Sharing Strategies for Racial Uplift: Afro-Cubans, Afro-Puerto Ricans, and African Amer-
was Washington’s focus on education and economic progress that
earned him disdain. W.E.B. Dubois, for example, thought that Wash-
ington should be focusing on the moral imperatives in southern race
relations, as Frederick Douglass had done. But, as Moses asserts,
Washington rightly realized that while abolitionism allowed its sup-
porters to take the high moral ground, Reconstruction required mun-
dane attention to industry, agriculture, and labor (Moses 2004:
Introduction, Chapter 8).
Critics of Booker T. Washington’s industrial education ignore the
significant academic component of Tuskegee’s program. In addition,
it is highly unlikely that intellectuals as keenly aware of the threats of
empire as Gómez and Serra would have willingly interacted with
Washington had they suspected him of having similar goals to his
imperial government. In fact, this paper seeks to demonstrate that it
was precisely the aspects of Washington’s strategies that were
denounced during his time and in the subsequent historiography that
appealed to the Afro-Cuban leaders. Dismissing Washington as a will-
ing participant in a white imperialist project not only inaccurately
describes his position, but also causes us to overlook or downplay the
ways that Afro-Cuban leaders attempted to deal with the imperial
threat and changing economic situation by reaching across the dias-
pora to find new solutions.
Though the criticism of Washington as actively participating in US
empire is overstated and obscures the important contributions he
made to a method that was appreciated through the African diaspora,
we cannot separate the exchange of strategies of racial uplift explored
here from the US imperial project. The presence of Afro-Cuban and
Afro-Puerto Rican students at Tuskegee was part of an ideological
and strategic circulation of ideas among intellectual leaders in the
black diaspora that should be taken seriously. However, the student
exchange was also clearly bound up in the US imperial project. The
Afro-Cuban students ended up at Tuskegee through the impetus of
several Afro-Cuban leaders and Booker T. Washington’s interest. But
their tuition and travel expenses were often funded by wealthy north-