Afro-Americans encounter racism in Castro Kingdom

The Castro Kingdom claims it eliminated racism in 1959.

Many fools around the world believe that lie.

In Baltimore, a  journalism professor leads tours to Cuba once a year, to expose Afro-Americans to the blatant racism that still exists on the island slave plantation.

The conclusion easily and quickly reached by those who go on these tours is that Cuba is a lot like the pre-civil rights era southern states of the U.S.

The article below echoes much of what liberal columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post discovered in Cuba.  His book Last Dance in Havana, which exposes Castronoid racism, was largely ignored.

It’s so rare to find reports such as this, even in lesser-known news outlets.

From Afro:

Baltimore Tourist Says Racism Exists in Cuba

Myra Queen, who knows what discrimination looks like having grown up in  a segregated section of Baltimore during the 1950s and ‘60s, said she saw subtle patterns of racism play out during a recent trip to Cuba.

Queen, 66, said she noticed during her weeklong trip that most of the staff waiting on her in restaurants were White. So were the people behind the counter at her hotel, despite the island’s large Black population.

Jeffrey Smith of California who was also on the trip, observed that Afro Cubans are almost invisible on the island, saying they are seen, but not necessarily heard.

“It just harkens back to the ‘60s when we were cooking and cleaning in hotels and not given management positions,” Smith, 55, said.

Queen and Smith were part of a 23-member group that was in Cuba from June 4-11, thanks to a cultural exchange through Morgan State University. DeWayne Wickham, founding dean of the university’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, takes Black journalists, students and professionals to the island twice a year to learn about Afro Cubans and their connection to Black Americans.

Wickham, formerly a USA Today syndicated columnist, has arranged the trips through his Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies since 2000. He said the mainstream media wasn’t covering Afro Cubans and their issues to his satisfaction, so he took matters into his own hands.

“It’s important to take Black journalists to Cuba because the stories we find are the stories that too often seem to be ignored [and] overlooked by White journalists when they get there,” Wickham said. “It’s not mean spirited, it’s that their life experiences don’t drive them toward those stories.”

Several members of the delegation talked about racism on the island with Esteban Morales Domínguez, a leading Afro-Cuban intellectual and Nancy Morejón, an Afro-Cuban poet, essayist and critic.

Domínguez, author of “Race in Cuba: Essays of the Revolution and Racial Equality,” called racism a cultural problem that many people deny exists.

He said he is trying to push the Cuban government to compile and release a list of employees in the island’s lucrative tourism industry by race and by job. Domínguez compiled a 2008 report for the Cuban government that showed between 62 percent and 72 percent of the island’s 11 million population was Black. But his report also revealed that the overwhelming majority of scientists, civic and public leaders and professors at the University of Havana were White.

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