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On his first day in Cuba, President Barack Obama walked to the center of the Plaza de Armas in the colonial section of Havana to view the imposing marble statue of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes—the George Washington of Cuba’s 19-century independence movement.
Before he leaves, Obama also should visit a memorial to Antonio Maceo.
In 1868—three years after slavery ended in the United States—Céspedes, a white plantation owner, freed his slaves and urged them to join the revolution he led against Spanish rule of Cuba. The following year, he became the first president of that rebellion, whose constitution called for U.S. annexation of Cuba. The rebellion failed—in part over fear that a black-controlled government might emerge.
Maceo, an Afro-Cuban, was the legendary military leader of that struggle, and the later campaign, which ended Spanish rule in 1898. Called the “Bronze Titan,” Maceo was a commander of the interracial army that existed in Cuba around the time that in the United States, Reconstruction was being dismantled, Black Codes that legitimized decades of Jim Crow practices were being enacted and the Supreme Court issued its “separate but equal” decision, which justified racial segregation.
Maceo is a major figure in the lost history of the close ties between Afro-Cubans and African Americans that date back nearly 150 years.
In 1872, while Maceo’s interracial army was battling Spanish troops in Cuba, Samuel R. Scottron and James M. Trotter were organizing the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee in the United States. Scottron was the grandfather of Lena Horne. Trotter was the father of William Monroe Trotter, the black journalist who was kicked out of the White House in 1914 after confronting Woodrow Wilson over the racist practices of his administration.
Slavery didn’t officially end in Cuba until 1886, but in this country, the drumbeat for emancipation was loudest among African-American leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who urged young blacks “to surrender their citizenship to join their fortunes with those of their suffering brethren in Cuba,” Johnetta Cole wrote in a 1977 Black Scholar article titled, “Afro-American Solidarity With Cuba.”
During the U.S. military occupation of Cuba 1898-1902, it was the American black press that regularly complained about the imposition of “American race prejudice” on the Caribbean island. That racism sparked the creation of an all-black political party inside Cuba in 1908. Its members were largely veterans of the independence war—soldiers who served with Maceo. In May 1912, thousands of them were massacred by Cuban government troops.
For nearly 50 years, a succession of Cuban leaders kept Afro-Cubans mired in an enforced racial caste system that locked them into the bottom of the nation’s political and economic system.
Source: The Root | DEWAYNE WICKHAM
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