Cuba is known for it’s Afro-Cuban flair, blackness and Cubaness are not necessarily separate things. Yet, in a 2002 census only 11% of the Islands’ 11.2 million people described themselves as black. However the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami puts the real figure closer to 62%!

Who knows the full reason for the discrepancy but at the heart of it, it may have something to do with the fact that being black in Cuba seemingly affords you less than white counter-parts. Hardly a new story but maybe surprising for some from the outside looking in.

Life for Cubans has in many ways been improving over the years, a softening of the hard lined socialism, people can own cell phones, run small businesses (to some degree) and tourism is growing bringing more and more jobs to the locals. However, according to one Afro-Cuban account, things are not exactly getting any better for blacks.

Roberto Zurbano wrote an article back in 2013 for the NYTimes where looked at the state of things and what it’s like to be black in Cuba.

Here is an excerpt from that article:

Havana

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it.

In the early 1990s, after the cold war ended, Fidel Castro embarked on economic reforms that his brother and successor, Raúl, continues to pursue. Cuba had lost its greatest benefactor, the Soviet Union, and plunged into a deep recession that came to be known as the “Special Period.” There were frequent blackouts. Public transportation hardly functioned. Food was scarce. To stem unrest, the government ordered the economy split into two sectors: one for private businesses and foreign-oriented enterprises, which were essentially permitted to trade in United States dollars, and the other, the continuation of the old socialist order, built on government jobs that pay an average of $20 a month.

It’s true that Cubans still have a strong safety net: most do not pay rent, and education and health care are free. But the economic divergence created two contrasting realities that persist today. The first is that of white Cubans, who have leveraged their resources to enter the new market-driven economy and reap the benefits of a supposedly more open socialism. The other reality is that of the black plurality, which witnessed the demise of the socialist utopia from the island’s least comfortable quarters.

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Read the rest of the article here.