“Racial Integration, No! National Integration, Yes!” Revolutionary Politics in Santiago de Cuba, 1959–63

During the first three years of the Cuban Revolution, the new government launched a brief campaign to eliminate racial discrimination.  Young leaders, like Fidel Castro, publicly criticized Cubans who practiced racial discrimination and announced plans to integrate previously white-only spaces, such as private schools, beaches, and recreational facilities. This campaign filled the headlines of national newspapers and opened a debate about how to respond to Afro-Cuban demands for equality. Other research has shown how black and mulato intellectuals in Havana facilitated this campaign by pushing for equal rights.

Shifting the focus from Cuba’s capital, this paper uses sources from the provincial archive in Santiago to explore how the rhetoric surrounding race and revolution in the island’s eastern city both ran parallel to and departed from policies in Havana due to a higher population of Afro-Cubans living in Oriente and the large numbers of black leaders in the city’s Communist party (PSP). Attitudes published in the Santiago press reveal a substantial divide between groups that wanted a direct plan of action against racism and those who would have preferred not to talk about race at all. For example, the PSP used language from the national racial integration campaign to promote its own activities, especially to drum up enthusiasm for the first May Day parade in nearly 10 years. Meanwhile, the National Integration Front (Frente de Integración Nacional), a committee organized in 1959, eschewed the state’s anti-racist plans and called for reconciliation between members of the anti-Batista coalition without mentioning race, despite using the word “integration” in its title. The distance between how black PSP leaders and the National Integration Front committee defined unity, national integration, and revolution after 1959 illuminates the challenges of implementing a state-led program to eliminate racial discrimination on a politically and racially divided island in the 1960s.