Cuban Culture: Racial Discrimination In Africa

Racial discrimination is inevitably seen throughout our history. Cuba had discriminated the Africans solely based on the colour of their skin. As there race dictated where they fit within the social hierarchy. Thus, allowing for the Cubans to enslave the Africans, however being slaves only made them fight harder as they never disregard their upbringing entailing their beliefs. Their strong beliefs and backgrounds ended up integrating within the Spaniards culture to form a hybrid, making them just as much apart of the Cuban culture as the spaniards were. Therefore, although the Africans were racially discriminated within Cuba it allowed them to be rebellious and never give up. Thus, creating a positive outcome, as Cuba would not be where it

Race was something that people were able to use to dictate your status within a society. As if you were not considered white you were looked down upon, thus the reasoning for why the Africans were depicted to slavery. The African population were in charge of things such as the sugar plantation. However, the purchase costs of the African slaves had been increasing which forced Cuban sugar planters to find another source of labour. Thus the Cuban planters had to analyze the production team and find out the problem of the costs. The Cubans always wanted to have lower labour costs to allow them to be a competitor around the world as if their product was more expensive people would be shunned away. Therefore, this caused the African slave imports to be dropped tremendously as there were 10,000 Africans slaves in 1844 and just in one year it doped to 1,300 in 1845. Thus, this is one of the reasons slavery towards Africans dropped immensely. ( Yun, Lisa and Ricardo R.

Europe’s ego and inhumane treatment of the slaves gave the slaves strength and unnoticed power while Europe lost economic control with every new ruler/system. Transculturation was apparent within this time as it is the process of combining and merging from culture to culture. For instance, looking at one culture with a superiority view point would result in transculturation. The hybridity that formed was the beginning of the change that happened within the cuban culture. Africans changed the way the Cuban society was running as many were passionate about many different things. People of African decent, particularly women in this case, challenge the way society was running. Specifically African women were focused on the aspects of of education, racial order and how African women were able to voice their opinion. Therefore, since the hybridity was formed the Africans were challenging the social hierarchy and the elite policies to try and make changes within their community. In 1901 Buffalo Exposition and how it is now socially unacceptable to discriminate people solely based on their gender or race in Cuba. ( Lucero, Bonnie