Кубаның афро-кубалық этникалық азаматтары

Ethnic minority in Cuba

Afro Cubans or Black Cubans are Cubans of full or partial sub Saharan African ancestry. The term Afro Cuban can also refer to historical or cultural elements in Cuba associated with this community, and the combining of native African and other cultural elements found in Cuban society, such as race, religion, music, language, the arts and class culture.

According to the 2002 national census that surveyed 11.2 million Cubans, 1 million or 11% of Cubans identified as Afro Cuban or Black. Some 3 million identified as "mulatto" or "mestizo", meaning of mixed race, primarily a combination of African and European. Thus more than 40% of the population on the island affirm some African ancestry. The Cuban Revolution brought to power Fidel Castro, who promised a communist society without racism. His government promised equal opportunities for education, health care and work. There has been much scholarly discussion about the demographic composition of the island. A study by the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami estimated the proportion of people as having some black ancestry is more likely about 62%. In Cuba, there are many terms to classify Afro Cubans of varying portions of African descent, related to the historic Spanish casta system. In addition, in current society, classification may simply be made based on visible attributes; thus, a person who looks white is likely classified as white, especially if educated and middle class. A DNA study in 2014 estimated the genetic admixture of the population of Cuba to be 72% European, 20% African and 8% Native American. Although Afro Cubans can be found throughout Cuba, they comprise a higher proportion of the population in Oriente Province in Eastern Cuba than in other parts of the island. As the major city, Havana has the largest population of Afro Cubans of any city in Cuba. In the 21st century, many native African immigrants have been going to Cuba, especially from Angola. Also, immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti have been settling in Cuba. Most of them settle in the eastern part of the island, due to its proximity to their home countries, and further contributing to the already high percentage of ethnic blacks on that side of the island. A small percentage of Afro Cubans left Cuba, mostly for the United States (particularly Florida). They and their U. S. born children are known variously as Afro Cuban Americans, Cuban Americans, Hispanic Americans, and African Americans. Relatively few Afro Cubans resided in the nearby Spanish speaking country of Dominican Republic and the U. S. territory of Puerto Rico. The Minority Rights Group International says that "An objective assessment of the situation of Afro Cubans remains problematic due to scant records and a paucity of systematic studies both pre and post revolution".

During the 17th century, ex slaves from Cuba and Brazil were transported to Africa to work for colonists as indentured servants or workers. They were taken largely to present day Nigeria, the home of the Yoruba cultures, and Spanish Guinea (present day Equatorial Guinea) home of the Fang and Bubi cultures. In the 19th century, the former slaves were taken to Africa under the Royal Orders of September 13, 1845 (by way of voluntary arrangement). When there were an insufficient number of volunteers, the colonial government arranged a June 20, 1861, deportation from Cuba. In Spanish Guinea, the indentured servants became part of the Emancipados. In the area of present day Nigeria, they were called Amaros. Although the indentured workers were nominally free to return to Cuba when their tenure was over, most settled in these countries, marrying into the local African indigenous tribes. Angola has had more recent immigrant communities of Afro Cubans, known as Amparos. They are descendants of Afro Cuban soldiers who were transported to serve as military in the country in 1975 as a result of Cuban involvement in the Cold War. Cuba's Prime Minister, Fidel Castro, deployed thousands of troops to the country during the Angolan Civil War to support a faction of society. As a result of this era, a small Spanish speaking community formed in Angola of Afro Cubans; they number about 100,000 persons.

Haitian Creole language and culture first entered Cuba with the arrival of immigrants from Saint Domingue at the start of the 19th century. This was a French colony on the island of Hispaniola. The violence associated with the final years of the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution resulted in a wave of ethnic French settlers fleeing to Cuba, and often taking numerous African slaves with them. These refugees settled mainly in the east, and especially Guantánamo. There the French later introduced sugar cane cultivation, and constructed sugar refineries. They also developed coffee plantations for another important commodity crop. By 1804, some 30,000 Frenchmen were living in Baracoa and Maisí, the furthest eastern municipalities of the province. Later, Afro Haitians continued to emigrate to Cuba to work as braceros (Spanish for "manual laborers") cutting cane in the fields and processing it during harvest. Their living and working conditions were not much better than under slavery. Although many workers had planned to return to Haiti, most stayed on in Cuba. For years, many Haitians and their descendants in Cuba did not identify as such or speak Creole, which is based in French and African languages. In the eastern part of the island, many Haitians suffered discrimination among the majority Spanish speakers. In the 21st century, classes in Haitian Creole are offered in Guantanamo, Matanzas and the City of Havana, in an effort to preserve the traditional language of the Afro Haitians. There is also a Creole language radio program.

Afro Cubans are predominantly Roman Catholic, with minorities of Protestant. Afro Cuban religion can be broken down into three main currents: Santería, Palo Monte and include individuals of all origins. Santería is syncretized with Roman Catholicism.

Since the mid 19th century, innovations within Cuban music have been attributed to the Afro Cuban community. Genres such as son, conga, mambo and chachachá combined European influences with sub Saharan African elements. Cuban music evolved markedly away from the traditional European model towards improvisational African traditions. Afro Cuban musicians have taken pre existing genres such as trova, country and rap and added their own realities of life in a socialist country and as black persons. Genres like Nueva Trova are seen as live representations of the revolution and have been affected by Afro Cuban musicians like Pablo Milanes who included African spirituals in his early repertory. Music in Cuba is encouraged both as a scholarly exercise and a popular enjoyment. To Cubans, music and study of it are integral parts of the revolution. Audiences are proud of mixed ethnicity that makes up the music from the Afro Cuban community, despite there being a boundary of distrust and uncertainty between Cubans and Afro Cuban culture. Afro Cuban music can be divided into religious and profane. Religious music includes the chants, rhythms and instruments used in rituals of the religious currents mentioned above. Profane music includes rumba, guaguancó, comparsa (carnival music) and lesser styles such as the tumba francesa. Virtually all Cuban music is influenced by African rhythms. Cuban popular music, and much of the art music, combines influences from Spain and Africa in ways unique to Cuba. For example son combines African instruments and playing styles with the meter and rhythm of Spanish poetic forms. While much of the music is performed in cut time, artists typically use an array of time signatures like 6/8 for drumming beats. On the other hand, clave uses a polymetric 7/8 + 5/8 time signature. Afro Cuban arts emerged in the early 1960s with musicians spearheading an amateur movement bringing African influenced drumming to the forefront of Cuban music. For example, Enrique Bonne's drumming ensembles took inspiration from Cuban folklore, traditional trova, dance music, and American Jazz. Pello de Afrokan created a new dance rhythm called Mozambique that increased in popularity after his predominantly afro Cuban folklore troupe performed in 1964. Afro Cuban artists Mario Bauzá and Frank Grillo, known as Machito, were influential figures in shaping the Afro Cuban community and its music. Bauzá, a trumpeter and composer, pioneered the fusion of Afro Cuban rhythms with jazz, giving rise to the Afro Cuban jazz movement which gained considerable popularity in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean in the mid 20th century. Before the revolution, authorities considered Afro Cuban religious music a lesser culture; religious drummers were persecuted and instruments were confiscated. After the revolution, Afro Cuban music could be practiced more openly, but authorities were suspicious due to its relation to Afro Cuban religions. The first revolutionary institution created for the performing "national folklore" (Afro Cuban artistic traditions) was Conjunto Folklórico Nacional.

Other cultural elements considered to be Afro Cuban can be found in language (including syntax, vocabulary, and style of speech). The Afro Cuban religions all maintain some degree of use of African languages. Santería and Abakuá both have large parts of their liturgy in African languages (Lucumí and Ñañigo, respectively) while Palo uses a mixture of Spanish and Kikongo, known as Habla Congo.

According to anthropologists dispatched by the European Union, racism is entrenched in Cuba. Enrique Patterson, an Afro Cuban journalist and former University of Havana professor of Marxist philosophy, describes race as a "social bomb" and says that "If the Cuban government were to permit Afro Cubans to organize and raise their problems before [authorities] totalitarianism would fall". Esteban Morales Domínguez, a professor at the University of Havana, says that "The absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens the revolution's social project". In the years between the triumph of the revolution and the victory at Playa Girón the Cuban government was one of the world's most proactive regimes in the fight against discrimination. It achieved significant gains in racial equality through a series of egalitarian reforms early in the 1960s. Fidel Castro's first public address on racism after his rise to power was on March 23, 1959, at a labor rally in Havana, less than three months after he defeated Fulgencio Batista. He is quoted as saying: "One of the most just battles that must be fought, a battle that must be emphasized more and more, which I might call the fourth battle the battle to end racial discrimination at work centers. I repeat: the battle to end racial discrimination at work centers. Of all the forms of racial discrimination the worst is the one that limits the colored Cuban's access to jobs. " Castro pointed to the distinction between social segregation and employment, while placing great emphasis on correcting the latter. In response to the large amount of racism that existed in the job market, Castro issued anti discrimination laws. In addition, he attempted to close the class gap between wealthy white Cubans and Afro Cubans with a massive literacy campaign among other egalitarian reforms in the early and mid 1960s. Two years after his 1959 speech at the Havana Labor Rally, Castro declared that the age of racism and discrimination was over. In a speech given at the Confederation of Cuban Workers in observance of May Day, Castro declared that the "just laws of the revolution ended unemployment, put an end to villages without hospitals and schools, enacted laws which ended discrimination, control by monopolies, humiliation, and the suffering of the people." Although inspiring, many would consider the claim to be premature." Research conducted by Yesilernis Peña, Jim Sidanius and Mark Sawyer in 2003, suggests that social discrimination is still prevalent, despite the low levels of economic discrimination. After considering the issue solved, the Cuban government moved beyond the issue of racism. His message marked a shift in Cuban society's perception of racism that was triggered by the change in government focus." In spite of all the promises and speeches by government leaders, racial discrimination against Afro Cubans continues to be a major Human Rights issue for the Cuban government, even resulting in riots in Central Havana, a mostly black neighborhood in the capital. Most of the Latin population of Tampa in the 1950s was working class and lived in restricted areas, ethnic enclaves in the vicinity of Tampa's hundreds of cigar factories. African Cubans were tolerated to an extent in the Latin quarter (where most neighborhoods and cigar factories were integrated). Ybor City and its counterpart, West Tampa, were areas that bordered on other restricted sections areas for U. S. blacks or whites only. In this Latin quarter, there existed racial discrimination despite its subtleness.

During the 1920s and 1930s Cuba experienced a movement geared towards Afro Cuban culture called Afrocubanismo. The movement had a large impact on Cuban literature, poetry, painting, music, and sculpture. It was the first artistic campaign in Cuba that focused on one particular theme: African culture. Specifically it highlighted the struggle for independence from Spain, African slavery, and building a purely Cuban national identity. Its goal was to incorporate African folklore and rhythm into traditional modes of art.

The movement evolved from an interest in the rediscovery of African heritage. It developed in two very different and parallel stages. One stage stemmed from European artists and intellectuals who were interested in African art and musical folk forms. This stage paralleled the Harlem Renaissance in New York, Négritude in the French Caribbean, and coincided with stylistic European Vanguard (like Cubism and its representation of African masks). It was characterized by the participation of white intellectuals such as Cubans Alejo Carpentier, Rómulo Lachatañeré, Fortunato Vizcarrondo, Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera, Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos and Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Roger de Lauria. The African inspired art tended to represent Afro Cubans with cliché images such as a black man sitting beneath a palm tree with a cigar. Poems and essays by Afro Cuban writers began to be published in the 1930s in newspapers, magazines and books, where they discussed their own personal heritage. Afro Cuban and Afro Cuban heritage artists such as Nicolás Guillén, Alberto Arredondo and Emilio Ballagas brought light to the once marginalized African race and culture. It became a symbol of empowerment and individuality for Afro Cubans within the established Western culture of the Americas. This empowerment became a catalyst for the second stage to be characterized by Afro Cuban artists making art that truly reflected what it meant to be Afro Cuban. Beginning in the 1930s this stage depicted a more serious view of black culture like African religions and the struggles associated with slavery. The main protagonist during this stage of the movement was Nicolás Guillén.

The lasting reputation of the Afrocubanismo movement was the establishment of a New World art form that used aesthetics from both European and African culture. Although the actual movement of Afrocubanismo faded by the early 1940s, Afro Cuban culture continues to play a vital role in the identity of Cuba. It has been the Cuban Revolution that opened up a space for extended research of African ethnic roots in Cuba. The rhetoric of the Revolution incorporates black history and its contribution as an important stratum of Cuban identity. The Revolution has funded many projects that restore the work of Afro Cubans in an effort to accommodate an African driven identity within the new anti racist Cuban society.