Castro: A Friend to Americans of Color?
Cuba's Fidel Castro has an intriguing relationship with many of America's minorities. It could be argued that the foreign leader has reached out to blacks and Latinos more than many U.S elected officials. Commentator William Jelani Cobb is assistant professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta.
ED GORDON, host:
Recent reports on Fidel Castro's health say the Cuban leader is doing well and may soon return to his position as president.
Commentator William Jelani Cobb says, in all the talk over Castro's latest health scare and his troubled relationship with the United States, what's often overlooked is his outreach to minorities in America.
Mr. WILLIAM JELANI COBB (Assistant Professor of History, Spelman College, in Atlanta): The current crisis over the health of Fidel Castro has once again brought the long-standing animosity between the United States and the Cuban leader to the surface.
As rumors of his demise continued to swirl, we have revisited the question of what will become of Cuba after Castro. His model of government is far from ideal. It should go almost without saying that no state should be governed by a single individual for nearly half a century. And as recently as 2002, Amnesty International criticized Castro's regime for its suppression of political dissidents.
Yet Castro is a more complex figure than one would suspect. Discussions of Castro's government tend to overlook the fact that Cuba was far from a model of democratic freedom prior to his rise to power. His 1959 coupe d'etat deposed another dictator, Fulgencio Batista, whose regime had witnessed widespread corruption and the influence of American organized crime.
And in this current discussion, there's been no mention of another politically significant aspect of Castro's career: his relentless criticism of racism in America and elsewhere. From the outset, Fidel Castro was one of the staunchest critics of American racism and the subordinate status of blacks in the United States.
Certainly there were political implications to his outspokenness. Any criticism of his own government could be easily deflected by pointing to the United States' record of racial violence and segregation. But cynical politicking does not fully explain Castro's relationship to African-American causes.
As early as 1960, Castro invited a group of African-American writers, including Amiri Baraka, Harold Cruse, Julian Mayfield, and John Henrik Clarke, to visit Cuba and survey the progress the nation had made. He also appealed for black tourists to travel to Cuba, and briefly hired boxer Joe Lewis to do public relations for the island at a time when many hotels in the United States would not accept black patronage.
In 1961, when the NAACP organizer Robert F. Williams' civil rights activities in North Carolina had generated a tidal wave of white mob violence, he was given asylum in Cuba. Castro famously visited Harlem twice. During the first visit in 1960, he treated the historic black neighborhood with reverence, meeting with Nikita Kruschev, with Gamil Nasser and Malcolm X there. And in 1995, some 1,300 people crammed into the Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear him speak when he returned to New York.
More recently, his government extended full scholarships to students who wished to study medicine in Cuba, and return home to provide care for poor and underserved black and Latino communities in the United States.
If Castro's relentless criticism of American racism was a ploy of international politics, it was nonetheless beneficial to black America. To the extent that figures like Castro consistently raised the issue of racism, they created a diplomatic embarrassment for the United States, and increased pressure on this country to support democracy and equal rights for all of its citizens.
Nor was this concern with racism isolated to the United States. When successive presidential administrations placed themselves on the wrong side of history, Castro supported Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress's efforts to end Apartheid.
Amid the current Fidel health watch, with images of exultant crowds in Miami beamed around the world, it is relatively easy to cite Castro's shortcomings. The real question is whether we are equally willing to confront our own.
GORDON: William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College.
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