4
DeWayne Wickham
HAVANA – Long before the United States imposed an economic embargo on Cuba in 1960, and launched a decades-long effort to topple the communist regime that rules this island nation, African Americans have had a close connection to this country.
In the 1890s, as an interracial army of Cubans entered the final stage of a nearly 30-year struggle to win independence from Spain, African Americans in the United States were hostages of a Jim Crow society that believed blacks “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” At the head of Cuba’s liberation struggle were men like Jose Marti, a white intellectual, and Antonio Maceo, a black general.
Black newspapers across the United States followed the entry of American troops into this struggle in 1898 – and the resulting U.S. occupation of Cuba that lasted until 1902. When the racial harmony that existed among black and white Cubans began to rupture during American rule of the island, the “Voice of the Negro,” an Atlanta-based literary journal blamed it on the introduction of “degenerate prejudice” by its American occupiers.
That intrusion of America's Jim Crow practices upon the Cuban nation that emerged from the so-called Spanish-American War has had a lingering impact on the Caribbean Island nation to which a delegation Morgan academics and journalists traveled in May of this year.
This edition of the Morgan Global Journalism Review looks at Cuba through lens shaped primarily by our interest in the role that race continues to play in Cuba.
The job of the journalist is to shine a bright light in dark places; and in this context, the job of the academic is to bring understanding and put into context that which gets exposed.
This volume is the first of a series of detailed looks that the MGJR will take of Cuba, as part of a larger journalistic effort to probe all reaches of the African Diaspora.
DEAN'S CORNER