Sharing Strategies for Racial Uplift: Afro-Cubans, Afro-Puerto Ricans, and African Amer-
through education. As part of this effort to disseminate American val-
ues, the American occupying governments sent white Puerto Rican
and Cuban teachers to the United States to learn at the Normal
Schools there. A well-known example of this is the summer schools at
Harvard and Cornell, though there were also longer-term stays at The
State Normal College at New Paltz. At the same time, this parallel
exchange was going on between African-American institutions of
higher learning and Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans. The United
States’ intervention and occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico compli-
cated this diasporic exchange, as now the source of inspiration also
challenged these Afro-Cubans’ nationalist goals. Yet Gómez, Serra,
and other Afro-Cubans managed to maintain their nationalist loyalties
while reaching out to the African diaspora to adopt a very specific
strategy of racial uplift.
The mechanisms for this exchange was different for the Afro-
Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican students attending Tuskegee, however,
and the Puerto Rican case seems to fit into the rubric of imperialism
more squarely. The Cubans were recruited by Washington himself,
sent from Cuba by the famous Afro-Cuban intellectual Juan Gual-
berto Gómez, and funded by wealthy Northern donors, but the
Puerto Rican group was sent and funded by the American colonial
government in Puerto Rico, at least in the beginning years. Thus the
presence of Puerto Rican students at Tuskegee was clearly part of the
larger strategy of imperialism-through-education being employed by
the U.S. government. This does not exclude the possibility that for the
students and parents themselves the experience was part of an effort
at building transnational ties with an eye toward specific strategies of
racial uplift—that Afro-Puerto Ricans could put this imperial project
to their own use (Guridy, 2010 and Sobe, 2010).
The existence of empire that not only added North American rac-
ist ideas to the existing racism in Cuba and Puerto Rico, but also con-
tributed to an economic shift in these areas. Empire transformed the
relations between these countries radically, and altered the opportuni-
ties for work and economic status available to both white and blacks