The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) invited Robaina, who is a native Cuban, to speak for the purpose of achieving two main goals. First, to understand the historical Black reality in Cuba. Second, to understand the Black reality in the context of today; that is, with the initiative of both Raúl Castro and President Barack Obama to re-establish diplomatic relations and begin talks on normalizing relations.
To understand the current situation, Nimtz and Robaina took the audience back in time to look at the Cuban Revolution in order to answer the questions: What was the situation like for Blacks at the time? What were the changes that took place over the last 55 years? What does that mean for today?
One of the major themes of the presentation was the imposition of the U.S. embargo in 1962, particularly the United States’ intentions and the economic repercussions felt by the Cuban people. In order to fully comprehend how it relates to the problems faced today, Professor Nimtz provided a brief, historical overview of how the embargo affected the Cuban population. “The purpose of the embargo was originally intended to create much discomfort for the Cuban population, with the hope that the Cubans would rise up and overthrow their revolution,” Nimtz explains. The genesis of the embargo and the consequential latent effects were padded with a period of social gains within the Black community.
Nimtz explained that unlike the U.S., which had a strict system of racial segregation at the time, Cubans had a large, diverse working class consisting of Blacks, Whites, and Mulattos. The affinity felt between these groups in the working class allowed for an emergence of a socialist revolution in 1959. As a result, there were tremendous changes for the Black community in Cuba in terms of gains in education and healthcare, and there was significant progress until the 1990’s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the wrath of the U.S. embargo was in full bloom as Cuba lost more than 80 percent of its trade partners and the economy went into a tailspin. This caused the Cuban people to become increasingly more dependent on remittances, and because White Cubans were more likely to have relatives in the U.S. who could send them remittances than did their Black counterparts, the racial disparities that were once eliminated returned.
Nimtz and Robaina then addressed the surfacing of a new challenge for the revolution beginning in the 1990’s to the early 2000’s: How to deal with these re-emerging disparities?
One solution they offered was to create a discussion about the role of race in Cuba and the U.S., and how the two realities are similar and different. “By simply sharing our experiences, the conversation is initiated,” Nimtz said.
