Cuban-American Anti-Blackness
reflection on our history as an exile community
Cuban family member: “the problem in this country is all the immigrants taking the jobs away, most of them are illegal.”
Me: do your colleagues feel that way about you?
It may be unexamined,
It may be unintellectual,
But what it isn’t….
It is not ignorance, it is not stupidity,
It is…
aligning. with.whiteness.
American Whiteness.
An American Whiteness that seeks to consume, to dominate, to subjugate,
to feel powerful, always at the expense of another…
“mi amigito negrito no podía entrar conmigo”. ~ elder family member about 1950’s Havana while going into a social club.
Southern American Whiteness felt familiar to Cubans in the first and second wave,
And like many other ethnic groups before…
assimilating to American Whiteness,
is the path to acceptance and participation for Cuban Americans.
Cuban Americans immigrated with a red carpet…
self-identified as *EXILES*
…not immigrants
so for the average Cuban American there’s no problem with brown folks at the border getting kidnapped, abused, raped, forcibly sterilized.
… because that was the legacy that we left behind in Cuba. that legacy is not intellectual. rather,
is a legacy of violence against Black and Indigenous bodies, and it lives in white bodies.
Facts…
Cuba had more enslaved African people than the US, 🤯
Cuba’s slave trade started earlier and ended later than in the US,🤭
Cuba was an apartheid state before the revolution 🧐
And in 1959…
the pas de deux between Cuban-Americans and American whiteness began.
it is a dance called assimilation,
where the lead is the muse,
and the partner is the fool.
