Throughout the world in many different countries, people of African descent have been discriminated against and treated very poorly in society. They have been ran over and seen as people who don’t really matter. This problem has been very true and troublesome for a long time in the country of Cuba. The Afro-Cubans that live in Cuba have a hard time living day to day in their society because they are looked so down upon. Afro-Cubans have the hardest time getting jobs in Cuba and mostly all of them are forced to live in poverty. Throughout the years many of these people who have been discriminated against try different methods to get it to stop, but in most occasions they are not allowed to speak up at all. If they have any types of civil rights movements or rallies it could get a lot of people thrown into jail and possibly get thousands of people killed. To get around things like this happening they go to a different method to tell the world and that is through music.
To talk about discrimination and racism that happens in Cuba, it’s good to know a little background information. Africans were brought over to Cuba as slaves and worked as slaves for a very long time. Most of the slaves that were brought over to Cuba were from West African. Historians believe that there were between 400,000 - 600,000 slaves brought over to Cuba from West Africa. In Cuba slavery was abolished in 1886 and all of the slaves were set free. Some of the slaves that worked continued to work for their people but instead of doing it for free they were payed in small amounts. But for the rest of the people that were freed, they had nowhere to go. This is one of the main reasons that so many Afro-Cubans in Cuba are living in poverty. As time went on Afro-Cubans went through some hard times. Trying to find a job was very hard and even finding a place to live was even harder. But when Fidel Castro came into power things looked like they would change for the better for Afro-Cubans. Fidel Castro is one Cuban official that recognized that there was discrimination happening to Afro-Cubans and he wanted to do something about it. He focused more on discrimination that happened in the workplace in order to get more jobs for Afro-Cubans. With this Fidel ordered a anti-discrimination law to stop the inequality. In addition, he attempted to close the class gap between wealthy white Cubans and Afro-Cubans with a massive literacy campaign, among other reforms in the early and mid-1960s. But soon after his end of power in Cuba, those laws weren’t seen as important and discrimination soon came again.
The race demographics that they have in Cuba are very different and sometimes a little hard to understand. As of the 2012 census that Cuba had, it said that their race demographics are 64.1% white, 26.6% Mulatto and Mestizo, and only 9.3% black.
But for people that go over to Cuba on vacation and are from the United States see it a different way. Foreigners see the population as there being about 64% black people and the rest of them being white. This is because people in Cuba see themselves differently. If you have a lighter skin complexion and live in Cuba you consider yourself to be white. This is so you have a better chance at getting jobs and things like that. But for the United States its different. If you have a lighter skin complexion then you consider yourself to be black instead of white. This goes to show that people in cuba don’t tend to call themselves black before they do white because they see being white as superior and being black as the non superior.
Another big thing that goes a long deeply with discrimination and inequality in Cuba is the Afro-Cubans have a very hard time getting good jobs. Since they are the race that is looked down upon, they are not given an equal chance to get good jobs in their community. In 2005, 65.8% of Afro-Cubans were unemployed, whereas employment of whites went well over 70%. This statistic goes to show that Afro-Cubans don’t have a fair advantage at all when it comes to getting a job. Experts also estimated that the unemployment rate of Afro-Cubans would be above 70% by the year 2009. One of the big and major ways that a lot of people in Cuba make their money is through tourism. A lot of people from all around the world pay a lot of money to come spend a few days in Cuba. But with this, only 5% of people that work in the tourism business in Cuba are Afro-Cubans. And with not having jobs, comes not being able to afford a house. Privately owned land in Cuba is 98% white and only 2% of the private sector in Cuba is in the hands of Afro-Cubans. This goes to show that Afro-Cubans have a very hard time owning land. Most of that comes from not being able to get and hold a decent well paying job. Another way in which Afro-Cubans are discriminated against is that they have a hard time finding a good place to get good education. This could feed in the idea of why most Afro-Cubans have a hard time getting a job.
There are many different ways in which you can stand out against discrimination. You can protest, rally, or even have civil rights movements. But these are things that can’t happen in Cuba. If anything like this happens tons of people will be put in jail. The government of Cuba does not tolerate any speaking out against them in any way. So people in Afro-Cubans have to result to a different way to speak out on what is happening to them. So they result to speaking out through hip hop music. This isn’t a relatively new thing that is going on, it has been going on for a very long time now. In the 1980’s and 1990’s hip hop music was used for things like break dancing and just for pure enjoyment, but one things started to get really bad for Afro-Cubans they used it as a way to express their frustration.
In Cuba racism is seen as something that is not really happening and no one really pays attention to it at all. But to the rappers in Cuba they know that this is not true. Henry Louis Gates went to Cuba and did an interview with one of the well known rappers there. The person that he interviewed was Soandres Del Rio Ferrer and in the interview Soandres explains why the rap exactly. He says “Underground rap informs the people of what is really going on. What is being shown to us on television is not really what is going on.” He continues to say “On television, they tell us that everything’s good, that everything’s okay, that everything is going the way it should, that the economy is doing great, that the country is getting better. But in the poor areas, this is not true.” Since the Television shows and News channels are telling the community things that aren’t true at all, this is what caused people to start speaking out through rap music. The lyrics that are in all of these rap songs aren’t ones like you hear in the United States they all have meaning to them. Most of these rap songs touch the hearts of many people and make them want to speak out on what happening. In one of Soandres Del Rio Ferrer songs the lyrics say “The black Cuban wants to be just like the white man
. Because he thinks that darkness is obsolete and that whiteness is progress. It’s this way so much that he’s always laughing loudly at racist jokes
. The black Cuban discriminates against his brother and is violent to him. And even though he has no master, he crawls like a worm
.” The lyrics to this song are very touching but serious and I know they touch the hearts of many fans around Cuba's community.
But with these songs come some trouble sometimes. All of the songs that are played over the radio are regulated through the government. Any song that the government thinks is trying to say anything bad about them, they will not let it play over the radio. So the government has total control over all rap music in Cuba. In the interview that Henry Gates did with the Soandres he says that he wanted to go to one of the concerts that Soandres was having and film it but the government would allow it. Since the government has most of the control, most rappers try to stay out of their way. They do everything they can to stay out of the government’s way because they know they can have their song removed at any time. Soandres says in the interview that was done with him that the government and police are at every concert and if you step across the line and play something that they don’t like, the police will stop the entire concert right then and there. Rappers like Soandres don’t want this to happen because then they wouldn’t be able to get their message out, so they cooperate with the government. But most of the rappers go a different way in trying to get their music out into the community. Most of the rappers have their own recording studio in their house. With this they make their own CD’s and give them out to people at big events. On some of these CD’s is the music that the government doesn’t allow to be played on the radio. This ultimately allows the rappers to say whatever they want to without having any consequences. Some of these Afro-Cubans that are rappers are often looked down upon for what they do but they continue to do it anyways. The only reason they do this is to get there goal accomplished of stopping inequality in Cuba. Afro-Cubans just want an equal opportunity in live just like everyone does. Buy making this music they hope that it will inform people on what is really happening to Afro-Cubans in the area and make people change their ways.
You may be asking how are government officials helping the Afro-Cubans getting equality in Cuba. And the answer is, they aren’t. The Government of Cuba does not see that there is any problem with how things are with Afro-Cubans and say that there is no inequality in the region at all. Even if the government knew that there was an inequality problem I don’t believe that they would actually do anything to solve it. In Cuba’s government Afro-Cubans have ultimately no say on what happens in the community. The Cuban Government is 72% white and that is between civic and public leadership despite the black population being between 62-72%. Without any people in power to lobby for your community then you will have no say in what goes on and there will be no change in the community around you.
As you can see, music has been a way that Afro-Cubans can spread what is happening to them. Without having music to tell the community what is happening to them, they wouldn’t be able to talk about it at all because of the government. Even though the government has hard restrictions on things I believe that one day inequality will be stopped for good in Cuba. And with this comes the birth of a new nation.
Works Cited
Dominquez, Esteban. “Cuba Briefing Sheet.” Latin American Studies. n.p. 2005. Web.
17 April 2016.
Gates, Henry. “What happens When Cubans Speak About Anti-Black Racism in Their
Country.” The Root. New York University Press., 19 July 2015. Web. 17 April
2016.
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