The colours of Havana

Omar Hernández had just entered his teenage years when his father took him aside to talk about his future — his future as a Black man in Cuba.

Years later, in November 2022, Omar would recall that conversation. He was waiting for a friend on a busy street corner in Vedado, a central neighbourhood in Havana. It was around eight in the evening. He passed the time scrolling on his phone when suddenly a police car pulled up. Officers got out and asked to see his ID. They also searched the contents of his bag and found a multitool — a kind of small Swiss Army knife.

Omar is a mechanical engineer and uses the tool in his daily work. That evening, he was planning to fix a few plug sockets in his friend’s apartment. But the police were not satisfied with his answer. Carrying such a tool was a crime, they said, and took him to the station for questioning. He was held behind bars until midnight.

“Racial profiling by the Cuban police is far from new”

His father had warned him - and, as a police officer himself, he knew exactly how things worked. “He explained that the police would stop me and that I must remain calm above all,” Omar recalls. “He told me that officers are trained to believe that people like me are more likely to commit all sorts of crimes.”

And racial profiling by the Cuban police is far from new. The roots of racism in Cuba stretch back to the island’s history as a Spanish colony. People of African descent were brought there as slaves, primarily to toil in the sugar industry. Even almost a century and a half after slavery was abolished in 1886, these long-established patterns of inequality persisted.

When colonial rule ended and the Republic of Cuba was founded in 1902, racial discrimination continued. Black people were barred from holding important positions, while they made up the majority of the working, impoverished population. Clubs, parks, associations, barbershops, and other public spaces remained segregated by skin colour.

It was the 1959 revolution that finally ended formal segregation. Political measures were implemented to give all citizens access to land, education, the arts, housing, and more. Black people and mixed-race Cubans were legally and socially placed on an equal footing with the rest of the population.

This was a crucial step towards historical redress, says historian Alexander Hall Lujardo, who studies racism on the island. By removing the material foundations for exclusion and prejudice, it was thought that discrimination would eventually fade.

But, in reality, not everyone benefited equally from this official shift, and new forms of inequality emerged. “The hierarchy of skin colour that shaped every aspect of life remained as a cultural legacy that cannot simply be erased,” Lujardo said.

In 1962, Fidel Castro declared that racial discrimination in Cuba was a thing of the past. During the 1960s, racism was increasingly absent from public debate, eventually becoming a taboo subject. In the so-called “Special Period” — the economic and social crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union, on which Cuba was heavily dependent — old injustices and divisions became visible again. Today, poverty and inequality are glaring problems.

“Naming the problem of racism would be the first step towards overcoming it”

A 2020 study by the German Institute of Global and Area Studies found that only 11.5 per cent of Afro-Cubans have a bank account, compared with fifty per cent of white Cubans. Meanwhile, seventy per cent of Black people had no internet access, compared with just a quarter of those classified as white.

According to lawyer and feminist Alina Herrera, Black women are particularly at risk of being socially marginalised. Their average life expectancy, for example, is lower than that of white women — and even lower than that of white men.

At primary school, Omar’s teachers dubbed him as “a Black man with the soul of a white man,” referring to his good behaviour and grades. On the night of his arrest, the police ultimately let him go with a warning. Since then, his working life has become more difficult: he now avoids carrying certain tools out of fear of another police stop.

“Naming the problem of racism would be the first step towards overcoming it,” Lujardo concludes. “The challenges are huge, and we must finally tackle them head on.”