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Published: June 19th 2015
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There is a long list of re-entry shocks to deal with in coming back home after nearly a year in Cuba. Close to the top of the list is our country’s continuing struggles around race. Not having access to internet or U.S. television, we basically missed the news cycles dealing with Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and Baltimore. We heard about the incidents, from friends’ emails and from the
Granma, Cuba’s daily newspaper which never misses an opportunity to broadcast bad news from their neighbor to the north. But that’s not the same as being in the middle of it, hearing and seeing the images 24/7 as our country is prone to do.
The re-entry shock in coming back is parallel to the entry shock in going to Cuba, as far as race relations are concerned. At least on the surface, in stark contrast to the U.S., Cuba seems to have solved the race problem that emerged there, as it did here, from the legacy of the slave trade. Bi-racial marriages are much more the norm than the exception. Every church we visited was multi-racial; 11:00 Sunday morning hour is not a segregated hour in Cuba. And of the 43 churches
of the Fraternity of Baptists, nearly half have pastors of African descent. Another difference – the way they talk about race. Cubans regularly refer to each other in racial terms, with no thought of offense.
Hola blanco; oye negrita; escucha mulatto; hay mi china... (Cuban President Raul Castro is known on the street as
El Chino, because of his Asian facial features). Another, more profound difference, is the absence of violence. Being a white person socialized in the American south, I am familiar with the ingrained prejudicial fear associated with walking through a predominantly black neighborhood at night. And yet, we regularly walked at night through a Matanzas neighborhood named Harlem, with loud music and few working street lights, and never felt the least bit uncomfortable. Kids and teens would sometimes speak to us, asking us where we were from, and they always got a laugh out of my answer —
soy matencero, y tú? (I'm from Matanzas, how about you?)
All this is not to say that racism is non-existent in Cuba. One benefit from gaining more proficiency in the language is that you begin to understand more of the subtleties of the society. Racism is present, just
in a more subtle form. It has a regional dynamic, as the people on the eastern end of the island, with more African influence, experience their fair share of prejudice and discrimination. Eastern Cubans who have been displaced by the economy call themselves Palestinians, an effort to exercise solidarity with another displaced people group suffering from discrimination. The continued strong presence of African based popular religions, deemed demonic by the more conservative Christian denominations in Cuba, presents yet another cultural difference that can at times be a shock. This was true for us one Sunday afternoon when we went to an inter-faith dialogue event in the Marina, a neighborhood in Matanzas with a strong presence of African religions. After the dialogue, there was a demonstration of Orisha dance, for which Kim was on the front row. As two men in rumba costume demonstrated the Ogún machete dance, from my perch several rows back it appeared that the machetes came perilously close to her neck. But Kim survived; no blood was shed, and she even got coaxed up to dance with the rumberos.
Living for 11 months in Matanzas, we missed the all too real bloodshed of Ferguson and Baltimore.
But we are here for Charleston. Nine worshipers gunned down during their Wednesday night prayer meeting, at around 9 PM according to the reports. That was about the time Kim and I had put in a DVD and started watching the movie
Selma. I remember flinching in reactive horror at the shocking scene of four young girls walking down a staircase in their Birmingham church, getting blasted by a bomb. And now, over fifty years later, I turn on the news to another shocking scene. This kind of scene, this kind of race-based hate crime, does not happen in Cuba, or at least it hasn’t happened in the last 56 years. I hope that our analysis of events like this will include a comparison with neighboring countries who do not share our "exceptionalism," who do not experience this kind of violent hate crime. What have we done to create the conditions for this kind of hatred in our society, and what have other cultures done to create different conditions that foster co-existence across lines of difference? Cuba, for all its flaws, has something to teach us when it comes to overcoming the legacy of slavery and ongoing racism and gun violence. May we be humble enough to learn and apply their lessons.
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carolyn christman
non-member comment
there is more to the story?
Stan, in my humble opinion there are more threads to discover here. I believe that the human mind has a universal weakness in fear, which is often transformed into hatred and anger. In the modern world, these feelings can be easily amplified by quick and powerful internet communication, also increasingly universal. What is different in the US and in some other places is the ready and cheap supply of weapons, allowing for people to act upon their hatred more publicly. Why do the American people tolerate this? I believe it's because of the role of the gun in the cultural stories of America -- people believe that the country was built by physical courage and the stories of our country reflect this -- the Revolution, the Wild West, the lone hero. The shooters such as the person in Charleston are trying o recreate that myth by becoming heroes against 'the other.' I had a harder time of getting how this played out in Sandy Hook CT -- who has to show heroism against first graders?! -- but I think that is the way that fear is being expressed. And the reason that people tolerate guns and the NRA rules is that there is an inability to take the gun out of the American story. As a former social studies teacher, I grieve how our history is taught. I reflect a lot on the blog post about how Cubans know the WORDS of their history. US students learn very few words of the American story beyond a few sound bites, and words are the only antidote to guns. We need to find a way to teach the American story so that it is more rich, more generous, more diverse, and more strong in the ideas of the nation. We can't get rid of the gun stories in the culture without having something to replace them with. I think that the Cuban culture has valued and retained its full history so much better. Thanks for writing.