Racism in Cuba: a lingering challenge of the Cuban revolution

Abstract

This article examines the persistence of anti-Black racism in revolutionary Cuba by centering the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente (RBA), the grassroots network of Afro-Cuban community organizers founded in Havana in 2012. Rather than retracing ground already well covered in the historiography of race in Cuba, the article draws on original interviews with RBA members and Afro-Cuban scholars, conducted by the authors in 2024 and 2025, to advance two arguments. First, it shows how the RBA has reorganized the field of Afro-Cuban civil society since Alejandro de la Fuente’s (2012) landmark overview of the movement, expanding its reach beyond Havana, foregrounding Black women's leadership, and using Freirean popular education to make racism nameable in everyday community life. Second, it argues that racialized ideology has actively organized recent class differentiation in Cuba. Building on these findings, the article contends that the RBA's practice exemplifies the anti-colonial, feminist, and revolutionary pedagogical Marxism that Cuban revolutionary theory has yet to fully realize, and that this theoretical reformulation, more than a call for redistribution, is the central lesson the Cuban case offers for renewing Marxism.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗