Transnational Afrocubanos: Co-ethnic Cuban Identity & Divergence

This digital project was created by Chalisa Budhai during her participation in the 2025 Bob Graham Center Gulf Scholar and Latin American & Caribbean Collection Fall Internship.

History illuminates the migration of those who fled authoritarian persecution to the shores of the United States. Cubans advocated for Temporary Protected Status, created institutional networks of mass migration, and asserted representation at all levels of governance in the states. However, this narrative is a testament to the colorblind silences in Cuban archives. Afro-Cubans have a polar relationship with migration, living within the confines of segregation in both Cuba and America. This exhibit seeks to illustrate the Afro-Cuban diaspora – how their labor and lives are impacted by residential redlining and intentional cultural criminalization – in an attempt to re-incorporate Afro-Cubans into the greater historical mosaic. This exhibit highlights the migration experience of Black Cubans, distinct from their White co-ethnics, revealing cultural continuities and divergences from Havana to Miami.

Overall, these words, terms, and phrases blend throughout this exhibit to contextualize the positionality of Afro Cubans. The final goal expressed contemporarily in Cuba, is the preference for the nationality over all else, employing a colorblind image of the Cuban.

The term co-ethnic Cuban, while invoking a sense of nationality remains within the realm of ethnicity as it reveals a deeper shared history and language of the Island. Contrary to the popular concept of the colorblind Cuban identity, the archives suggest that there are much more separated experiences of those considered Black or White Cuban. Tools of the Empire, like redlining, segregation, and the criminalization of cultural practices show continuity in the transnational Afro Cuban experience. This exhibit illuminates the following questions:

La Raza en Cuba

Before the Cuban revolutionary period, chattel labor brought Africans to “Isla Juana,” the Spanish colonial name, later dubbed Cuba in lieu of the Tainos. After brief British occupation, the sugar plantation economy overtook the Caribbean, increasing the importation of enslaved labor. Though fights for Cuban independence melded with abolitionist attitudes, the movement for manumission stalemated when it competed with White Cuban planters. Slavery was abolished in 1886, but citizenship was not granted to Black Cubans until 1901, Black and Mulatto Cubans making up ⅓ of the population. Post-abolition, racial discrimination was embedded in the government and society.

While the one-drop rule demarcated the color line between Black and White Americans, a U.S. mandate-like regime guided Cuba to observe “Mulatto” and “Black” Cubans as the minorities. The hierarchy of privilege hinged upon proximity to whiteness and class status. This initiated institutional supported blanqueamiento (whitening) programs where Cuba purported forced sterilization encouraged Euro-Spanish immigration to mix among the colored population. For Afrocubanos, dissent was met with alienation, seen as anti-Cuban and anti-Patriotic, splintering the national identity and social co-ethnic cohesion.

Bearing this context in mind, it is crucial to denote which tools of Empire created this rift among the people. Prolific Black author, Audre Lord remarks,

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

As land was owned and by the White planter class, this acted as the foundation on which all oppressive systems operated on. It was arable land that drew colonial powers to establish a plantocracy in Cuba. The crops produced were only extensions of la tierra, which was the determinant of colonial laws that policed and criminalized Afro Cubans. The master’s house became la tierra, paired with his tools (mores) that determined coercive labor, standards of living, and erasure of culture.

Land Determining Labor

Before the Revolution, Cubans of African descent lived on plantation land owned by the White Cuban planter class. They were bound to chattel labor, producing sugar, tobacco, and coffee. The Spanish crown issued the Real Cédula (1789) that mandated travel permits, as well as the baseline customary rights of enslaved African people. Black residency was both controlled and fixed by the governing bodies of both Spanish and British (1762-1763) occupation. The nature of Afrocubano locked location was the foundation for future segregation, which impacted cultural, political, and economic identity.

Survey maps of plantations on the island correlate nearly a century later, showing an overlay of majority Black areas in the cities containing the most plantations. These maps display a distinct color line between co-ethnic Cubans because of the legacy of coercive labor.

Land Determining Life

The plantation economy drastically affected de facto and de jure segregation, creating distinct White and Black Cuban residential enclaves. What further determined communal conditions was the topography of plantation living. On one side of the color line were White planters’ homes built on comfortable coercive wealth; on the other were Afro Cubans who united in community amongst the land. With resourcefulness and creativity, byproducts of the sugar mill supported households as tools and food.

Stereographs display the communal style of living exhibited on the plantation. Women are seen cooking and child-rearing in the Kitchen scene. A young boy is seen fashioning likely a Cuban Cuatro instrument as they surround the crops they will cook.

Afrocubano men are seen harvesting at the Sugar Mill, the chattel labor age stretching children to elderly men. It is notable to see younger men bearing the brunt of work for the older men resting in the background of the photographed group.

Land Determining Culture

The laws that governed labor and life also impacted culture with land as the vessel for exclusion. Religious and leisurely activities were prohibited for Afro Cubans. Yoruba ceremonies were specifically prohibited along with other cultural expressions like song and dance. As an example of this criminalization, the document below details the specific government permission required for enslaved Afro Cubans to engage with their own cultures.

Transcription and translation of the Belardo petition:

Religion and leisure mesh, requiring special permission from the Crown to engage in African culture, otherwise criminalized.

West African cosmology suggests that culture and religion hold a deep relationship to the land, where ceremonies are extensions of the earth and the ancestors. The descript control of cultural practices allowed la tierra as a colonial entity, dictating Afro Cuban identity formation distinct from White Cuban formation.

The colonial concept of land, la tierra, determined racial, ethnic, and a diverging national identity for Black Cubans. Pre-revolution, overt criminalization and segregation through the plantocracy acted as tools in this evolving sense of self.

A Colorblind Revolution

After emancipation, the Revolutionary period was crucial to Cuban national identity formation. This period determined the freedom of an island from a colonial power to the friendship with American hegemony. While fighting for sovereignty from the Crown that created the plantocracy they resisted, Black Cubans played a major role in the War of Independence. Accruing a disparate 82,000 casualties over the 26,000 casualties from White Cubans, they demonstrated a undeniable force to be reckoned with by any means necessary.

“To arms for liberty!” “Drive out of Cuba the government that exploits you in order to tyrannize your race. Yes, expel those enemies of black humanity who are the cause of your misfortune.” – Antonio Maceo

Antonio Maceo (pictured on the right), promoted to 2nd in command in the Cuban army for independence. He was an honorable leader for the island’s emerging struggle for sovereignty. Son of an Afro Cuban woman, he is a symbol of Black Cuban pride, earning a monument and park in Havana.

He stated in 1884, ““The sovereignty and freedom of my native land is my only desire; I have no other aspirations; as a sovereign nation we shall secure our rightful privileges, we shall have dignity, and the recognition due a free and independent people.” He refers to Cuba as his native land. The War for Independence was predicated on the usurpation of la tierra for the people. However, Maceo and the Patriotic Organizing Committee (POC), that maintained the independence movement opted to take a colorblind approach.

“Aqui no hay negritos ni blanquitos sino cubanos.” (Here there are not little Blacks or little Whites, only Cubans) – Antonio Maceo

Maceo, however, could not escape the intentions of the empire. The infamous, Leonard Woodward – U.S. military appointed Governor of the early Republic experiment – procured a whitening schema based off of the American apartheid legacy. Maceo’s body was exhumed from his grave only three years after his death, where Woodward ordered the studying of his racial makeup, in line with the broader eugenic ideologies of the era. A man dedicated to the liberation of his land, was torn from it in the pursuit of racist Western dogma.

La Historia – Bienvenidos a Cuba!

Liberation from Spanish Colonial forces created a complex relationship between United States intervention and race. Black Cubans fought alongside the Cuban/U.S. front for freedom from Spain. When administrations post-revolution promoted republican reforms or progress, they often coalesced to imperial goals.

The Platt Amendment (1902), allowed America to operate in Cuba as a proxy power in government. With American influence, the color line was enforced through Jim Crow.

In restaurants and hotels, Afro-Cubans were denied service and barred from entry in Universities. Job postings noted race preferences and agricultural land was repossessed. This PBS documentary highlights to difficulty of revolutionary leaders to find jobs or escape over policing. The master’s tools had evolved.

El Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) was created by Black Cubans with the goal of centering their political demands in the Cuban government, banned two years later in 1910 due to the Morúa Amendment barring racial political parties.

Tensions came to a boiling point in 1912 with La Guerra de Razas, where Afro Cubans resisted the early republic in an armed rebellion. They responded to a series of discriminatory practices in Cuba.

Pedro Ivonnet, officer alongside Maceo was assassinated while escaping La Guerra also characterized as the Massacre of 1912 where White Cuban assailants attacked and murdered PIC members at a nonviolent protest against the Morúa Amendment. These demonstrations of resistance show how Afro Cubans resisted the demarcated color line of segregation that descended from slavery.

Fulgencio Batista’s rise to power characterized a descent into worse conditions for Afro Cubanos. Batista continued the blanqueamiento policy. He echoed segregationist tactics, banning those who were Black from private clubs, restricting coastal beach access, and prohibiting Afro music and religion. Again, access to land was restricted and the criminalization of Afro culture reprimanded Black Cuban identity. While taking the position of a colorblind Cuban nationality, Batista made it clear that rather than co-equal-ethnics, there was an unspoken power structure.

This hierarchy remained so unspoken due to Batista’s unfortunately successful censorship efforts. He found loopholes in the Constitution to charge those who dissented with capital punishment, creating a mass surveillance society. Through this silencing, Afro Cubans were invisible in the grand Cuban fabric with little representation for issues that affect them – like the racist legacies of Jim Crow and over policing in predominantly Black cities like Havana and Santiago de Cuba.

While Castro vowed to end racial discrimination and bring liberation to Afro Cubans, there are interpretations of his rule that suggest otherwise.

Political Cartoons are a great historical metric for social commentary. Analyzing their faults offers value to the contextualized period of time. Dr. Devyn Spence Benson, author of Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, analyzes the following cartoon in an interview. She states, “These political cartoons illustrate the contradictions of the state’s antiracist rhetoric and reveal the part of it that devalues blackness, black history, and black culture, even as they claim to want to be inclusive.”

Castro’s colorblind society became literal. Comments of dissent, even jokes made by Afro Cubans on the political climate, resulted in adverse consequences. Mentions of race were seen as divisive from the “uniting” Cuban nationality. In the seminal article, Re-Narrating Mariel: Black Cubans, Racial Exclusion, and Building Community in Miami by Dr. Benson, an interview with a man named Hugo Cancio reveals just this. After making a joke about Castro in a boarding school in Matanzas, he was expelled. Another man lost his job. These examples show how fragile the climate of race and Cuban identity became in spite of promises of an antiracist government.

Silence and suppression enforced the Cuban elite to create a colorblind society. The conquest of la tierra and geographic segregation entered the subconscious political arena. Embedded in social mores that informed censorship, paired with redlining, not only were Afro Cubans enclosed to so few Black spaces, but also relegated outside the borders of Cuban consciousness. The final cementing factor of the master’s tools was not only to segregate the land but segregate the mind.

Race in Florida

As Afro Cubans arrived in the 1980s, around the third wave of Cuban migration to the U.S., they were distinct from their White predecessors. Dubbed “Marielitos” for migrating through the rough sea passages to Florida on the Mariel boat rafts, they faced anti-Black racism from White Americans, White Cubans, and competitive tension from Black Americans. Aligning with the global south of the American color line, Afro Cubans were subject to the aftermath of Jim Crow in the deep south.

The New York Times (Sep 29, 1974)

Miami si, Cuba no.

“The 10.5 per cent unemployment rate was higher than the national average, and the black. community was particularly hard‐hit by the shrinking job market. When the Cubans arrived, they were willing to work longer hours and for lower pay than most Americans; the refugees moved en masse into blue‐collar and low‐level white‐collar jobs that were just beginning to open up to blacks. The role of the Cubans in the Miami job market of the early sixties contributed to a legacy of racial tension that hangs over black‐Cuban relations in Miami today.“

The plantation economy in Florida created a similar juxtaposition between those of African descent and colonial governments in Cuba. Even though Afro Cubans immigrated to the U.S., their racial circumstances were reflections of each other. Segregation after emancipation encouraged Black enclaves in Miami and Tampa. These Black American neighborhoods soon housed Afrocubanos who encountered the residue of Jim Crow, mass incarceration and anti-Black discrimination.

Miami’s Land

The major city of Miami became one of the largest hubs for the Cuban diaspora. As a planned city, the land was developed atop the skeletons of southern plantations. Again, the master’s tool of land control is evermore apparent in segregated housing districts. The mechanism of American institutional discrimination played out in the same vein as Cuba – in fact, the U.S. was the blueprint.

The Colonel William English Plantation House

Stretching from Biscayne to modern Vizcaya Gardens, the plantation property of Colonel English (among others) established population distribution in South Florida circa 1830. This survey map details the layout of enslaved barracks and agricultural plots. The land was then bought by multiple development companies in the 20th century.

Views of a Congested Area of Overtown

Post-emancipation, Black laborers who developed Miami districts, would reside in Overtown, Miami, colloquially “the Negro District.” Operating under Jim Crow segregation in the United States, Overtown was known as the Harlem of the South, a staple stop in the Chitlin circuit. Allapattah also housed a prolific Black community.

In 1937, a series of public housing plans attempted to redline and segregate neighborhoods that created ethnic/racial enclaves.

Racial distribution maps from 2020 Census data show the impact of largely Black communities in Miami remaining enclaves as a result of segregation and redlining.

Miami Marielitos Facing Redlining

Upon entering Miami, Afro Cubans were relegated to the social status of Black Americans. White Cubans denied Black Cubans housing in their neighborhoods, coalescing with American race constructs and diverging from their co-ethnic peers. Again, Cuban nationality is splintered on the Color Line.

Though they faced resistance from Black American Communities who saw their entrance as a threat to their already limited economic opportunity, many Black Cubans settled in Overtown and Allapattah. Other White Cubans excluded Afro Cubans from Hialeah also known as Little Havana. Though Afrocubanos crossed the color line into Hialeah for groceries or the occasional job, they would travel back to Black neighborhoods where they lived.

“In 1973, the family moved to Miami. Nobody wanted to rent them a house because they were Black. Neither did Cubans, even though they were Cuban. The South was still segregated.” – Catalina Rosemond

“I noticed that we had to sit in the back. I did not understand why.” – Barbara Jimeno

Tampa’s Land

Tampa diverted this narrative, as an exception to the Miami pattern. At the turn of the 20th century, Afro Cubans worked in Vicente Ybor’s cigar factories that relocated to Ybor City, Tampa. Rather than forced assimilation, Afro Cubans were staple workers in this industrial revolution. They maintained strikes, mutual aid through worker kitchens, and a sense of community with Black Americans. The focus of Tampa’s land was for production, but rather than being a consequence of refugee migration, the imposition of Black Cubans was a labor source that was courted.

Pedroso Boarding House – Ybor City, Tampa

This boarding house accommodated Cuban cigar workers, established in 1900 by Sociedad la Unión Martí-Maceo in 1900. This lodging center represents Vicente Martinez Ybor’s cigar factory that relocated to Tampa. Early city planning accounted for this industrial revolution. Many Afro Cubans made up the labor population.

Economic Kitchen Staff Cooking

“Afro-Cuban cooks working in the "Economic Kitchen" to provide meals to striking cigar factory workers during the ‘Weight Strike.’" Outside of these boarding houses, Black Cubans also resided in Tampa’s historically Black towns, Dobyville among them.

Another series in 1937 redlining maps shows the enclaves districted that belonged to Black communities. Featured on the right are contemporary racial distribution of Tampa’s cities, that show a continuity of majority Black districts with the aforementioned segregated housing schema.

Segregation turned to redlining, creating cohesive Black residential enclaves. By relegating them to a corner of an urban sprawl, institutions are encouraged to perform population control and surveillance through over policing. The contemporary control of land has adverse consequences for the Global South and the Black diaspora, with various barriers preventing agency over resources.

Bifurcando a Los Cubanos

In both Cuba and Florida, la tierra was the vehicle for the bifurcation of the co-ethnic Cuban identity. Upon it, both segregation of the land, mind, and institutions diverged the experiences of White and Black Cubans. In the United States, the continued erasure of Afrocubanos is prevalent through the government’s actions. However, this did not discourage the long legacy of resistance as demonstrated in the revolutionary period.

Unequal Opportunity

In the U.S., White Cubans were permitted to attend White-only schools with government subsidized English language learning programs. However, Black Cuban students did not enjoy this privilege at predominantly Black schools. The Polaroid illustrates a classroom of adult Cubans learning English. An archival silence of this document is the lack of Afro Cuban presence within this supplementary program.

Afro-Cuban Activism

Despite these setbacks, there was a culture of activism among Overtown and Allapattah. Rather than fully assimilating, recognizing Black solidarity allowed Afro Cubans to advocate for their own policy needs and demands. In collaboration with ongoing Civil Rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and more, Afro-Cubans attended the Miami Inner City Minority Experience (MICME) to arrive to common ground with each other. This display of solidarity became crucial in the shared Black diasporic struggle for representation and equal opportunity.

Bob Simms, a popular local organizer, bridged the gap between Black Americans and Black Cubans, creating MICME to address tensions on the road to representation. The MICME Program Pamphlet featured the efforts of the Defense Race Relations Institute, a branch of the U.S. government that focused on educating and learning about race to better understand urban areas.

Black Cubans began to document and advocate against the anti-Black violence they encountered in White Cuban communities. With continued intersectional activism, they actively fight to overcome the residue of redlining, despite the various hurdles they overcame without government support.

Today, there are many who still hold this resistance at the forefront of their work. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, representing Florida’s 10th Congressional District (Orlando, FL) advocates for issues that affect Black Cubans and Black Americans. One of his staple platform points from his election in 2022, highlighted the decriminalization of marijuana, one of the leading causes of mass incarceration of Black people. He is a vocal advocate for the immigrant community having submitted legislation that offers support to many marginalized communities.

Las Raices de mi Corazon, a short independent film by Gloria Ronaldo was released in 2001 that explored an Afro Cuban woman who reflected on the discovery that her grandparents were part of El Partido Independiente de Color. Concepts of race, belonging, and the taboo nature of race are weaved throughout the media. In the contemporary, Afrocubanos invoked both art and action to pay homage to their heritage and legacy of resistance against hegemonic power structures.

Conclusion

Land acts as the vehicle in the institutional power structures that disenfranchised Afrocubanos. Utilizing Audre Lord’s framework of the master’s tools, entities of the Empire segregated the physical and social landscapes of Cuba and the United States. While identity formation on the island praised the colorblind Cuban identity, this exhibit demonstrates a lack of social cohesion among Cuban co-ethnics. In other words, the neglected color line fostered by Eurocentric influence diverged Black Cubans from White Cubans. In Cuba, the divisions of labor and race were made clear with de jure segregation later bolstered by authoritarian administrations that censored racial barriers. In the United States, White Cubans abandoned their brethren in pursuit of privilege, where Afro Cubans were forced to reconcile differences with African Americans in redlined districts. From Havana and Santiago de Cuba to Overtown and Ybor City, Afrocubanos maintained a spirit of resistance in spite of segregated experiences.

Positionality and Acknowledgements

About the author

Chalisa Budhai is a senior at the University of Florida completing three Bachelor’s degrees in African American Studies, Legal History, and Political Science, cum laude. Her Honors Thesis titled, The Tenants of Trinidad: Our Structures, Law, and the People, investigates de jure and de facto segregation. Chalisa aspires to complete a joint J.D./Ph.D. program concentrating on diasporic Black Legal Studies. The crux of this exhibit is influenced by Chalisa’s academic and personal pursuits of illumination Black historical narratives. Her heritage hailing from Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana, this Afro Caribbean experience is a prominent and often overlooked sector of liberation history.

Chalisa’s relationship with Spanish is learned through the classroom and experiential learning. However, in investigating her home of Trinidad more closely, her ties to the language and the shared colonial experience have deepened – her family was born and raised in the Port of Spain.

This research has taught her more than she anticipated about Afro-Latin revolution and resistance. This project serves as an ode to the archival silences of the diasporic Black community. By investigating primary materials provided by the University of Florida’s Latin American and Caribbean Collection and Smathers’ Special Collections, this project highlights the resilience of the Afro Cuban network against transnational legal and systemic barriers.

Collection Acknowledgements

• UF Latin American & Caribbean Collection
• UF Smathers Library Special Collections
• UF Digital Collections (UFDC)
• University of Miami Special Collection and Cuban Heritage Collection
• HistoryMiami Special Collections
• Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
• Florida International University – The Wolfsonian Collection
• University of South Florida Special Collections

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• Image 37: Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). “Tampa Redlining Map.” Digital Scholarship Lab, October 15, 1936. https://dsl.richmond.edu/socialvulnerability/map/#loc=11/27.932/-82.475&city=tampa-fl.
• Image 38: “Race and Ethnicity in the US by Dot Density (2020 Census).” Map Viewer, 2020. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=30d2e10d4d694b3eb4dc4d2e58dbb5a5.
• Image 39: “The Miami Times,” December 8, 1967. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028321/00497/images.
• Image 40: Adults attending an English class. Photograph. Cuban Refugee Center Records. Miami, 1960. Miami. https://cdm17191.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/chc0218/id/1979.
• Image 41: MICME Weekend 1974 participants having a conversation. Photograph. Miami, 1974. Miami. https://cdm17191.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/asm0650/id/1251.
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• Image 43: “The Miami Times,” May 19, 1983. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028321/03383/images.
• Image 44: “The Miami Times,” November 15, 1990. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/uf00028321/02627.
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• Image 46: Rolandod, Gloria, ed. “Raíces de Mi Corazón.” YouTube, 2001. https://youtu.be/j_Lbqdda23I?si=Q8W34rAsfRDLb7Xd.
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About the Internship

This research project was made possible thanks to grant funding from the University of Florida Gulf Scholars Experiential Learning Program. The internship, Archival Research & Digital Exhibit in Cuban Studies, was coordinated by Dr. Onursal Erol (Bob Graham Center) and Melissa Jerome (Latin American & Caribbean Collection). It offered a semester long experiential learning opportunity. It directly addressed the Gulf Scholars Program’s emphasis on “Cultural Heritage, History, and Storytelling” by focusing on Cuba’s historical, cultural, and social ties to the Gulf of Mexico and its communities. By engaging with archival materials from the LACC’s renowned Cuba collection, the student explored these connections and contributed to broader understandings of the Gulf region’s transnational histories. The internship’s primary goal was to produce a digital project that highlights a selected theme, demonstrates the intern’s skills (such as archival research, foreign language proficiency, analytical and communication abilities, and digital curation), contributed to an ongoing project at the Smathers Library, and concluded with an analysis that ties the project’s findings to contemporary issues.