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What If… Fulgencio Batista Had Been Black?

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What If… Fulgencio Batista Had Been Black? WHAT IF… FULGENCIO BATISTA HAD BEEN BLACK? Nicolás Sánchez1 El dominio de Batista sobre la vida política trajo over the world, including those in Cuba working at ciertos cambios para los negros cubanos: el ex sar- the National Centre of Medical Genetics of the Med- gento era obviamente un mulato y, a pesar de su ical University of Havana. This paper also argues that traición a la revolución de 1933,… Batista realizó— charges of widespread racism in pre-revolutionary proponiéndoselo o no–varias tareas de importancia revolucionaria. Cuba are unfounded, and in disagreement with the —Lourdes Casal (1979 quote view of highly respected scholars. The author argues from Cultura Afrocubana,2 pp. 390–391) that many blacks and mixed race people in Cuba (in- Fulgencio Batista was… working class, mixed-blood cluding the strongman, then president, and finally cane cutter, water-boy, tailor, carpenter and railroad dictator Batista, and such well-known heroes and brakeman… politicians as Juan Gualberto Gómez and Martin —Enrique Oltuski (Minister of Communications under Morúa Delgado) played significant roles in Cuban Castro, 2002 quote from Vida Clandestina,3 p. 290) history. It is ironic that the only often-cited and fa- Despite the fact that his contemporaries, including mous Cuban of mixed race (and aspiring politician) many supporters of Fidel Castro, acknowledged that is Nicolás Guillén Batista, who was no different from Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar was either a mulatto or a Fulgencio Batista Zaldivar in terms of skin color. man of mixed race, many writers in the Twenty First Guillén’s second surname is politely ignored, and his Century have ignored his Afro-Cuban roots and pos- wealthy family background (including that of his fa- sibly his aboriginal ancestry. This has happened for ther, who was also of mixed race and a Senator in the two related reasons: Batista did not have a dark Cuban Republic) are never mentioned. The paper enough complexion to be considered black (negro), closes with a brief comparison of racial policies in the and conceding his mixed race challenged the percep- US and Cuba, showing that the democratic process tion of widespread discrimination in Cuba prior to in America was far more compromised than in Cuba, the Castro revolution. especially in the first half of the Twentieth Century. This paper claims both that Batista was a man of If Fulgencio Batista had been black (in the sense that mixed race and that race is not a social construct, an no one could pretend that he was not of African de- assumption that obfuscates the discussion of racial is- scent), then Cuban historiography could not deny sues. Race can be defined objectively in terms of ge- the significance of an Afro-Cuban becoming a freely netic markers, the way it is now done by scientists all elected President of the Republic in the year 1940. It 1. This is a condensed version of the original paper. Readers interested in the full version may contact the author at The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. Please write to [email protected]. The author thanks Frank Martínez for his assistance in preparing the audio-visual presentation for the annual conference 2. Castellanos, Jorge & Isabel. 1990. Cultura Afrocubana, Vol 2. Ediciones Universal: Miami, FL. 3. Oltuski, Enrique. 2002. Vida Clandestina: My Life in the Cuban Revolution, Wiley. 282 What If… Fulgencio Batista Had Been Black? would be as if future American historians denied that ics were able to discover relationships and make pre- President Barack Obama was the first black President dictions that turned out to be useful in our under- of the United States. Such denial would represent a standing of both the physical world and the social refutation that a tremendous amount of progress in sciences. Governments wisely or unwisely cooperated racial relations had occurred in the US by 2008. In in gathering crude observations about the races of Batista’s case, the Cuban people should be proud humankind in specific countries. That such data that a man of African ancestry had been elected pres- were misused had nothing to do with the relevance ident of Cuba in 1940, a fact that is hardly ever ac- or validity of any of the three concepts. knowledged. Cuban history is being rewritten before What needs to be understood is the difference be- our very eyes, the way it has been rewritten about tween empirical concepts and laws and theoretical Charles Curtis, the American Vice President under concepts and laws.4 The difference between the old Herbert Hoover, who was a Native-American, presi- and the new abstractions is that theoretical concepts dent of the US Senate, US Congressman and even a and laws have no right or wrong definitions, because famous child-hero raised for some time in an Indian these are embedded in mathematical structures that reservation: his heritage is known by practically no are subject to strict logical rules. Hence, both space one in this country. and time, after Newton, were determined to possess THE CONCEPT OF RACE mathematical characteristics that are independent of The concept of race has a long history, but one can our common experiences. Equally, we need to think argue that one of the earliest scientific discussions of race in theoretical terms. Today, races refer to dif- about race occurs with Charles Darwin, whose great ferent populations of humankind, which can be sepa- book on evolution was entitled On the Origins of Spe- rated and defined according to the genetic structures cies by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of those populations. The differences, as we now of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Several people know, arose as a result of physical separation, found- have noted how the subtitle of his book is usually re- ing effects, natural selection, mutations, sexual selec- pressed in discussions about evolution, for the appar- tion and developmental stress. The concept of race, ent reason that it is politically incorrect to associate in theoretical terms, is neither right nor wrong: It is Darwin with any discussion about race. This is done simply a useful term that is subject to improvements despite the fact that Darwin wrote a second famous as we gain a better understanding of its significance book entitled The Descent of Man, and Selection in in an overall theoretical structure. Relation to Sex. There, he explicitly discussed the dif- Employing genetic markers, one can extract (with the ferences among human races and expressed great dis- help of cluster analysis) distinctive races. This is dain for “savage races;” but in the end, he felt that known as racial population naturalism,5 and it leads human races did not refer to human sub-species, to three variant (yet related) theoretical concepts of claiming that there was only one species of human- race. The first is cladistic races (or populations), kind. which are those that share a common ancestor. The It is not uncommon for scientific concepts to change. second is socially isolated races, which have arisen as Our original concepts of space, time and race have a result of social pressures, yet have produced specific turned out to be wrong. Yet even when these con- clusters of genes — such as those of African-Ameri- cepts were misleading, Newton in physics, and many cans. Most people do not realize that there are now others in anthropology, sociology, and even econom- medical treatments in the US that have been ap- 4. Rudolph Carnap, Philosophical Foundations of Physics; An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 1966, Basic Books, is a clear state- ment of the principles involved. 5. See the article on “Race” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which was last revised on February 17, 2016. https://plato.stan- ford.edu/entries/race/ Consulted in June, 2017. 283 Cuba in Transition • ASCE 2017 proved only for people of African American ancestry. ing author is from Cuba (and worked at the National Finally, there are genetically clustered races which are Centre of Medical Genetics of the Medical Universi- related to racial categories associated with specific ty of Havana), most collaborators came from Den- geographic regions and phenotypes. It should be not- mark, Cuba and Spain, in that order, plus one from ed in passing that genes influence behavior, such as Canada and one from Saudi Arabia. Their academic aggression, which is far more manifest in males than backgrounds were mainly in Medicine and Genetics, in females, for both human and nonhuman animals. but two were anthropologists. The massive research Those interested in this issue should consult the arti- effort involved 1,019 adults randomly chosen from cle on the “Genetic Basis of Behavior” in the Biology all Cuban provinces, the use of 128 autosomal ances- Encyclopedia available on the web.6 try Informative markers, quantitative estimates of skin pigmentation, and markers for the mtDNA and RACES IN CUBA the Y chromosome. These are the main results: Scientists all over the world have rushed to determine not just the racial composition of their countries’ 1. Admixture proportions for the population as a populations, but also to link their findings to medical whole were 72% European (range 4.3% to issues. Many findings are often reported in the jour- 98.2%); 20% African (range 0.8% to 95.2) and nal PLoS Genetics. Cuban scholars in Cuban universi- 8% Native American (range 0.4% to 34%). ties have done exactly that. It turns out that the racial Large racial differences were found among the composition of the Cuban people is made up of three provinces. ancestral races: Europeans, Africans and Native 2. Very high and highly significant correlations be- Americans, for lack of a better term.
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