The Red Barrial Afrodescendiente: A Cuban Experiment in Black Community Empowerment

From Baobab Trees to Popular Education: Spiritual Roots of the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente

Upon arrival, once they had the chance, they searched for the wide, tanish-gray trunk and twisting limbs of the Baobab tree, whose leaves gave shadow as if they were chiding the sun. The tree they searched for was not only central to their religion, one that colonial authorities deemed animistic and tried to torture out of them, but we had been told that the tree was also central to their lives; it was used to place offerings of food, money, and clothes underneath the trunks to receive blessings from the orishas, the leaves boiled to soup to cure sore throats, the occasional fruits a sign of good luck and often dried into a nutritional powder to be consumed. What do you do when you arrive forcefully on the shores of an island in chains, your life awash with middle passages and languages foreign to you, and when your feet eventually gain comfort and familiarity on the ground, the symbol of the power of your orishas your deities, your guiding lights of wisdom and strength — are nowhere to be found?

Instead of finding the Baobab they found the Ceiba, still massive in grandeur but a more vertical, thicker limbed tree. They made do. They maintained. They translated the Earth they’d grown acquainted with into a world in which they had to redefine to their spiritualities, unmoored but marooned, not dead but now ‘diasporic’ as it would eventually be called: these are the spiritual roots of Black people , blackness , and black activism in Cuba.

These spiritual roots are found and evoked today in much of the activism and community organizing that takes place on the island. Shortly after the creation of the Cuban chapter of the Regional Afro-descendant Articulation (ARAAC) as a political space within which to coordinate social movements and non-governmental associations within the larger Latin American framework of African diaspora struggles, the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente (Afrodescendant Neighborhood Network RBA) was created in November 2012 by a group of black women active in grassroots efforts to generate discussion of issues of racism and discrimination in Cuba The RBA’s objectives are the struggle against stereotypes, the strengthening of community-level leadership, the empowerment of marginalized sectors of working class neighborhoods, and the stimulation of grassroots economic solidarity.

Social scientists such as Carmen Nora Hern'andez and Daisy Rubiera Castillo, founder of the “Afrocubanas” movement, a pioneering black feminist collective that played a key role opening public discussion of the erasure of black women’s history in Cuban academia and education, participated in the early stages of the organization. Several neighborhood groups (Casas Comunitarias) such as the Pogolotti, Buena Vista, P'arraga, Jesu's Mar'ıa, La Ceiba, Los A'ngeles, Balc'on Arimao, Alamar Playa and the Equipo de estudios sociales del Instituto Pedro Kur'ı collaborated with the RBA in the early dissemination of its activities. Sections propped up in Matanzas and Trinidad, and alliances developed in several other provinces of the western part of the island. The project entitled “Building PoliticalPedagogical Freedoms” generated by the “Oscar A. Romero Area of Theology, Ecumenical Articulation and Solidarity” and the Antonio Gramsci Popular Education Group of Santiago del Estero, Argentina, as well as the Swedish Foundation for Human Rights, also lent their support to the RBA. Truly, in a fashion that is equally Cuban and black, the forming of the RBA’s beginning activities and goals was a community collaboration.

Like many things in Cuba, racism has been recycled and has slowly re-inserted itself in civil society. Due to the high level of social consciousness that still pervades Cuba, and the varied ways in which racial hierarchies have expressed themselves throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the RBA quickly understood that workers and representatives from all sectors of society would need to participate in some capacity in order to effect meaningful change. The first projects taken up by the RBA were -inspired discussions (usually in the form of ‘cultural circles’) and debates in which physicians, professors, architects, cultural workers, psychologists, retirees, and students of all social and racial backgrounds participated. Several writers, including the aforementioned historian of AfroCuban women, Daisy Rubiera, contributed articles to the first publication of the RBA, a magazine published in 2014 entitled “Afrobarriando: Experiencias Comunitarias.” In both large public forums and intimate social settings, members of the RBA sit in culture circles and affirm each participants’ humanity before discussing a topic of concern. Discussions and pedagogical exchanges traverse between topics as broad as blanquemianto (whitening) in Latin America to local amendment propositions to the Cuban constitution and, through the processes of facilitated dialog and exchange, they arrive community education and understanding based on processes of collective knowledge.

Initiatives, Growth, and Community Involvement

From these humble early initiatives of the RBA, they’ve now grown to work on a variety of initiatives and special projects which have begun across the island. One of such was the publication of social cartographies, a prominent example of this having taken place in the predominantly African-descended La Marina neighborhood in Matanzas (“Bolet'ın Informativo No.2: La Marina – Barrio, Identidad, Religi'on y Tradici'on”) in 2016. The social cartographies project in La Marina was spearheaded by Rau'l “Kimbo” Dom'ınguez, a self-proclaimed “former punk” turned community organizer whose energy that is profound, loud, and unique, with a presence that you encounter once in a lifetime. Kimbo heads the La Marina Project, a community initiative that pulled together collective resources and labor to create a cultural center in the mostly Afro-Cuban working-class area of La Marina. Kimbo, with his wife Yudania Garcia, in conjunction with the RBA, organized activities to preserve the local and often overlooked Afro-Cuban culture of La Marina, including rumba activities (a genre of black popular music and dance rooted in Yoruban orishas), the comparsa (an Afro-Cuban traditional folk and dance procession), and a large annual feast (“comida”). The social cartography project and the festive comida, like most RBA initiatives including sports, recreation, culture and pedagogy, involve entire community participation. Residents in La Marina formed processes to deliver their own familial histories and cultural geographies for the cartography project, and likewise are able each year to uplift historic family recipes, practices, and traditions through the comida, engaging the black community at every level in the community and remaining in constant dialogic praxis.

At one point during one of several trips of members of our international liaison group with the RBA, called “ASERE” (term for a popular Afro-Cuban greeting) while forming a cultural circle atop the San Severino Castle in Matanzas, Kimbo told us with clarity and force: “We live in a revolutionary society, this is what Fidel said, and I am Fidelista to the death. Why should we drop our guard? Why not continue our struggle against racism in honor of Fidel?” In his words one can hear the group historically most loyal to the Cuban Revolution expressing their commitment to continue it, in his face we see the commitment.

Other groups and initiatives have joined the RBA as well, such as the Casa Tomada Mirarte led by Mirna Dickson and Siria Gonzalez. The Casa Tomada is a queer intersectional and multi-functional project that initiated inclusive community activities around the theme of LGBTQI rights, gender issues, and artistic expression, which organizes such consciousness-raising events as the Festival Doble Negra, a popular gathering of queer black women. The Casa Tomada Mirarte’s name itself is a testament to Afro-Cuba’s ability to not only make do, but make better, beckoning us to recall the story of the Baobab tree once more; it is headquartered inside a dilapidated and formerly vacant home in the Marianao neighborhood of La Habana, where Black LGBTQI community members reclaimed the home for their purposes of starting an art gallery and community center. Thus, the Casa Tomada, or “Taken/Reclaimed Home” in English, was born.

Here, community members flow freely through the doors, enjoying various programing organized be the Dickson, Gonz'alez, and allied activist organizations such as the Alianza Afro-Cubana (Afro-Cuban Alliance). Educational workshops on gender, race, and sexuality, violence and feminicide, Paolo Freire-inspired culture circles, art workshops, artist exhibitions, and more all take place within this community home. Screen prints of the late American gay activist Marsha P. John, banners and poetry, drawings of Cuban flags and soldiers, and massive, beautiful nearly cubist paintings by artist Daymi Ticet line the walls the Casa Tomada; this immersion in Afro-Cuban and Afro-diasporic art, and specifically art that centers on black LGBTQI identity, highlights the ways in which the founders of the Casa Tomada attempt to have the community engage with creative liberation alongside their discussions and workshops.

The RBA also developed an alliance with the “Juan Marinello” Center of Research on Cuban Culture, the Africa-Caribbean Department of the Casa de las Am'ericas (one of Latin America’s most renowned center for the promotion of arts and letters), the Aponte Commission of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and several black-themed Working Groups of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). The Center for Psychological and Social Research (CIPS), the Cuban Institute of Anthropology, the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), the University of Havana, the Nicol'as Gull'en and Fernando Ortiz Foundations, Afrocubanas, the Club del Espendru' (founded by well-known activist Roberto Zubrano and Tom'as Fern'andez Robaina), the “Deborah” Network of Christian Women, the Alliance for Racial Unity (which focuses on black advocacy in the legal arena), Afro-Modernidades (a vanguard cultural movement created by Alberto Jones) and the Black Cuban Women’s Block were all invited to participate in community workshops and gatherings, conducted on the basis of full autonomy and horizontal participation. The sheer number – which is rapidly – of such independent, grass-roots movements, collectives, clubs and associations attests to the vitality of independent black Cuban activism and its constructive interaction with academic and socialist circles; they are diverse because they all stem from local, grass-roots initiatives Within the Red Barrial itself, several projects were formed, among them “Rizos” which is dedicated to the promoting African hair styles, an African doll project based on the importance of celebrating Yoruba religious traditions, and others dedicated to the celebration of Afrodescendant traditions, self-esteem, art, memory, spirituality and religiosity, with an overwhelming participation of women from the participant communities. Several members of the RBA were invited to gatherings of Afro-descendant movements in Columbia, Central America, Mexico and Argentina.

Maritza Lopez McBean, founder and leader of the RBA, is a popular educator trained, as were many of the movement’s protagonists, in Freirean pedagogy and community leadership by the Martin Luther King Ecumenical Center in La Habana (a Baptist institution centered on Liberation Theology) . As the director of the Casa Comunitaria Paulo Freire in La Lisa, a working-class community on the outskirts of La Habana, she has brought years of experience in stimulating debate on issues of family and domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, the reintegration of former prisoners into civil society, women’s equality, hip-hop and youth culture, and the preservation of the cultural and material history of Black communities. She carried out her pedagogical work in the spirit of empowering women and men of all ages to participate actively in the life of the barrio, encouraging civic participation in public debates regarding race, gender, sexual diversity, equity and participatory democracy.

“No objective of the revolution has ever been met without the participation of the community,” says RBA coordinator Maritza Lopez McBean, “and popular education has taught us that the voice of the people is varied. The problems of everyday life and the struggles we have undergone since the 1990s are discussed in workshops and events that reveal personal experiences with racism, machismo, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination that have to be voiced. They are not specific to Cuba, but they have Cuban solutions.” In the fall of 2019, echoing Fidel Castro’s admonitions that these issues be taken seriously, the Cuban government officially recognized, in no small part as a result of the efforts of the RBA and other kindred black associations, the importance of developing public policies to redress the lingering legacies of slavery and colonialism in Cuba, and combat racism and related anti-social mentalities in the rapidly changing socialist society.

Conclusion: ASERE and the Forming of Diaspora Connections

In 2018, a group of academics and community activists from the United States created ASERE, the aforementioned liaison group dedicated to supporting the RBA in its activities and generating knowledge outside of Cuba of the movement’s work. Based on the principles of reciprocity, absolute respect for the leadership and agency of the RBA, far from the designs of foreign academic institutions or nongovernmental organizations intent upon exercising influence on independent Black activism in Cuba, ASERE promises to create a new model of international and cross-cultural cooperation. Emphasizing what Cuban social activism has lessons to teach anti-racist and non-authoritarian movements everywhere, ASERE aims to exercise influence only on the correction of structural inequalities in the availability of resources and material support for social activists who do not enjoy access to institutional networks and visibility on a scale comparable to governmental and scholarly institutions. The RBA is dedicated to full sovereignty, to the improvement and reinforcement of the Cuban revolutionary project; it aspires to the collective articulation of all sectors of Cuban civil society in the fight against racism and discrimination of all types, and to the empowerment of marginalized sectors of the population to articulate and disseminate knowledge in the interest of community and grassroots empowerment.

The work by the RBA, and of Afro-Cuban associations that members of ASERE have worked with or witnessed, are being documented in hopes of of disseminating them widely, across the island and abroad. ASERE represents a new model international and cross-cultural solidarity. Whether it be black artists like Emilio O’Farrill, whose work in Matanzas teaches children African and Afro-Cuban art for empowerment and liberation, Idelsi Barbara Alfonso Sandrino whose dedicated preservation of Afro-diasporic spiritualities informs the RBA’s activities, or the often misunderstood yet deeply profound Abaku'a, Santer'ıa (Regla de Ocha-If'a), and Palo Monte practitioners who largely influence Afro-Cuban society, the movement taking place in Cuba with the support of the RBA is still growing. The vibrancy of Afro-Cuban spirituality across Matanzas and in parts of Havana is evidenced by shrines and alters that are actively prayed to, imagery and fables which directly descend from Nigeria’s Yoruba and Efik cultures intertwined with the Catholic names and faces which were placed onto them by the colonizers. Statuettes of Catholic idols like Mother Mary stand in many alters, however the orishas are as African as can be; it is a black theology tale as old as time, but a tale nonetheless that shows the resilience of Afro-Cuba’s abilities to adapt in post-colonial and post-revolutionary times.

The movement invites us, and the larger diaspora, to join in the perpetual assertion of blackness. The RBA is a testament to the power, resilience, and cultural insurgency which comes from a people who have continued to make do, to maintain, to reinvigorate and recharge and recommunicate and upcycle, who beckoned revolution and refused to let it stop, who, like black people in every society, will create fire from ashes and warm entire villages, towns and cities. Its alliances with independent movements, governmental agencies, academic and intellectual circles is a model of invention of new spaces of empowerment, social and cultural agency, and its voice within the broader Cuban anti-discrimination and black consciousness movement reverberates widely. In just a few years, the RBA has expanded, morphed, and grown in influence, and we are only now beginning to witness the potential of power for such a network on the island. We are thrilled to continue documenting and exploring this work for the entire diaspora. It is in thorugh this work of documentation, active participation and sharing that we hope to generate similar cycles of renewal, upcycling, and ancestral, radical regeneration, which will spread everywhere that blackness touches.