From Solidarity to C ross-F ertilization: Afro-Cuban ...

From Solidarity to Cross-Fertilization:

Afro-Cuban/African American Interaction

during the 1930s and 1940s

Frank A. Guridy

In December 1937, Arthur W. Mitchell, an African American congressman fromChicago, Illinois, embarked on a holiday trip to Cuba. On his arrival to the island, hereceived an enthusiastic welcome from leading Afro-Cuban intellectuals and politi-cians. Their fervor was based on their awareness of Mitchell’s significance as the onlyAfrican American serving in the U.S. Congress at the time. But Mitchell’s otherwisesuccessful visit was tarnished by a familiar encounter with racial discrimination whenthe congressman, his wife Annie Harris Mitchell, and his Afro-Cuban hosts ran intodifficulty obtaining a table for dinner at the Hotel Saratoga in Havana. Word of theincident quickly spread throughout Cuba, generating spirited protests from numer-ous Afro-Cuban organizations on the island. Petitions directed to the president ofCuba called for the hotel owner’s expulsion from the country for violating the Cubanconstitution and for insulting this “distinguished leader of the colored race.”

El caso Mitchell (the Mitchell case), as it became known, highlights the inter-section between local and transnational processes in the making of racial under-standings in Cuban society during the tumultuous period of the 1930s and early1940s, a time of heightened political mobilization in Cuba and across the African dias-pora.1 This essay situates the Mitchell case and other instances of Afro-Cuban/AfricanAmerican interaction in this period within a longer history of cross-fertilizationbetween Cubans and North Americans of African descent. I argue that such

Radical History ReviewIssue 87 (fall 2003): 19–48Copyright 2003 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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exchanges played a crucial role in stimulating a resurgent antidiscrimination move-ment on the island. In subsequent years, transnational networks would continue toinvigorate antidiscrimination activism, not only in Cuba but also in some influentialAfrican American activist communities, particularly during the Second World War.The power of these information circuits led the U.S. government to attempt to manip-ulate the circulation of racial understandings between the two countries in an effortto neutralize Afro-Cuban activism. By underscoring the dynamic interplay betweenlocal and transnational processes in the making of racial understandings in a particu-lar historical moment, this essay illustrates the utility of a transnational approach tothe study of the interactions among people of African descent across national bound-aries during the twentieth century.2

Foregrounding the exchanges between Afro-Cubans and African Americanschallenges our understanding of the fields of “Cuban,” “Afro-Cuban” and “AfricanAmerican” history. For historians of race in Cuba, this essay underscores how Afro-Cubans viewed the issue of racial inequality not simply as a “Cuban” question butalso as an issue pertinent to themselves and African Americans as members of thelarger transnational collective called la raza de color (the colored race).3 For AfricanAmerican historiography, an examination of Afro-Cuban/African American interac-tion sheds new light on established topics in the field, such as the emergence of racialuplift ideology in the postemancipation period and the renewed struggle for civilrights during the 1930s and 1940s. In this way, it invites further investigations intothe ways interactions between Cubans and North Americans of African descentshaped the making of African American principles of affiliation. To be sure, interac-tions with people of African descent throughout the globe shaped African Americanself-understandings. However, Cuba’s geographical proximity to the United Statesgave the “Negro in Cuba” particular significance and familiarity for North Americanpersons of African descent.4

Scholars have already begun to uncover the multiple ties that linked Afro-Cubans and African Americans. As African American and Afro-Cuban communitiesexpanded and were differentiated by the processes of migration and classstratification during the opening decades of the twentieth century, they came in con-tact with people of African descent from other parts of the Americas. The ground-breaking volume edited by Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, Between Raceand Empire, highlighted some of the connections created by Cubans and NorthAmericans of African descent across national borders and cultural frontiers.5 Thesepoints of contact were numerous and involved relationships among people from dif-ferent social classes, which produced a dynamic cross-fertilization of cultures. Suchexchanges were embodied in the relationships established by Afro-Cuban andAfrican American baseball players, in the interaction between intellectuals such asNicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes, and in the collaborations among musicians

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who played in nightclubs and dancehalls in Harlem and Havana. My research con-tributes to this work by highlighting the relationships between a particular group ofintellectuals, entrepreneurs, and political activists dedicated to circulating informa-tion about the “Negro,” and their impact on Afro-Cuban conceptions of race. Theseconnections did not just constitute expressions of racial solidarity; rather they madefor seminal influences in the ways Cubans and North Americans of African descentcame to view themselves both as citizens of their respective countries and as mem-bers of the colored race. While the relationships examined here were undoubtedlyshaped by the class and gender positions of their participants, their involvement inthe production and dissemination of news and ideas pertinent to the colored racemade them influential in black communities in both countries.

Spaces of Congregation and Cross-Fertilization, 1898–1933The dynamic process of cross-fertilization between Cubans and North Americans ofthe 1930s and 1940s had its roots in the transnational history of slavery in the Amer-icas. In the nineteenth century, slaves and free persons of color in Cuba and theUnited States inextricably linked their collective struggles for freedom. Along withHaiti, perhaps no other society in the Americas captured African American imagi-nations more than Cuba. In the antebellum period, African American abolitionistsincluded the liberation of slaves in Cuba in their vision of emancipation.6 At thesame time, an understanding of the African American experience with slave eman-cipation informed Afro-Cuban struggles for freedom. In the years following the finalabolition of slavery on the island in 1886, Afro-Cuban journalists, both women andmen, drew on the example of African Americans as part of their own effort to definecitizenship against encroaching practices of racial segregation.7

If Afro-Cuban/African American encounters were defined by their parallelstruggles for freedom during the era of slavery, in the decades following emancipa-tion, they were transformed by the U.S. intervention into the Cuban struggle forindependence against Spain (1868–98). Since the outbreak of war, African Ameri-can observers of Cuba sympathized with Cuban separatists, in large part because ofthe prevalence of people of African descent in the Cuban Liberation Army, such asthe celebrated mulatto general Antonio Maceo.8 As historians have shown, however,African American sympathies with Cuba became more ambivalent after the UnitedStates militarily intervened in the conflict. Many African Americans found them-selves caught between the desire to identify with the colored race in Cuba and theirown efforts to combat encroaching disfranchisement by serving for the U.S. militaryin the war. These tensions informed the construction of a racial citizenship that drewon the imperial and masculinist discourses of the age.9

After the conclusion of the war, Cuba’s deepening integration into the UnitedStates empire in the Caribbean profoundly reshaped relationships between Cubans

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and North Americans of African descent. Following the U.S. military occupation ofthe island and the republic’s establishment under U.S. supervision in 1902, Cubabecame entrenched in a rapidly expanding network of bodies and ideas migratingto and from the United States. Consequently, African American/Afro-Cuban inter-action accelerated. Afro-Cubans who migrated to the United States in search ofopportunities for employment and education provided one point of contact. Thesemigrants often found themselves living alongside African Americans in segregatedcommunities. The black press supplied another point of contact. An increasing num-ber of stories published by journalists who had traveled to the island heightenedAfrican American interest in the “Negro in Cuba.” Thus Cuba’s integration into theU.S. Caribbean empire had the unintended effect of expanding the scope of Afro-Cuban/African American interaction.10

The complicated effects of the U.S./Cuban imperial encounter on the interac-tions between Cubans and North Americans of African descent can be seen in theinfluence of Booker T. Washington in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. Asscholars have shown, Washington’s reputation as a race leader extended beyond theborders of the United States. Washington’s stature in Cuba was enhanced not onlybecause North Americans disseminated his message in Cuba but also because notionsof racial uplift already prevailed among Cubans of African descent, making the Wiz-ard of Tuskegee a celebrated figure among some Cuban blacks and mulattoes.11

Afro-Cubans’ veneration of Booker T. Washington exemplified their admira-tion for the achievements of African Americans in the face of rigidifying practices ofwhite racism during the early Jim Crow era. To a number of Cuban blacks andmulattoes, el negro americano (the Negro American) epitomized racial advancementin the hierarchical construction of the African diaspora. Afro-Cuban observers of thecolored race in the United States saw leaders such as Booker T. Washington as modelrepresentatives of their race in the most developed country in the world. As an Afro-Cuban writer put it in 1915: “We, like the Negro American, must look for ourstrength in commerce, the arts, and independence. In my opinion, those are the onlysources of prosperity where we can find our progress.”12

Soon after the U.S. intervention in the Cuban war for independence, Wash-ington sought to make his own contribution to the North American imperial projectby recruiting Afro-Cubans to study at Tuskegee Institute. His program of “industrialeducation for Cuban Negroes” brought a number of Cuban students to Tuskegeeand Hampton Institute at the turn of the century.13 While this plan worked in tan-dem with the U.S. imperial project in Cuba, institutions such as Tuskegee providedimportant settings for Afro-Cuban encounters with African Americans, particularlyfor upwardly mobile Cubans of African descent. Such was the case of José GarcíaInerarity, an Afro-Cuban entrepreneur from the town of Santa Clara, who first metAfrican Americans while he studied at Hampton Institute. His experience at Hamp-


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ton shaped his self-understanding as a member of the colored race. At Hampton, hewas also exposed to the ideology of racial improvement, and his efforts to connectwith black businessmen in the United States in subsequent years reflect his bour-geois outlook. During the 1930s, he acted as the Cuban correspondent for ClaudeBarnett’s Associated Negro Press and became a regular contact for African Americantravelers to Cuba.14 While such relationships were forged in the class-based, gen-dered, and hierarchical world of racial uplift, for García and a number of Cubans ofAfrican descent who studied in the United States, black educational institutions suchas Tuskegee and Hampton provided concrete settings for cross-fertilization and thedevelopment of ties simultaneously reinforcing both national and racial principles ofaffiliation.15

If black schools functioned as centers of interaction between upwardlymobile Afro-Cubans and African Americans in the United States in the decades afterthe war of 1898, in Cuba such spaces were provided by the so-called societies ofcolor, an island-wide network of recreational and mutual aid societies created by andfor Afro-Cubans.16 Though always fraught with tensions along the lines of class andcolor, these Afro-Cuban institutions were centers of social life during a period inwhich most leisure activity on the island remained racially segregated. The mostwell-known society of color on the island was the Havana-based Club Atenas,described in a profile written for the Crisis by Margaret Ross Martin, an AfricanAmerican journalist then residing in Cuba, as “Cuba’s most exclusive cultural, socialand recreational organization among the colored people.” Founded in 1917 by mem-bers of an emerging class of Afro-Cuban professionals and other public figures, theClub Atenas assumed the role of voice of the Afro-Cuban population.17 Despite itselitist tendencies, the organization served as a space for congregation and recreation,as well as an important political advocacy group for Afro-Cubans. As a representativeof the colored race in Cuba, the association also identified itself with black popula-tions in other parts of the world, particularly African Americans. Through activitiessuch as organizing readings of works by African American writers or by profiling thecareers of prominent black leaders in the United States in their publications, theClub Atenas and other Afro-Cuban societies became important sources of informa-tion on African Americans during these years.18

The Club Atenas also served as an unofficial host for African Americans andother persons of African descent who visited Cuba. Several foreign black visitors tothe island during the 1920s and 1930s were introduced to Afro-Cuban social lifethrough their encounters with the societies of color during their stays on the island,particularly the Club Atenas.19 In the early 1930s, the club entertained a number ofAfrican American visitors to Cuba, including Langston Hughes, William Pickens,and Mary McLeod Bethune, among many others. The Club Atenas not only hostedAfrican American visitors to the island but also counted some as members. While


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residing in Cuba in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Margaret Ross Martin and JamesWalter Martin were active members of the organization. In 1930, they helped coor-dinate the club’s reception of Pickens, Bethune, and other African American visitorsto Cuba.20

The Club Atenas also made a favorable impression on another foreign blackvisitor, Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg. In 1932, he published an essay on his trip toCuba in quest of Negro books in the National Urban League’s magazine Opportu-nity, in which he enthusiastically described his encounters with Afro-Cuban intel-lectuals in the halls of Atenas, including his meeting with Nicolás Guillén. Schom-burg was so impressed with the activities of the Afro-Cuban community in Havanathat he wrote, “To American Negroes interested in the cultural development of theirrace, a trip to Cuba would be an inspiration and a revelation that might astoundthem.”21 Thus the Club Atenas and other Afro-Cuban societies throughout the islandperformed a function similar to that of black schools in the United States by pro-viding spaces of congregation for an emerging transnational network of Afro-Cuban/African American intellectuals, entrepreneurs, activists, and journalists whoplayed a critical role in disseminating information about the colored race in bothcountries.

Schomburg’s trip to Cuba took place at the beginning of a revolutionaryperiod in African diaspora history: the 1930s. During this tumultuous decade, racialunderstandings and the meaning of racial equality throughout the Atlantic worldwere transformed by the social and political upheavals generated by the GreatDepression. As scholars have shown, the decade proved a decisive moment formovements for racial equality throughout the African diaspora. The internationalScottsboro campaign waged by communist activists, the Italian invasion of Ethiopiaand the emerging anticolonial movement in Africa and Europe, and the explosion ofmilitant labor uprisings in the Caribbean helped set in motion more aggressive chal-lenges to ongoing practices of racial exclusion. At the same time, the economic col-lapse engendered by the Great Depression weakened the legitimacy of the capital-ist-oriented project of racial improvement that had been touted by organizationssuch as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, among manyothers. In the 1930s, movements that aggressively championed the interests of thelaboring majority of the colored race challenged organizations whose messagesremained primarily directed toward upwardly mobile, educated persons of Africandescent. These mobilizations had a profound effect on the ways the colored race wasimagined in activist and intellectual circles, challenging the paradigm of racialimprovement that had served as the dominant model of social and political organi-zation since the nineteenth century.22

These wider transformations had equally profound effects on the movementagainst racial discrimination in Cuba. Since the inauguration of the republic in 1902,


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Cuba had experienced two opposing tendencies in regards to questions of racialequality. On the one hand, the notion of a raceless nationality articulated by patri-ots such as José Martí and Antonio Maceo had become pillars of Cuban nationalistdiscourse. Martí’s notion of a Cuba “with all and for all” appeared to be borne outby the emergence of a small number of successful Afro-Cuban professionals whoattained a measure of political influence on the island during the opening decades of the century. On the other hand, the presence of this upwardly mobile class ofAfro-Cubans did not deter ongoing practices of racial discrimination and periodicoutbreaks of racial violence throughout the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, some Cubanwhites resented blacks and mulattoes with a measure of economic standing andpolitical influence, particularly after the onset of the economic crisis generated bythe depression. These simmering tensions exploded in the persecution of manyprominent Afro-Cubans following the collapse of the Cuban state in 1933.23

For a number of Cubans concerned about racial inequality in their society,the events of 1933 illustrated the need for more active measures to attack the per-sistence of racism on the island. During the 1930s, a younger generation of male andfemale activists with roots in the societies of color and the Cuban Communist Partywaged a battle for the citizenship rights belonging to Afro-Cubans. Like activists inother parts of the African diaspora at this time, these younger Afro-Cubans and theirprogressive white allies sought to combat practices of racial discrimination by moreforcefully incorporating the interests of the often-overlooked sectors of the Cubancolored race, namely, working-class blacks and mulattoes and Afro-Cuban women.They argued that the national ideology of a raceless nationality meant little if therewas no corresponding effort to actively contest persistent practices of racial discrim-ination on the island. It is within this context that one must situate the outburst ofactivism generated by the visit of Arthur W. Mitchell to Cuba in late 1937.24

El Caso Mitchell and the Antidiscrimination Movement in CubaIn the months leading up to Mitchell’s visit, the impact of transnational transforma-tions in racial understandings became increasingly apparent in Cuban political andintellectual culture. In December 1936, a group of Cuban intellectuals and activists,led by the well-known scholar Fernando Ortiz, founded the Sociedad de EstudiosAfrocubanos (Society of Afrocuban Studies).25 The group’s membership includedmany of the same figures who had been active participants in the Club Atenas andthe wider antidiscrimination movement, such as Miguel Angel Céspedes, NicolásGuillén, José Luciano Franco, Juan Marinello, Salvador García Agüero, and AnaEtchegoyen de Cañizares. In its activities and publications, the organization pro-vided a forum for newer scholarly perspectives on the political, social, and culturallife of the colored race in Cuba and in other parts of the African diaspora.

Among the plethora of noteworthy activities organized by the Society of


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Afrocuban Studies, two reveal the process of cross-fertilization taking place betweenCubans and African Americans during this period of heightened political mobiliza-tion and social awareness. In March 1937, the society held a seminar entitled “Los‘Spirituals negro songs’ y su acción étnico-social.” Complete with demonstrationsfrom the vocalist Zoila Gálvez de Andreu, a well-known intellectual and performerin Havana cultural circles, and accompanied by Pedro García Arango on the piano,the event was designed to educate the Cuban public on the “spiritual Negro song.”Gálvez and García performed such spiritual classics as “Weepin’ Mary” [No lloresMaría], “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See” [Nadie sabe las cosas que yo veo], and“By(e) an’ By(e)” [¡Oh, un día de estos!]. The performance of the “Negro spirituals”in the headquarters of one of the island’s leading cultural institutions highlights thecentrality of Cuban readings of African American experience in the formulation oftheir own understandings of racialized populations.26

The Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos also organized a lecture given by thePuerto Rican intellectual Tomás Blanco. In the presentation, entitled “El prejuicioracial en Puerto Rico” [Racial prejudice in Puerto Rico], Blanco presented hisviews of race in Puerto Rico by juxtaposing what he viewed as mild Puerto Ricanracism with the stringent racialized practices of the United States.27 Blanco’s text-book case of North American racism was an incident involving none other thanArthur Mitchell. Using Time magazine as his source, Blanco described an episodein which the African American congressman was forced out of a first-class “white”railroad car on a train traveling through the state of Arkansas, in April 1937.28

Blanco’s reference to the discrimination case involving congressman Mitchell wasironic, for it was only one month after Blanco’s lecture at the Society of AfrocubanStudies that Mitchell would again be embroiled in a racial discrimination incident,this time in Cuba.

Arthur Mitchell’s career illustrates the political trajectories of a number ofCuban and North American black leaders during this period. Born in Alabama in1883, he was a disciple of Booker T. Washington and rose to prominence as an edu-cator in his home state before he decided to enter into politics. After serving in Pres-ident Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign, Mitchell moved to Chicago and switchedover to the Democratic Party. He learned the rules of Chicago machine politics andquickly rose through the ranks of the Chicago Democrats. In 1934, he made anunsuccessful attempt to capture the Democratic nomination for representative ofthe First District, finishing as the runner-up to the longtime white politician HarryBaker. After Baker’s unexpected death shortly thereafter, Mitchell suddenly becamethe Democratic candidate for the congressional seat held by popular black incum-bent Oscar DePriest. Mitchell, who had been a virtual unknown in local politics,unexpectedly defeated DePriest in 1934 and replaced him as the only African Amer-ican in Congress. As the first African American elected to Congress as a Democrat,


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Mitchell’s victory signified the beginning of the shift of African American loyalties tothe Democratic Party after decades of loyal support for the Republicans.29

During his tenure in Congress, Mitchell became an unpopular figure amonga number of African American leaders who saw him as little more than a politicalopportunist. However, during the 1930s, his status as the only African Americanserving in the U.S. Congress automatically placed him in the role of race leader, aposition he strategically embraced. Mitchell’s conflicts with other African Americanleaders meant little to Afro-Cuban observers of U.S. domestic politics, who saw himas the “Honorable Arthur W. Mitchell,” leader of the “colored race.” One Afro-Cubanadmirer informed Mitchell that he “read with extraordinary satisfaction about yourliberal, valiant and realistic laws favorable to democracy, to workers, and to men ofour race.” Such efforts were “worthy of the most sincere praise and imitation.”30

When Congressman Mitchell and his wife Annie Harris Mitchell decided tomake Cuba part of a Caribbean holiday vacation, they called on José García Inerar-ity, the Hampton-educated Afro-Cuban entrepreneur. The origin of García’s rela-tionship with Mitchell is uncertain, but his ties to the congressman dated at least asfar back as 1934.31 His membership in the Hampton Alumni Association put him inregular contact with African Americans, especially those who traveled to Cuba.Moreover, his efforts to forge ties with African American entrepreneurs frequentlycarried him to the United States. These connections prompted García to serve thecolored race in Cuba and the United States in other ways. In 1930, following a sug-gestion from William Pickens of the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP), García had offered to become the Cuban correspondentfor the Associated Negro Press. A “son of General García of Santa Clara,” who “stud-ied at Hampton and knows English well,” in the words of Pickens, García initiateda correspondence with Barnett that would continue over twenty years.32 García hadalso written Barnett offering himself as a host for African American visitors to Cuba.After a discrimination case involving the African American educator Mary McLeodBethune in 1930, he told Barnett that “what we must have is somebody that will takecare of American colored people when they come to Cuba so nothing will happenlike [what] happen[ed] to Mrs. Bethune.” In the same letter, García enhanced hiscredentials as a host for African American visitors to the island when he told Barnettthat he had “take[n] care of all colored people from U.S. to Cuba every winter.”33

Thus by the time Arthur Mitchell arrived in December 1937, García had become anestablished contact for African Americans traveling to Cuba.

Thanks to the efforts of García and other black and mulatto journalists, theAfro-Cuban community in Havana was prepared to greet Congressman Mitchell.When he stepped off the S.S. Virginia on December 28, 1937, he found an enthusi-astic welcome from the who’s who of the Afro-Cuban community in Havana. García,the head of the so-called Commission of Reception for the visit, introduced Mitchell


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to several leading black and mulatto intellectuals and politicians on the island,including Miguel Angel Céspedes, Manuel Capestany Abreu, and Martín AntonioIglesias. Throughout his brief stay in Cuba, the press repeatedly saluted him for hisstatus as the only black elected official serving in the U.S. Congress. His membershipin Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and his ardent support of the president’sNew Deal programs enhanced his prestige.34

Mitchell was literally besieged by Cubans from the moment he arrived on theisland. It was a reception he was unprepared for: “For the love of Heaven,” Mitchellcried to reporters before he stepped off the steamship that brought him to Havana,“is this what was waiting for me when I left to get some rest from the exigencies ofthe press?—and I have yet to step on Cuban soil!”35 Despite his exasperated moodof the moment, Mitchell granted an interview to Gustavo Urrutia, the black colum-nist of the Havana daily, the Diario de la Marina, later that evening in the halls of theClub Atenas. The journalist’s questions reflected the keen awareness that Afro-Cuban intellectuals possessed of U.S. racial politics. Urrutia asked Mitchell about theopportunities for blacks under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Mitchell, the trueparty loyalist, insisted to Urrutia that “the Negro has awoken and is now filling theranks of the Democrats because of the benefits accruing to him by Rooseveltian pol-itics. . . . Roosevelt is advocating the improvement of the downtrodden classes andthe Negro is found in one of the lowliest of these.” He claimed that the “Roosevelt-ian policy is such that the intelligence of the Negro can serve as a lever with which to improve his status on a solid economic base offered to all the impoverishedclasses.”36 To Urrutia’s remark to Mitchell that “a few Afro-Cubans believe thatmoney from the North American Negro may come to help us in Cuba,” the con-gressman replied that since “the Negro is poor in every corner of the earth,” it wasbest for blacks in Cuba and the United States to “establish and maintain an intimatespiritual contact for the study and solution of our problems which are essentiallyidentical.”37

The Mitchell tour continued for the next two days, as the U.S. politican wasgreeted by other Afro-Cuban public figures. Besides Céspedes, Capestany Abreu,and Iglesias, Mitchell met leaders of other societies of color, including Pastor deAlbear Friol of the Unión Fraternal, who would become an important figure inCuban racial politics in subsequent years, and representatives of La Unión of Matan-zas, the Antilla Sport Club, and the Asociación Cultural Femenina. The Mitchellsalso visited the Senate chambers, where Capestany Abreu saluted them with achampagne punch. After another luncheon with Miguel Angel Céspedes, thenundersecretary of justice, the Mitchells boarded the S.S. Virginia to return to theUnited States.38

Despite the fanfare generated by Mitchell’s visit, his trip did not concludewithout incident. Following the reception at the Club Atenas, Mitchell and his party,


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which included his wife, Lieutenant Feliciano González, and José García Inerarity,ran into difficulties securing a table for dinner at the Hotel Saratoga. Though thedetails remain somewhat sketchy, word quickly spread that the proprietor refused toserve them because they were persons of African descent.39 The incident seems tohave occurred quietly, so subtly that even members of Mitchell’s party were notquite sure exactly what happened. After admitting that “some people have said thatI did not act as I should, being a lieutenant, that I should have punished the man,”Lieutenant González wrote to Mitchell weeks later claiming that he still did “not yetknow what happened,” wondering whether Mitchell himself knew precisely whathad occurred at the hotel. “You imagined, as I did,” wrote González, “that somethinghappened,” even though García “never told us.”40

The ambiguity evident in González’s letter and in other correspondencebetween Mitchell and his Afro-Cuban hosts makes it difficult to ascertain theirmotives for deciding on the Saratoga for their dinner plans that evening. It is unclearwhether they arrived at the Saratoga fully expecting to be served without encoun-tering difficulties or whether they went to the hotel intending to challenge the noto-riously discriminatory practices of many Havana establishments connected to thetourist sector.41 The Mitchells were not the first African American visitors to bedenied entrance to Havana hotels and resorts during these years. Certainly, Garcíahimself was well aware of the discriminatory practices of the tourist industry inCuba, as evidenced by a letter he wrote to Claude Barnett years earlier regardingthe racial discrimination incident against Mary McLeod Bethune and other AfricanAmericans who traveled to Cuba in 1930. It is therefore highly unlikely that he wasignorant of the possibility that he and his guests would encounter difficulties diningat the Hotel Saratoga. Despite the absence of evidence of their motives, it seems rea-sonable to suspect that García and González believed that the presence of a well-known visitor, who also happened to be a congressman from the United States,would override any possibility of racial discrimination.

Although members of Mitchell’s party remained in the dark about whatoccurred at the hotel that evening, the Cuban public quickly received the unam-biguous message that their distinguished visitor had been a victim of racial discrim-ination. In the days after the dinner at the Saratoga, the Havana press published afirestorm of protest. Antonio Villanueva, the owner of the hotel, quickly dismissedthe charges of racial discrimination in a letter written to the U.S. ambassador, pub-lished in the Diario de la Marina. Villanueva wanted to “definitively deny” the accu-sations of racial discrimination and insist that the delays in service were due to theoverwhelming number of tourists at the hotel’s restaurant that evening. Further-more, Villanueva insisted that “the head waiter personally served the congressmanand his associates” in an effort to make up for any inconveniences experienced by theMitchell party.42 José I. Rivero, the director of the Diario de la Marina, reiterated


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Villanueva’s account. An exchange appeared in Rivero’s newspaper over the director’sdecision not to publish an article of protest penned by the black columnist GustavoUrrutia. Rivero defended his decision, claiming that the accusations against Vil-lanueva were unfounded. In his reply to Urrutia, the editor argued that he found it“hard to believe that a businessman would openly insult an official of our Army, andthat official would accept the insult in as mild a manner as a Franciscan Friar.” Anydelays experienced by the “distinguished Negroes,” according to Rivero, were due tothe lack of available tables that evening. Moreover, the newspaper director blamedthe unfounded protests on the work of agitators of the “Bolshevik Revolution . . .who have elevated lies to the category of art and science.” While maintaining thatnothing discriminatory occurred at the hotel, the newspaper editor defended theright of businessmen to cater to the sensibilities of their more powerful and numer-ous white clientele. “If a businessman refuses to do business with a Negro,” Riveroargued, “in truth it is not he who refuses, but rather his white customers, who are inthe majority and possess greater buying power.” Thus Rivero argued against theadoption of an antidiscrimination law because it would punish the “innocent” mer-chant. “Any coercive legislative or governmental measures in this matter would onlyaggravate or create more conflicts,” he concluded.43

Yet the defenses put forth by Rivero and Villanueva did little to stem thegrowing tide of protest. Letters calling for the punishment of Villanueva came fromvarious sectors of Cuban society. José García Inerarity was among the first Cubansto inform Mitchell of the storm unleashed by the incident at the hotel. “All coloredpeople are getting there every night,” García wrote. He followed with the startlingclaim that “some people came to see me to kill him [the hotel owner].”44 Another let-ter from Clara Ruíz, whom Mitchell had met during his visit, conveyed the angergenerated by the episode. “The local press has commented bitterly and forcefully onthe incident,” Ruíz claimed, “and all organizations have denounced the deed,demanding of the authorities the immediate expulsion of the proprietor of the HotelSaratoga.”45

Ruíz and García were not exaggerating the uproar the incident generated.News of the Saratoga episode rapidly spread throughout the island, and heads of thesocieties of color sprang to action, leading the mobilization of Afro-Cubans inHavana. The Club Atenas became particularly active. On January 2, the club held anassembly designed to draw up a legal campaign against the management of the HotelSaratoga. The attendees of the meeting included many of the radical intellectualswho formed part of the antidiscrimination movement in Cuba, such as FernandoOrtiz, Emilio Roig de Leuchshenring, José Luciano Franco, Juan Marinello, Sal-vador García Agüero, and Benjamin Muñoz Ginarte. They argued that the Mitchellepisode illustrated the necessity of an antidiscrimination clause in the Cuban con-stitution. In previous years, Cuban politicians had routinely dismissed protests


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against racial discrimination by invoking article 11 of the Cuban constitution, whichstipulated that “all Cubans are equal before the law.” However, the delegates at theClub Atenas meeting argued that additional legislation that called for fines andimprisonment against those found guilty of racial discriminatory acts was needed to“prevent and suppress all acts of racial discrimination.”46 Moreover, the delegatesformed a legal team to file a lawsuit against the management of the Hotel Saratoga.In subsequent years, mobilization for antidiscrimination legislation would becomea major focus of Cuban antiracist activists. In this way, the Mitchell incident pro-vided an important stimulus for the resurgent campaign for Afro-Cuban rights in thelate 1930s and early 1940s.

As antidiscrimination activists worked to publicize the Mitchell case in theCuban public sphere, news of the upsurge of mobilization continued to flow to thecongressman’s Washington, DC, office. A few weeks after his return to the UnitedStates, a letter arrived from Feliciano González, the military officer who was with theMitchell party at the hotel. Writing from his military base in Cayo Mambi, Oriente,he informed Mitchell that “the people have raised hell” over the incident. Noting thewidespread publicity, the lieutenant related to Mitchell that “your name and minehave practically been in the newspaper everyday. Members of different societieshave come together protesting the case.” González claimed that the episode hadcaused concern even among the upper levels of the Cuban government, promptingFulgencio Batista, then chief of the Cuban army and de facto president of the repub-lic, to summon him to Havana from his post in Oriente in order to find out “whathappened, how it happened, and what was my opinion about the matter.” Gonzálezstated that Batista wanted to know “what you said and if you left Cuba happy ornot.”47

Afro-Cuban activists in Havana were not the only ones mobilized by thetreatment Mitchell received at the Hotel Saratoga. It is clear that the Cuban govern-ment’s concern about el caso Mitchell stemmed from the shower of angry telegrams itreceived from numerous societies of color and other associations throughout theisland. The scope of surviving letters and telegrams is truly astonishing and reflectsthe charged political atmosphere on the island at this time. Afro-Cubans were mobi-lized on an unparalleled scale. Their expectations were high, and the insult dealt to Mitchell, a “distinguished leader of the colored race” from the United States,signified to many across the island that more active measures were needed to protectthe rights of people of African descent in Cuba.

No less than thirty-eight associations, mostly societies of color, sent telegramsand letters to president Federico Laredo Brú.48 The La Antorcha Society of Artemisaargued that the government needed to “take all measures in order to avoid the rep-etition of such deplorable acts in honor of the harmony and fraternity that ought toprevail among all Cubans.”49 “It is humiliating,” wrote Francisco Pérez of the Club


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Artístico Cultural in another letter of protest, “that the democratic and liberal spiritof our Constitution has been trampled on and that even the duty of the most ele-mentary courtesy has been ignored in our fatherland and under your governmentwhich owes its freedom to a Maceo, to a Moncada, and so many other Negroes whopublicly confronted problems of a racial nature.”50 Meanwhile, in the town of Encru-cijada in Las Villas province, the leaders of the Sociedad La Unión held a meetingwith other organizations, including “labor groups,” and subsequently wrote a letter topresident Laredo Brú. “It is necessary for such an order of things to disappear,” theywrote, insisting that the “rulers of our country work to guarantee the true equality ofrights for our race.”51 Finally, the Asociación Más Luz of Santiago de las Vegasechoed these sentiments in their protest to the president. They called on the gov-ernment to take “swift and energetic action,” which was summed up in the conclud-ing line of the letter: “For the expulsion of the owner of the Saratoga Hotel!”52

While the episode outraged many black and mulatto Cubans, few if any cor-responding sentiments emanated from Congressman Mitchell’s office in Washing-ton. Curiously, Mitchell himself hardly mentioned the incident in the letters hewrote to Cubans following his return to the United States. In a letter to García, forexample, Mitchell thanked his Cuban friend for the “wonderful reception given usby the distinguished citizens of your great country.” Moreover, he communicated tohis host the “happiness that was ours during our short stay in Havana.”53 In one of hisfew references to the unpleasant moment at the hotel, Mitchell asked in a letter writ-ten to Clara Ruíz for “newspaper clippings expressing the attitude of the Cuban pub-lic toward the Saratoga Hotel affair.”54 Aside from such brief inquiries, Mitchell keptwhatever feelings he had about the incident to himself.55

Despite the significant impact of the wave of protests in Cuba, the campaignagainst Villanueva did not produce any immediate results. Spurred by the angrytelegrams from the societies of color throughout the island, the lawyers hired by theClub Atenas, along with representatives from the an organization called the Com-mittee against Racial Discrimination, filed a lawsuit against the hotel owner beforethe municipal court of Havana. However, the legal proceedings against the allegedperpetrators of racial discrimination ended in frustration. A few months after thetrial’s beginning, the Havana municipal court ruled that there was insufficient evi-dence to convict Villanueva of any wrongdoing.56

Victory at Home and Abroad: Afro-Cuban/African American Information Networks during the Second World War (1940–1944)Although the judicial defeat proved a bitter pill for the Cuban antidiscriminationmovement to swallow, the struggle around the Mitchell case legitimized its claimsabout the necessity of more concrete measures to ensure the equality of all Cubancitizens. Throughout the 1930s, Cubans from a wide range of political persuasions


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had argued for the adoption of a new constitution. After years of ongoing conflictbetween Fulgencio Batista, the de facto ruler of Cuba, and his numerous politicalopponents, by the end of the decade the path was clear for the creation of a new con-tract between the Cuban state and its citizenry. In 1940, the Cuban governmentadopted a new constitution. Although many measures proposed by antidiscrimina-tion activists were omitted, the constitution of 1940 implemented clauses that gavethe antidiscrimination movement new leverage against ongoing practices of racialexclusion.57

The fanfare and controversy that surrounded Arthur Mitchell’s trip to Cubashowed that while local struggles for Afro-Cuban civil rights were borne out ofspecific circumstances unfolding in Cuba, they were also shaped by wider transna-tional processes intruding on the ways racial questions were understood on theisland. Aspirations for a more tangible racial equality for the island’s population ofAfrican descent did not only derive their inspiration from the leverage created by thenew constitution but also from the discourses of democracy generated by the SecondWorld War. Indeed, confining the struggle for racial equality in Cuba or in theUnited States to a domestic narrative tells only part of the story. A transnational per-spective on racial politics in the United States and Cuba that extends beyond nation-bound historiographies reveals suggestive evidence inviting an integrative approachto understanding the ways questions of racial equality were debated, fought over,and redefined in this period. 58

Within African American intellectual and activist communities, the processof cross-fertilization of racial understandings between Cubans and North Americansof African descent was becoming increasingly apparent during the Second WorldWar. African American observers of the conditions facing the “Negro in Cuba” sawthemselves joining with Afro-Cubans in a worldwide struggle for equality and citi-zenship. Their identification with Cubans of African descent was a product of par-ticular relationships established across national borders. Key players in this regardwere black news services, such as Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press and theAfro-American newspaper chain, along with the connections established betweenAfrican American intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Irene Diggs, and MercerCook, and Afro-Cuban institutions. As editors and contributors to the recentlyfounded journal Phylon, the three African American scholars forged ties with Cubanintellectuals during these years in order to enrich the journal’s coverage of race inother parts of the Americas.59 In the early 1940s, Du Bois, Diggs, Cook, and theirCuban contacts formed part of a network of intellectuals and activists who providedvital information on parallel movements for racial equality in Cuba and the UnitedStates. Such relationships made it possible for North Americans and Cubans ofAfrican descent to identify themselves with a global movement for the extension ofdemocracy to the colored race in their home countries and abroad.


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The relationships constructed by Du Bois and Diggs were cemented duringa trip they made to Cuba in June 1941. On their arrival, they received a warm wel-come from their Cuban hosts, many of whom were the same figures who had coor-dinated the reception for Arthur Mitchell four years before. Using his powers asundersecretary of communications, Miguel Angel Céspedes advised local politiciansand leaders of the societies of color in the island’s interior of Du Bois’s arrival. DuBois’s itinerary was set by Fernando Ortiz, and the two men continued their rela-tionship beyond Du Bois’s visit. Soon after Du Bois and Diggs unpacked their bagsin Havana, they made what was now a familiar stop at the Club Atenas, where theyenjoyed a concert organized by the association’s Sección Femenina and directed byZoila Gálvez, the same vocalist who had performed the African American spiritualsat the Society of Afrocuban Studies in 1937. Like earlier African American visitorsto Cuba, Du Bois left the island impressed with Atenas, telling Céspedes, then pres-ident of the association, that he had a “deep admiration for the splendid organizationwhich you have.”60 Du Bois and Diggs then drove the length of the island to Santi-ago, where they met with other Afro-Cuban intellectuals and public officials. DuBois recorded his observations of Cuba in his column for the Amsterdam News,where he wrote pieces on race relations in Cuba, and was particularly taken by“Señorita Causse,” the Afro-Cuban woman who was superintendent of schools ofOriente province.61 The trip rejuvenated the then seventy-three-year-old Du Bois,and he wrote to Ortiz following his return to the United States that he “had not onlyopportunity for thought and observation, but one of the best vacations and periodsof rest that I have ever experienced. I come back with renewed vigor to attack theworld problems of race and color.”62

Soon after Irene Diggs’s return from her trip to Cuba with Du Bois, sheemerged as a key figure in this transnational network of intellectuals, journalists, andactivists.63 After serving for many years as W. E. B. Du Bois’s assistant, she was even-tually able to pursue her own anthropological research in Cuba after receiving aRoosevelt Fellowship to study at the University of Havana in 1943. It seems proba-ble that the 1941 sojourn inspired Diggs’s return to Cuba as a doctoral student inanthropology at the University of Havana to work with Fernando Ortiz. During herresidency in Havana, she associated herself with the Afro-Cuban intellectual com-munity in Havana, including Afro-Cuban feminists such as Ana Etchegoyen deCañizares. Like Du Bois, Diggs disseminated her knowledge of Afro-Cuban culturethrough her role as the Cuban correspondent for Claude Barnett’s Associated NegroPress. Diggs’s stay in Cuba proved a seminal moment for the young anthropologist.After she earned her Ph.D. in 1946, she continued her work as a specialist on theexperiences of people of African descent in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Diggs,like Zora Neale Hurston, became part of a pathbreaking group of black women intel-lectuals who studied the cultural practices of people of African descent outside the


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United States. In so doing, she managed to carve out a space for herself as an impor-tant figure in an arena generally dominated by educated men of African descent.64

Along with Diggs and Du Bois, Mercer Cook provided an important linkbetween Cubans and North Americans of African descent in the early 1940s. Cooktook a position at the University of Havana and wrote several stories for the Afro-American, the widely circulated black newspaper run by media entrepreneur CarlMurphy.65 In 1943, Cook served as the main contributor to the newspaper’s series on“colored Cubans,” in which readers could learn about “what they do, how they live,what they think, how the race problem affects them.” The series promised profiles ofa “cross-section of colored Cuban life” that would “include statesmen and school-girls, soldiers and entertainers, poets and peasants.” The newspaper confidently pre-dicted to its readers that a “scrapbook made up of these articles will prove an inter-esting addition to your library.”66

Throughout his stay in Cuba, Cook regularly wrote about his encounters withthe mobilized community of “colored Cubans” for readers of the Afro-American.During the elections of 1940, several Afro-Cuban candidates, particularly thoseaffiliated with the Communist Party, won seats in the national legislature. But per-haps the most significant victory for the antidiscrimination movement came with theelection of Justo Salas, an Afro-Cuban politician, for the mayoralty of Santiago deCuba. The importance of Salas’s triumph was not lost on Cook, who traveled to San-tiago to see the administration of the “colored mayor” for himself. After spottingSalas during the city’s annual carnival procession, Cook wrote, “There he was, thefirst colored mayor in the history of Cuba’s second largest city.” “For me, from thatmoment on,” Cook continued in his article written for the Afro-American, “Santiagowas no longer the scene of the Spanish-American War, of Teddy Roosevelt’s RoughRiders, or of a carnival; it was the home of Justo Salas, 48-year-old brown-skinnedmayor of a city which has a population of more than 150,000.”67 Cook’s profile of the“colored mayor” of Santiago proved particularly inspiring in a period when blackmayors remained unheard of in the United States.

Cook and other African American journalists in Cuba provided stories onperhaps the most important “colored Cuban” of them all at this time: FulgencioBatista. While most of the white Cuban elite never accepted the mulatto from Ori-ente, African American observers of Cuban affairs claimed him as one of their own.Indeed, the populist Batista of the early 1940s differed quite markedly from theanticommunist Batista of the 1950s. After ruling the island indirectly through a seriesof puppet regimes in the 1930s, the head of the Cuban army traded his military uni-form for civilian attire and won the presidency in 1940. His electoral victory and theadoption of the new constitution signaled the possibility that the promises of socialequality echoing in Cuba throughout the 1930s finally had been fulfilled. Indeed, itwas during Batista’s rule as civilian president (1940–44) that the movement against


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racial discrimination in Cuba reached its apogee. Even while receiving only nominalsupport from the Batista regime, black demands for racial equality had gatheredsteam as Afro-Cuban activists and politicians, particularly those within the Commu-nist Party, enjoyed an unprecedented voice in Cuban politics during these years.

From the moment Batista arrived on the political scene, African Americanjournalists monitoring the racial situation in Cuba portrayed him as the “CubanStrong Man.” In an era when heads of state of African descent remained few and farbetween, the black press in the United States latched onto Batista as a potential raceman. In the same way that Afro-Cubans had viewed Arthur Mitchell as a leader ofthe colored race during his visit to the island in 1937, so African American intellec-tuals approached Batista. Shortly after Batista’s emergence on the Cuban politicalstage in 1933, Claude Barnett wrote him inquiring about the role of Afro-Cubans in the revolutionary movement that had unseated the hated dictator GerardoMachado.68 During the revolution, Rayford Logan wrote several stories aboutBatista for the Afro-American, describing him as “the native of the province of Ori-ente, birthplace of Antonio Maceo.”69 By linking Batista with Maceo, a well-knownfigure to African Americans, Logan aimed to enhance the prestige of the Cubanblack leader. Stories on “colored” heads of state such as Batista provided an impor-tant strategic value for African American activists. By highlighting such signs of racialadvancement abroad, they sought to strengthen the legitimacy of calls for concretemeasures against racism in their home country.

In subsequent years, Batista’s career received substantial coverage in theblack press in the United States. In 1938, while working for Claude Barnett’s Asso-ciated Negro Press, African American intellectuals Ben Carruthers and WilliamAllen interviewed Batista at Camp Columbia, the island’s central military barracks.After their conversation, in which the army chief detailed the achievements of hisadministration’s social welfare programs, Carruthers wrote that he had “left the fortfeeling that we had met the ‘Strong Man of Cuba’ who holds the destinies of five mil-lion Cubans in his capable hands and is governing the island for the greatest good forthe greatest number which is one-third black, one-third olive, one-third white.”70

It seems that Batista himself was aware of the significance he held for AfricanAmerican observers of Cuban affairs. During his visit to Washington, DC, in 1942,the “Black Leader” granted an interview with Carruthers and Alvin White, anotherAssociated Negro Press correspondent. After Batista reiterated the dominantnational ideology of antiracism with the declaration that “there are no racial differ-ences in Cuba,” he told White and Carruthers, “half in Spanish and half in English,”that he “hoped the Negroes of the United States would show the same strength thatall free men in the world are showing, and that they may lend their aid to the finalachievement of victory and thus insure justice and freedom all over the world.”71

Although he patronized the societies of color, as did all Cuban politicians, Batista was


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never known for proclaiming any form of race pride during his political career. Hisinteractions with black intellectuals suggest, however, that he was aware of thesignificance African American observers had inscribed on him as a race man.

But readers of the African American press not only learned about the Cubanhead of state but also about the resurgent campaign against racial discrimination onthe island. Thanks to Mercer Cook and other black journalists, African Americansbecame informed of Cuba’s own version of the so-called Double V campaign. In theearly 1940s, the antidiscrimination movement on the island was stimulated by theunwavering support of the cross-racial cadre of activists in the Communist Party,including Blas Roca, Juan Marinello, and Salvador García Agüero. As electedofficials in this period, Marinello and García Agüero emerged as the most vocal pro-ponents of civil rights in the Cuban legislature. García Agüero’s efforts in particulardrew the attention of Cook, who included “Cuba’s Fighting Red Congressman” inthe Afro-American’s “Album” of “colored Cubans.” The article told North Americanreaders about García Agüero’s ascendancy as a politician and leader of the societiesof color. Not surprisingly, the congressman’s consciousness of the transnationaldimensions of racial discrimination was sharpened by his own encounter with JimCrow segregation during a trip to the United States, where he saw “horrible things.”The most noteworthy episode occurred when he and his white companions “almoststarted a riot in Daytona Beach trying to get something to eat.”72

This process of cross-fertilization continued to have a powerful impact onCubans of African descent during the Second World War. Afro-Cubans attuned tothe fate of the colored race in the United States saw African American participationin the war effort as a source of inspiration. One example of this current can befound in the activities of Serapio Páez Zamora, another member of the 1930s gen-eration of Afro-Cuban activists. In 1943, Páez founded a new Afro-Cuban magazinecalled Somos. Soon after the publication’s founding, Páez reached out to ClaudeBarnett’s Associated Negro Press in Chicago in order to subscribe to the news ser-vice. In his application for a subscription, Páez highlighted the importance ofAfrican American efforts in the war against fascism as part of his own motivation forfounding his publication:

As Director of the newspaper “Somos,” the most conspicuous of our race paperspublished in the Republic of Cuba, I send a fraternal greeting, through themedium of the Associated Negro Press, to all our racial comrades of NorthAmerica, who are fighting for social liberation, and, also, in a special manner, toour glorious sons who are engaged in the battle fronts for the triumph ofDemocracy, and I hope that the oppressors and discriminators of NorthAmerica, Cuba and the other countries of this hemisphere as well as in otherparts of the world, may come to realize the value of the black man’s efforts, nowgiven, as at other times, in the interest and benefit of what he understands to be


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democracy, in the truest sense of the term, and thus rectify their conduct. Ishould make no hesitation in signifying that the Negro youth of my country is[sic] awakening to the sense of his responsibilities and is making a determinedstand to play his part as circumstances demand.73

In another letter to Barnett, Páez justified his desire to affiliate the magazinewith the Associated Negro Press’s news service by highlighting “the necessity of racebrothers coming together though separated by ocean[s] deep, because our aims andaspirations are similar, as also our fates.”74 Such proclamations, while rooted in amasculine conception of citizenship, reveal the continuing significance of AfricanAmericans in the racialized imaginations constructed by Afro-Cuban activists duringthe war years.

Transnational Information Networks, the U.S. State Department, and the Coming Cold War in Cuba, 1943–1944The effectiveness Afro-Cuban/African American information circuits in stimulatingantiracist activism in both societies drove an unlikely part of the neighboring NorthAmerican community to take notice. During the Second World War, the U.S. gov-ernment attempted to shape the circulation of racial understandings among peopleof African descent in both countries. After decades of viewing “negroes” (with alowercase n) as at best a nuisance or at worst a serious threat to U.S. interests inCuba, the U.S. State Department suddenly shifted course in the early 1940s. Thismove was rooted in the rapidly changing international politics taking shape duringthe Second World War. U.S. officials in Cuba were well aware that the CommunistParty’s efforts in the antidiscrimination movement had contributed to its credibilityand influence among the Afro-Cuban population. The State Department attemptedto cut off the Communists’ influence among Afro-Cubans by courting segments ofthe black Cuban leadership. While this decision may have had a limited effect in theshort term, in the long run the State Department’s attempt to neutralize the island’santidiscrimination movement would have significant consequences in the develop-ment of racial politics on the island in subsequent decades.

The point man in the U.S. government’s effort to court support among Cubanblacks was Pastor de Albear Friol, a prominent leader in the world of the societiesof color who also formed part of the group of Afro-Cuban intellectuals welcomingCongressman Mitchell in 1937. As a “moderate Negro,” Pastor de Albear shared theState Department’s concern about the influence of communism in Cuba, and it ishere that he found common ground with the U.S. government. Although the begin-nings of Albear’s relationship with U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden are uncertain, by1943 he was becoming a regular visitor to the embassy, providing his view of racialpolitics on the island.


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In 1943, the U.S. State Department moved to direct its war propagandamachine toward Afro-Cubans. In a period in which the U.S. government was forcedto respond to the Double V campaign waged by African American activists, the StateDepartment sought to publicize the exploits of black servicemen for the Alliedforces. Robert McBride, a U.S. official in Cuba, wrote to the State Department inWashington, asking that “the appropriate stooges dig out material on the extent ofNegro participation in our war effort.” McBride wanted to provide the war propa-ganda because “the Ambassador has made it a particular point to address Negrogroups here” since it was “particularly important at this time when the Communistsare making such a strong play for Negro support here, and he has been most effec-tive in counteracting this.”75

Armed with information from Albear’s intelligence gathering, the U.S. StateDepartment went to work on courting the support of the island’s Afro-Cuban lead-ers. Writing for the Afro-American in February 1943, Mercer Cook reported on theU.S. ambassador’s efforts to “spread interracial flavor in Cuba.” At a speech in theheadquarters of the Unión Fraternal, a society of color in Havana, AmbassadorBraden told his audience: “I do not mean to infer that the democracies have beenperfect in these racial matters. On the contrary, we have many things to be ashamedof and to regret; but, at least, it is something that we are ashamed and do regret, forthat proves we are progressing. It would be to no avail now to enumerate the injus-tices and tragedies of the past. The point is to make sure that these errors will notbe repeated.”76

Shortly after his speech at the Unión Fraternal, Braden made another appear-ance at the Club Atenas to attend a meeting organized in honor of Franklin Roo-sevelt. “Meetings like these are a great pleasure to my chief President Roosevelt,” theambassador stated. He continued by tactlessly telling “Havana’s leading colored cit-izens” that “Roosevelt always enjoys being with the common folk” because he “is sodemocratic.” No doubt following the counsel of Albear, Braden made sure to quotefrom Antonio Maceo three times in his speech. The ambassador was then followedby “eloquent, straight from the shoulder addresses” from Angel Suárez Rocabrunaand Miguel Angel Céspedes. In a move exemplary of the influence of racial ideasemanating from African American intellectuals, Céspedes cited an article by W. E. B. Du Bois “on the significance of race during the present war.” According toCook’s piece, Céspedes argued that true peace would not be achieved unless “thedemocracies abolish color prejudice and discrimination.” This unlikely scene wasclosed with a rendition of “Dixie” by the Havana Municipal Band, an event which apuzzled Cook indicated was the “one sour note” of the evening.77

The U.S. embassy targeted not only Havana-based black intellectuals but alsoleaders of the societies of color in the island’s interior. In a letter to undersecretary ofstate Sumner Welles, Braden reported proudly that “in my trip to Cienfuegos and


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here in Habana [sic], I paid especial attention to and addressed the several coloredorganizations.” He hoped that his visit would succeed “in some measure to offsetCommunist drives which are directed to winning over negroes in Cuba.”78

The unprecedented attention paid by the United States government to the“Negroes in Cuba” formed part of the larger wartime propaganda campaign de-signed to attract support for the Allied war effort. Central to this agenda was anintensified intelligence gathering operation. In Cuba, U.S. officials were not onlyworried about the spread of fascism to the island, but they were even more con-cerned with the activities of their ally of the moment, the Soviet Union. It is for thisreason that they suddenly sought to undercut the Communists’ dominance over thequestion of racial equality in Cuba. Pastor de Albear saw eye to eye with the U.S.embassy on communist influence among blacks and mulattoes in Cuba, tellingAmbassador Braden that he was “convinced we must go to war with the Communistsnow, not later” because they were “making giant strides in proselytizing amongst thenegroes in Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and elsewhere throughout the Caribbean.”79

It seems that Albear was seeking to use his connection with the U.S. embassyto push his own agenda as a leader of the Cuban colored race. Albear sought tomanipulate transnational political alliances to suit his own interests. AmbassadorBraden admitted as much in a letter to Washington, writing about “Albear’s personalambitions,” which “as usual, come into play.” The ambassador reiterated that Albear“would like to be the man to organize, as he said in a conference of 500 Universitygraduated negroes, a group to support Grau [the anticommunist candidate for thepresidency].”80 Despite Braden’s frequent dismissals of Albear as his “colored” and“boring” friend in his confidential correspondence with his superiors, it is clear theambassador relied on his informant’s information to make inroads among Afro-Cuban societies of color.81

But opportunist black intellectuals were not the only ones appealing to theU.S. government to defend the rights of people of color in Cuba. Indeed, protestsinspired by the war emerged from sources outside the intellectual circles at the cen-ter of Afro-Cuban/African American information networks. In November 1944,Riven Met, a North American who identified himself as a “man of color” living in theeastern town of Holguín, filed a complaint with the Cuban government concerningthe “questionable activities” of José Trueba, owner of the Hotel Isla de Cuba.According to Met, the hotel owner refused to serve him and his friends drinks at thehotel tavern on the grounds that he did not serve “English dogs.” When Met toldTrueba that he was a North American, the hotel owner replied that he “did not serveNorth American dogs either.” In a written complaint Met gave to the U.S. consulatein nearby Antilla, Met insisted that Trueba had not only violated the Cuban consti-tution but had also offended those “who belonged to nations that are defendingDemocracy and Freedom in the world.” Furthermore, Met pointed out that as a manof color he “deserved the same respect as all men, especially in the current moment


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when men of color are dying in the battlefields as white men for the defense of Lib-erty.”82 Met’s protest provides another example of the ways people of African descentin Cuba used the discourses of freedom and democracy emanating from the war todefend their rights as citizens of “free” countries. Met’s petition also indicates theways such discourses could operate far away from the black intellectual circles inHavana on the ground, motivating blacks throughout the island to draw on thechanging configurations of international politics toward a democratic agenda. Withsuch identifications being made by Cubans and North Americans of African descent,it is no wonder that the U.S. government sought to harness this sentiment for its ownbenefit.

The shift in U.S. policy on the race question in Cuba underscores the funda-mentally transnational nature of racial politics in Cuba and the United States dur-ing and after the Second World War. Recent work on the U.S. civil rights movementhas highlighted the impact of the cold war on African American activism and theconceptualization of race and civil rights during this period.83 This literature hasshown that the U.S. government approached the question of racial equality as a transnational rather than simply a domestic issue. With the increasing influence of anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa, the U.S. government was forced toproject a positive portrait of race relations within its own national borders so as tolegitimize its sought-after position as a leader of the democratic world. The U.S.embassy’s attempts to cut the ties between Afro-Cuban activists and the CubanCommunist Party (then called the Unión Revolucionaria Comunista) formed part ofthis larger process. However, this effort was not only an imposition of a U.S. impe-rial agenda, but it also constituted a response to the effectiveness of the local antidis-crimination movement in Cuba. In subsequent decades, the dissemination of racialliberalism by the U.S. State Department and by anticommunist African Americansand Afro-Cubans in Cuba helped sever the alliance between black activists and theCommunist Party on the island that had formed the basis of the movement’s strengthduring the late 1930s and early 1940s. A competing faction of anticommunist Afro-Cuban leaders would purge many black and mulatto Communists from the federa-tions of the societies of color.84 These changing alliances had a profound effect,reflecting the impact of the cold war on the articulation of racial understandings inthe post–World War II period.

ConclusionAn exploration of the intersection between local and transnational processes in themaking of racial understandings in Cuba during the 1930s and early 1940s offers amore nuanced understanding of the complex interactions between people of Africandescent in Cuba and the United States. For antidiscrimination activists in both coun-tries, knowledge of the conditions facing the colored race abroad had a stimulatingeffect on antidiscrimination campaigns at home. The effects of this transnational


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racial awareness proved especially profound in Cuba. As in previous decades, Afro-Cuban principles of affiliation were informed by the example of African Americans inthe United States. As the Mitchell case illustrates, the news of an insult to the “dis-tinguished leader of the colored race” from the United States provided powerfulammunition for arguments for more concrete measures against racial discrimina-tion in a society that had supposedly eliminated racism. Yet African Americans werealso affected by this process of cross-fertilization. During the Second World War, theycontinued their historic interest in “the Negro in Cuba,” as evidenced by the coveragethe black press gave to Cuban race relations in general and the achievements of “col-ored Cubans” in particular. Analyzing this dynamic process of transnational exchangeenables us to understand these cases of Afro-Cuban/African American interaction notsimply as a product of a natural racial kinship but as a result of accelerating contactbetween an eclectic group of scholars, activists, entrepreneurs, and journalists whofound common cause in a global struggle for equality and citizenship. An examinationof these relationships reveals the limits of nation-bound approaches that tend to over-look the effects of the multiple points of contact on the making of racial understand-ings by people of African descent in different nation-states.

The power of the information networks created by Afro-Cubans and AfricanAmericans comes into clear evidence in the response of representatives of the U.S.State Department in Cuba. This historic shift by the U.S. government constituted apolicy that formed in response to local-level mobilization in Cuba, the United States,and in other parts of the colonial world. In this case, it was the antidiscriminationmovement in Cuba, and the concessions made to the emerging civil rights move-ment in the United States, that compelled the U.S. State Department to make anunprecedented shift in their attitude toward Afro-Cubans. Their attempts to courtCuban black leaders reflected their acknowledgment of the powerful influence oftransnational information flows among Cuban and North American persons ofAfrican descent.

The interactions between Afro-Cubans and African Americans examined inthis essay represent only a glimpse of the countless transnational relationships cre-ated by people of African descent in both societies. Instead of situating these rela-tionships within a vague transnational context, the analysis presented here can beviewed as a call for specificity in the writing of twentieth-century African diasporahistory.85 Capturing the histories of these transnational connections and their impacton the making of racial understandings and other forms of social knowledge can beaccomplished through an interrogation of the particular relationships between andamong specific communities across national borders. Such an approach need notcelebrate the triumph of the transnational over the local, but instead it can offer aperspective highlighting the complex interaction between the two. In this way, wecan continue to uncover the rich histories of exchange and cross-fertilization thatnation-based narratives remain less likely to reveal. Such an approach might allow us


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to grasp the dynamic interplay between local and transnational processes thatenabled people to link the lived experiences of members of the colored race inTuskegee, Harlem, Detroit, and Scottsboro with those who lived in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Santo Domingo, and San Juan.

NotesI would like to thank Rebecca Scott, Susan Dearing, Nicole Stanton, Kathryn Tomasek, NancyMirabal, and Marc McLeod for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. The research forthis article was made possible by grants from the Institute for the Study of World Politics, theLatin American and Caribbean Studies Center, the Mellon Candidacy Fellowship at theUniversity of Michigan, and the Office of the Provost at Wheaton College.

1. Scholars have highlighted the 1930s and 1940s as a key moment in the mobilization ofpeople of African descent for equality and citizenship. See for example, Immanuel Geiss,The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen, 1974); Robin D. G. Kelley, “The World theDiaspora Made: C. L. R. James and the Politics of History,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed.Grant Farred (London: Blackwell, 1996), 103–30; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind:Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1996); and Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans andAnticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

2. I use the term racial understandings, rather than racial identity, in order to highlight the ways people of African descent employed race as a form of social knowledge thatinformed political action. In this way, I join the work of scholars historicizing the process of“race-making” among all social classes and gendered and racialized groups. See Thomas C.Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” American HistoricalReview 100.1 (1995): 1–20; and Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). On the limits of identity as an analytical tool,see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society 29.1(2000): 1–47.

3. Scholars on race in twentieth-century Cuba have highlighted parallels between Afro-Cubanand African American struggles for equality, but they have not yet made them a subject ofintense study. See, for example, Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Strugglefor Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Helg, “Black Men,Racial Stereotyping, and Violence in Cuba and the U.S. South at the Turn of the Century,”Comparative Studies in Society and History 42.1 (2000): 576–604; Ada Ferrer, InsurgentCuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1999); Alejandra Bronfman, “Reforming Race in Cuba, 1902–1940” (Ph.D. diss.,Princeton University, 2000); and Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality,and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2001).

4. Historians have recently reemphasized the transnational dimensions of African Americanhistory. Aside from the works mentioned in note 2 above, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “ ‘But ALocal Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision,” Journal of AmericanHistory 86.3 (1999): 1045–92; Earl Lewis, “To Turn As on a Pivot: Writing AfricanAmericans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100.3(1995): 765–87; Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, ed., Between Race and Empire:African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple


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University Press, 1998); and James H. Merriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: BlackAmericans and Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

5. Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire. See also Ruth Reitan, The Riseand Fall of an Alliance: Cuba and African-American Leaders in the 1960s (East Lansing:Michigan State University Press, 1999). One important location of Afro-Cuban/AfricanAmerican interaction in the United States during this period was Tampa, Florida. See Susan Greenbaum, More Than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (Gainesville: University ofFlorida Press, 2002); Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Telling Silences and Making Community:Afro-Cubans and African Americans in Ybor City and Tampa, 1899–1915,” in Brock andCastañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, 49–69; as well as Evelio Grillo, BlackCuban/Black American: A Memoir (Houston, TX: Arte Público, 2000).

6. An example of this trend is Martin Delany’s novel Blake, which highlighted slavery in Cubaand the question of the island’s annexation to the United States during the antebellumperiod. Martin Delany, Blake; or, the Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston: Beacon,[1861] 1970).

7. See, for example, Carmen Montejo Arrechea, “Minerva: A Magazine for Women (and Men)of Color,” in Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, 36.

8. On African American support for Cuban separatism, see Johnetta Cole, “Afro-AmericanSolidarity with Cuba,” Black Scholar 8.8-10 (1977): 73–80. For an analysis of the dynamicsof race in the Cuban separatist movement, see Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba.

9. On African American reactions to the Cuban independence struggle, see WillardGatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1975), 154–79; and Rebecca J. Scott, “Reclamar la cuidadanía, imponiendoel imperio: La misión ambigua de los voluntarios negros del noveno regimiento deinfantería estadounidense en San Luis, Santiago de Cuba, 1898–99,” Del Caribe 37 (2002):22–27. On the complex interplay between notions of race, gender, and citizenship amongAfrican Americans in this period, see Michele Mitchell, “ ‘The Black Man’s Burden’: AfricanAmericans, Imperialism, and Notions of Manhood, 1890–1910,” International Review ofSocial History, supplement 44.4 (1999): 77–99.

10. My reading of the U.S./Cuban imperial encounter on Afro-Cuban/African Americaninteraction is informed by more recent work on the cultural ramifications of the U.S.presence in the Caribbean and Latin America. See Louis A. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban:Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);and Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., CloseEncounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

11. See Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Rafael Serra, Para blancos y negros(Havana: Imprenta “El Score,” 1907). I explore the multiple uses of Washington’s ideas inCuba in my dissertation, “Racial Knowledge in Cuba: The Production of a Social Fact,1912–44” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2002), 146–49. See also Helg, Our RightfulShare, 130; and de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 166.

12. “Ecos de sociedad,” El Comercio (Cienfuegos), September 4, 1915.13. Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for Cuban Negroes,” Christian Register,

August 18, 1898, 924–25. See also Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a BlackLeader, 1856–1901, 283–84. Washington also successfully recruited several students fromPuerto Rico after the U.S. invasion of the island in 1898. He solicited the participation ofHampton Institute in this effort.


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14. García’s relationships with African American intellectuals and activists can bee seen in hisletters to Claude Barnett, box 203, folder 4, Claude Barnett Papers (hereafter CBP),Chicago Historical Society (hereafter CHS). Barnett himself first encountered Cubans ofAfrican descent while a student at Tuskegee. See Guridy, “Racial Knowledge in Cuba,” 317.

15. García’s experience parallels that of the Tampa-born Evelio Grillo, who also described the impact of African American schools on the formation of his own racialized self-understanding. See Grillo, Black Cuban/Black American, 58–90.

16. Until implementation of desegregation measures by the revolutionary government of FidelCastro, most mutual aid and recreational societies in Cuba remained racially segregated.These societies, legally categorized as associations of “instruction and recreation,” playedcentral roles in Cuban social life during the republican period, often extending beyond theirprimary role in organizing leisure activities. On the histories of these important Afro-Cubaninstitutions, see Oilda Hevia Lanier, El Directorio Central de las Sociedades Negras deCuba, 1886–1894 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1996); Philip A. Howard,Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); de la Fuente, A Nation for All,particularly chap. 4, and Guridy, “Racial Knowledge in Cuba,” 34–105.

17. Margaret Ross Martin, “The Negro in Cuba,” Crisis, January 1932, 453–55.18. The Club Atenas, like many Afro-Cuban organizations at this time, fulfilled many of the

same functions as African American literary societies. See Elizabeth McHenry, ForgottenReaders: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2002).

19. In 1921, the club provided a reception for Marcus Garvey during his trip to Cuba. SeeBernardo García Dominguez, “Garvey and Cuba,” in Garvey: His Work and Impact, ed.Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991), 299–305; andMarc McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba, 1920–1940,” Journal of Caribbean History 30.1–2(1996): 132–68.

20. “Visita de distinción,” Boletín oficial del Club Atenas, September 20, 1930, 56, 60.21. Arthur A. Schomburg, “My Trip to Cuba in Quest of Negro Books,” Opportunity, February

1933, 48–50.22. The literature on the 1930s is too voluminous to cite here. For concise summaries, see

Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made”; and Plummer, Rising Wind, 37–81. For animportant study on the impact of the international Scottsboro campaign on the changingmeanings of race in this period, see James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and EveRosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the ScottsboroBoys, 1931–1934,” American Historical Review 106.2 (2001): 387–430.

23. For more extensive discussions of the impact of the events of 1933 on racial understandingsin Cuba, see de la Fuente, A Nation For All, chap. 5, and Guridy, “Racial Knowledge inCuba,” 225–88.

24. See Guridy, “Racial Knowledge in Cuba,” 289–355. My reading of this important period inCuban history is informed by historian Robert Whitney’s analysis of Cuban political cultureduring the 1930s. See Robert Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilizationand Political Change, 1920–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

25. The founding of the organization was noted by the Journal of Negro History. See “CubanNegro Studies,” Journal of Negro History 23.1 (1938): 116–20.

26. “Los ‘Spirituals negro songs’ y su acción étnico-social,” Estudios afrocubanos 1.1 (1937):76–91.


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27. The lecture was subsequently published in 1942 as Tomás Blanco, El prejuicio racial enPuerto Rico, (San Juan: Editorial Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños, 1942).

28. Ibid., 121. On the Mitchell incident and its impact on the desegregation of southernrailways, see Catherine A. Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of SouthernTransit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 1–34.

29. See Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

30. Letter to Arthur Mitchell, February 5, 1938, box 36, folder 6, Arthur Mitchell Papers(hereafter AMP), CHS. The signature on the letter is illegible, but it is clear that it waswritten by an Afro-Cuban politician.

31. José García, Inerarity to Arthur Mitchell, December 11, 1934, box 3, folders 3–5, AMP,CHS.

32. William Pickens to Claude Barnett, October 27, 1930, box 203, folder 4, CBP, CHS.33. García to Barnett, December 30, 1930, box 203, folder 4, CBP, CHS.34. The U.S. embassy in Havana even noticed the warm reception Mitchell received. The

embassy sent Mitchell several news clippings detailing his visit that were published in theCuban press. Du Bois to Mitchell, December 30, 1937, box 35, folder 1, AMP, CHS.

35. “Hacia 26 años que no iba al congreso de los E. Unidos un legislador de la raza negra,”Diario de la Marina, December 30, 1937.

36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Enclosed news clippings in box 35, folder 1, AMP, CHS.39. It seems that the Mitchell party did eventually secure a table after the initial snub, perhaps

after some negotiation with the hotel manager.40. Feliciano González to Arthur Mitchell, January 22, 1938, box 36, folder 4, AMP, CHS.

González’s comments suggest that García was likely the person who negotiated someagreement with the hotel’s management.

41. Unlike the United States, Cuba had no laws sanctioning racial segregation at this time.However, many hotels and resorts routinely excluded persons of African descent.

42. “Sobre el incidente del congresista Mr. Mitchell en el Hotel Saratoga,” Diario de la Marina,January 1, 1938.

43. Jose I. Rivero, “Impresiones,” Diario de la Marina, January 5, 1938.44. José García Inerarity to Arthur Mitchell, January 2, 1938, box 35, folder 7, AMP, CHS.45. Clara Ruíz to Arthur Mitchell, January 19, 1938, box 36, folder 4, AMP, CHS.46. “Efectuada ayer la asamblea en el Club Atenas por el incidente de Mr. Mitchell,” Diario de

la Marina, January 3, 1938.47. Feliciano González to Arthur Mitchell, January 22, 1938, box 36, folder 4, AMP, CHS.48. These letters and cablegrams were found in box 39, no. 14, Fondo Secretaria de la

Presidencia (hereafter SP), Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hereafter ANC).49. Angel Martínez to Presidente de la República, December 2, 1937, box 39, no. 14, SP, ANC.

The date is incorrect. Since the incident at the Hotel Saratoga occurred on the night ofDecember 29, the letter was likely written on December 29 or 30.

50. Francisco A. Pérez to Colonel Federico Laredo Brú, December 31, 1937, box 39, no. 14, SP,ANC.

51. Sociedad La Unión to Presidente de la República, January 8, 1938, box 39, no. 14, SP, ANC.


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52. Asociación “Más Luz” to Presidente de la República, January 4, 1938, box 39, no. 14, SP,ANC.

53. Mitchell to García, January 15, 1938, box 36, folder 3, AMP, CHS. The incident, likeMitchell’s trip to Cuba in general, received scant treatment in the African American press,possibly because it occurred during the holiday season, and possibly because Mitchell wasnot beloved by the editors of major black newspapers, including Robert Vann of the ChicagoDefender, the preeminent black publication in Mitchell’s home city.

54. Mitchell to Clara Ruíz, February 2, 1938, box 36, folder 6, AMP, CHS.55. Mitchell’s silence could have been due to the fact that aside from periodic transgressions of

racial etiquette on the quotidian level, African Americans had not yet waged a sustainednational legal campaign against racial segregation in public facilities and accommodations inthe United States during this period. Thus perhaps, to Mitchell, whatever took place at thehotel that evening simply made for yet another encounter with the color line. In the 1930s,civil rights groups such as the NAACP were beginning to focus their efforts on attackingracial segregation in education. On the evolution of the legal campaign for desegregation inthe United States, see Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against SegregatedEducation, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Meanwhile,the legal campaign against segregation in transportation industries in the United States wasrejuvenated by Mitchell’s own lawsuit against the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific RailwayCompany, which was filed in April 1938. See Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow, 20–37.

56. “La ley convertida en letra muerta,” Adelante, April 1938, 1.57. On the debates on racial discrimination during the constitutional conventions of 1940, see

de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 212–22.58. Historians have illustrated the changing configurations of racial politics in the United States

and throughout the African diaspora during the 1940s. See, for example, Plummer, RisingWind; and Von Eschen, Race against Empire.

59. Du Bois and Cook were on the Atlanta University faculty at this time, while Diggs was agraduate student and the personal secretary of the former. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York:Henry Holt, 2000), 477–78.

60. W. E. B. Du Bois to Miguel Angel Céspedes, July 7, 1941, reel 42, frame 771, W. E. B. DuBois Papers (hereafter DBP), W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts,Amherst.

61. W. E. B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News, June 28, 1941.62. Du Bois to Ortiz, July 7, 1941, reel 53, frame 178, DBP.63. I would like to thank Arlene Torres for bringing Diggs’s residency in Cuba to my attention.64. On Diggs’s understudied life and work, see A. Lynn Bolles, “Ellen Irene Diggs: Coming of

Age in Atlanta, Havana, and Baltimore,” in African-American Pioneers in Anthropology, ed.Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 154–67.On her initial trip to Cuba with Du Bois, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 485.

65. Du Bois to Ortiz, October 1, 1942, reel 54, frame 59, DBP. On the important role ofMurphy’s newspaper chain within African American communities during these years, seeHayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892–1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood,1998).

66. Mercer Cook, “Colored People in Cuba: What They Are Doing,” Afro-American, March 27,1943.


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67. Mercer Cook, “Santiago Calls Colored Mayor Best One It Ever Had,” Afro-American,August 23, 1941. According to Cook, some black santiagueros he spoke to also highlightedthe importance of the election of a “colored mayor.” One “colored man” he interviewed toldhim that “ ‘we black folks were in the majority, and we put him in office. He’s the best mayorwe ever had,’ he added with a satisfied chuckle.” I would like to thank Eric Arnesen forbringing this and other articles published by the Afro-American on blacks in Cuba duringthe early 1940s to my attention.

68. Claude Barnett to Fulgencio Batista, September 25, 1933, box 203, folder 3, CBP, CHS. Afew weeks later, Batista responded to Barnett’s letter with the stock reply: “Colored race inthis country, as Cubans, is taking part in the goal of stabilizing the Republic.” Batista to theAssociated Negro Press, October 10, 1933, box 203, folder 3, CBP, CHS.

69. For example, see Rayford Logan, “Black Sergeant Now Becomes Head of the Cuban Army,”Afro-American, September 23, 1933; and Rayford Logan, “Bomb Sent to Cuban Army’sBlack Leader,” Afro-American, September 30, 1933.

70. “Howard Prof. Interviews Colonel Batista, Cuban ‘Strong Man,’” Associated Negro Pressnews release, September 7, 1938, box 203, folder 3, CBP, CHS.

71. “Cuba Has No Color Lines, Says President,” Afro-American, December 19, 1942.72. Mercer Cook, “Cuba’s Fighting Red Congressman,” Afro-American, April 10, 1943.73. Serapio Páez Zamora to Claude Barnett, November 27, 1943, box 203, folder 3, CBP, CHS.74. Páez Zamora to Barnett, August 14, 1944, box 203, folder 3, CBP, CHS. A few months later,

the National Federation of Negro Writers and Reporters of Cuba and America also affiliateditself with Barnett’s news service. See Antolin Pujadas and David A. Clack to ClaudeBarnett, December 10, 1944, box 203, folder 3, CBP, CHS.

75. Robert McBride to George Scherer, Esquire, Division of Latin American Republics, March20, 1943, decimal file 840.1, record group (hereafter RG) 84, U.S. National Archives(hereafter USNA).

76. Mercer Cook, “U.S. Ambassador Spreads Interracial Flavor in Cuba,” Afro-American,February 13, 1943.

77. Ibid.78. Braden to Sumner Welles, Under Secretary of State, March 19, 1943, decimal file

837.00/9263, RG 59, USNA.79. “Memorandum,” April 6, 1944, decimal file 800B, Havana Embassy confidential file, RG 84,

USNA.80. “Memorandum,” October 24, 1944, decimal file 840.1, RG 84, USNA.81. Ibid.82. Riven V. Met to Francisco Navarro, October 24, 1944, in Dickinson to Braden, November 8,

1944, decimal file 840.1, RG 84, USNA. In Met’s fascinating letter, which was written inSpanish, he identifies himself as a “native of the United States, North American citizen.”

83. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 145–66; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Raceand the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations inthe Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

84. On the ascendance of anticommunist Afro-Cuban leaders among the societies of colorduring the late 1940s and 1950s, see de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 235–43.

85. For a critique of imprecise analyses of transnational processes by scholars who employ theconcept of globalization, see Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of GlobalizationGood For? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213.


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