352 Chapter 15
worst kind of racism, because, in Cuba, to be openly racist became
synonymous with being unpatriotic. This led to some very real gains
by Afro-Cubans. For example, despite the intervention of the United
States, which was currently under an administration that was allowing
the oppression of its own African-descended people, Cubans were
able to guarantee that Afro-Cubans be given the vote. The Cuban
Constitutional Convention seated men of all colors, and—along with
town councils, mass meetings and veterans associations—clamored in
support of “writing a positive right to vote directly into the Constitu-
tion” (De la Fuente, 2001: 371, and Scott, 2005: 203- 4).
However, despite the right to vote and the existence of some Afro-
Cuban representatives in the national legislature, Afro-Cubans contin-
ued to struggle for equality. Some scholars, particularly Aline Helg,
have criticized the “myth of racial equality,” and the way that it
obscured a deeply segregated and racist environment. The same dis-
course of nationalism based on racial equality that prevented the worst
racism also allowed whites to gloss over complaints of racial inequal-
ity, and to maintain the status quo. Continued racial inequality and
oppression culminated in the race war—really a massacre of Afro-
Cubans—of 1912, which was a response to an attempt on the part of
some Afro-Cubans to organize a black political party. In the face of
dashed hopes and increasing oppression, therefore, blacks in Cuba
and the United States mobilized to improve their situation. Afro-
Cubans were particularly active in establishing mutual aid societies
that provided education and assistance to black Cubans. This indepen-
dent organizing along racial lines had a specifically Cuban origin—the
ethnic African cabildos—but was also a counterpart to strategies imple-
mented by African Americans.
In both the North American and Cuban historiographies, histori-
ans writing about racial uplift have focused on the political efforts, and
political exclusion, of black people. In part, this is the because of the
legacy of the Civil Rights Movement—it was an insistence on civil and
political rights that created a major breakthrough for African Ameri-
cans in the United States in the 1960s. It is also because, in the period