Sharing Strategies for Racial Uplift: Afro-Cubans, Afro-Puerto Ricans, and African Amer-
of Jim Crow, the situation of black people in the US South seemed so
bleak and oppressive, with institutionalized segregation, a lack of vot-
ing rights, and condoned lynching, that historians could not seem to
find any instances of attempts at improvements that seemed worth
writing about. As Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore has shown, however,
even in periods of extreme oppression, it is possible to find examples
of African-Americans striving to improve their status in society. In
Cuba, too, historians have been very interested in the existence of
political rights and participation. They have been especially focused
on how discourses of racial equality were translated into real political
rights in the aftermath of the War of Independence, as Ada Ferrer and
others have brilliantly demonstrated. Rebecca Scott has written about
a transnational circulation of political ideas, particularly ideas of citi-
zenship rights, throughout the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
However, in Cuba the period of political organization and advance-
ment is often seen as coming to a screeching halt with 1912 massacre
and the end of the independent Afro-Cuban political party, el Partido
Independiente de Color. Helg argues this point forcefully, and adds that
after 1912, Afro-Cubans’ efforts at organizing can be seen in the cul-
tural realm better than in the political realm. And indeed, the histori-
ography on Afro-Cubans in the mid-twentieth century has focused on
afrocubanismo and other cultural forms. And because Puerto Rico
became a U.S. colony at the turn of the century, the historiography has
focused on colonialism and US imperialism, and the racialization of all
Puerto Ricans, rather than the specific challenges facing Afro-Puerto
Ricans.
This paper proposes that in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United
States, blacks were focused on economic methods of advancements
for their community, as well as on political and cultural ones. In their
attempts to expand educational opportunities that would help lead to
new employment situations for those who had been formerly
enslaved, black intellectuals looked beyond their national boundaries,
even while keeping solidly within them when it came to their political
efforts. Juan Gualberto Gómez and Rafael Serra, both black Cuban