some structural areas and, in particular, have created mindsets prepared to tackle the issue, racism in Cuba still possesses very specific, stubborn qualities that we must continue to confront.”

How Cuba says it is trying to end racism

The Cuban government says it is combating racism in a layered approach. Instead of just creating a single law or campaign, it has created constitutional guarantees; established anti-discrimination law; created a national data collection; and targeted social programs, cultural work, education, public memory, and international solidarity.

When Color Cubano was approved by the Council of Ministers, it created a national commission of about 30 representatives from ministries, institutions, and organizations, and then mandated the Color Cubano Social Laboratory in Havana to see to its implementation. Rodríguez Camejo said the commission includes government bodies, academia, and civil society organizations, and that it identifies the specific places where Black and Afrodescendant Cubans still face unequal conditions.

For example, Rodríguez Camejo said Cuba looks at whether Black Cubans are represented in general education, higher education, and specific fields of study. “We have numbers on that,” she said. “We have Black and white people in our universities, in our schools, in the general education system, because that is a free and universal system, and everybody has the right to it.”

Housing is another issue that has to be dealt with. Rodríguez Camejo said current housing disparities remain rooted in colonial inheritances and unequal property accumulation. “We see how [Black people] are doing and how to address this problem of housing,” she said, “and to provide them with the … conditions to have those opportunities [for quality housing]…”

Cuba, Rodríguez Camejo asserted, does not allow racism, but it recognizes that history has created unequal starting points for its citizens. “Then we have to guarantee that we give all people the same opportunities,” she said. “The approach is the approach of human rights for all –– all human rights for all –– and of trying to address those specific vulnerabilities that we have.”