Sharing Strategies for Racial Uplift: Afro-Cubans, Afro-Puerto Ricans, and African Amer-
as workers. But their efforts were not taken in isolation. Working with
long-standing currents of communication and exchange, and creating
new ones in new circumstances, African Americans’ ideas and actions
of racial uplift intersected with those of Afro-Cubans and Afro-
Puerto Ricans, particularly when they came to education and labor.
Their efforts at sharing strategies across the diaspora were undertaken
in a wider context of the nationalist ideals of the Cubans and Puerto
Ricans and their confrontation with US imperialism.
In the years after emancipation, it became clear that black people in
Cuba, Puerto Rico and the United States would face terrible obstacles
to their advancement. In the United States, efforts at Reconstruction
ended in 1877 and the federal troops left the South and its African
American population to fend for themselves. By the 1890s the rights
initially given to blacks, particularly that of suffrage, and their meager
advancements, were being rolled back and blacks were being disfran-
chised throughout the South. On the heels of disenfranchisement
came institutionalized segregation, lynching, and Jim Crow. Political
avenues for advancement were foreclosed to the black population of
the US South. Black aspirations to economic autonomy as small land-
owners and farmers were also thwarted as white southern elites,
assisted by the Freedman’s Bureau, forced African-American laborers
to sign work contracts that forced them into an exploitative share-
cropping system (Zimmerman, 2010).
In Cuba, the worst kind of oppression was mitigated, but Afro-
Cubans were far from being granted an equal place in society. Black
military service in the wars of independence ensured that freed slaves
and other Afro-Cubans were treated with some measure of respect.
With a largely integrated army and the prevalence of black war heroes,
the Cuban revolutionary leaders had quickly realized that the support
of African slaves and free men was necessary to sustain the rebellion.
When espousing ideas of who belonged in the new nation, Cuban
leaders proclaimed that being Cuban was more important than one’s
race, and that all Cubans were equal. Some scholars, most notably Ale-
jandro de la Fuente, have emphasized that this idea mitigated the