African Gods Under Communism

by David Lewis (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Cuba

After four days in Havana, I could understand Cuban Spanish good enough to have a conversation, but I still couldn’t understand Cuban racism. How did it work here? Despite priding themselves on being free of the bigotry of their big capitalist neighbor to the north, just glancing around Havana it was clear Hispanic Cubans viewed themselves as superior to their Black comrades. Cuba is 62% Black, yet the statues, currency, and even the communist museums dedicated to the revolution only depicted Hispanic Cubans like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and José Martí. To figure out what was going on, I went to a Havana bookstore in search of a book on race relations. One looked promising, but its back cover’s claim that “racism plagued Cuba from its founding until 1959, when racism ended,” showed it probably wasn’t objective. “There is a Black Cuban museum in Guanabacoa,” the son of the woman who ran my hostel told me, “but be careful, that’s a bad neighborhood.” I asked what a “bad” neighborhood here could possibly look like. I was in the “nice” neighborhood of Vedado, filled with crumbling early 20th century mansions, stray dogs, and prostitutes. The only thing that had been built or repaired since the revolution was the North Korean embassy. He didn’t want to explain why Guanabacoa was bad. His mother said something to me in Russian (the go-to foreigner language for older Cubans), but besides the word “Guanabacoa” I have no idea what she said. I soon learned that a lot of Hispanic Cubans seemed to be afraid of that neighborhood for reasons they didn’t want to talk about. One cab driver wouldn’t take me there, telling me the Hotel Nacional de Cuba was much nicer and closer. Wanting to see the Hotel Nacional anyway (it still has anti-aircraft guns from the Cuban Missile Crisis), I agreed to go with him. He took me on a long loop around the beach and then dropped me off 100ft. from where I got on, for $10.00. Cultural spotlight: Cuba has two currencies, one for locals, and one to gouge tourists. $10.00 in Cuba is the same as $10.00 in the USA. I then found a driver who would take me to the Museo Municipal de Guanabacoa, but it would cost me cinquenta ($15.00). His eyebrows raised when I didn’t try and haggle. It was only when halfway there that I remembered “wait, $15.00 is quince like in quinceañera. Cinquenta is…. crap.” I asked if I could get a ride back for free and he agreed. The museum was well worth it. The guide only knew numbers and colors in English, but as long as he had an American there he was going to use all of them. In Spanish, he explained unbelievably esoteric concepts from Afro-Caribbean religions such as “the creation of the universe never happened, is constantly changing, and only exists in the minds of seers.” Then he would point at something red and tell me in English, “Red.” On the tour, I learned that in addition to Santería, Cuba is home to at least seven other West African religions that get lumped in as Santería by outsiders. Except for one photo of Fidel Castro with a famous Santería Pardrino, nothing else in the museum had anything to do with communism. Later that night, I was talking to a nurse from Spain about Guanabacoa and how I still couldn’t figure out why it was considered a bad neighborhood. “You went to that museum and you still don’t understand it?” she told me in surprise. “No. It just seems like there is a lot of unacknowledged racism in this country.” She laughed. “They aren’t racist. They’re scared of magic.” This was obvious to every Catholic. Back in LA, my Mexican Spanish teacher also knew the issue wasn’t skin color, but fear of supernatural powers underneath the skin. In the Afro-Caribbean religions the African Gods literally take over the body, which to Catholics is known demonic possession. What I’d taken for racism was actually religious discrimination. I still don’t know if this is more or less open-minded.