Race And Reproduction In Cuba

Women’s reproduction, including conception, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and other physical acts of motherhood (as well as the rejection of those roles), played a critical role in the evolution and management of Cuba’s population. While existing scholarship has approached Cuba’s demographic history through the lens of migration, both forced and voluntary, Race and Reproduction in Cuba challenges this male-normative perspective by centering women in the first book-length history of reproduction in Cuba. Bonnie A. Lucero traces women’s reproductive lives, as well as key medical, legal, and institutional interventions influencing them, over four centuries. Her study begins in the early colonial period with the emergence of the island’s first charitable institutions dedicated to relieving poor women and abandoned white infants. The book’s centerpiece is the long nineteenth century, when elite interventions in women’s reproduction hinged not only on race but also legal status. It ends in 1965 when Cuba’s nascent revolutionary government shifted away from enforcing antiabortion laws that had historically targeted impoverished women of color. Questioning how elite demographic desires—specifically white population growth and nonwhite population management—shaped women’s reproduction, Lucero argues that elite men, including judges, physicians, philanthropists, and public officials, intervened in women’s reproductive lives in racially specific ways. Lucero examines how white supremacy shaped tangible differences in the treatment of women and their infants across racial lines and outlines how those reproductive outcomes were crucial in sustaining racial hierarchies through moments of tremendous political, economic, and social change.

As a young militant in the 26th of July Movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales Dominguez, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context. Today, he is one of Cuba’s most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question. Available for the first time in English, the essays collected here describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward. Morales Dominguez surveys the major advancements in race relations that occurred as a result of the revolution, but does not ignore continuing signs of inequality and discrimination. Instead, he argues that the revolution must be an ongoing process and that to truly transform society it must continue to confront the question of race in Cuba.

Women’s reproduction, including conception, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and other physical acts of motherhood (as well as the rejection of those roles), played a critical role in the evolution and management of Cuba’s population. While existing scholarship has approached Cuba’s demographic history through the lens of migration, both forced and voluntary, Race and Reproduction in Cuba challenges this male-normative perspective by centering women in the first book-length history of reproduction in Cuba. Bonnie A. Lucero traces women’s reproductive lives, as well as key medical, legal, and institutional interventions influencing them, over four centuries. Her study begins in the early colonial period with the emergence of the island’s first charitable institutions dedicated to relieving poor women and abandoned white infants. The book’s centerpiece is the long nineteenth century, when elite interventions in women’s reproduction hinged not only on race but also legal status. It ends in 1965 when Cuba’s nascent revolutionary government shifted away from enforcing antiabortion laws that had historically targeted impoverished women of color. Questioning how elite demographic desires—specifically white population growth and nonwhite population management—shaped women’s reproduction, Lucero argues that elite men, including judges, physicians, philanthropists, and public officials, intervened in women’s reproductive lives in racially specific ways. Lucero examines how white supremacy shaped tangible differences in the treatment of women and their infants across racial lines and outlines how those reproductive outcomes were crucial in sustaining racial hierarchies through moments of tremendous political, economic, and social change.

A vivid exploration of the key role played by multiracial women in visualizing and performing Cuban identity

'The Power of Race in Cuba' analyzes racial ideologies that negate the existence of racism and their effect on racial progress and activism through the lens of Cuba.

Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.

DIVAn ethnography of sexual identity formation in contemporary Cuba./div

This prize-winning study examines the historical interplay of racial identity, nationality, and family formation in Cuba from the 18th century to today. Since the 19th century, there have been two opposing perspectives on Cuban racial identity: one that frames Cubans as white, and one that sees them as racially mixed based on acceptance of African descent. For the past two centuries, these competing views of have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented decisions about choosing partners and family formation. Cuba’s Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the role race has played in reproductive practices and genealogical memories associated with family formation. Karen Y. Morrison reads archival, oral-history, and literary sources to demonstrate the ideological centrality and inseparability of "race," "nation," and "family," in definitions of Cuban identity. Morrison also analyzes the conditions that supported the social advance and decline of notions of white racial superiority, nationalist projections of racial hybridity, and pride in African descent. Winner, NECLAS Marissa Navarro Best Book Prize