Cubanocast

Popular music can be a powerful sociology tool because it's most often an unconscious, organic reflection of prevailing attitudes (an soon-to-be-updated analysis of Cuban attitudes towards America is here) The last couple of months having been a time to meditate on race, I wanted to see what Cuban popular music of the time can tell us about race relations in pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Methodology.

Pre-revolutionary Cuban music is more reliable for this purpose because it wasn't a government propaganda tool. The songs I've assembled for this post are representative of the general themes in Cuban music in pre-Castro Cuba- not exceptions. I will use no other sources except the music, a story, and my own brain.

Blacks' place in Cuban society.

One of the first items on my father's “to-do" when he arrived in Miami, Florida in the late fifties was to acquire a driver license. He set out to accomplish that task one fine tropical morning and, upon entering the Miami DMV, noticed that one side was bustling with people while the other side was empty. Neither a fool nor the only man in history who wished to extend his DMV experience, my father went to take the test on the empty side. The security guard gently nudged him back to the populated side and pointed to a sign. The sign indicated that side was for “colored” people. The experience surprised my father.

Blacks, you see, were generally regarded as being of lower social status in Cuba, but their status wasn't codified into law. In the American South, black inferiority was a legal reality. Cuban blacks had a greater amount of social mobility than American blacks- their race was an inhibition, not an impenetrable barrier.

The pre-fifties Cuban approach to race was encapsulated in the terms, "money whitens" and negro fino (literally, "fine black person" to be read as "classy" or "articulate."). All things being equal, whites had a social advantage. Of course, all things are never equal (money, looks, talent, etc.). The song above, "Negro de Sociedad" by Orquesta America tells of a black wife who embarrasses her black husband at an upscale affair by dancing the rumba, the “blackest” Cuban dance, seen by the party attendees, apparently, as uncivil.

The song's very name and that the singer's embarrassed shows the black disadvantage, that the black person is there in the first place proves the possibility of black social mobility, and that Orquesta America makes a joke about it says that people didn't take the “money whitens” concept completely seriously. One imagines the situation closer to a modern black businessman's rapping cousin busting a few rhymes at a corporate cocktail party than a turn-of-the-century Alabama woman bringing her black boyfriend home to pa'.

Cuba Morning: Great Bands of the Fifties

“De Que te Vale,” by Antonio Machin asks, “What good is it to be blanco y rubio ("white and blond") when you have no shame?” Both physical traits, then, were good ones to have in pre-rev Cuban society. Like any moderately well-ordered society, however, character trumps phenotype and race.

Ese Soy Yo by antonio machin

Black and white beauty.

In “Negra Bembon” by Arcano y sus Maravillas, a girl puts on airs because her hair is straighter and her skin color lighter than the rest of the people in the solar (ghetto). The narrator doesn't criticize her for thinking that lighter and straighter is better- the concept. He mocks her inaccurate self-image. She is, in fact, big-lipped and black, “just like him.” One can interpret "Negra Bembon" as the singer both acceding to white superiority in appearance and not questioning its justice. His only complaint is the woman's false pride.

The Best of Cuba

A white beauty standard, then?

Not quite. There are far more pre-revolutionary songs celebrating the beauty of the Cuban mulatta* (literally, "mule." It's a person of mixed black and white heritage.) than there are songs lauding white features.

Similar to how the Rolling Stones see black women in Brown Sugar, classic Cuban music praises mulatas for their beauty, dancing ability, and warmth, the last of which may be a euphemism.

Read more »

Tags: afro-cuban, afrocuban, contrast american racism, ethnomusicology, history, how were black treated in cuba, racism in cuba, racismo en cuba