The African Diaspora in Latin America
Overview
One of the most important legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and also of colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean has been the creation of the modern African diaspora – the dispersal of millions of people of African origin all over the world but especially in Europe and the Americas.The Latin American and Caribbean regions were the first areas of the Americas to be populated by African immigrants. An estimated eight to fifteen million Africans reached the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. The need for manpower increased towards the end of the sixteenth century largely due to the rapid decline of the indigenous population in the main centers of the Spanish empire, Mexico and Peru. Only the youngest and healthiest Africans were taken on the ‘middle passage’ of the triangle trade. Conditions aboard the ship were dreadful. Slaves were jammed into the hull and chained to one another in order to stop revolts. As many as one in five passengers did not survive the journey.
Today, African descendants form significant ethnic minorities in several Latin American countries. However, in many of the Caribbean nations the situation has arisen where the previous minority has actually become the majority. Over the centuries, African descendants have added their original contributions to the cultural mix of their respective societies and thus exerted a profound influence on all facets of life in Latin America. A strong African influence pervades music, dance, the arts, literature, speech forms, and religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Africans, whether as slaves or free immigrants, brought a variety of different cultural influences to the New World. Like all other immigrant groups, they abandoned some aspects of their culture, modified others, and created new forms.
African Diaspora in Cuba
From the 1500s, Spanish colonizers brought about 8,000 Africans, largely from West Africa, to Cuba as slaves, to work the sugar plantations. By 1838, at their peak, there were nearly 400,000 slaves on the island. As their numbers increased, so did the tons of sugar Cuba produced. Slavery didn’t end in the country until 1886. But even when it did, Black Cubans were shut out of education and schools.
Unlike in the United States following slavery’s end, there were no separate schools or Historically Black Colleges and Universities established to educate those who had been enslaved. Following the 1959 Cuban revolution, institutional racism and the color line was supposed to be erased. Free education for all was among the social gains.
So when the doors to education flung open, poverty kept some Blacks from taking advantage. Slavery wasn’t that far behind them. But for those who did enter, thrived.
By the 1980s, many had managed to become professionals—doctors, lawyers and teachers. Then in the 1990s, just a decade later, Blacks found themselves again on the margins and falling behind, says August Nimtz, who teaches a course on the Cuban revolution at the University of Minnesota.
Blacks who were already struggling tumbled further economically in the late 1980s and 1990 when Soviet support to Cuba dried up, and the economy tanked. Analyzing numbers from 2005, DomÃnguez, in a recent cover story, “Race as a Challenge to Cuba’s Educational System,” in the Havana Times.org, offers a rare statistical look at the employment scene for blacks and whites: “73 percent of scientists and technicians were white; 80 percent of professors at the University of Havana, too. These numbers held for the rest of the country. Blacks were unemployed at double the rate of whites. Blacks spearheaded more black-market activities; jails held 85 percent darker-skinned Cubans.”