Where Hip Hop Fits in Cuba's Anti-Racist Curriculum

Where Hip Hop Fits in Cuba's Anti-Racist Curriculum
The country's education leaders confront deep-seated discrimination in
the classroom through rap.
Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters

I was sitting with the Afrocentric rapstress Magia López Cabrera in her
modest Havana walk-up in June when Cuba's prominent black-history
scholar Tomás Fernández Robaina showed up for a café con leche. Her tiny
living room was filled with African folk art and images of women with
1970s-style Afros. It felt like the Cuban equivalent of Cornel West
dropping in on Queen Latifah. Two nights later at an anniversary
celebration for López's rap-duo Obsesión, Fernández Robaina sat
discussing racial profiling in the U.S. with Roberto Zurbano Torres,
widely known in the U.S. for his writing on Cuban racial issues.

Since arriving in Havana several weeks before to investigate Cuba's work
to eliminate racism, I had discovered a collaborative, tight-knit
movement that's gone largely unpublicized in the U.S., including in its
six-time-zone, decentralized academic world. In Havana, community
artists like Lopez, academics like Fernández, and members of the
National Ministry of Education are collectively exploring how to
integrate Afro-Cuban history and related gender concerns into the
primary-through-university school system. It's hard to imagine a U.S.
parallel, such as Secretary of Education John King officially asking
teachers to teach students a song like "Le Llaman Puta" (They Call Her
Whore)—López's critique of how Afro-Cuban women are driven into
prostitution—to fulfill the Common Core standards.

Efforts to combat racism in Cuba—which is widely believed to be majority
nonwhite—through education have emerged quietly over the last several
years. The National Ministry of Education officially leads the way
through the Aponte Commission, where Fernández has served, exploring how
to remove traces of racially denigrating language and imagery from, and
include more Afro-Cuban history in, school textbooks. But the bold
efforts are coming from below. A few semi-independent universities in
Havana, and regional centers like Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba, and
Camagüey, are taking the initiative, along with grassroots educators and
activists involved in a hip-hop movement spearheaded by Obsesión.

These educational shifts belie the stereotypical image of hovering Cuban
authorities appropriating schools to baldly transmit socialist ideology
and shut down social criticism. The U.S. press has historically
maintained an ambivalent dual narrative when it comes to Cuba. Recent
storylines note the promise of the American flag above the U.S. embassy
in Havana and American Airlines flying direct from New York beginning
this fall. But a darker narrative depicts continued repression under
Fidel Castro's lingering presence. Education is often assigned the
second narrative, but that's not what I found on the ground. While I did
read some dry 10th-grade history texts portraying the U.S. as an
imperialist aggressor and was slightly unnerved by overzealous,
uniformed fourth-graders in Camagüey Province reciting Fidel quotes in
the yard, generally, I found schools to be relaxed. There were engaging
communities where I openly talked about social concerns, including those
like racism that showed the government in an unfavorable light, and even
designed lessons comparing Cuban and U.S. racial dynamics.

Cuba has historically been slow to publicly confront its deep
racism—largely because it has almost mythologized its supposed racial
unity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Cubans quote their post-racial
nationalist hero José Martí more often than they do Fidel or the Marxist
revolutionary Che Guevara. They often cite Martí's 1893 statement that
"Man is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black." Inspired
by Martí and other nationalist predecessors, the revolutionary
government after 1959 impressively reduced racial economic disparities.
But it became absolutist, announcing in 1962 that racial issues had been
fully resolved and then closing off public debate. The silence was
reinforced by what the government perceived as the need to prevent
internal tensions from disrupting national unity in the face of ongoing
U.S. aggression.

Alejandro de la Fuente, a Cuban-educated professor of Latin American
history and African American studies at Harvard, told me that the Cuban
government "expected racism to wither away once its perceived structural
bases were dismantled. It did not." While Cuba, according to the U.S.
State Department's Overseas Security Advisory Council, has no ethnic
violence that compares with the police killings of young black men in
the U.S., the Aponte Commission has acknowledged the reality of police
racial profiling, a tourist industry that disproportionately hires
whites, and a national entertainment media in which Afro-Cubans are
underrepresented.

University professors, including the political scientists Esteban
Morales Domínguez at the University of Havana and Maikel Pons Giralt at
the University of Camagüey, are encouraging classroom discussions on
race. In a lesson that could be taught in almost any U.S. undergraduate
class, Pons had groups analyze details of a five-minute fictional film
depicting a black male teen being racially profiled in a store. As the
boy scans shelves for medicine to aid a sick mother, we see the
stereotypical images in the mind of a suspicious grocer and elderly
white woman. Group analyses, which I later read and discussed with their
professor, were sound, if slightly superficial—perhaps a global pattern
among freshmen undergraduates. A representative response was "In this
case, the young man is misjudged by everyone, while the white woman, who
has a shared trust with the vendor," is the one who actually robs the
store. The government allows the university to give Pons the freedom to
design such lessons.

Many primary schools address racial prejudice by talking with parents
about how to engage with their children. In a 2014 study, the University
of Toronto education professor Arlo Kempf showed how primary-school
teachers in Cuba make family visits, helping parents talk about racial
prejudice with their children. This is a relatively common, though not
an officially mandated, practice; about a third of teachers make such
visits.

Beyond the classroom walls, several hip-hop groups and grassroots
activists have openly developed an anti-racism curriculum, signaling the
government's willingness to permit public discussion of racial issues.
Some hip-hop groups are even registered with a national Cuban Rap
Agency. The key community-outreach organization is Red Barrial
Afrodescendiente (Afrodescendent Barrio Network), a group of Havana
women who hold meetings to discuss racial realities and provide hands-on
workshops for families. The leader, Hildelisa Leal Díaz, said the
meetings give women a language to describe a racism they had never
consciously named. In the Black Doll project, named for a José Martí
short story, mothers and their children make paper-maché figures that
are sometimes Afrocentric, such as the Yoruba Santería deity Yemaya.

Source: Cuban Educators Confront Country's Racism Through Hip Hop, Rap -
The Atlantic -
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/where-hip-hop-fits-in-cubas-anti-racist-curriculum/493682/