34716 Sharing Strategies for Racial
Uplift: Afro-Cubans, Afro-
Puerto Ricans, and African
Americans
Raquel Alicia Otheguy^1
In 1899, Afro-Cuban intellectual and statesman, Juan Gualberto
Gómez, sent his son and a group of Cuban students to Booker T.
Washington’s Tuskegee Institute with a letter of introduction. These
were the first in a wave of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican stu-
dents who attended Tuskegee in the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury. This academic exchange was accompanied by a great interest in
Booker T. Washington’s educational philosophy and in his Tuskegee
Institute by another Afro-Cuban intellectual and leader, Rafael Serra,
during his years in exile in the United States. This connection between
Afro-Cubans, Afro-Puerto Ricans, and African Americans reveals an
important exchange of strategies for racial uplift among members of
these post-emancipation societies.
This paper will argue that while black leaders throughout the Afri-
can diaspora in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century
often concentrated primarily on the attainment of narrowly defined
- PhD Student, Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook