On civil rights, a tale of two Castros

So, I awoke Saturday to learn that longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has died at the age of 90, only to immediately ascertain that perspectives of his life and legacy are as polarized as any public figure in recent memory.

{mosads}My social media feeds are filled with competing rhetorical obsequies where it seems that many (but not all) of my black and Muslim followers remember Castro as a liberator of oppressed people, while many (but not all) of my white and Cuban friends remember him as an evil oppressor.

Why the disparate views?

First, we must remember that Cuba, like the majority of nations in the Western Hemisphere, was a bastion of slavery. According to a 2002 report from the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, approximately 62 percent of Cubans are black or mixed heavily with black, thus the dominance of the Afro-Cuban culture on the island.

But as slavery waned in Cuba in the late 1800s, many Afro-Cubans were subjected to some of the same customs that their American kinsmen were experiencing under Jim Crow laws.

So when the United States found itself embroiled in war with Spain not long after the USS Maine sunk in Havana Harbor in February 1898, by the war’s end, the American influence on Cuba’s economy began and would remain strong until Fidel Castro emerged and deposed the Fulgencio Batista regime in the late 1950s.

Indeed, from the 1890s to 1959, American businesses turned Cuba into a Western playground; hotels and casinos were erected, and banking concerns established major branches, but to a great extent, the mostly poor Afro-Cubans were repressed by an insidious caste system.

As such, a great majority of the initial Cuban exiles to the United States were white Cubans of Spanish descent, many of whom found their business interests and personal property seized by the new communist regime.

Castro, upon taking power, boasted that his Cuba would be a raceless society, and almost six years before American blacks gained equal accomodation rights following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Castro banned separate facilities for blacks while establishing free education programs desgined to ameliorate conditions for poorer Afro-Cubans.

Amid that backdrop, Castro was hailed as a conquering hero — a race equalizer, if you will — as he traveled to address the United Nations in 1960.

There are iconic images of Castro from that visit that remain permanently etched into my mind now, if not the collective American black subconscious.

There are photos of Castro with Minister Malcolm X during his trek through Harlem in 1960 that speaks volumes as Brother Malcolm and the Nation of Islam were considered pariahs even among many self-styled liberal American whites who feared them.

There are pictures of Castro, a head of state who eschewed a Midtown Manhattan hotel and chose to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem instead, waiving at adoring black supporters who crowded outside to pay homage.

Those gestures by Castro were preludes to later actions, some controversial, which include his providing asylum to black revolutionary Assata Shakur, a woman who remains on the FBI “Most Wanted” list for allegedly killing police officers in the 1970s.

Or, lest wr forget the time that Castro sent Cuban troops to fight against aparthied in Angola.

Further, lest we forget the Cuban health care system that offered aid to exiled American civil rights leader Kwame Ture (nee Stokely Carmichael), or the later offers of medical and clean-up assistance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the devastating 2005 storm that detrimentally impacted the poor in Louisiana.

These images and issues have inured a sort of folk hero status for Castro among many American blacks.

But to be clear, there were serious, extremely serious, red flags with Castro’s regime as well, starting with his critically inane decision to allow the Soviet Union to store nuclear weapons barely 90 miles from Miami.

The resulting Cuban missile crisis almost led to World War III and the complete annihilation of the human race.

Further, the 1980 Mariel boatlift that found over 100,000 mostly Spanish-descended Cubans seeking asylum in Miami led to bitter acrimony among many within Miami’s black community as the Cuban community, by decade’s end, had grown to dominate politics and jobs in the city that, for many blacks, replaced an overtly racist white power structure from the old Jim Crow era with a latently racist white Cuban power structure.

Over the past two decades, Castro and his brother and successor Raúl, the current president of Cuba, drew harsh criticism for replacing one form of repression of the nation’s black citizens with another.

Carlos Moore, an Afro-Cuban activist who writes prolifically about race issues, in 2008 penned a letter to Raúl Castro where he reminded him that:

You are a descendant of Europeans born in Spain; I am a descendant of Africans born in the Caribbean. We are both Cubans. However, being Cuban confers no specific privilege on either of us as human beings. … Notwithstanding the grandiose but vacuous speeches, or bombastic but no less deceitful declarations on the alleged elimination of racism and racial discrimination, wherever we look in socialist Cuba our eyes are confronted with a cobweb of social and racial inequities and racial hatred against black people.

Ouch!

Two years after Moore’s letter, 60 American black social and entertainment leaders, including Dr. Cornel West, and actor and director Mario Van Peebles, issued a statement, “Acting on Our Conscience,” where they blasted Castro’s communist government for “increased violations of civil and human rights for those black activists in Cuba who dare raise their voices against the island’s racial system.”

Understanding these facts, I ask today: Was Fidel Castro a heroic figure with respect to racial discrimination, or a repressive foe to civil rights himself?

It is pretty clear that he was a mixed bag, not unlike many American political leaders dealing with the same key issue. We praise President John Kennedy for reaching out to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his brief administration, but we pillory Kennedy for his own patriarchal, arguably racist views that informed his mistrust of the civil rights movement and insistence that King stand down from speeding up the cause of equal rights in a South that was then heavily Democratic and key to Kennedy’s 1964 reelection hopes.

We praise President Lyndon Johnson for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while we pillory him for his virulent racist animus, including his love of using the racist “n-word.”

More recently, we praise Bill Clinton for appointing more black Cabinet members than any of his predecessors and presiding over a strong economy, while we pillory him for the 1994 crime bill and 1996 welfare reform that vilified poor black men and women across America.

In essence, Castro, too, was fraught with the same vicissitudes and maddening inconsistencies with respect to race that has plagued most major Western Hemisphere leaders of European descent ever since the slave trade waned and rigid de jure segregation took root.

Because of that, it is critical that emotion and “feelings” do not replace the facts that Castro was not quite the hero that he is hailed to be by many this morning, nor was he the personification of pure evil as others suggest while wishing him eternity in Hell.

He was, in essence, a man whose legacy will be judged by historians and pundits, and whose soul will be judged by the Almighty.

Hobbs is a lawyer and award-winning freelance writer who is a regular contributor to The Hill. Hobbs has been featured in The New York Times and theGrio in addition to numerous regional newspapers. Follow him on Twitter @RealChuckHobbs.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.