Cuban Struggle is Pan-African Struggle!
A manifesto for Black internationalism
Ian Scott
Int. Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, 1970, Gladys Acosta Ávila
I.
In 1962, in a retaliatory move to preserve imperial power, the United States imposed an economic embargo on the small island of Cuba. Restricting all trade between the two countries, the embargo severely hampered Cuba’s economic development, leading the socialist state to lose approximately $130 billion over almost sixty years and forcing Cubans to rely heavily on tourism to bring in revenue. With COVID-19 abruptly restricting travel in the past year and a half, the country’s precarity became increasingly obvious; in late July, faced with food and medicine shortages amidst the pandemic, some groups of Cubans coalesced in protest against what they understood to be a string of failures by the country’s Communist Party. But the culpability of the US in creating these conditions has also become apparent—as has our obligation as Black radicals living in the belly of the beast to dispel the lies peddled by our oppressors and those in bed with them.
As they have done for decades, corporate US media outlets have taken this opportunity to push out an array of articles and newscasts vilifying the party. Amidst the deluge, several Black pundits have cynically weaponised identity politics in service of imperialist intrigue. In one such MSNBC segment, political scientist and commentator Jason Johnson and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Amalia Dache drew from a long history of anticommunist rhetoric, brushing away the US’ crushing economic sanctions and conflating the protests in Cuba with Black uprisings throughout the history of the United States. The segment—dismissive, indoctrinated, and ahistorical—works in step with a general co-option of the language and aesthetics of Black resistance that we have witnessed following the riots of last summer; yet another clear attempt to disrupt the bonds between Black Americans and Cubans, which we still express today.
This COVID-fueled anticommunist media blitz is one of the most recent attempts to turn Black Americans into willing accomplices to the United States’ imperialist crimes—from South America to Asia to Africa. But we know their game. We know that talking heads on television and writers for prestigious publications hold no real authority on Black oppression in the US, not to mention the breadth of experience spanning countries from Haiti to Nigeria. We know that a country that continues exploiting and murdering Black people domestically does not grow a heart for Black people abroad. We know that the economic, political, and material warfare that unfolds within our borders is inextricably linked to those that unfold across the Pan-African world. And we know that, as the US continues to push for regime changes in Cuba and throughout the Third World, this knowledge is indispensable. As Nelson Mandela offered when US imperialists attempted to turn South Africa against Cuba in the early ‘90s, we know that “their mistake is to believe that [the West’s] enemies should be our enemies. That…we will never do. We have our own struggle which we are conducting…our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle.”
Continuously committed to our struggle, Cuba is far from an enemy to Black liberation. Unlike mainstream Western media, we will not engage in flattenings and distortions. We know that the differences in the ways Black Americans and Afro-Cubans understand their Blackness are central to a robust coalition; Cuba’s overriding national consciousness—one popularized during the revolutionary period, and sustained by the ever-present threat of US imperialism—leads many Afro-Cubans to not define themselves as distinct from the rest of Cuban society like many of us in the US do. And we know that the history of Afro-Cuban life and resistance is central to the liberation of all of us. There are no “true” architects of revolution here, but there is blossoming solidarity rooted in centuries of interconnected struggle. The promise of Cuba’s remarkable multiracial and multi-class revolution, and its connection to the Pan-African world.
II.
The Cuban slave trade was one of the longest lasting slave enterprises in the West, beginning right after the Spanish conquest in 1511 and officially lasting until 1886. In the 16th century, not yet the primary productive force on the island, enslaved Africans were mostly forced to work in Cuba’s urban centres. But as formerly enslaved insurrectionists in neighboring Haiti actualized a free society, Spanish colonists sought to fill the vacuum left by France’s retreat. By the end of the 18th century, Cuba had risen to prominence as one of the greatest plantation regions in the New World colonies.
As in Haiti before the successful revolts, enslaved Africans in Cuba soon outnumbered slave holders, and the threat of revolution hung over the heads of merchants and planters. To safeguard against Black revolt, Cuban aristocrats repelled pushes for abolition by the newly industrialising Britain, arguing that slavery brought Africans out of their basal nature. As Cuban priest Juan Bernardo O’Gavan claimed: “these men, who would be indomitable wild beasts in Africa, learn and practice among us the precepts of the religion of peace, love, and sweetness, and become part of the great evangelical society.” From these seeds grew the racism that shaped all life in Cuba, and, as in all the other places enslaved Africans landed, Afro-Cubans resisted it to the hilt.
Rebellions, sabotage, and marronage can be traced alongside the development of the island colony itself. Maroons, alongside Indigenous islanders, formed communities and mustered for more sustained assaults on the plantations and towns. As slavery expanded in Cuba, rebellions became more frequent and more potent; and, in turn, slave holders ramped up repressive measures to break the spirit and eradicate the humanity of those they held captive. But this offered only a respite for the colonists, and slave rebellions throughout the colonies slowly fomented a collective African confidence in eventual victory.
For Black people struggling against slavery and white supremacy in the United States, Cuba’s rebellions ignited new political imaginations. Early Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist Martin Robinson Delaney turned to Cuba to sharpen his analysis of racism in the US; a series of large-scale slave revolts known as “La Escalera” led to his writing Blake: or the Huts of America—which historians have claimed to be one of the first African American novels. In the midst of resisting new forms of unfreedom, one of Black America's first acts of international solidarity post-emancipation was support for Cuban independence. And throughout the 20th century, African American radicals drew upon “the territory in revolt” to think up our own liberation. From Angela Davis to George Jackson to Alice Walker, a rich exchange of culture and history blossomed; a testament to the possibilities that open up when oppressed people build solidarity with each other.
III.
For many Afro-Cubans, the island’s liberation from Spain was the beginning of a new era of self-determination. In 1895, Africans overwhelmingly sided with the separatists during the Cuban War of Independence, joining the Liberation Army en masse with the hopes that ingratiating themselves in the provisional government would eradicate anti-Black racism. But following Cuba’s independence, all progress was lost. “Suddenly,” writes Louis A. Pérez Jr., “all the institutional expressions of Cuba Libre in which Afro-Cubans had registered important gains disappeared, and with them the political positions, military ranks, and public offices held by thousands of [B]lacks.”
Day of Solidarity with Angola, 1972, José Lucio Martínez Pedro
Afro-Cuban peasants were forced out of their land by corporations and the domestic bourgeoisie. Fields once used for subsistence farming were now the site of mass sugar production. Alienated from the land and shut out from political power, most Afro-Cubans found themselves in positions only nominally different from slavery.
But in the 20th century, anti-racist organizing in Cuba also grew increasingly militant. Early on, the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), the Caribbean’s first Black political party founded by veterans of the War of Independence, agitated for racial equality and fair labour standards, striving to build solidarity between working class peoples in rural and urban Cuba and publishing their own newspaper Previsión. In 1912, fearing what the party could achieve, the government froze the PIC out of the elections—and the PIC responded, first organising an armed movement of peasants who battled the government army, and ultimately sparking a larger uprising concerned with raiding and destroying corporate property. Arsonists set fire to the cane fields and sugar mills that had forced them off their land. Company railroad lines were destroyed. Horses and cattle reappropriated.
In many ways, the events of the 1912 Race War were a precursor to the reclamation of the land 47 years later—and the US support for government forces at the time, in the form of both weapons and military advisors, was an early salvo in its counterrevolutionary campaign against Cubans. In the years after the rebellion, Black people pooled their efforts into class-based and cultural organizations, abolitionist groups, trade unions, and even secret societies. In 1933, peasants in Eastern Cuba battled the Rural Guard to reclaim their land and the Cuban Communist Party, inspired by this struggle, moved to align themselves with the Black peasantry. And Black campesinos were crucial to Cuba’s revolutionary state. Radicals like Ángel Betancourt, Teodoro Pereira la Rosa, and Cándido Betancourt Ámelo allied with Raul Castro to form the Second Oriental Front. Pablo Milanés Fuentes, a Haitian-Cuban Vodou priest and rebel army veteran, led the fight against Domingo Lantour (a landlord who descended from French landowners who fled Haiti!) when he refused to comply with the new land reforms. Black peasants formed the summit known as el Campesino Congress en Armas (Peasant Congress in Arms), leading the charge that transformed Cuba entirely. Through coalition, a commitment to combating racism alongside capitalism quickly developed.
IV.
The afterlife of slavery still permeates. By the early 1960s, much of the Cuban elite had fled to Miami, bringing new forms of anti-Blackness and anticommunism with them; and, with integration, neoliberalism, and the destruction of the Black vanguard parties, some Black Americans have hedged their bets with the status quo. Our consciousness seems to transcend imperial borders in fits and starts. We are too often used for our siblings’ destruction: as Buffalo Soldiers, as marines and infantry, as spies and politicians; and now as imperialist academics and newscasters threatening Afro-Cuban struggle under the guise of promoting democracy. But the history of Afro-Cuban resistance is a reminder that, if we understand ourselves as part of a larger Black world, new avenues of struggle open up. With the revolution came an increase in the quality of life for all Cubans. Universal schooling, healthcare, housing, laws promoting racial and gender equality— all of which have led to an even greater life expectancy for Afro-Cubans than their Black siblings in the United States. And Cuba has actively worked for Black liberation globally: materially and militarily supporting the struggle against apartheid in Angola and South Africa, training African American doctors who serve their communities in the US, providing sanctuary for Assata Shakur.
In studying the contributions of Africans to the Cuban Revolution, we learn the importance of the land. It is at the heart of every struggle in the Pan-African World: Black communists in the the south have fought to free it for generations; in urban environments, Black organisations look to it as a base for building power. What would it look like for radicals in the United States to align with this work? To align with its entanglement with Indigenous sovereignty movements? With Cuban freedom? As in Cuba, no one group will be the true leaders of the revolution. White supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism dominates—and building a better world will require revolutionaries to realise each others’ particular goals. Organisations like The Black Alliance for Peace and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party are already leading the way towards a sustained, militant Black internationalism. It is upon the rest of us to contribute as well. Organise in your community against the blockade threatening to destroy the new world emerging in Cuba. Turn towards the imperialists that threaten, connive, and cajole you for your support and say, “No!”. In the face of such a movement, this epoch of Western hegemony might come to an end and a new phase of human history will emerge.
For this lesson, we owe the Cuban people a debt of gratitude.
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