Cuba: reasonable doubt or blatant racism?

Yusumi Rodriguez

HAVANA TIMES – On Saturday, October 18, I waved down a collective taxi to head home from the upscale Vedado neighborhood. I got in next to the driver, since three other people already occupied the back seat. In the neighborhood known as Sports City, a woman got in next to me.

Three blocks before the intersection at Acosta and 10th of October streets she paid the driver with a dollar bill, took her change and got out. The driver was about take off in his taxi, when the woman turned back around and signaled him to wait. She had left her cell phone in the taxi. She looked on the seat and then felt around it, but she couldn’t find it.

The driver turned on the inside lights of the taxi, and I got out so that the woman could make a more exhaustive inspection. This too yielded nothing. She then “asked” to inspect my bags. I responded by saying that the request was very offensive. She agreed, but at the same time her voice held the conviction that she not only had the right to examine my things but also that she would find her cell phone in my bag.

Could I have refused? Of course I could. But if I had, I would have reinforced that woman’s belief that I had stolen her cell phone. Right away I could imagine her declaring that “the black woman” had taken her cell phone. Both she and the other passengers were all white. I opened my bag and challenged her to find her phone in it.

It appeared. Not in my bag, but on the ground where it had fallen under the taxi. The woman had accidentally dropped it in her hurry to safeguard her change. In fact, she had also dropped a ten peso bill; something I pointed it out to her when I got out of the taxi to let her look for her phone.

I got back in, trembling with rage, and shouted at her: “You racist shithead!”

Was this stupidity? Yes, clearly; because if you’re holding a cell phone in one hand and trying to put money into a change purse with the other, it’s almost a sure bet that you’ll end up dropping the phone. But — racist? Can I be sure that she wouldn’t have suspected me if I had been white? Unfortunately, I had been the one sitting next to her. It would have been almost impossible for those sitting in the back seat to have stolen her phone.

So why did I associate her reaction with the color of my skin? Obviously because I have been a victim of a number of similar incidents related to my color. I’ve been the only black person in a group and the only one asked to show my identity card. I haven’t forgotten the morning I was collecting snails with my colleague Veronica on the beach, and a policeman asked me for my ID. But he didn’t ask her – he took her for a foreigner, and since we were together he considered me responsible for whatever was going on.

Two weeks ago, I witnessed an argument between a white woman and a black one in a large and very full bus, the normal state of the omnibuses on our route. The cause of the conflict, as could be expected in a bus full of people squeezed into a narrow middle aisle, was that one of them – I’m not sure which – had bumped into the other as she went by. As the black woman moved on towards the back, the white one sang out that famous phrase: “It had to be a black woman.” So…if she had been white, they wouldn’t have bumped into each other?

After so many years of inefficient public transportation, where the buses arrive crammed to the gills if you have the luck to have them show up and stop at all, haven’t we learned that we’re all victims of the same circumstances and that we should treat each other in a civilized manner?

Instead, we manage only to vent our frustrations on each other and to scream out the first ugly thing that comes into our heads: “Fatty!”, “Idiot!”, “Useless old woman!”, “Palestinian” (the term we use to insult our fellow citizens from the eastern part of Cuba), “Black shithead!”.. We black people are not exempt from the general hurling of insults.

These are the reflections that come to my mind now, when my anger has evaporated. Not that night, although I was a little calmer by the time I got home and told my mother about the incident. She was immediately infected with my rage: “Why didn’t you haul off and give her a good whack?”

I confess that I felt the impulse. What held me back? I wish I could say that it was the conviction that violence only generates more violence. But the sad reality is that what kept me from going after that woman was only the thought of the comments that she and the others would make, despite my being totally innocent of that supposed robbery: “Did you see that? If those black people don’t do it on the way in, they do it on the way out.”

I used to criticize a friend, who was black like me, because all of his actions passed through the prism of his skin color. It peeved me to hear him say: “I’m going to do this and so, so that they don’t say…”, “I kept my mouth shut so they don’t have a reason to say..” “It had to be the black person” – that was the phrase he was trying so hard to avoid. At that time I would criticize him, without suspecting that I would come to feel the same way, even though I know in my mind that I’m not inferior (or superior) because I have dark skin.

Without our realizing it, we begin to find racism in everything, and in this way we too become victims of racism. But – careful – we also place ourselves on the edges of opportunism. Some black people associate every failure with discrimination, without stopping to consider their own faults or limitations. Some use the topic of racism to gain notoriety.

Once the bad moment and my mortification passed, I ask myself if it could have been me who dropped my cell phone while putting my change away. It’s very possible give how absent-minded I can be. Wouldn’t my first reaction have been to suspect the people who had been closest to me? Would I have stopped to think about the skin color of that person?

Maybe the only difference between that woman and myself is that I would have apologized when I discovered I had made a mistake. She didn’t. That has nothing to do with skin color.