The Atlantic
Where Hip Hop Fits in Cuba’s Anti-Racist Curriculum
The country’s education leaders confront deep-seated discrimination in the classroom through rap.
I was sitting with the Afrocentric rapstress Magia López Cabrera in her modest Havana walk-up in June when Cuba’s prominent black-history scholar Tomás Fernández Robaina showed up for a café con leche. Her tiny living room was filled with African folk art and images of women with 1970s-style Afros. It felt like the Cuban equivalent of Cornel West dropping in on Queen Latifah. Two nights later at an anniversary celebration for López’s rap-duo Obsesión, Fernández Robaina sat discussing racial profiling in the U.S. with Roberto Zurbano Torres, widely known in the U.S. for his writing on Cuban racial issues.
Since arriving in Havana several weeks before to investigate Cuba’s work to eliminate racism, I had discovered a collaborative, tight-knit movement that’s gone largely unpublicized in the U.S., including in its six-time-zone, decentralized academic world. In Havana, community artists like Lopez, academics like Fernández, and members of the National Ministry of Education are collectively exploring how to integrate Afro-Cuban history and related gender concerns into the primary-through-university school system. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. parallel, such as Secretary of Education John King officially asking teachers to teach students a song like “Le Llaman Puta” (They Call Her Whore)—López’s critique of how Afro-Cuban women are driven into prostitution—to fulfill the Common Core standards.
Efforts to combat racism in Cuba—which is widely believed to be majority nonwhite—through education have emerged quietly over the last several years. The National Ministry of Education officially leads the way through the Aponte Commission, where Fernández has served, exploring how to remove traces of racially denigrating language and imagery from, and include more Afro-Cuban history in, school textbooks. But the bold efforts are coming from below. A few semi-independent universities in Havana, and regional centers like Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba, and Camagüey, are taking the initiative, along with grassroots educators and activists involved in a hip-hop movement spearheaded by Obsesión.
These educational shifts belie the stereotypical image of hovering Cuban authorities appropriating schools to baldly transmit socialist ideology and shut down social criticism. The U.S. press has historically maintained an ambivalent dual narrative when it comes to Cuba. Recent storylines note the promise of the American flag above the U.S. embassy in Havana and American Airlines flying direct from New York beginning this fall. But a darker narrative depicts continued repression under Fidel Castro’s lingering presence. Education is often assigned the second narrative, but that’s not what I found on the ground. While I did read some dry 10th-grade history texts portraying the U.S. as an imperialist aggressor and was slightly unnerved by overzealous, uniformed fourth-graders in Camagüey Province reciting Fidel quotes in the yard, generally, I found schools to be relaxed. There were engaging communities where I openly talked about social concerns, including those like racism that showed the government in an unfavorable light, and even designed lessons comparing Cuban and U.S. racial dynamics.
Cuba has historically been slow to publicly confront its deep racism—largely because it has almost mythologized its supposed racial unity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Cubans quote their post-racial nationalist hero José Martí more often than they do Fidel or the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. They often cite Martí’s 1893 statement that “Man is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black.” Inspired by Martí and other nationalist predecessors, the revolutionary government after 1959 impressively reduced racial economic disparities. But it became absolutist, announcing in 1962 that racial issues had been fully resolved and then closing off public debate. The silence was reinforced by what the government perceived as the need to prevent internal tensions from disrupting national unity in the face of ongoing U.S. aggression.
“[The Cuban government] expected racism to wither away once its perceived structural bases were dismantled. It did not.”
Alejandro de la Fuente, a Cuban-educated professor of Latin American history and African American studies at Harvard, told me that the Cuban government “expected racism to wither away once its perceived structural bases were dismantled. It did not.” While Cuba, according to the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council, has no ethnic violence that compares with the police killings of young black men in the U.S., the Aponte Commission has acknowledged the reality of police racial profiling, a tourist industry that disproportionately hires whites, and a national entertainment media in which Afro-Cubans are underrepresented.
University professors, including the political scientists Esteban Morales Domínguez at the University of Havana and Maikel Pons Giralt at the University of Camagüey, are encouraging classroom discussions on race. In a lesson that could be taught in almost any U.S. undergraduate class, Pons had groups analyze details of a five-minute fictional film depicting a black male teen being racially profiled in a store. As the boy scans shelves for medicine to aid a sick mother, we see the stereotypical images in the mind of a suspicious grocer and elderly white woman. Group analyses, which I later read and discussed with their professor, were sound, if slightly superficial—perhaps a global pattern among freshmen undergraduates. A representative response was “In this case, the young man is misjudged by everyone, while the white woman, who has a shared trust with the vendor,” is the one who actually robs the store. The government allows the university to give Pons the freedom to design such lessons.
Many primary schools address racial prejudice by talking with parents about how to engage with their children. In a 2014 study, the University of Toronto education professor Arlo Kempf showed how primary-school teachers in Cuba make family visits, helping parents talk about racial prejudice with their children. This is a relatively common, though not an officially mandated, practice; about a third of teachers make such visits.
Beyond the classroom walls, several hip-hop groups and grassroots activists have openly developed an anti-racism curriculum, signaling the government’s willingness to permit public discussion of racial issues. Some hip-hop groups are even registered with a national Cuban Rap Agency. The key community-outreach organization is Red Barrial Afrodescendiente (Afrodescendent Barrio Network), a group of Havana women who hold meetings to discuss racial realities and provide hands-on workshops for families. The leader, Hildelisa Leal Díaz, said the meetings give women a language to describe a racism they had never consciously named. In the Black Doll project, named for a José Martí short story, mothers and their children make paper-maché figures that are sometimes Afrocentric, such as the Yoruba Santería deity Yemaya.
