How Cuba recognizes Blackness through laws and science

According to Anayansi Rodriguez Camejo, Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, any talk about race in Cuba has to look at the work done by Color Cubano.

- By KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO

Created by the country’s government in 2019, it is Cuba’s official National Program Against Racism and Racial Discrimination. It was implemented in 2021.

Run by a National Commission that promotes affirmative action-style anti-discrimination laws and educational programs, Color Cubano has also become a new way to understand the island’s identity: It recognizes Cuba as an Afrodescendant nation and acknowledges that the majority of its people can trace their ancestry to Africa, Spain, and Indigenous peoples.

“It’s something even scientifically proven that we — all Cubans — we are, after all, the same, because we have a lot in our genes, including in our blood,” Rodríguez Camejo said. “We come from Africa and we come from Spain. That has been scientifically demonstrated, genetically demonstrated — that almost 100% of our genes, mainly in Cuba, have some Afro-descendance. That is why we consider ourselves Afrodescendants in general and in total in the Cuban population.”

Rodríguez Camejo cited findings from a 2014 genetics study, which found that out of 1,019 people, the average Cuban had ancestry that was 72% European, 20% African, and 8% Indigenous. Cubans in the southeast provinces of Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba had higher percentages of African ancestry, and there was higher Indigenous Taíno ancestry in the nation’s eastern provinces. Another study, in 2018, found that out of 860 people, patterns showed that Cubans have a mixed genetic heritage.

Cuban officials say that these scientific studies pointing to the nation’s diverse genetic heritage help shape the ideas behind Color Cubano and the way the government’s laws, its inequality measurements, and its public policy are being designed.