Joe Tate's List: Afrolatinos - Joe

• • Historia
    El revolucion de Cuba impezar en 26th de Julio, 1953, guiar de Fidel Castro, contrar Fulgencio Batista, dictadura de Cuba. Después 
    
    
    
    
    fracaso, Fidel Castro y los revolucionarios cubanos, M-26-7, estar encarcelares, con el tiempo exiliares a Mexico. En 2nd de Diciembre, 
    
    
    
    
    1956, Fidel y 82 revolucionarios reaunudares la revolucion en Cuba. La ejército de guerrilleros crecer en números, y en 1st de Enero, 
    
    
    
    
    1959, Fulgencio Batista huir Cuba.
• IN THE early hours of January 1st 1959, as New Year parties were in full swing in an otherwise unnaturally quiet Havana, Fulgencio Batista stole away. He flew from Camp Columbia, the city’s main military base, to exile in the Dominican Republic with an entourage of relatives and cronies.
• landing with 81 men, all but a dozen of whom were immediately killed or captured, Fidel Castro, a lawyer and former student leader, had led his guerrilla force to an improbable triumph against Batista’s American-backed army.
• “This time, luckily for Cuba, the revolution will truly come into being. It will not be like 1895, when the North Am

  ericans came and took over…For the first time the republic will really be entirely free.”
• Mr Castro prevented the Americans from derailing his victory.
• before the United States imposed its economic embargo against the

  island—he had taken decisive steps to turn Cuba into the first, and still the only, communist country in the Americas.
• On the face of things, Cuba was an unlikely candidate for communism. The largest island in the Caribbean, it was also the wealthiest, thanks to sugar. Its insular status had allowed Spain to hold on to its “ever-faithful isle” for seven decades after it lost its colonies on the American mainland. As Mr Castro noted in his victory speech, a long struggle for independence was hijacked when the United States intervened: the Spanish-American war of 1898 marked the end of Spain’s presence in the Americas and turned Cuba into an American neo-colony. Some 60% of farmland and much of the sugar industry came to be owned by Americans. A third of the workforce, most of them black rural labourers, lived in severe poverty.

• But it was the Cuban revolution that turned the region into an important theatre in that ideological and military conflict. Installing moderate civilian politicians in government, Mr Castro named himself head of the armed forces. He quickly dismantled Batista’s army. Some 550 people more or less closely linked to Batista’s regime were executed after show trials, a bloodbath in which Guevara played a particularly prominent role. Mr Castro deepened his alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (as Cuba’s old-established communist party called itself), and set up a parallel government at a newly created National Agrarian Reform Institute headed by Guevara. Within seven months of victory he had shelved his promise of elections. The July 26th Movement splintered, with many of its non-communists (including Mr Franqui) going into exile, jail or quiet opposition. In October 1959, just nine months after entering Havana, Mr Castro began the contacts with the Soviet Union that swiftly led to a full-scale economic and military alliance.

   

  The CIA quickly concluded that Mr Castro was a closet communist and set out to overthrow him. But it was not until October 1960 that the United States began to impose the embargo. By the time a CIA-organised invasion of anti-Castro Cubans landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Mr Castro was ready for them, as Arbenz had not been in Guatemala. In 1962 the Soviet Union’s decision to station missiles on Cuban soil brought the world the closest it has ever come to nuclear war. In return for their withdrawal, the Kennedy administration guaranteed that it would not again invade Cuba. Mr Castro had consolidated his victory. His triumph would prompt an exodus of hundreds of thousands of the more entrepreneurial Cubans.
• Precisely when Mr Castro became a communist is a matter of conjecture (though Raúl was a member of the Communist

  Youth and Guevara’s experience in Guatemala strengthened his previous embrace of Marxism). The evidence suggests that Mr Castro imposed communism in Cuba of his own volition, not in reaction to American hostility. Certainly that hostility (which included endless CIA attempts to kill him) made his task easier. But it was not inevitable that the Cuban revolution should become a communist one. Mexico’s revolution earlier in the 20th century installed a nationalist but non-communist regime. In Venezuela in 1958 a popular uprising against a dictatorship led to a democracy under Rómulo Betancourt, a social-democrat, though this would be corroded by the collapse in the price of oil in the 1980s and 1990s.
• Even as Cuba turned into a Soviet client and a police state, Mr Castro’s communism was always rather different from the drab variety imposed on eastern Europe by the Red Army after the second world war. That was partly because of its easier-going tropical ambience. It was more because Mr Castro presented himself as a nationalist first and a communist second: the “intellectual author” of the revolution, he always insisted, was not Marx but José Martí, a writer and political activist who perished fighting for independence in 1895. It was also because Mr Castro’s rule relied on his own charisma, his oratorical machismo and the regular mobilisation of vast crowds, as much as on the Communist Party machine or on repression.
• There were also genuine achievements. Mr Castro funnelled a chunk of Soviet subsidies into creating the best education and health systems in Latin America, as well as a fairly advanced biotechnology industry. What connects the Cuba of today with the ideals of the revolution is a commitment to “social justice, equity [and] national independence”, argues Rafael Hernández, a Havana-based political scientist, in an article in Foreign Policy en Español.

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• • Cultura
    Salsa musica originar en Cuba en la 1930s. Salsa evolucionares de Són musica. Salsa es combinación de jazz, sonero musica de Espana, 
    
    
    
    
    y tambor Africano. Salsa ser popularizar en Celia Cruz's musica.
• Its roots come from various African rhythms and the traditional Cuban music "Son".
• uba in the early 1930's.
• Salsa Dancing – The music originated from C
• the Són of the Cuban people, which was a mixture of the Spanish troubadour (sonero) and the African drumbeats.
• The roots of salsa music come from traditional Cuban music such as el Son, la Rumba, el Guaguanco and el Mambo. Musicians began to mix these music styles into one during the early 1950s. Before and around the time of World War II, the music traveled to Mexico City and New York. It was in New York where the term "Salsa" was created. In fact, the use of the word salsa for danceable Latin Music was coined in 1933 when Cuban song composer Ignacio Piñerio wrote the song Échale Salsita. According to the late Alfredo Valdés Sr. the idea occurred to Piñerio after eating food that lacked Cuban spices. This new style of music traveled to New York City from Cuba and Puerto Rico as Latinos began to migrate in search of a better life. Upscale nightclubs and dancehalls, such as "The Palladium", started to appear around Spanish Harlem and cater to New York City's Latino immigrants.

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• Barack  Obama's victory has made Cubans more willing to speak out against the  institutional racism that exists half a century after Fidel Castro  established a "color blind" egalitarian society.
• tro to  power, U.S. President–elect Barack Obama’s victory is raising  disturbing questions about the institutional racism in the so-called  egalitarian society, where racism is said to have disappeared along with  capitalism.
• As Cuba prepares to commemorate  the 50th anniversary of the revolution that brought Fidel Cas
• • Percepciónes
    Afrocubanos ere discriminar de blanco cubanos. Cubanos es avergonzado de antepasados Africano. Afrocubanos es pobre. Fidel Castro es 
    
    
    
    
    defensor de Afrocubanos. Sin embargo, criticar la gobierno en la políticas de raza es crimen contrar comunismo.
• Since the first days of the revolution, Fidel has  been aware of the racism that permeated Cuban society. “In the daily  life of defense, loyalty, brotherhood, and shrewdness,” Fidel wrote in  January 1959, “there has always been a Negro standing beside every  white man.”
• Castro envisioned a “color-blind” society, an  aspiration that dated back to the 19th century liberator Jose Martí who  fought to end the vestiges of slavery as part of severing ties with  Spain. But there was paradox in Castro’s declarations: Castro, the son  of European immigrants from Galicia, Spain, was a white man who had  overthrown the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned  mulatto born to parents who were both of mixed race.
• In the decades that followed, Castro’s vision of  giving Cuban blacks equal opportunities was thwarted by the realities of  race outside the island nation: Soviet and East European allies  preferred white Cubans, and these were granted scholarships to study for  advanced degrees throughout behind the Iron Curtain. The growing  disparities between white Cubans and black Cubans remained a lingering  problem throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
• It was the official policy of the government to  deny the existence of racism, arguing that Communist  “egalitarianism” made discrimination based on race “an  impossibility,” simply because it was incompatible with a socialist  state. This was a polite fiction. As Alejandro De La Fuente wrote in his  aut
• horitative book, “A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics  in Twentieth-Century Cuba,” (The University of North Carolina Press,  2000) the color of one’s skin determines the life one leads in  Communist Cuba.
• The European Union recently dispatched  anthropologists to study racism in Cuba. Their findings were shocking:  Not only was racism alive and well in the workers’ paradise, but it  was systemic and institutional. Blacks were systematically excluded from  positions that involved coming in contact with foreign tourists (where  they could earn tips in hard currencies), they were relegated to poor  housing, complained of the longest waits for healthcare, were excluded  from managerial positions, received the lowest remittances from  relatives abroad, and were five times more likely to be imprisoned.
• the findings were irrefutable, and they  reflected an acceleration of racism in the 1990s.

• The collapse of the Soviet Union only exacerbated  the problem, particularly as Cuba now competed with Cancun and San Juan  for European vacationers. As Democracy Now!>/>; reported in 2000,  Cu ban officials continued to exclude blacks from tourist-related  industries.

   

  When Maria Carrion of Democracy Now! interviewed a  black Cuban identified only as Victor, he told her that the only jobs  black Cubans have access to are in construction and cleaning. Blacks are  randomly stopped on the street by police, he said, and are unable to  denounce racism in Cuba for fear of going to prison for being  anti-Communist.
• Yet there is rising anger among Cuban blacks who  view Obama’s victory as a sharp reminder of the racism that still  exists in Cuba. In a country where few dare to post messages in public  view that are not in support of the government, signs in windows have  begun to appear that are startling: “Si se puede, coño” or “Yes  we can,” with a Cuban twist – “Damn it.”
• In the last few years the role of race in  the Cuban Revolution has steadily emerged as a topic of public conversation among  increasing numbers of Cubans on the Island. In the past forty years, occasional  pronouncements from Fidel Castro have been the exception to the usual casual dismissal of  the issue among many Cubans and the measured roundabout discourse of intellectuals and  polemical encounters between visiting solidarity activists and their official host  organizations.
• Last month Fidel Castro, in an extended discussion with the Union of Artists and  Writers, once again addressed the topic of Cuban identity, touching upon issues of race in  the context of globalization. The issue of race was given special attention in the  proceedings of the Fifth Cuban Communist Party Congress (October, 1997):  "in  the present we must continue the consolidation of the fair policy of promoting blacks and  women, especially as cadres, in the same way that has been occurring with youth, with out  being mechanical.  This is a policy that guarantees the moral authority of the Party  before our people. The Party must insist in the application of that policy in all spheres  of society."

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