Raced Neoliberalism: Groundings for Hip Hop

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. — W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Dicen que Dios no aprieta, pero Cuba estrangula. Pero a pesar de todo, de mil modos te amo Cuba [They say God does not squeeze, but Cuba strangles. Regardless of all, in a thousand ways I love you, Cuba] — "Mi nación," Los Paisanos

In the summer of 1998 I made my first trip to Havana for a Spanish-language course I had arranged through online sleuthing and e-mail exchanges. I had recently completed my MA work on Garifuna youth and performance in New York City, and having leftover research funds I decided to take the opportunity to visit Cuba while seeking to improve my Spanish skills. Raised in New York City by leftist parents — my father African American, my mother Jewish — who met through their early 1960s activism amid the U.S. civil rights movement, Cuba and its revolution were celebrated in my home as a defiant counterweight to histories of imperial capitalism.

As was the case within many black left circles of the time, the Cuban Revolution's early commitments to racial equity and internationalist support for U.S. black radicals and anticolonial struggles in Africa carried particular resonance in my movement household. Fidel Castro's famed 1960 stay in Harlem and impromptu meeting with Malcolm X at the Hotel Theresa struck an especially intimate chord, occurring around the time of my father's on-air reporting on social justice issues with New York–based WBAI-Pacifica radio, work through which he had interviewed Malcolm X on a number of occasions himself. My mother, moreover, was involved in early solidarity work with the leftist Fair Play for Cuba Committee, while a close aunt visited Havana in the late 1980s as part of a delegation of U.S. health care professionals exploring the island's public health system. Given this familial history, Cuba and its revolution had long occupied a site of intrigue.

Yet while my trip to Havana that summer may have been informed by inherited nostalgias of revolutionary lore, I recognized the necessity of experiencing this mythic Cuba on my own historical terms. Cuba of 1998, of course, was not the Cuba of my parents' era and generation. It had been a decade since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the end of Cuba's preferential trade with the Soviet Union and its allies. Since the early 1990s the island's ambivalent though ever-deepening engagement with market capitalism had introduced new social incongruencies and heightened levels of contradiction into a once defiant revolutionary socialism. By 1998 the strains were clearly evident even to a foreign visitor such as myself. Of particular note were the ways these developments impacted the island's complexities of race and class, long foci of revolutionary Cuba's efforts to build egalitarianism under state socialism.