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Representations of Black Women in Cuba
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Racist caricatures for sale in Cuba (Credit: www.afrocubaweb.com)

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With the continued box oce success of the Fate of the Furious, we are
once again returning to the idea of Cuba as Americas playground.
The newest edition in the Vin Diesel muscle car franchise is one of the Submit
rst major U.S. studio movies lmed in Cuba since the two countries
broke diplomatic relations in 1961. The movie depicts Dom (Diesel)
and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) honeymooning in Havana and
incorporates a high-speed street race between two vintage American Categories
cars along the capitals famous seawall, the Malecon.
Select Cat
This image of Cuba as a tourist paradise lled with pristine 1950s
egory
Chevrolets and Cadillacs, white sand beaches, and exotic women has
enticed hundreds of thousands of North Americans to the island since
President Barack Obama eased travel restrictions last year. Most Archives
frequently, I hear soon-to-be Cuba travelers commenting that they
hope to see Cuba before it changes. As others have noted, this Select Mo
language of wanting to see Cuba before it changesusually in nth
reference to a Cuba stuck in the 1950s where cars from their parents
and grandparents adolescence roam the streetssilences both the
numerous economic and social changes occurring every day on the Tags
island and the fact that it is the very arrival of tourists (and in this case
U.S. movie producers) who are nancing most of the changes #AAIHSRoundta
travelers hope to avoid by getting to Cuba before the rush. Hidden
inside this language of a static Cuba also seems to be a desire for an
ble
island from the 1950s where tourists (and many white Cubans) #BlackLivesMatter
imagined black womens bodies as either overly sexualized prostitutes #comicsandrace
#WomenandPanAfricanismSeries
and cabaret dancers or as maids in upper-class hotels and homes.
More recently, since the post-1989 economic crisis, uneven economic Activism black
development has often seen black womens bodies resexualized or
(re)mammy-ed, as shown in the sales of tourist T-shirts with black feminism black
minstrel faces.
intellectual
Racist caricatures for sale in Cuba (Credit: www.afrocubaweb.com) history black
internationalism
In fact, one aspect of Cuban society usually ignored by the vintage car black lives matter black
craze is the now established antiracist movement in Cuba. While nationalism Black
North-American and Fast 8 watchers around the world admired Dom
navigating a smoking jalopy down the streets of Havana, many of Panther Party black
Cubas highest-prole black activists met at the Afro-Latin American
Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American politics Black Power
Research at Harvard University. Thirty Afro-Cuban activists joined with black protest Black
select U.S. academics from April 1415, 2017 to take stock of the
radicalism black radical
nearly twenty-year-old movements achievements, challenges, and
future goals. Spanning a variety of groups, including religious tradition Black
practitioners, hip-hop artists, community leaders, and intellectuals,
this was the rst meeting of its kind. As scholar-activist Toms women Brazil
Fernndez Robaina noted, We have to be aware that this is a
capitalism Caribbean
historical event.
civil rights Civil Rights
Previously, Ive written about an Afro-Cubana organization in Havana
Movement Cuba Donald
composed of black and mulata women. This month I want to oer the
documentaries of award-winning Cuban lmmaker Gloria Rolando, Trump Garveyism
one of the attendees at the Harvard conference last month, as a Gender Haiti imperialism
counter-discourse to the ways that black womens bodies are Malcolm X mass incarceration
imagined and represented in and by Cubas tourist industry.
music New York Pan-
Gloria Rolando was born in Africanism police
Gloria Rolando Havana in 1953. Growing up
brutality police
with the revolution, she
studied music at the Provincial violence Politics Racial
Conservatory Amadeo Roldan and later Art History at the University
Violence racism
of Havana. She has completed over a dozen lms and documentaries
reconstruction religion
about Afro-Cuban history. Some of her most well known works
include Eyes of the Rainbow (1997), a lm about U.S. Black Panther slavery slave trade
Assata Shakur; a three-part series on the 1912 massacre of members
teaching violence W.E.B. Du
of the Independent Party of Color, titled Breaking the Silence (2010);
Bois
and a history of the West Indian community in eastern Cuba, My
Footsteps in Baragu (1996).

But, it is her most recent documentary, Dialogue with my Grandmother

Trending Now
(2015), that speaks directly to the representations of black women in
contemporary Cuba. Based on a conversation she had with her How
grandmother, Inocencia Leonarda Armas y Abrea, on February 17, Gentrication
and
1993, the documentary is a magical blend of her grandmothers voice,
Displacement
Afro-Cuban religious incantations, and Rolandos narration about
Are
central moments in Cubas past. It took over twenty years for Rolando Remaking
to rediscover the cassette tape where she had recorded the initial Boston
conversation and nd the funds to make this end product in By Zebulon
conjunction with the National Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). In a 2016 Miletsky and
Tomas
interview, she admits that she had not planned to use the recording.
Gonzalez
The lmmaker and her grandmother talked all the time and that day
in 1993 had been no dierent. Only in recent years while caring for The
her ailing mother did Rolando decide that she wanted to give Connections
something back to the women who had given so much to her. Between
Urban
One of the ways the lm challenges negative stereotypes about black Development
women in Cuba is through a focus on her grandmothers labor and and
contributions to her family and the nation as a whole. While Inocencia Colonialism
recounts her childhood in Santa Clara and tells stories of attending By Paige
Glotzer | 1
dances in some of the citys most well-known black social clubs, the
Comment
camera irts back and forth between family photographs and the
hands of an aging black actor clutching a handkerchief. Repeatedly, The Impact
the only image on the screen is Rolando and her grandmothers of Student
Loans on
hands. Rolando said, This is a the story of the many black women
Black Wealth
who washed, ironed, and who were the foundation of our families.
By Devin
This is why I showed her hands; out of respect for those hands that
Fergus
worked so hard to build a family.
Race,
Dialogue with my Grandmother is also a spiritual dialogue with Afro-
Property, and
Cuban ancestors. Featuring the groups Vocal Boabab (Havana) and Economic
Obba Ilu (Santa Clara) singing ritual songs from Cuban Spiritualism History: An
(espiritismo), the documentary begins and ends with a mesa spiritual Introduction
(spiritual table) where practitioners call on the dead to speak in the By Walter
present: I invite you to join me in a dialogue with my grandmother. Greason | 1
Comment
The documentary is a counter-discourse to more sanitized versions of
Cuban history that rarely speak about race. Noting that her A Discourse
grandmother was the rst to tell her about the segregated social on Race and
clubs that existed in Cuba before the revolution, Rolando highlights Inequality in
social and religious traditions that often do not make their way into the United
Cuban textbooks. In particular, she details a 1925 racial uprising in States

Santa Clara that occurred when blacks tried to walk on a side of the By Kasturi
"Rumu"
park that had been barred to them and whites responded with
DasGupta
violence (throwing chairs and shooting guns) to stop changes they
feared would lead to interracial dating. Throughout the documentary,
Rolando recovers hidden pieces of Cuban history with special
Comments
attention to black womens lives.

Each authors posts reect

But, it is the documentarys nal scene that visually contradicts the
their own views and not
idea of Cuba as Americas playground. In a halting voice, as images of
necessarily those of the
blackface minstrels on tourist shirts and gurines of black women
African American
smoking cigars ash across the screen, Rolando concludes: There is Intellectual History Society
something I cant avoid saying. Theyve wanted to distort my Inc. AAIHS welcomes
grandmothers image many times . . . Since the colonial times theyve comments on and vigorous
invented the patterns for an industry that doesnt represent us. But discussion about our posts.
sadly many people in Cuba and other countries too still reproduce We recognize that there will
and sell those disrespectful colonial versions. Why that false and be disagreement but ask
degrading picture of the black woman? Why? Why? Why? that you be civil about such
disagreements. Personal
Each why is punctuated by a rhythmic drumbeat and a dierent insults and mean spirited
gurine smashing to the ground. This nal scene showing the broken comments will not be
 pieces of a Cuban paradise that sells blackfaces to tourists and tolerated and AAIHS
devalues Afro-Cuban womens bodies sits in stark contrast to the reserves the right to delete

story of the woman featured in Dialogue with my Grandmother. such comments from the
blog.
Rolando ends the documentary as it begins by sitting in a rocking
chair across from the empty chair of her late grandmother. She
challenges us as viewers to decide which Cuba we want to see. As you
CONTRIBUTORS
plan your trip to the island, will you only see the cars and the girls
aunted in the Fast 8, or will you remember the oft-overlooked hands
of the many women and men of African descent who built and
DONATE
continue to build Cuba?

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Devyn Spence Benson

Devyn Spence Benson is an Assistant Professor of
Africana and Latin American Studies at Davidson
College and the author of Antiracism in Cuba: The
Unnished Revolution (UNC Press, 2016). Benson
received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in
the eld of Latin American History, where her research focused on
racial politics during the rst three years of the Cuban revolution.
Follow her on Twitter @BensonDevyn.

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