Cuban Revolution in America by Teishan A. Latner

Author:Teishan A. Latner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

Indeed, the demographics of race and class on the island were still shifting in the 1970s. Owing to the heavily blanco and middle-class composition of the waves of emigration out of Cuba in the 1960s, the nation’s population had become phenotypically darker and socioeconomically more working class. These characteristics of the Cuban outmigration would hold until the Mariel emigration crisis of 1980 — known in U.S. parlance as the “Mariel boatlift”— the first major wave of emigration that included large numbers of working-class and Afro-Cubans. By the mid-1970s, too, new discourses of race were also becoming prominent on the island. As Cuba’s military and humanitarian involvement in Africa deepened, recognition of the island’s connection to the continent, historically, genetically, and politically, became more widespread. Amid Cuba’s tide-turning aid to Angola in its battle against South African and U.S.-backed forces, Castro notably declared in the mid-1970s that Cuba was a “Latin African” nation that was linked to the continent both genealogically, through the history of slavery, and politically, through Cuba’s aid to anticolonial movements after 1959. Although the upper levels of the Cuban government remained disproportionately composed of nonblack Cubans in the 1970s, members of the Maceo Brigade returned to an island that had changed in both the phenotypic composition of its population and the racial imaginary of the nation.

The Maceo Brigade’s presence in Cuba was front-page news on the island in 1978 and 1979, as the group’s contingents enthusiastically threw themselves into labor projects, listened to talks by Cuban officials, development engineers, and health workers, and toured the island. Prensa Latina described the Brigade as “the most important youth organization of the Cuban community abroad,”83 while Granma International noted that “[t]hey have sought and found abroad the roots of their nationality thus binding them to the Cuban Revolution.”84

For many Cubans, the arrival of the Maceo Brigade came with little warning. Accustomed to thinking of émigrés as Florida-based terrorists or as departed family and loved ones who never returned, the arrival of the young Cubans from the United States and Puerto Rico challenged their assumptions about the Cuban diaspora. “Their arrival came as a big surprise,” admitted one ICAP officer who worked closely with the Brigade. “These were Cuban[s] who came back. And we admired them, we were grateful to them, although we did not know how they would react to the new Cuba.”85 The shifting views on the island toward émigrés were reflected in new colloquialisms. Instead of gusanos — counterrevolutionary “worms”— Cubans had begun playfully referring to the “transformed” visitors as mariposas: butterflies.

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