10 April 2015

Cuba, the Summit, and Africans


I'm going through a few media sites covering the Summit of the Americas in Panama. I usually don't bother, but this is the first time the Organization of American States [OAS] has allowed Cuba's participation - meaning, this is the first time the US has allowed it [more on that presently]. Many Latin American countries - to their credit - told the US they would boycott this Summit were Cuba excluded. In 1960, these same countries had expelled Cuba for having a revolution.

In December 2014, Pres. Obama announced re-establishing relations with Cuba, broken after its 1959 revolution. Never a country to take the high road, in the same breath practically, the White House said some stupid things about Venezuela being a threat to the US, and that dissident, anti-Castro groups should also be allowed at the OAS Summit.

To my knowledge, Obama did not invite Occupy Wall Street, the Nation of Islam, BlackLivesMatter, The Huey Newton Gun Club, or the KKK to attend the Summit.

Other creepy things have happened since Obama's December surprise. The US has included a known terrorist in its Summit line-up, a man who was involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, trained by the CIA as a killer and anti-Castro subversive, and is credited as the person who pulled the trigger against Che Guevara's head in Bolivia.

Like I said, the US is never one to take the high road.

In many news conferences and interviews, Cuban representatives are demanding the removal of this offensive man. They are reminding us of the US propensity to harbor its own terrorists, like in Miami, who have murdered Cuban civilians, blew up Cuban passenger planes, bombed hotels, etc.

Also, while Obama called for dissident groups to be present at the Summit, various civil society organizations from Cuba, like the Worker's Union, the CTC, have been refused accreditation by the Summit coordinators [read: USA]. Cuban officials have also been interviewed about how blocking these organization a vital aspect of Cuba's development is being left out of panel discussions.

The word "discrimination" was used several times. I agree. Cuban workers should have a voice at the Summit and not only those corporate labor unions.

But what struck me after watching too many clips is this: WHERE IS THE AFRICAN? On my first [and second] trips to Cuba I was struck immediately how African the country is, and yet so far I see no Cuban official of the African diaspora represented in interviews or news conferences, none condemning Che's assassin, none speaking about evolving relations with the US, or noting the "discrimination" behind blocking civil groups from Cuba at the Summit, or none noting overall the Summit is still in the hands of the United States. No Africans from Cuba ... None. Not even in the background!

Over one hundred years ago, before the US entered the Cuban landscape and imposed Jim Crow on the island, the white elite were like other white elites of Latin America: they feared their African majorities and did not want to be known, or, worse, become, another Haiti. Europeans of all classes were invited in en masse in an attempt to counterbalance the Africanness of the Cuban landscape. This white-washing was official policy all over African Latin America.

White men, like Fidel's own father, a poor soldier from Gallicia, Spain, were given as some sort of reparation huge tracts of land: a reparation denied Africans in Cuba who had worked that land for many generations as slaves. From this wealthy start, Fidel was born, while African Cubans remained the lowest part of society.

The Revolution did benefit Africans in Cuba most of all, and in almost every area they showed progress - education, life expectancy, housing. The Revolution did not take two generations of panel discussions and church meetings to undo Jim Crow as the US did: It was immediate. Fidel said he would not betray the revolution's promise. He acknowledged in speeches that Cuba was an "African and Latin" country.

But just as swiftly as the revolution has lost ground since the disappearance of the USSR, Africans in Cuba have fallen further and further behind. As the economy suffocated, white professional Cubans were given lucrative service jobs in the hotels, with access to dollars. I rarely saw an African in a hotel.

But I got harshly schooled one day when a hotel manager, two police, came to fish me out of the hotel pool in Santiago de Cuba. They thought I was Cuban, had trespassed onto the hotel, and had the cojones to go for a swim. I ranted on about apartheid in Cuba, that I could not enter or leave my hotel without being stopped, etc. Using the word "apartheid" seemed to genuinely hurt these Cubans.

Unlike the United States, this poor Caribbean country had since the mid 1960's sent teachers, technicians, and military personnel to help build resistance, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid movements in Africa; to start schools, provide guidance, wage war, sacrifice their lives.

South Africa's apartheid regime, whatever its imperfections today, could not have ended without the intervention of Cuban troops defeating the US-backed racist regime.

What other African-Caribbean country has attempted to do half as much on the continent? None. And they have nominal Africans heading their governments. They are present at the Summit, wearing the costumes of European businessmen, a subtle reminder where their allegiances lay. They have done nothing to address the crimes done to destabilize the African continent; these House Negroes are too busy making Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium their "Mother Country." These heads of state and government are actually no better than the best clowns, peacemakers, and tap-dancers leading our deeply colonized people throughout the diaspora, especially in the US.

Still, I strive to reconcile these two Cubas, if they are in fact distinct, which has made tremendous sacrifice for African liberation but has limits to how this is affected at home. Because it would seem to me that any country, let alone a poor one, who would be so committed to African social justice and sovereignty, would look different domestically.

A Summit of whose America?

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