The critical study of race in Cuba's past and present is enjoying a veritable boom, both outside the island and, significantly, within. The last year alone has brought us several books that advance the conversation on race and the 1959 Revolution in suggestive and important ways. Drawing on the results of in-depth surveys and interviews conducted on the island, Danielle Clealand's The Power of Race tackles the structures and legacies of racism in Cuba's post-Special Period context, when the fall of the Soviet Union ushered in significant economic and social shifts. Overall, Clealand argues for the continued salience of official racial ideology in shaping the ways Cubans talk about and experience not only racism, but also the expanding contours of black consciousness.
When it comes to racial ideology, Cuba shares much with other Latin American and Caribbean nations, specifically in the prevalent notion of ‘racial democracy’. Yet the Cuban Revolution introduced a unique variable into this equation: the expectation that socialism – and a short-lived campaign against racial discrimination in the early 1960s – would eradicate the structural underpinnings of prejudice. These factors contributed to what Clealand identifies as a dominant ‘ethos’ of ‘anti-racialism’, an official (and, often, popular) denialism around the existence of racism or even the relevance of race as a social category. Though economic changes in the post-Special Period context have prompted some more overt acknowledgements from governing officials that ‘prejudice’ (the preferred terminology) does not belong wholly to the past, overall, as Clealand argues, the dominant discourse continues to frame racism as ‘attitudinal, rather than structural’ (p. 7). This, she insightfully suggests, ‘allows for people to acknowledge racism and trivialise it simultaneously’ (p. 7).
Importantly, however, The Power of Race does not merely take official discourse for popular reality. Through a survey disseminated to 409 respondents and 42 full interviews, Clealand aims to explore how ordinary Cubans, and Cubans of colour in particular, relate to the dominant racial ideology. Overall, she finds that that ideology continues to exercise a strong influence on popular experiences and identities, but in contradictory ways. Official silence around the persistence of racism, for example, has created space for the kinds of ‘double mechanism[s]’ that Clealand finds throughout her results, wherein the roots of racism are located exclusively within the private sphere, thereby relegating it to a realm beyond official reach (p. 102). That logic has, to some degree, been internalised at the popular level. Racism, Clealand points out, ‘is … considered to be a socially undesirable trait, yet openly racist commentary is part of everyday conversations and not often attributed to racism’ (p. 105).
Crucially, however, Clealand seeks to explore not only how white Cubans mirror and enact these racial structures, but also how Cubans of colour respond. In this respect, her reconstruction of ‘hidden transcripts’ of ‘black political talk’ represents one of the most important contributions of her book (p. 51). Acknowledging the importance of public anti-racist stances taken by prominent artists, intellectuals and musicians, Clealand nonetheless pushes to bring ordinary black voices into the conversation as well. She thus frames ‘black consciousness’ in deliberately inclusive terms, fleshing out its contours and some of its contradictions. Clealand hypothesises, with good evidence to support her, that black consciousness has expanded at the popular level since the Special Period, due to some of the more open exclusionary practices that have taken root in the economic sphere. She thus finds that a ‘positive, affirming black identity’ occupies an increasingly important place in the lives of many black Cubans (p. 189).
As these conclusions suggests, Clealand's results are rich and exciting, and one wishes that they had been foregrounded somewhat more throughout the first half of the book. The social, cultural and economic context of the post-Special Period moment offers similarly fruitful terrain for thinking through the significance of her results. The expansion of tourism, for example, has provided a key role in shaping the differential economic possibilities available to Cubans of colour in Havana, but what about elsewhere in the country? One thinks, too, of intensifying cultural and media flows within and outside the country, which have introduced novel fodder for rethinking official racial ideologies, well beyond the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 (undeniably a watershed event in Cuba).
Nonetheless, in an increasingly robust scholarly and popular literature, Clealand's book stands out for its textured and evidence-rich portrait of racial ideology and realities in twenty-first-century Cuba. This reader also appreciated the sympathy and rigour evident in the author's methodological praxis. Talking about racism in Cuba remains an extraordinarily sensitive endeavour, and Clealand excels at eliciting honest responses, which she handles deftly and responsibly. The Power of Race in Cuba will contribute in important ways to scholarly and popular conversations about racial formations in contemporary Cuba, but it will also undoubtedly be of interest to scholars of racism and racial formations elsewhere in the hemisphere.
