Journal Issue: Ethnicity, Gender, Culture, & Cuba (Special Section)
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1994-01-01
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(1994)
Expanding Northamerican and Cuban Dialogues
(1994) James, Joy
The concept for this volume on "Ethnicity, Gender, Culture and Cuba" originated in discussions at the 1993 NorthAmerican and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists Conference, held at the University of Havana. Many of the contributors to this journal were participants in last year's academic Conference; in particular, presentations and debates in that Conference's commission on "Gender, Race, and Class" setthe theme for this collection.
Back to the Future: African-Americans and Cuba in the Time(s) of Race
(1994) Brock, Lisa
Cuba has, at least since the American revolution, occupied the imagination of North Americans. For nineteenth-century capital, Cuba's close proximity, its Black slaves, and its warm but diverse climate invited economic penetration. By 1900, capital desired in Cuba "a docile working class, a passive peasantry, a compliant bourgeoisie, and a subservient political elite.'" Not surprisingly, Cuba's African heritage stirred an opposite imagination among Blacks to the North. The island's rebellious captives, its anti-colonial struggle, and its resistance to U.S. hegemony beckoned solidarity. Like Haiti, Ethiopia, and South Africa, Cuba occupied a special place in the hearts and minds of African-Americans.
U.S. African American Denomonations in Cuba
(1994) Dodson, Jualynne E.
Currently there are two Protestant traditions in Cuba whose organizational homes are lodged in the African American Christian community ofthe United States. The Mt. Sinai Holy Church and the Progressive National Baptist Convention are two predominately African American U.S. denominations with congregations located on the island. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church also had Cuban churches and was the first "Black Church" to organize there. The relationship between U.S. Protestants of African ancestry and AfroCubans is an unspoken, and relatively unknown, international alliance. Isolated from dialogue with Cubans, most contemporary U.S. generations know nothing about links between the two diaspora communities and specifically links by way of Protestantism. Some tend to assume Cubans are White as well as Catholic - or since the 1959 Revolution "atheist." Not only are Cubans largely a brown-skinned people, there are Cuban Protestants-albeit a numerical minority; and at least two African American denominations of the U.S. have had an alliance with their southern kin for fifty years or more.
Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery
(1994) Hu-Dehart, Evelyn
From 1847 to 1874, as many as 125,000 Chinese indentured or contract laborers, almost all male, were sent to Cuba. This is no small number, considering the time span of just 27 years. Eighty percent or more were destined for the sugar plantations. The Chinese were imported while African slavery was still in effect though undergoing "gradual abolition," and worked alongside this traditional form of plantation labor. (During this same period, Peru also imported Chinese coolies - about 95,000 for its sugar plantations. In the case of Peru, however, slavery was being abolished just when coolies were being introduced, essentially supplanting slave labor on the revived coastal plantations, although initially they did work with or under free blacks.) Was coolie labor another form of slavery, or was it a transition to free labor? This paper will examine La trata amarilla [the yellow trade] from its inception to its dissolution in light of these apparently opposing propositions of free labor or neoslavery.