“ THERE IS NO RACISM IN CUBA ” : A FIELD STUDY OF THE “ POST-RACE ” RHETORIC OF MODERN CUBA

Claims of racelessness in present-day Cuba conflate identities and generate public discourse that misaligns with the social realities of black Cubans on the island. Decolonial and critical race theorists argue the necessity of a racial-identity language: Unconfronted race-based injustice and unproblematized whiteness are among the unaddressed issues concretized by racial democracy rhetoric. The aim of this qualitative study is to investigate the collective narrative of modern-day Cuban interviewees to determine their epistemological knowledge and current uses for the rhetorics of racelessness; further, the study tracks the island’s century-old rhetorical practices designed to sustain erasure of race rhetoric in Cuba. This work will determine the consequentiality of the purported racelessness and the absence of race rhetoric for modern-day black Cubans. In this context, “race rhetoric” registers racial identity and acknowledges concomitant experiences within the social ecology; specifically, race-based disparities and aggressions experienced by black Cubans may be isolated, amplified and made public. Structured interviews were conducted with 97 participants in Santiago, Cuba; additionally, archival Cuban artifacts were analyzed, serving as historical context for the interview data and content examined in this project. The majority of the participants claim, “There is no racism in Cuba,” clarifying that the claim refers to constitutional racism and not “social racism”. Some participants reported individual experiences with racism and shared testimonies of race-based discrimination, dispelling assumptions of a monolithic solidarity rhetoric driven exclusively by socialism and state censorship. “There is no racism in Cuba” is an assertion that signifies allegiance to victories of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and affirms “Cubanidad” or a patriot’s individual association with the island’s national identity. Finally, project participant responses were highly influenced by #BlackLivesMatter rhetoric and United States news stories of police violence against people of color; Cuba’s first public Internet connections and the BLM movement began one month apart, a short time before this study commenced.

• What are the social mechanisms in place that potentially veil and/or influence racial discourse in modern day Cuba?
• Which are the rhetorical strategies and discursive configuring that sustain the rhetoric of solidarity or national identity tropes?

Issue Subquestions
• Specifically, with the American field researcher as an embodied (embattled) hegemonic rhetoric, how does researcher subjectivity influence the data gathering process in Cuba?
• Considering the current state of de-racialized expression in modern Cuba, what are the embodied/material/psychological implications for black Cubans?
• How has the absence of racial discourse influenced the crystallization of a national consciousness?
This chapter serves as the researcher journey narrative, recounting select experiences in the field and problems that I encountered while in the early phases of the project. The aim is to contextualize the work and describe the impact that the destabilized zeitgeist of United States-Cuba relations had on this research; this is a historically significant moment because, while the changes incentivized over 2 million Americans to travel to Cuba annually, this hegemonic relationship sluggishly awakens from diplomatic paralysis that lasted more than a half century. The decision to use an autobiographical approach in this chapter has precedence with composition studies researchers who assert that narratives of the researchers lived experiences effectively contextualize studies (Smitherman, 1977;Gilyard 1991;Martinez, 2016).
In the Journal of Education Research (2009), Petra Munro Hendry argues that there is an urgent need to think beyond the binary framework that privileges science and empiricism. It is this body of scholarship that compels me to, autobiographically, discuss the impact of polarizing policy changes of two U.S. presidential administrations between January 2009 to the present; to share the challenges of curating effective "race language" for interview instruments in preparation for field work in modern Cuba; and, to discuss why preliminarily, my greatest worries for the project were the misguided inclusion of incendiary (to participants) questions about race language or that these research efforts would be reduced to a mere transference of American race politics or counter-revolutionary discourse. I underscore the key challenges tethered to my subjectivity as a researcher in Cuba, specifically the double indictment of being from the United States and being African American, each often carrying a respective set of distrusted agendas. Most significant to the anchoring of this project, this chapter anecdotally situates my introduction to the claim: "There is No Racism in Cuba". This project journey began for me in 2014.

The Stage: A Shifting Hegemony
On February 28, 2014, I was the first speaker at the University of Rhode Island's Women's Day Conference. The topic of my raw and undeveloped presentation, "Rhetoric s of Activism: Afro-Cuban Women Tweeting, Blogging, Tracking the Finish of the 59-year-old Castro Regime," at that stage was no more than a clumsy statement of burgeoning inquiry. Over the next four years, this dissertation project would be pruned and developed on a realtime turbulent diplomatic landscape, a historic shifting in U.S.-Cuba relations that amounts to more hegemonic political activity in those few months than the world had seen in over a half century. For the last 60 years, U.S. universities have sent student groups to Cuba annually, under the visa type "educational activities," one of 12 approved categories for traveling to Cuba. It is a misconception is that this began with the Obama administration; the change was that prior approval for travel was no longer needed after the President's December 7, 2014 announcement, which clarified they new terms of the loosened embargo. As I prepared to satisfy IRB requirements for my project, I 20 fastly learned that the new arrangements for "educational activities" did not solve my field work access problems.
I was an American graduate student who needed permission to study as a researcher in-residence at one of the universities or cultural centers in Havana or, more preferably, Santiago. The learning institutions in Cuba are narrowly themed and the work of a foreign researcher must align with the emphasis of the island's sponsoring institution. The nature of my project, which sought to investigate forms and uses of race language in modern Cuba, is deemed to be counter-revolutionary by many on the island. Realizing what I faced, I contacted my family in Augusta, Georgia and explained that I would not be home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I emailed three Cuban cultural and educational institutions requesting support and was denied by one.
The others did not reply because on November 25, 2016, the Cuban government announced the death of Fidel Castro and the island shut down for weeks to memorialize their iconic leader, who died at age 90. My generation has not experienced a single death so prodigious that it arrests a nation. However, I grew up hearing repeats of treasured family lore that began with, "When I heard Martin/President Kennedy was assassinated, I was… ," my Uncle David, Gram and Papa could recall with precision where they were when "it" happened. This was more than that. A regime leader of 67 years, who defined a revolutionary Cuban identity, was gone. Other than the thriving black market, the island is essentially a state-run apparatus, I got no responses as they mourned. This is the point when my new friend, Afro-Cuban writer Pedro Sarduy Perez, was most heroic in my story.
I discovered Pedro's work on AfroCubaWeb.com in 2013; he authored Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993) and the Maids of Havana (2003). Pedro is a 75-year-old writer who was born in Havana, Cuba. In 1980, he moved to London, England and now spends only the spring and summer months on the island. In 2014, I located him as he traveled on a book tour in the United States. We would Skype several times during this process and eventually meet in person when I arrived in Santiago for the pilot study.   those who have never returned, tell true but cherry picked stories of modern Cuba that I found fueled divisiveness; 24 race rhetoric in Cuba, there is no assumption that there is exact sameness in the African-diasporic experiences, ecological factors, shared social realities or an "easily stated unitary identity" (CRT). "Socially dispossessed and culturally displaced adherents (are) active social actors and knowledgeable agents capable of making their own history" (Singh 18). This project aligns with those scholars who "take issue with black cultural nationalists who deploy a race-culture essentialist discourse, homogenizing blackness" (18). In this study, Afro-Cuban participants, rightly speaking from their subject positions, state clearly and decidedly that the social 32 situation concerning race and racism in Cuba is in no way comparable to that of the United States: There is no racism in Cuba, some participants claim. However, there is an undeniable history of colonization on the island and the importation of kidnapped Africans forced into slavery guided the imperialistic shaping of Cuba; this is how the use of the following scholarship is justified.
Objectives of this dissertation project require a cobbling together of seemingly eclectic theory and scholarship that will, collectively, engage and contextualize the Santiago field data and archival artifacts. Necessarily, critical race theorists and decolonial works provide discourse that catalog the lasting social and material consequences of rhetorical acts that have historically sought to erase racial identity of Afro-descendent groups. Above all else, the Santiaguan participants of this study, their agency and voice are the centerpiece of this project. However, the prominence given (by Cuban participants) to the significance of the archival artifacts compels the inclusion of public rhetoric scholarship. Here, public rhetoric work offers insight on the ubiquitous role and the vast rhetorical and material influence of the archival artifacts included in this study and the participant interview data collected in the field.

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The objectives of this chapter are: • To explore critical race theory, decolonial and public rhetoric scholarship that contribute to a working definition of "race rhetoric" for this dissertation project.
• To contextualize the function of race rhetorics in social ecologies and discuss consequentiality for African-derived people in spaces that attempt to de-racialized discourse.
• To isolate rhetorical acts and strategies practiced as colonial oppression and trace these moves to present day public spheres.

Critical Race Theory
Because areas of this dissertation are informed by the race politics of two vastly different countries, it is productive to describe how "race rhetoric" and Critical Race Theory (CRT) are conceptualized in the strategy of inquiry for this project.
Drawing from law and humanities-based scholarship, CRT theorists understand racism to be "ordinary business" in the United States, "not aberrational," but operating more like "normal science" (Delgado et al "Critical Race" 2001). This conceptualization encompasses the rhetorical acts that lead to material realities for blacks, acts born from a "system of white-over-color ascendancy that serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group" (Delgado et al "Critical Race" 2001;Williams 1998;Bell 1995;Prendergast 1998). Because this "normal science" is so pervasive, the activity is prevalent, yet often unacknowledged, in routines, rote practices, and structuring institutions. This body of CRT work consistently calls for an examination and the transforming of the relationship between racism and power (Delgado et al "Critical Race" 2001). In other words, CRT is focused on the relationship between power and the construction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination (Delgado et al "Critical Race" 2001). Therefore, this work situates the a functionable conceptualization of "race rhetoric" in the conversation generated from the legacy of critical race theory.

Toward a Conceptualization of "Race Rhetoric"
In Race, Rhetoric and Composition (1999), Keith Gilyard presents the challenges he faced curating the scholarly collection of essays. "I was inclined to demand that contributors take a hard materialist turn and link race explicitly to historical formations of racism and economic exploitation," (ix). By doing this, Race, Rhetoric would have been "a clearly focused assault on the idea of race". Further, the work may have represented a body of evidence illustrating the relationship between the social realities of African-diasporic groups to racist discourse, symbols, signifiers and rhetorical structures operating in their respective ecologies. However, Gilyard did not choose that route; he went another way: "Race itself is little more than the language of race-ism ; the writers would eschew or foreground the labels, categories, and terminologies that constitute and promote 'race' dialogue" (ix). The difficulties expressed by Gilyard --a veteran, "blacktivist", American Book Award-winning, sociolinguist, compositionist, pedagogue and scholar --reflects the numerable landmine issues engrafted in such an effort. For example, in his contribution to the collection, "Higher Learning: Composition's Racialized Reflection", he juxtaposes the pedagogical musings of Professor Maurice Phipps (a fictitious character in an Ice Cube film) with the argument of James Berlin (1991) in "Composition and Cultural Studies" to draw out the hypocrisies in the way that we teach students to construct racialized identities with language. On the matter of raising awareness of controlling discourses, "hegemonic discourses", Berlin states: Our effort is to make students aware of the cultural codes --the various competing discourses --that attempt to influence who they are. Our larger purpose is to encourage our students to resist and to negotiate these codes --these hegemonic discourses --in order to bring about more personally humane and socially equitable economic and political arrangements (Berlin 50).
There are, at least, three assertions that Berlin presents to explain the characteristics and function of hegemonic discourse: (1.) Hegemonic discourses are multiple and compete for influence, (2) the influence controls identity formation and, to remain dominant, these discourses are often constructed to diminish and marginalize counter discourses, and (3) agency lies in the negotiations. The power is in one's capability to "resist", reject or "negotiate" "these codes. Gilyard embraces this analysis and, among other things, agrees with Berlin, saying that embedded in discourse is ideology.
However, the problem is that scholars, including Berlin, rarely racialize "whiteness" and there is rarely an examination of how controlling whiteness is as a discourse (Gilyard 48). Unaddressed issues, like unproblematized whiteness, deeply complicate all attempts to conceptualize race rhetoric. "Casting race analysis in conventional terms leads students to pedestrian interpretations and constructions inside a bankrupt race-relations model, thus leading to a sort of King to King solution, students dreaming and all getting along --rhetorically" (Gilyard 49). Similar scholarly aims guided the Rhetoric and Ethnicity (2004) conference and edited collection. To isolate an "American ethnic rhetoric," Gilyard and other contributing contributors considered "how ethnic rhetorics might function as generative sites of difference and how they intersect with social movements" (v). Finally, Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson (2007) define African American rhetoric as "the study of culturally and discursively developed knowledge forms, communicative practices and persuasive strategies rooted in freedom struggles of people of African ancestry in America" (xiii).
They continue, these are "indivorceable components of a larger study of the universe of Black discourse. From this perspective, African Americans and other diasporic Africans have developed communicative behaviors, ideas, and persuasive techniques to advance and protect themselves while counteracting injustice" (xiii). produced one century apart, discuss the lasting race rhetoric restrictions in the context of the historical crusade of the black intellectual.
According to David Macey (2000), Fanon survived at least one assassination attempt for espousing anti-colonialist rhetoric up until he died of leukemia in 1961 (3).
Fanon studied psychiatry in Lyon and, therefore, focused on the deep (and, in his opinion irreversible) psychological attacks endured by the colonized. He is a post colonial theorist who used Marxism to demonstrate that the racist colonial system was, above all else, a socioeconomic issue. Because he grew up in Martinique, which was under colonial rule at the time, his own testimony of consequentiality for Africans and their descendants is the linchpin of his work's perspective. Many decolonial scholars disagree with Fanon's position on the colonized, as he asserts the impossibility of undoing colonial structures, systems and thinking. He states: "However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And, it is white" (Fanon "Black" 10).
Of course, the scope of Fanon's work far exceeds the colonial influences on the positionality, destiny of the individual. In the "National Culture" chapter of The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Fanon discusses the would-be restoration process of national identity after colonists are defeated and independence is gained. While some African diasporic groups concentrated more on local collectives or closed discourse communities for identity formation, Fanon discusses the colonizer's aim for national agency, national-level control. This informs the scale of influence and cultural formation (Fanon " Wretched " 218).
This point further contextualizes this dissertation project objectives because Fanon describes the cultivation of a social ecosystem that benefits from and necessitates the homogeneity of hegemonic discourse; in such public spaces there is a fora for building nationalism, "true" patriotism, from rhetorics of solidarity. Racialized or ethnic rhetoric described as "labels, categories, terminologies that constitute and promote race dialogue" (Gilyard " Race " ix) or " culturally and discursively developed knowledge forms, communicative practices and persuasive strategies rooted in freedom struggles of people of African ancestry in America" (Richardson et al. " Rhetoric " xiii) would obviously not register in such a system as evidence of diversity or cultural richness; in the system (and the components of its long legacy) described by Fanon, this would necessarily be perceived as counter-rhetorics that work against patriotism.
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing precolonial history takes on a dialectical significance today (Fanon "Wretched" 210).
Because the constructed national identity needs a following, proponents and disseminators. Fanon's scholarship traces the mental transformation of the individual, the proselytizing process of the colonized.

Psychological Oppression
Reaching beyond structural determinist arguments, which tend to start and stop with the assertion that racist systems will cyclically yield racism, Fanon delineates the stages of targeted attempts at psychological retooling of the colonized. He suggests that when the oppressed aligns with the system, the "retooling involves identification with the oppressor and the appropriation (personalized use, ownership and validation of) the oppressor's narratives and justifications. In dominant systems, blacks are "appraised in terms of the extent of assimilation" (Fanon "Black" 36). He discusses the relationship between language acquisition and use with fear, fear of displacement, fearing the loss of membership within the African-diasporic group and fear brought on by an inferiority complex. According to Fanon, these systems reward the embrace of rhetoric supporting imperialistic structures. Therefore, those who master dominant discourses are also "inordinately feared", as this mastery is a form of power (Fanon 21). Fanon's work clarifies the role of a psychic shift for the colonized; among other things, this shift often accounts for the adoption of an oppressors discourse, or rationale, even when the discourse carries ideology that so evidently does not reflect the social reality of the oppressed. Fanon establishes that one of the key roles of language is empowerment. He also notes that language can cause blacks to "be slaves of their own archetypes" (35). As the oppressed builds an identity with the language of the oppressor, "he is the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance, for which he is not responsible"; in this case, that which can empower can ensnare and imprison.

Dispossession of Language
Anchoring Powell's suggestion that culture and people cannot be separated, Fanon and Ngugi Wa Thiongo argue that, for African-diasporic groups, specifically, agency and language are inextricable. While in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) Fanon describes the function and acquisition of French and pidgin languages for Martinicans (25), other postcolonial theorists extend this notion, including language as the colonized group's carrier of history, racial identity and ideological positioning (Ngugi, Fanon, etc.). This is important for the consideration of race rhetoric that potentially exists in ecologies that do not to register racial realities in the public sphere and that systematically arrest meaning making or a fluency in race language . For this project, the interest is in what happens when African-diasporic groups assimilate into social ecologies that completely deny the development of a race language as public discourse; and, under those circumstances what serves as testimony when racism is still in operation. As Fanon elucidates one of the many legacy effects of colonialism, he discusses the psychological position of the oppressed that allows for the dispossession of language and delineates the psychic shifts that are the result of colonial subjugation (Fanon "Black" 17). "Mastery of language moves the colonized closer to being human; he likens possession with power. A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language" (Fanon "Black" 18). Dominance of hegemonic discourse is sustained through the same system. Adoption of a national identity and of a solidarity rhetoric are more than patriotic and compliant. In the system that Fanon describes, Cubans who have, for a more than a century, adopted solidarity rhetoric and participated in the sustained erasure of racial identity discourse are thought to have engaged in a rhetorical act that, by colonial measures, indicate the acquisition of power.

A Way to Name It: Race Rhetoric and Black Voicedness
In her book, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), bell hooks details the process of "coming into voice" and describes the nature of the constraints that make expressions of black voicedness significant, symbolic victories: The absence of a humane critical response has tremendous impact on the writer from any oppressed, colonized group who endeavors to speak. For us, true speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless (hooks 251).
For African-derived community voices, rhetorical acts, specifically public acts of sharing testimony and having a public fora to shine a light on the racist events and encounters are significant; the lasting consequences of such absences are socioeconomic, familial/generational and psychological. There is a concern with areas of a social reality that are deeply impacted by absences that seem merely rhetorical in scope. Hooks addresses the quality of life tethered to testimony: "Without a way to name our pain, we are also without the words to articulate our pleasure" (hooks 2).
Lacking fora, a collective mode of expression, to speak openly about racialized experiences invalidates and erases the testimony of people of color; this practice effects chronicling and the collective memory. Previously indicated by Fanon, the suppression of rhetoric, the practice and commitment to familial/social systems that mute black voices may also be controlled by other psychologically colonized blacks.
Because so many are taught that there is so much that you "should not talk about in the private of public" (Hooks 151).
Scholars such as bell hooks and Jacqueline Jones Royster, not only explore the necessity of this type of voicedness for marginalized groups, but insist on the subject position (that of the Other) as the focal point, the centerpiece or a starting place of scholarly inquiry. This is important because individual testimonies are rhetorical acts that honor, chronicle and cultivate unique individual experiences within a black collective. "Indeed, a fundamental task of black critical thinkers has been the struggle to break with hegemonic modes of seeing, thinking, and being that block our capacity to see ourselves oppositionaly, to imagine, describe, and invent ourselves in ways that are liberatory" (hooks 2). Discourse is the evidence that meaning making has occurred or is occurring, a process that requires a space that authenticates various experiences that come with the social realities of differing black communities. The legacy of colonialism includes practices (objectification, exoticization, etc.) that build discourse from outsider interpretations.
Such interpretations of human potential create a type of discourse that serves as a distraction, as noise that drains energy and sabotages the work of identifying substantive problems within and across cultural boundaries and the work also of finding solutions that have import, not simply but for human beings who's living conditions, values, and preferences vary" (Jones-Royster 31).
In this scholarship, there is an expressed need for research that amplifies participant story from the subject position, in this case, the Cuban interviewees' worldview; this is one of the most powerful approaches of decolonizing scholars.
According to Jacqueline Jones Royster, it is academic negligence when scholars fail to perform rigorous inquiry from the subject position. To illustrate the dangers of this negligence, she discusses The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), a book that argues that human intelligence is influenced by genetic and environmental factors; the writers, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, (among other things) excluded blacks from the group they called "the cognitive elite," claiming that there were racial differences in intelligence. The work was pummeled critically by researchers and reviewers who called the work racist 48 rhetoric and rhetoric of eugenics, advancing controlled breeding to increase desirable population characteristics (Soloway 506). Royster calls this type of discourse a distraction, clearly invalidated by its creators' detachment and lack of familiarity with the complex subjectivities of the individuals discussed. She describes the uselessness of an essentialistic work that attempts to report on "the innate capacity of the race as a whole, again". She discusses the ways in which public discourse created by outsiders historically places African-diasporic groups on the defensive. "We are compelled to respond to the rendering of our potential that demands, not that we account for attitudes, actions, and conditions, but that we defend ourselves as human beings" (Jones-Royster "Bell Curve" 31). Beyond black voicedness as a counter narrative to dominant discourse indictments, there is multidimensionality that must be considered.
This claim is instructive in that it exposes the places where the scholarly investigations of black voicedness are limited and limiting.
Our critical approaches to voice again as a central manifestation of subjectivity, are currently skewed toward voice as a spoken or written phenomena. The call for action in cross-boundary exchange is to redefine theory and practice so that they include voicing as a phenomenon that is constructed and expressly visually and aurally, and as a phenomenon that has import also in being a thing heard, perceived, and constructed (Jones-Royster "Bell Curve" 30).
For marginalized groups, voicedness is recompense, evidence of a win in a continuous struggle against a hegemonic overcast. The absence of the black voice "blocks our capacity to see ourselves oppositionaly" (hooks 2). Most importantly, without black voicedness, as it is described by decolonizing scholars, liberatory invention/reinvention/reinscription within a social system cannot occur for African-diasporic groups. By issuing calls for theoretical frameworks and study design that conduct work from this subject position, as the central position, is one way these scholars hold outsiders accountable for creating various discourses of alterity.

The Rhetorics They Carried: African-derived Frameworks
There is considerable scholarship drawing from African rhetorics that kidnapped and enslaved Africans brought with them to the colonies; not only is this body of work comprised of the most powerful counter rhetorics, but the uniqueness of an African rhetorical force is isolated and celebrated here. Caribbeanist Edward Kamau Braithwaite suggests that histories of African-diasporic groups are not accessible to Anglo-derived methods of study and valuation, in part, because "conventional" approaches are an impossibility to examine a diaspora that was logistically and by its nature unconventional. Braithwaite discusses the "immanence of African culture" (13) to explain the manner in which African slaves stored and carried culture, stories and their theorizing. "The slave ship became a kind of psycho-physical space capsule, carrying intact the carriers of the kind of invisible/atomic culture" (Braithwaite 13). Because this differed so greatly from that of the Europeans which was located "existentially, externalized in buildings, monuments, books, the artifacts of civilization," colonizers assumed that there was no culture or signs of African civilization comparable to their own (13). Those slave communities internally housed their volumes, lamentations, riddles, narratives, chronicles and critical assessments of their experience, the rhetorical life of each is sustained by use.
In 1988, when Henry Louis Gates presented the book, Signifying Monkey , to academia, he was offering a system of rhetoric for interpreting black literature; he demonstrated a way of theorizing that was already inscribed in black vernacular traditions; and, he created critical discourse that explored the relationship between the African and African American vernacular traditions. By addressing the African ontological context of known rhetorical moves of African-descendents, Gates filled a gap with an "academically-authenticated" framework constructed by the contributions of Africans and African Americans. While it is by no means comprehensive, the following encapsulates discussion of the aforementioned rhetorical moves that are decidedly African-derived; the connection between these rhetorical actions --their creativity, their meaning-making power --and Africanness is indissoluble.
Both anchored in African mythology, two trickster figures, Esu-Elegbara (Yoruba) and the Signifying Monkey (African American) are metaphors for formal revision and intertextuality (Gates "Signifying" 52). The functions of the tricksters gives access to "reference and representation, of connotation and denotation, or truth 51 and understanding"; as a rhetorical act the speaker is deliberately embodying the ambiguous shifts of language, often stacking tropes in a single discursive act. Of course, in the literary sense, this work created a theorizing space uniquely African speakerly texts, repeated (yet altered) tropes in various black texts, intertextuality between black books, etc. Gates also discusses "black rhetorical tropes subsumed under 'signifying' that include marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens (52). In Talkin  Extending on Gates' scholarship and Gerald Visenor's "Trickster Discourse" (1989), native American decolonial theorist Malea Powell suggests the relational trickster, or mixed-blood, rhetoric in which "the rhetor's very relationship with oppressive discourses opens a space of possibility" (Powell "Blood" 10). Employing the double-voicedness and revision, suggests a rhetoric that follows the hegemony, follows the rules by transgressing them. "Not just to oppose them, but to transform them, to change utterly the grounds on which our scholarship exists (Powell "Blood 10).
When Gates states, "I have attempted here to show how the black tradition has inscribed its own theories of its nature and function within elaborate hermeneutical 52 and rhetorical systems", he affirms the need for a race rhetoric, one that is functioning in the public sphere and in the matter described in this project.

Public Rhetoric Scholarship
Public rhetoric scholarship addresses the portion of the research strategy seeking: • To understand an individual's self-selecting process of joining a "public" and the agency to build ideology from a self-identifying space.
• To understand the role of "things" like the turn-of-the-century archival speeches and seeing the rhetorical life of such artifacts (almost personified) as circulating, unifying, generative and influential far beyond the moment of production (Laura Gries "Still Life" 24).
• To have a sense of temporality in the consideration of rhetorical action; what is it to track influence of an artifact from the time of production (or speech delivery) to continued material consequences in futurity (to date)?
• To access a theoretical lens for this rhetorical study that is both materialist and consequentialist.
Paramount nineteenth and twentieth century Cuban speeches and essays containing the island's racial democracy narrative qualify as "public rhetoric"; however, public rhetoric research suggests that, beyond those original artifacts, every subsequent message, every proselytized witness, every revolutionary campaign, every nonhuman and human thing that encountered the rhetorical life of those original artifacts must be counted as a part of their influence (Warner 2002;Gries 2015;Edbauer 2005). " Artifacts do 'live' on beyond their initial moments of production and delivery. And, during circulation, material artifacts generate traceable consequences in their wake, which contribute to their ongoing rhetoricity" (Gries 24). Public rhetoric research informs the role of these artifacts in the wielding of or distribution of power in the participants' material circumstances.
As he differentiates "a public" from "the public," Michael Warner (2002) explains that "the public" is a kind of fictitious social totality. However: A public is "the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation. A text's public can be based in speech as well as writing.
Publics have a constitutive nature as a cultural form, a cultural artifact" (Warner 72).
In this conceptualization of a "public," there is a reevaluation of popular notions of the audiences as receivers, of "rhetoric encountering an already-formed, already-discrete set of individuals" (Edbauer 7). Seeing publics as multiple and self-selecting is a viewpoint that thwarts generalizing and some of the dangers of essentialism. The complexity of this cultural form means acknowledgement that a single public is anchored (because of the membership) in multiple histories, as well. This dissertation project, in part, seeks to understand what Warner calls the "mutually defining interplay between texts and publics" (Warner 16).
Participant agency or agency of all who elect to engage discourse shifts to an empowered, self-understanding positionality, arguably the opposite of models like Paulo Freire's "banking" model (in which discourse is deposited or "banked" into an intended audience). Michael Warner asserts that public discourse is a thing that is to be "inhabited" and only in this habitation can a continual transition occur. Most relevant to this project is Warner's assertion that people are a part of a public because they elect to engage with the discourse; this opens a multi-dimensional discussion about participant agency in this project.
A public sets its boundaries and its organization by its own discourse rather than by external frameworks only if it openly addresses people who are identified primarily through their participation in the discourse and who therefore cannot be known in advance (Warner 74).
Discourse generated by a public reveals its rules, interpretations of the text and establishes its discursive boundaries; according to Warner, external frameworks are not as significant for "recruitment" because people are identified through their participation in the discourse (74). For this study, this approach is significant because it provides a way to reconsider the role of political ideology or "external frameworks" in the absence and prevention of race rhetoric. A public rhetoric lens will allow for an examination that begins with, "Sure. Cuba's contemporary socialist governance has 55 played a significant role in the social constraints generated by solidarity rhetoric; beyond ideology, what should be the other influential considerations?" This work could help researchers avoid reductionist, dismissive assessments that assume that agency is not located with the individuals of the public. This work helps to explore: What can we learn exploring the testimony behind the choice? Warner writes, "In the self-understanding that makes them work, publics thus resemble the model of voluntary association that is so important to civil society" (Warner 88). What is the modern Cuba contribution to this discussion of publics comprised of participants versus intended audiences comprised of recipients?
Jenny Edbauer-Rice (2005) describes a framework of affective ecologies that will re-contextualize rhetorics in their "temporal, historical and lived fluxes" (9). The notion of a rhetorical ecology examines rhetoric as a complex thing moving, traveling through time spaces; this challenges a suggestion that a turn-of-the-century Cuban speech is stable, fixed. Instead, such an artifact is generative and concatenations are created in the form of metaphors of conversation, answering, talking back, argument, interplay, etc. over time. An extension of Warner's notion of a public as an "ongoing space of encounter for discourse," Edbauer describes the movement of rhetoric as circulating through ecologies, having an impact on new enactments, compelling events and generations. These concatenations are texts created through time "between the discourse that comes before and the discourse that comes after a link that has a social 56 character; it is not mere consecutiveness in time, but the context of interaction" (Edbauer 6).
In this project, public rhetoric scholarship serves in two capacities. The discussion situates inquiry about the operation of racial democracy rhetoric that spans a century. The degree to which the project participants are self-selecting and self-understanding in their engagement with national identity rhetorics that purport racelessness can be considered here. Agency of participants is considered, respected, in this discussion. Also, discussed in depth in the Methodology chapter, public rhetoric scholarship is joined with elements of CRT to create the theoretical framework employed in this project to study curated archival artifacts and participant interview data collected in Santiago.

LITERATURE REVIEW | CUBA-CENTERED
The objective of this section is: • To present context and a cursory description of the discursive trail that led to existing claims of a racial democracy in modern Cuba.
• To hear from Cuban voices, deemed heroes, thought leaders who are credited with composing the historical identity and solidarity rhetorics of the island.
• To historicize the claim "There is no racism in Cuba", as several project participants echo the exhortations and writings of Cuban scholars and cultural leaders Ferdinando Ortiz and José Martí.

Who is Ferdinando Ortiz?
The field work for this project was conducted at the Center for African Studies Ferdinando Ortiz in Santiago, Cuba. The center is one of three archival collections in the country bearing the name of the scholar and national hero credited with cultivating cultural syncretism ideology, a Cuban version of Eduard Said's hybridisation theory; with publically challenging the sorcery and voodoo lore that alienated and endangered Afro Cubans; and, with purporting a sociological approach to race that countered biological reductionist arguments for racial disparities (Coronil xvii Hybridisation and transculturation are the themes of this writing as well; because the story of "Don Tobacco" and "Dona Azucar" is an allegory, black/white race categories are but one of the binaries explored in related scholarship (i.e. the blending of white colonists and Afro Cuban labor begat the "mulatto child," tobacco). Because Ortiz's race narratives are loyal to multiplicity, complex racial mixtures that support a transcultural identity, it is important to note that the black/white and West/nonWest binary are seen as "experimental terms for people subjected to imperial domination… 61 .Ortiz treat binary oppositions not as fixities, but as hybrid and productive, reflecting their transcultural formation and their transitional value (Coronil xiv However, public artistic works historicize racial discrimination in Cuba, often dealing with the country's social failure through similar metaphors.

A Way to Say It: When It's Treasonous to Say That Racism Exists
In Cuba's public sphere, there is a willingness to generate discourse that acknowledges racial discrimination; however, in these accounts, the racist events are relayed as dated and exclusively legacy of colonialism and occupiers and the structural discrimination was remedied in 1959 during the Cuban Revolution. In other words, these rhetorical boundaries are consistent and clear: Acknowledgment of racism in Cuba is limited to a long past, pre-Revolution import.
These questions of sociological nomenclature are not to be disregarded in the interests of a better understanding of social phenomena, especially in Cuba, whose history, more than that of any other country of America, is an intense, complex, unbroken process of transculturation of human groups, in all state of transition. (Ortiz, 1947, 103) Creating this "sociological nomenclature" or negotiating a way to say it , a way to chronicle or publicly make meaning of experiences with racism on the island, has yielded a unique storytelling process in Cuba. In many artistic works and writing, coding, double-talk and allegorical devices put sugar and tobacco into play as race symbols and the "main characters" of the nation's race politics narrative. The trickster and other elements of African diasporic rhetorical systems are used by Cuban artists and filmmakers most likely because these strategies have allowed for the masking of strong counternarratives embedded in creative work that tacitly expose racism and oppression in more recent years; in the years after the Revolution, public claims of racist acts of the state are deemed by many to be treasonous.
According to Sujatha Fernandes (2011), Cuban film and rap music content often address Cuba's local problem with racial inequality, police harassment, etc.
indirectly through poignant commentary on global problems (Fernandes 47). She argues that filmmakers like Tomas Gutierrez Alea, also known as "Titon", the black director Sergio Giral, chose undeniable historical themes, like slavery, as a way to comment on racism in modern Cuba (Fernandes 47

La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper)
This section provides a cursory opportunity to examine, an award-winning Cuban artistic text (a film) that thematically addresses racism in Cuba and illustrates how the island's writers employ "the black rhetorical tropes, subsumed under film as a platform for making powerful references to foundational racist beliefs that are a part of the national identity.
In the film, Alea uses several devices to achieve rhetorical strategy described by postcolonial theory, including Gates' Signifying Monkey : In one scene, the Count inspects the sugar processing area/the mill on his plantation. There, a white area manager yells, ordering for an increase in burning bagasse (which is all there is left to burn due to deforestation); slaves stir several cauldrons filled with liquid, composed of sugar at varying stages of the production process (8:20). The manager, Don Gaspar, explains that nature, rather than technique, instructs sugar production, a notion that the priest calls "witchcraft". Alea uses this character to make a powerfully disturbing commentary on the discursive role of eugenics, supremacy of the white/dominant/Spanish plantation-owning race and economic justifications for slavery in Cuba: Manager: (waves a small bag) This powder's purpose is to produce sugar… . This is necessary for change. The green juice turns dark because what was white must first be black.
Priest: What's in the bag?
Manager: It's not a secret. Caca de poulet (chicken feces) The sugar is here: black, brown and then pristine white. It was purged by fire like souls in Purgatory.
Priest: Not all souls grow white in Purgatory.
Manager: Not all cane juice turns into white sugar.
In this scene, Alea also uses an elaborate sugar production metaphor representing the racialized social hierarchy in Cuba and a race mix on the island with African origination: "The green juice turns dark because what was white must first be black." Here, the writer discusses this ethnic anchoring in blackness as the only way to arrive at "pristine white" in production. "The sugar is here: black, brown and then pristine white. It was purged by fire like souls in Purgatory." This alludes to the belief of Cuban leadership that solution to Cuba's savagery is European in essence.
In the subsequent famous dinner scene, the Count, as an act of atonement for the brutalization of the runaway slave, assembles 12 slaves for an elaborate dinner, which is obviously a representation of the well-known symbol of the Christian faith --

It's Racist to be "Afro Cuban"
In the late nineteenth century, Cuban political leaders used rhetoric to rally a public around the conviction that it is racist and unpatriotic to claim a racial identity.
Fanon describes this conversion process using public rhetoric and highlights the potential for resulting tension between controllers of national identity and members of marginalized communities that attempt to reclaim their voices, testimonies and individual cultural histories. Fanon (1963) uses the Negritude movement as one work of black mobilizers or change agents from African-derived communities (Fanon "Wretched" 212). Nineteenth century Cuba is a fitting case study for the dynamics described here by Fanon.
In the 1890s, it was the Afro-Cuban intelligentsia who served as the voice of resistance, challenging claims touting that the island had achieved a racial democracy (De la Fuente 33). During the country's Ten Years War (1868 -1878), a unified Cuban force fought for la patria , for Cuba's independence from Spain. The first constitution of the resulting, Cuba Libre, stipulated that "all the inhabitants of the Republic were free and equal" (26). Cuban leaders and scholars such as José Martí strung together solidarity rhetoric in rallying cries intended to counteract divisions by race and class that would fragment a would-be Cuban fighting force. This racial democracy, built rhetorically and not through material shifts or social change, was layered discourse, anticipating, resisting and leveling every possible opposing assertion. As Fanon observed, in the case of Cuba, it was considered unpatriotic and 'racist' even to claim racial identity: To insist on someone's Blackness or whiteness could then be easily construed as a racist and un-Cuban act. As Martí put it, 'the Negro who proclaims his racial character … authorizes and brings forth the white racist… . Two racists would be equally guilty, the white racist and the Negro. This constant allusion to a man's color should cease' (De la Fuente 28).

One History: An Operational Cuban Race Rhetoric?
Scholars suggest that what might call a Cuban dominant rhetoric was shaped, not only by political strategy and the state's military needs, but largely by the fears of the elite class. The practice of "diluting" and creating hazy racial imagery was rhetorical strategy, also. In Cuban political discourse, race labels inexplicitly alluded to blackness: "race of color" and "class of color". And, there was an apparent effort to disengage racial identities that might be perceived as socially fragmenting: negro, moreno, pardo, and mulato (De La Fuente 31) . Historically, the Cuban elite feared that, with the strength of Afro Cuban military leaders and fighters, blacks could be organize an uprising similar to the 1791 Haitian Revolution, which circulated as terrifying regional lore. In 1812, Cuban blacks, led by Jose Antonio Aponte, orchestrated several revolts meant to end slavery; of course, this disputes were believed to be inspired by the successful Haitian Revolution (Childs 2006). Here the consideration of the fear and emotionality of the elite as an exigence for this solidarity rhetoric is instructive.
To quell those fears, Martí and others advanced a retooled idea of the freed slave as "the subservient insurgent": "Martí suggested that rather than being seen as a racial threat, blacks should be seen as grateful recipients of white generosity" (De La Fuente 28). At this point, all of the shifts in race relations were rhetorical. There were no concomitant socioeconomic equality plans and this sustained socioeconomic 70 disparity was evident to Afro-Cubans and the creole elite alike. The response to the disparity was completely rhetorical as well. According to De la Fuente, the elites reasoned that the abolition of slavery was a sacrifice of the wealthy class. They admitted that it was the injustices of the defunct slavery system that caused Afro-Cubans to be "unprepared for Republic life".
As Fanon predicts, it was the Afro-Cuban intelligentsia who responded to this layered dominant discourse that justified sustained inequalities amid claims of a racelessness Cuban society. The Afro-Cuban intellectuals challenged the the foundational claims of the island's racial democracy.
It was exactly because of their extensive participation in the struggle, to which they had contributed more than their proportional share, that they had gained the right to full citizenship. To the argument that blacks were indebted to whites for their freedom: the abolition of slavery was not an example of generosity by Cuban Masters or Spanish Colonial authorities but a conquest by black insurgents in the 1868 War (De la Fuente 32). study.
I deemed this trip to be a necessary step because the communication infrastructure between the United States and Cuba continues to waiver between developing and stalled. Email exchanges are slow and telephone calls are non-existent, too expensive to rely upon. For example, AT&T charges $3 per minute for a telephone call between the two countries. Also, the island established its first Internet connections in 2014; therefore, even in 2018, many Cubans, including the staff in the research center, do not have daily access to the Internet. In a research environment in which trust is an influential variable, personal contact with the center director and the other coordinating researchers would be more sensible for initiating fruitful relationships.
Therefore, one important goal for the trip was to expedite the project setup process and begin to cultivate relationships with necessary agents of the study. Secondly, I sought to test the efficacy of the project design; more specifically, the interview questions. At 5 a.m. each day, the neighborhood shakes off its slumber by the rhythmic shrill of a whistle. The bread man is a drum major marching through his route in the event that there is a need for fresh bread at breakfast. Soon, the egg man, the lady with mangoes and green beans, guava, onion, fresh garlic and okra will roll down the street like a traveling garden. But, this is only one part of the commerce exchange in Reparto Sueño. On the island, the fortitude of the black market matches that of the state-run marketplace. In the neighborhood, the blocks are laden with industrious entrepreneurs, whose hustles vary from door to door. The "paint man" markets his inventory with an empty metal gallon container suspended from the awning that shades his living room window. (He may have many hustles, but he is understood to be the paint man here.) I walked through Reparto Sueño with Yamira, a 44-year-old bed and breakfast owner whose husband is restoring a second property; she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and yelled into the paint man's window screen to place her order: "I need one gallon of white paint." A voice replied: "One.
O.K." No person ever appeared, but this is the way orders are confirmed and buyers authenticated. Because, obviously, there are no paper trails in this market. Therefore, I  (Cintron 1997). As Cuba is also a unique socio-political ecology laden with multiple agents and systems, Santiago, Cuba's Ferdinand Ortiz African Studies Center is the first area of the field site that I will describe. As a resident investigator, I spent several hours in this environment weekly.
Here, I recount select personal experiences and my observations of the interrelations of foreigners and Cubans there in the regular operations. This contextualization sets up the subsequent and essential discussion about researchers as complex (human) apparati that have historically influenced the fieldsite, the final text and every negotiation in between (Cintron 1997).
Scholars have isolated and discussed factors that may establish or destabilize a field researcher's ethos, credibility to make project inquiries and claims in the "home places of others" (Cintron, 1997;Powell 2002;Cushman 1996;Jones-Royster, 1996).
Border-crossing problems and breaches of local decorum have inspired a call for a research lens that begins with a terministic screen from the subject or the participant position (Jones-Royster,1996;Anzaldua, 1999). Further, first phases of project design (and dissertation proposal) should take into consideration reciprocity between the participant community, the investigator, village-level governance, traditions, differing ways of knowing, communication, hierarchies of concern and other elements of the fieldsite ecology (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2012;Powell 2002;Cushman 1996). Finally, I delineate negotiation struggles in, what Ralph Cintron calls, the real field site, the text, the IRB-approved instrumentation where he claims the researcher's knowledge making also occurs. I attempt to capture my tussling with observation and memory "between brand new experiences and very old experiences and it is through processes like these that real field sites become understood both as objects of knowledge and as extensions of life-pattern or ethos" (Cintron 8). Ironically, poorly selected methodology for my dissertation proposal, the subsequent process of reflection, revision and correction led to an apt approach to field work in Cuba, one most fitting for an African American southern US-native seeking to build researcher ethos amid Santiaguans.

Failed Ethos Borrowing
Facing the dissertation proposal deadline, I initially pressed my project into many ill-fitting methodological models. I first settled on a qualitative approach that included "talking circles" as the main field data-gathering strategy, which was at the time popular in Cultural Rhetoric Studies and was a indigenous, decolonizing methodology. I presupposed that talking circles would address my chief concerns: Mistakenly employing an approach that essentialized all African descendents , too heavy-handedly imposing United States Critical Race Theory models on "black Cuba", and unwittingly using obtrusive Western instrumentation (interview protocols, IRB-approved guidelines, artifacts and procedure) were among them. I was also concerned about affronting Cuban participants by asserting a hierarchy of concerns that were vastly different from their own.
In my dissertation proposal, I described the process as follows: By employing methodology that includes talking circles ( Beyond the function of the institutional hierarchies, the component parts of the researcher's subjectivity must be scrutinized during the design phase and considered 83 living contributors to the strategy of inquiry, the outcomes of the field site and the real time meaning-making process of the project participants.

Three Women Scholars, Africa-derived Identities, Nationalistic Dissimilarities
Identity can never be reduced to a bunch of little cubby holes. Identity flows between, over, aspects of a person. Identity is a river, a process (Anzaldua 252).
In the following sections, I will discuss the scholarship I used to grapple with the significance of the moments in the field like those described here and the influence of the multiple identities --American, African American, woman, University of Rhode Island scholar --I conveyed within the participant community. Ada Lescay Gonzalez, a 20-something scholar who self-identifies as Afro-Cuban, has been a researcher in the center for five years. She is also a graduate student at the University of the Orient in Santiago, Cuba; she publishes and speaks on themes that branch from her foci -history of the island's enslavement of blacks and art produced to chronicle that history. Ada was one of only two staff researchers who spoke English with me in the research center. After some weeks, Ada confided in me that she was self-conscious of her "professional English speaking abilities"; she wanted to increase precision, vocabulary and practice enunciation. She hoped to explain her own scholarship better in English, she explained. I suggested daily lunchtime intercambios . For weeks, Ada and I met in the conference room and discussed Cuban texts from my reading list and 84 others that she recommended. I read passages aloud in Spanish and we discussed the scholarly content and arguments in English. Ellen Cushman (1996) and Malea Powell (2014) discusses a "theory of reciprocity" in which researchers enter a community with an activist agenda that is inherently self-critical, accountable (Cushman 16).
This activity with Ada, who was a colleague, a fellow researcher and graduate student, not only generated discourse that contextualized this project, but it established my role as more than a "needy requestor" in the community, but a willing facilitator  when the outsiders within challenge these negative definitions and images they are "assaulted with more, varied externally-defined negative images designed to control assertiveness". In response, Collins expresses the importance of self-definition, within oppressive power systems in which negative identities have been assigned to the marginalized; the right to define self must be restored (19). Self evaluation takes the recovery process a step further. Self valuation is a psychological process that "allows black women to reject internalized, psychological oppression" (19).
As three black academic women, Zoe, Ada and I are the subject group that Collins discusses in her work, as we are all from groups historically marginalized by the academy. This outsider within is highly influential in our engagement and that status is significant to all of us, particularly relevant to the exigence for our work together. What is also illustrated here are the complexities involved in a scholarly In the field, project participants, each possessing several complex identities and perspectives, present researchers with an entanglement of characteristics often related to the socio-political situation of the terrain. Ralph Cintron (1997) suggests that it is negligence when we fail to acknowledge that these environmental factors may align or conflict with racial membership, history, memory or loyalties of the researcher in the field. And, this is a meaningful collision.
Cintron states that he concerns himself with asymmetrical power relationships (xi). This is likely a remnant of childhood and life experiences and the impetus for curating the following story for inclusion in the final text of his fieldwork: "My own ethos contains a certain socio-economic and cultural nervousness. These are odd 91 demons that have helped place me on the periphery of two groups of people (Cintron 5 Yet, he confesses that the "demons" of his childhood on the Texas citrus farm greatly influenced this work. Making amends for the distance between that house on the hill and the citrus workers below, he says, compelled this project. The real field site observed by a knowledge-making ethnographer eventually becomes the fieldsite of a text, which is the only fieldsite an audience comes to know. Part of the transformation of the first fieldsite into the second is through negotiations that become explicit between observation and memory, the tween brand new experiences and very old experiences, and it is through processes like these that real field sites become understood both as objects of knowledge and as extensions of a life pattern or ethos (Cintron 8).
Therefore, the field site, inevitably, includes the material, psychological and existing community elements that the outsider enters. However, the site is also This scene, whether it occurs in an ivy tower or on a field site in Central America, is comprised of the violence that decolonizing theorists work to counter. The problems, and their histories are deeply rooted in the mission of imperialism and the field of composition and rhetoric is charged with "deliberately unseeing its participation in imperialism" (Powell "Survivance" 398). While this is not intended to be a comprehensive deep dive into the many demons and remnants of imperialism, I will delineate the egregious violations that will contextualize proposals discussed here that suggest improved approaches to "border crossing". In part, decolonizing scholars seek to correct historically problematic, cyclical rhetorical practices: As Jones-Royster indicates, the entitled outsider approaches and generates normalizing rhetoric, which David Spurr (1996) also refers to as "colonial discourse"(1). Powell gives the example of public sphere imperialism discourses such as anti-tribal pro-private property advocacy solutions, justifying material consequences and permanent land loss for American Indians in the "civilizing" and nation identity-building process of America ( Survivance 404). The exigence, of course, is to make subsequent appropriation easier and set the stage for future thefts. It follows that creators and contributors from the participant community, their meaning-making process and its context are omitted from 94 the final text or contorted to fit frameworks of the academy. As Jones-Royster illustrates, a subject sitting "well-mannered and silent" in the space of such exchanges, excluded from the outsider's unfolding observation narrative, is never given the opportunity to weigh in or shape testimony.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that a research system that expects the use of generalizable inferences will, by design, commit such offenses. She states: "It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us" (Tuhiwai Smith 1). Smith

Aim of Study
The purpose of this qualitative project is to investigate rhetorical practices designed to sustain the erasure of race rhetoric in Cuba; this work seeks to determine the consequentiality of the purported "racelessness" for modern-day black Cubans. This is accomplished by using researcher field observations in Santiago, Cuba and content analysis of interview data and two Cuban archival artifacts.

Qualitative Research Approach
A qualitative research design provides protocols for data collected in the participant settings, interviews, data/content analysis, and the role of researcher subjectivity in the meaning making interpretations of that data (Creswell 3). Often, the mission of qualitative work is to understand how groups of participants ascribe meaning to their social reality.
"Qualitative researchers tend to collect data in the field at the site where participants experience the issue or the problem under study. They do not bring individuals into a lab (contrived situation), nor do they typically send out instruments for individuals to complete. This up close information gathered by actually talking directly to people and seeing them behave and act within their context is a major characteristic of qualitative research" (Creswell 175).
Also, this approach aligns with one of the chief objectives of this work, which is to register and trace rhetorical actions that address race and racism in the island's unique political ecology; further, this project's analysis considers temporality, as the work presupposes the operation of solidarity/racelessness rhetoric over generations. As I do with this project, typically, scholars who use qualitative methods operate from perspectives focused on social construction and the negotiation of meaning (Atkinson 69). With the use of curated historical Cuban artifacts, this methodological system can aptly examine the tensions and shifts in negotiations conveyed by turn-of-the-century Cuban national heroes and, subsequently, by this project's interview participants.
Interviews conducted on the island are the most effective means of gathering verbal data units that are coded and analyzed using these long-lauded Cuba artifacts as references.
Further, field notes and researcher observations are a significant for interpretive work and contextualizing results. Work in Miami and Santiago, Cuba generated field notes that further contextualize the inquiry narrative (Smitherman, 1977;Gilyard, 1991;Martinez 2016). Because the project's investigation considers the participants' claims chronicling their perceptions of their modern social realities, these notes provide textured snapshots of energetic communities and complex social assemblages. Additionally, researchers develop intersubjectivity through field notes (Lindlof & Taylor 159); arguably, this process allows the researchers to gain (1.) an empathetic understanding of their participants' experience, and (2) more successfully 99 represent that understanding to others (159). These notes are presented in the project as chapters, specifically "researcher narrative" chapters.

Interview Procedure
Structured interviews were conducted with 100 participants in Santiago, Cuba;97 were used in this work. This field site was selected because, from the sixteenth to the  Center for African Studies supported this work and served as the "gatekeeper".

Participants Selection and Engagement
The Fernando Ortiz Center for African Studies is located in Santiago, Cuba  The following is the procedure for participant selection: • One hundred participants will be interviewed.
• The participants are all age 18 and over.
• Participants are drawn from three groups: academics, professionals and laborers (translated from categories given by the gatekeeper).

Academics
The academics are practicing social scientists, humanists and other scholars who are familiar with or who are professionally invested in the subject. This group is believed to be able to offer an academic interpretation of the topic as well as personal responses. Responses from this group adds context, "expertise" and are not expected to be exclusively personal.

Professionals
The professionals are engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers and homemakers. This group possesses basic information about social sciences, but not necessarily experts on the topic of this project. It is presupposed that this group will be focused and scholarly in their responses.

Laborers/Everyday People
This group is intended to be blue collar workers who are minimally educated. They are believed to offer varying understandings of the topic circulating in the public sphere.
assistance. (Willing) volunteers who fit the project's approved criteria may also participate without a gatekeeper present. Introductions between participant and researcher occur.

Researcher gives participant an information sheet in Spanish, containing
University of Rhode Island contacts, description of project and participants requested role, including a request to record audio.
3. Participants verbally agrees or disagrees to continue.
4. If participant agrees, researcher asks participant to complete a project registration/contact sheet/onboarding form.

Researcher begins audio recorder.
6. Researcher asks questions as per the schedule of interview questions and participant responds verbally.
7. After the last question, researcher thanks participant for help and asks for permission to take headshot with cellular phone camera.
Per the IRB (Institutional Review Board) stipulations, the participants were asked if a name could be used and, if yes, to write the preferred name on the onboarding form (APPENDIX A). In this dissertation, names have been changed and initials are used to identify participants. This is an effort to protect the true identities of the interviewees.

Content Analysis Using the Theoretical Framework (Public Rhetoric and CRT)
Content analysis was performed using a framework comprised of public rhetoric scholarship and elements of critical race theory (CRT). "Content analysis is viewed more generously as a method for describing and interpreting the artifacts of a society or social group" (Marshall et al. 108). Content analysis allows for a "nonreactive" distance that will honor the integrity of the setting and the researcher may "determine where the emphasis lies after the data has been gathered" (Marshall et al. 108). The interview data gathering (described above) yields the first set and the second set are the following two archival artifacts: Fernando Ortiz's speech "The Human Factors of Cubanidad" (1939) and José Martí's essay "Nuestra America" (1892). "Archival data are the routinely gathered records of society, community, or organization and may further supplement other qualitative methods" (Marshall et al. 107). These works of Ortiz and Martí were selected because the study's participants quote or reference portions of these artifacts; they are treated here as epistemic references that will lend insight about how the participants came to understand the precepts of racial democracy in their responses. Also, the artifacts will allow us to historicize claims such as "There is no racism in Cuba". ;

Approach to Interview Content Analysis
While the interview data and the archival artifacts require different analysis, the objective of using the theoretical framework to perform content analysis is the same.
This phase of the design work was largely concerned with an creating an approach that (1.) organized the participant responses thematically, and (2.) used archival Cuban documents as a framework for further analysis. More generally, the audio transcripts were coded using a categorization system that aligned with the following key sub-questions of this project: • What are everyday Cubans willing to say about race and racism when the dominant discourse makes claims of a raceless society?
• How do the creators of public discourse in Cuba veil and influence use of The value of this approach is that is adds necessary context, further validating researcher claims and further confirming "where the phenomenon lives".
Here is an example of how this coding strategy is employed in the (thematic tier) of the interview data analysis of this project: Below, respondent conceptualizations of the term "Afro-Cuban" are used to illustrate the segmenting codes for this project.
Step 1 Major themes are drawn from the project's research questions, specifically: (1.) How do Cubans use race rhetoric in an ecology in which racialized discourse is considered counter-revolutionary or treasonous? (2.) What are island-based Cubans willing to say about race and racism when the dominant discourse makes claims of a raceless society? (3.) Which are the rhetorical strategies and discursive configuring that sustain the rhetoric of solidarity or national identity tropes? Therefore, in this first step, the "discourse level structures" are drawn from the the major themes of the research questions, used to isolate direct articulations, inferences, narrative inclusions that broach: • Discursive configuring • National consciousness • Cuban solidarity

• Researcher (Me) Interference
Step 2 Regarding participant responses to the first three interview questions, researcher observations of emergent patterns reveal potential usefulness of the following categories (1) application/use, (2) individual connectivity and (3) perceptions of use of race language in modern Cuba.
Application/Use (A) -Is the acknowledgement of the concepts existence and personal use Individual Connectivity (C) -Reports the respondents use of the concept as it is personally experienced or one that is experienced by others (alterity).

Perceptions of Use (P) -Gages feelings about the use of the term.
In this step, the individual responses are coded for the respondent's use of "Afro-Cuban" and the respondent's indicated level of connectivity to the concept. For example, once a participant acknowledges the existence of the term "Afro-Cuban", the second step registers whether the response is an articulation of personal identity, collective identity or alterity. exodus of the many Cubans leaving the island at the time. Aligning with this mission is Ortiz's erasure of racial identity. Ortiz suggests that race exists only for anthropological authorities and states "one must recognize the real insignificance of race for Cubanidad, which is nothing but a category of culture. To understand the Cuban soul, one needs to study not race but cultures". According to Ortiz, Cuban culture, as it is presented in the soulful qualities of "Cubanidad", replaces race.

Gaining Perspective Using Public Rhetoric Scholarship
In this project, public rhetoric scholarship provides a theoretical framework that allows for the necessary examination of the "rhetorical life" --movement, encounters, influence and transfiguration --of "Nuestra America" and "The Human Factors of Cubanidad" artifacts.
Public rhetoric work responds to problematic, limited ways that we tend to conceptualize the operation of rhetoric (Edbauer 6). Too often, there is presumably a homeostatic relationship between rhetoric and its environment, an examination limited to what Paulo Freire described as the banking model. Or, according Laurie Edbauer Rice, we rely on the sender-receiver-text public communication models, further the misbelief of a stable, static function of rhetoric. Most importantly, the public rhetoric discussion compels a re-conceptualization of the audience of the artifacts (Warner, 2002). A closer consideration of the audience's exigence: Has the audience, in these cases, been invited to engage these artifacts, create discourse? Can we assume 126 (always) a "mutuality of exigence between the rhetor and the audience"? There must be an account for the claim, "there can be no pure exigence that does not involve various felt interests" (Smith & Lybarger, 1996). Therefore, public rhetoric discourse insists that the audience at the University of Havana, while "attending to" Ortiz's speech, is necessarily and notably comprised many perspectives, histories, ages and variant feelings. In publics, these scholars suggest, we must register the inevitable range and diversity; and homogeneity, even when the public is situated in socialist political landscapes, is a dangerous assumption.
In Public and Counterpublics (2002), Michael Warner states that a "public" is self-organized, self-understanding; in other words, it is the "Cubanidad" speech and the "Nuestra America" essay that cause their respective publics to exist. "Publics do not exist apart from the discourse that addresses them" (Warner 72). Also, this discourse suggests that we temper our assumptions about the prolific roles that we often give "external frameworks", which in the Santiago Cuba case study includes the ever-changing political frameworks. From 1892 to 1939 to the Cuban Revolution, the island experienced famed volatile political shifts; yet the rhetorical lives of these artifacts moved separately, colliding with and compelling the concatenation of events (Edbauer 6; Warner 74) that these scholars describe.
This framework lends a perspective that registers individual difference, insists on ideological variances, on the most presumably monolithic public arena. In part, this dissertation project amplifies the voices of Santiaguan participants who have encountered, engaged, and in some cases, claim to embody this solidarity rhetoric.
Rhetorical events continue to result from the production of "Nuestra" and "Cubanidad" over time connecting publics, multiple and generative. This approach thwarts some of the dangers of tendencies to generalize and essentialism. The complexity of the form considers a public that is anchored (because of the membership) in multiple histories. This project, in part, seeks to further understand what Warner calls the "mutually defining interplay between texts and (their) publics" (Warner 16).
A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through time, and because this can only be confirmed through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric (Warner 97).
While the "Nuestra America" essay is arguably a recruitment tool, so pronounced was the intended audience and needed response: To motivate the exhausted and fearful among Martí's compatriots to fight (again) for the sovereignty of the island. Expressed and described by Laurie Gries (2015) as, "(rhetorical is) a thing's ability to induce change in thought, feeling, and action… to organize and maintain collective formation" (Gries 11). Public rhetoric scholars extend the operation of rhetoric as emerging from material relations and activities "that unfold a diverse ecology of nonhuman and human things assemble and intra-act in various collectives" (Gries 12). This means that these artifacts, "Nuestra" and "Cubanidad", exist in the same rhetorical ecology, one artifact having influenced the other and both having encountered and generated publics of their own, absorbing and rejecting reconstituted ideologies across generations.
In conclusion, the historicization of statements claiming racelessness in modern Cuba is instructive. This process makes plain the social ecology at the time of each artifact's production. In the case of Martí's "Nuestra America", the island nation faced a dreaded, but pending fight for independence. At the delivery of "Cubanidad", the speaker's address engaged an audience that was 3 months into World War II and, likely, questioning the fate of the Monroe Doctrine. These artifacts most decidedly had prescribed work to do at the time of production. Yet, "artifacts do 'live' on beyond their initial moments of production and delivery. And during circulation, material artifacts generate traceable consequences in their wake, which contribute to their ongoing rhetoricity" (Gries 24). From the point of production to the participant interviews, the rhetorical force of these artifacts compelled material consequences.
While the world and hegemonic shifts continue politically, the uses of this rhetoric, its ways of stripping racial identity and continued insistence on muting expressions of difference lives in modern Cuba.
workshop at the Teatro Macubá in Santiago,G.F.L. discussed his use and his conceptualization of "Afro-Cuban".
I am insulted by it. It is quite a pejorative term, period, and discriminatory. I do not like it, because I think there are those who serve to lower it. It can mean something discriminatory and derogatory when it is used by someone who is not black; they use it as a term to folklorize or to call you banal. An "Afro-Cuban art". I think that because a Cuban white person who writes are not called a "Cuban-Cuban". It is not called "Cuban-Hispanic". They are merely Cuban. But then when we blacks write, they call us "Afro-Cuban writers. I am Cuban (Participant G.F.L.).
Participants like G.F.L. explain how the term signifies an inferiorizing category. He clarifies that, in his experience, this is a rhetorical activity and exigence of non-blacks, specifically Spanish Cubans and foreign whites. In this explanation, attempts to eliminate this distinction is a protection, a move to thwart discursive ways that the creative contributions of blacks in Cuba are minimized or denigrated. From this purview, "Afro-Cuban" labeling for music, literature, plays, etc. are folklorizing, a way to rhetorically marginalize. G.F.L. expressed a preference for monikers that use "African-descent" if the intent is to acknowledge an ontological tie to African communities. Also, G.F.L. indicated that the use of 'Afro-Cuban' seems to be most often employed to connect with tourists.

The perception that "AfroCuban" and other African-descendancy words (Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, African American, etc.) are Western, expressly American, and, in some cases, anti-Cuban.
Twenty-three-year-old college student C.R.M shares her understanding of the term "African American" in the United States; by walking through the rhetoricity (power, function, sphere of influence, and use) of "African American", C.R.M. draws a comparison to conceptualize "AfroCuban" and to further explain the futility of African descendancy expressions in Cuban culture.
As I understand it, the concept of "African-American" is applied to people who are born in the United States, but who have African roots.
That type of appellation cannot be applied in the Cuban context. Temporality is an important consideration in this process because this rhetorical activity between the two countries, in many ways, ceased for a half century. The

There are Cubans who self-identify as "Afro-Cuban". (personal, embodied -me or us)
In the responses of Afro Cuban elders were nostalgic anecdotes about the 1950s and 1960s on the island when, suddenly, being "Afro-Cuban" meant more opportunities, promotion, better homes, lucrative jobs, access to education for the first time --one immediate aftereffect of the revolutionary government's anti-discrimination policies. "The term "Afro Cuban" means something very pleasant" As far as I understand it, the term afro-cuban is the mixture of, not racist, but rather of the origins of a person who has African origins but who also has Cuban Origins. It can also believe people who are of African descent but who have been born in Cuban territory (J.J.F). In their descriptions, these participants indicated that Afro Cubans are a discrete group; the connection to African-derived cultural and artistic contributions in these responses do not reflect a sense of a personal tie. As they use "they" and "them" to discuss this category of Cuban compatriots, it seems that the African components of the "cultural syncretism" are not expressed here as embodied by the speaker.

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"I have a lot of friends who are descended Afro Cubans" (Participant A.N.M) " In our culture, (Afro Cubans) brought the drums. They brought the instruments. They mixed with the Cubans, so that's why Afro-Cuban music was born" (Participant R.U.C.).
Afro Cuban music and cuisine are ubiquitous and named worldwide; there were Santigueran study participants who discussed "AfroCuban" as a folklorized categorization, at times folklorization in the discussion pushed the term away from complex ontological significance, in these cases. S.Y.V., age 51, works as a cultural promoter for large-scale, government-sponsored events (conferences, festivals, etc.) "It is a very general concept. We will use it only from the point of view of culture if a thing has Cuban elements and black elements. We use it a lot in foods, and music, and dance, and paintings. We use it in literature" (S.Y.V.).
The term is identified in many bibliographies. Afro-Cuban term is a base of social culture that is rooted in African culture. In Cuba it is relevant in cultural, social, and culinary manifestations. During the Caribbean Festival, it is a time when that term becomes en vogue (B.V.R.).
The discussion about the use of Afro Cuban as a cultural label did not necessarily mean (in every case) that the participants did not express a personal connection to African ancestry. M.R.D., age 44, is a dancer who self identifies as Cuban, French and Venezuelan. M.B.D. understands "AfroCuban" as the music "that came from our ancestors". She shares her understanding of the African in Cuba narrative: "The Africans that came from the time of slavery in Baracoa, many settled.
Either by the Spanish (Cuba) or the French (Haiti), the African came to the country and implanted his piece" (M.B.D.).

"Afro-Cuban" Results Summary
While there were participants who denied that they had any familiarity with the term "AfroCuban", most participants expressed prior knowledge of the term's existence. Consistently, Cubans who knew the term stated that "AfroCuban" is not used colloquially in modern Cuba. These outcomes were expected and confirmed ideas about use, rather than provide new information.
Variances in the claims of personal connections and those who expressed distant folklorized, knowledge of the term were unexpected. Most informative were the varied explanations about what the word signified. Meaning, there were a large group of participants stated that use of "AfroCuban" was problematic, but the rationale or why they believed the term was a problem differed. This portion of the study revealed that Cuba is not as monolithic as Cubans believe.
A.J.J. responded, "Girl, here in our country we don't use those types of terms.
Everyone is the same. The blacks are the same, the whites are the same, the mestizo, the Indian. We are the same" (A.J.J., 51, event coordinator). In some cases Afro Cuban is a proud cultural distinction woven into the tapestry of the larger, national "Cubanidad" narrative. On some occasions, as it is in A.J.J.'s case, sameness is a protection, a positive, inclusive and validating. In other instances, "We are the same." is meant to defend social value. As participant G.F.L. indicated there is also an understanding of "Afro Cuban" and labels tied to African descendancy is used as, in modern day terms a microaggression, intended as debasement, a lessening.
The role that forms censorship/monitoring plays in this study's data gathering process were also instructive. On one of the interview days, Zoe accompanied me to the Archivo Histórico Provencial Santiago de Cuba (City Archive) to conduct interviews. Aged, neglected and towering, this concrete and metal structure in the heart of Santiago was once a prison; now, the relatively spacious cells are used for individual offices and record storage. After Zoe introduced me, one of the interviewees and I stood in the doorway before our session. She had asked to review the questions beforehand, questions that I provided: "You are fortunate to have Zoe.
You couldn't do this without her, not talking about topics like this. Not with questions like this. " She was referring to questions about conceptualizations and uses of "AfroCuban" and other race identity language.
During interviews at Teatro El Quijote, I observed an event speaker eavesdropping on the interview that followed his own; I realized that he hoped for uniformity in responses, an active proponent for the solidarity rhetoric that likely informed his answers. A fist pump indicated that he was pleased with "Cuban" as the response to the project question about participant origin.

"Origenes"
At the start of each interview, the 97 participants completed an interview form composed in Spanish (APPENDIX A) reporting name, age, gender, level of education attained, occupation and origin. "Origin," which appeared on the form as "origenes" was, for the majority of participants arresting and became the anticipated disruption in an, otherwise, smooth onboarding process. Each would ask: "What do you mean by this?" Zoe, the adviser/gatekeeper, and I decided to leave the question because the word "origenes" invoked discussion about ontological variances and the participant's interpretations of the term's use inspired storytelling of grandparents and great grandparents, deeply personal familial ties and lineage; just as often, "origenes" caused participants to declare the singleness of their "Cubanidad" or their Cubanness.
Defenders of "Cubanidad" seemed to offer their forgiveness for the inclusion of such a ridiculous question, a question that all Cubans, being Cuban, must answer the same.
But, all Cubans didn't respond the same. Zoe explained "Cubans never ask this question. We are all 'Cuban'". The only researcher clarification of "origenes" offered was: "There are no wrong answers to that question. Write whatever that means to you." The following are the results of the "origin" item from the onboarding instrument.

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One third of the participants instinctively shared an ontology in terms that were not nationalistic nor Cuban. Instinctively, 32 participants (33 percent) elected to list descriptive cultural complexities of their lineage woven into the stories of French and Spanish immigrant grandparents and the mixing of Haitian great grandparents with those from the Canary Islands. Interestingly, those participants who gave prominence to "Africa, African and Afro-Cuban" heritage in their descriptions were either under age 30, laborers, food service workers or musicians. That this group used are electing to give differing prominence to shared histories and how the data provides evidence of varied worldviews cultivated in part by lived, generational experiences on the island. The collective expectation is that each responses to "origines" would be the same, aligning with Ortiz's notion of ajiaco and Cubanidad as the descriptive that is expectedly "Cuban". However, many Cubans, especially younger Cubans may be sharing racial identity rhetorics that represent frays and splits in a revolution-inspired solidarity discourse caused by time gaps.
Casa del Caribe, one of Santiago's state-operated cultural centers, held its annual July festival while I completed field work for this project. Typically, 6,000 to 7,000 attendees travel to the city from several countries, participating in academic panel discussions, drumming courses, street parties and musical and dance performances; some of the events at the government center and theaters had "Afro "There is no racism in Cuba? Maybe there is no institutional racism as such, but among the people, it still persists" (Participant P.R.R.).
In this chapter, the responses of 50 Santiaguan interview participants are examined to learn how they conceptualize, codify, and of course, erase the term "racism" in the race discourse of modern Cuba. This field work was designed to address the following project questions: (1.) How do Cubans use race rhetoric in an ecology in which racialized discourse is considered counter-revolutionary or treasonous? (2.) What are island-based Cubans willing to say about race and racism when the dominant discourse makes claims of a raceless society? (3.) Which are the rhetorical strategies and discursive configuring that sustain the rhetoric of solidarity or national identity tropes? Further, the following interview data responds to a strategy of inquiry that seeks to understand how testimonies and experience narratives of victims of racism are chronicled in a public space where it is considered treasonous to do so.

Santiaguan conceptualizations of the term "racism": In your opinion, why are tourists told "There is no racism in Cuba?"
Fifty participants were asked about the expression, "There is no racism in Cuba"; confirming Hillary's assertion, that everyone in Cuba "knows" and often announces that there is no racism in Cuba, 39 of the 50 participants knew of the expression, would use the expression and agreed that "there is no racism in Cuba." However, in the interview data set it is apparent that, for several the Santiaguan participants, the term "racism" signifies a litany of social infractions, not only those against black Cubans, but those against women, homosexuals and whites as well. The groups' conceptualization of the Spanish word "racismo" is further splintered by a popular understanding of two categories: "constitutional racism" and everyday (or social) racism. In this case, Hillary's sources and the 39 participants claiming the validity of the expression, "there is no racism in Cuba", refer to the constitutional brand of racism. Clarifying this point, several black Cuban participants state: "There is no racism. We can go anywhere the whites can go." Look, I really do not think it exists. Because I can stand in front of anyone and they will not say "because you are black you can't be here". I think this is one of the countries where it is seen the least. And, where the manifestation of discrimination exists least ( Participant D.M.S. ).
Participant M.M.G., a university in Santiago discusses use of the term "racism" in modern Cuba. (While she is an administrator, Garcia noted that she was not speaking in this interview in that capacity.) When we talk about racism in Cuba today, we are talking about a racism that is not instituted from the power. It is a cultural racism that is installed in the subjectivity of people but that does not have a backing from power. The revolution in Cuba took all possible measures to achieve justice and equity.
Therefore, racist practices are associated to people's subjectivity and not from policies or mechanisms that allow racism to be exercised from power (Participant M.M.G.).
M.M.G. uses "power" here to reference government power, reiterating the significance of "racism" in post-revolutionary discourse. She also reveals how successful eradication of racism continues to be measured by most Cubans, how the continued existence and extinction of "racism" is quantified by Cubans today. "Cuba already went through that stage and whites, blacks, mestizos, we have the same rights. The same opportunities. No one is prohibited from accessing one space or another because of the color of their skin. There is no discrimination when accessing" (Participant M.M.G.).
Today, "There is no racism in Cuba" means that people of color (all who are not the white or creole elites) may legally access the same restaurants, hospitals, universities and neighborhoods as their compatriots. The majority of the participants 151 understand this statement to mean that in today's Cuba that racist acts or race-based discrimination may not be legally performed or supported by the State.
Historicized, the phrase "There is no racism in Cuba" is tethered to concatenations of rhetorical acts that sought to establish national identity, activity that spans more than a century. Claims of José Martí in the 1800s, the solidarity rhetoric of Fernando Ortiz in the 1930s and the revolutionary government political platform in the 1950s necessitate the claimed racelessness of the state; and, it followed, if there are no races, there is no place for racism to nest. Today, several of the project's participants contribute to this lineage of racial identity erasure and the absence of racism. Others articulate the functioning dualism of the term: Officially there is no racism in our country. Officially. Officially there is none.
But yes. Officially, means that the state, the Cuban state, the government, the institutions can't declare openly a racist practice because that would imply legal actions and judicial action. Because constitutionally, it is decreed that in our country racism has no place. Now, one thing is the official and another is the familial or maybe the personal. Even, within an institution what a certain group of leaders (Participant A.V.I.).
A lack of consensus on what the term "racism" signifies was expressed as a problem, truly one of the constraints faced in developing public fora in modern Cuba for addressing racism, registering testimony of racism's individual survivors and, of course, needed redress.
(The term "racism") is very controversial even from an investigative point of view. It creates a lot of dilemma because people do not agree. And, it does exist. I was a victim of racism in the university. Because of a subject, because of a research topic that is religious. That's why I would not speak of it sometimes because I was the blackest in the classroom. And, so I do not take the subject on (Participant E.D.R.).
For the participants, discursive negotiations around the term, "racismo" occur at the intersection where Cuban law meets lived experiences of black Cubans.
Latent. We feel it, those of us who are black...we are the ones who feel it most.
People do not do it consciously. They have it (racism) in their minds and as long as that is not removed it is very difficult to detach oneself. After the revolution, there is a law, but that does not eliminate it; racism was not eliminated because of a law. But I will tell you, if we do not remove it from the minds, if people do not remove it from their heads... it is very difficult to eliminate it. It is latent there. It is latent (Participant C.D.P.).
Essentially, according to the study participants, the most common exigence for creating race rhetoric in modern Cuba is a dual-missioned one, always existing with ambivalence and embattled contemporaneity: (1) To protect the Cuban Revolution legacy, specifically claims about the eradication of racism and inequality on the island from 1959 to the present day, and (2) To craft testimony lived, witnessed experiences with racism today. This struggle leads to the creations of rhetorical categories, degrees: "constitutional" versus "social or everyday" racism. Also, these negotiations makes the term, in many cases a catch-all signifier for variations of acts of discrimination against women, disabled, LGBTQ and black Cubans. For some, any marginality can be called racism. The most common conceptualization is that "no racism" means that there is material access and opportunity equality for all Cubans, the most pronounced remnant of revolution rhetoric in operation.

Discursive consequences of "racelessness":
The absence of public meaning-making spaces that register a common conceptualization of "racism".
Participants responses reveal problems with modern social ecologies functioning without public racialized meaning-making spaces, spaces that compel a sharing of testimony, a grappling with individual collisions with racism and that call for correction. Racial democracy discourse has long helped shape national identity for Cuba and a century of public rhetoric sought to elevate cultural/regional/local identities above all others. Therefore, in fairness, a search for points of consensus or discord about race language and its uses needed to include what is arguably the most rudimentary of questions. Participants were asked to share their understanding of the term "racism" and whether that term was, for them, different from "race prejudice".
Twenty-six of the 50 participants indicated that they were aware of occurrences of "race prejudice" in modern Cuba. Race prejudice, they described, is (at times, multiple) material and, more often rhetorical, acts of racist individuals; still, all deny the existence of "racism" or "racismo". Although, 26 have personally experienced or witnessed "race prejudice". For them, the two concepts are unrelated in terms of their social function. " Racism is cruder (than "race prejudice") when we consider the term because there is violence involved in 'racism'. There totally is discrimination, racial discrimination due to the economic problem that exists in Cuba" (Participant E.D.R.). "The concept of racism describes everything" said Participant R.Z.P).
There are white people and there are homosexuals that are discriminated against. That is racism, too. If two women are inverted (lesbians) and you are against something like that, racism also applies. There are racists who are black and there are racists who are white. The term is unpleasant for me. It's a bit unpleasant (R.Z.P.).
Researcher: Describe what the term racism means to you. What is the significance of "racismo"?
Felina Gonzalez: When one does not accept the color of the race. With blacks is mainly where you see that racism. But, here in Cuba that racism is not produced; it is not as crude as it is in other countries. Because here everyone has the same rights. They are equals: man, woman, black, white, yellow, pink While there are interviewees who conceptualize "racismo" as a catch-all for gender discrimination, bigotry, race-driven persecution, others isolated its use to racial identity-related infractions. Further, several participants described circumstances where they believed blacks were being racists toward whites. These participants suggest that "racismo" is synonymous with "phobia": "Phobia or racism doesn't just exist toward the black man; there is racism toward the white man. Sometimes black people are racists toward whites," added 40-year-old trumpeter, R.R.V. Phew! Cuba is an ajiaco as Fernando Ortíz said, an ajiaco in which they mix.
Here there is no pure white. There is no pure black. Here, we are all mestizo products of a mixture that comes from years from centuries (Participant

D.M.S.).
Social constructivist theory about the colonial motives for amplifying the import of the races is relayed in the participants' recitations of these early teachings. However, dangerous are the times when the recitations are immovable replacements for personal reports, experiential narratives that, as they unfold today's example, add nuanced updates and become generative.

A question of agency: Racism expressed as a economic and social mobility constraint
Fifteen of the 50 participants defined "racism" as an aesthetic-level, melanin and skin-deep partiality. Arguably attributed to socialism indoctrination, these participants did not express racism as a social issue that involved economic disparities and a race-based lack of access. Only 4 of the 50 participants connected racism with a stripping of power, an earning hindrance or (in any way) with socioeconomic realities of black Cubans.
However, there were interviewees who claimed that they either experienced or witnessed racism operating in a way that had economic implications, particularly inequitable for black Cubans. Several interviewees acknowledged a class hierarchy and the uneven distribution of wealth; this is a topic widely discussed in Cuba. However, validating the existence of race-based economic disparities in modern Cuba is considered counter-revolutionary, is discussed less frequently, or more often, denied altogether.
In the '90s, a product of a Special Period that we Cubans had to go through… .
We were limited in many things, many products that were necessary and essential for life, including food. We had 10 years of a very difficult process.
And, I remember in one of his speeches, Fidel Castro said: We are going to have to endure seeing a family eat a fish and another family has to eat a yaca or what is called a tamale.
We were being prepared, that there would be a difference. In the income, in the economic part ( Participant H.B.S.) .
To avoid over-simplification or misrepresentation, it is important to note that most participants understand family contributions from abroad as the primary advantage.
Sogarra also notes improvements, saying that a few black Cubans are among those who have been permitted to engage in increasing entrepreneurship on the island in recent years: " But still, the differences can be noticed" (H.B.S.). Self-identified For a project like this conducted in an ecology long structured by socialism ideology, the hypothesis would be that there would be a high number of participants who were proponents of public race rhetoric that aligned with the precepts of those political ideals.
With the discussion of education, the timbre of the conversations often changed. Emotionality around the role of the Cuban Revolution in overhauling the education landscape on the island is consistent in the interview sessions; this stance is ubiquitous, claimed and proclaimed in Cuba. The revolutionary government's literacy program invoked stories of inspiring lore for younger participants and nostalgic pride for those who were old enough to have been there. "The first thing that the revolution did was the literacy campaign in 1961. There is no racism in Cuba because of the We do not want to return to the past we had in relation to the issue of racism and to, above all, educate (Cubans) to be anti-racist. We're working on that.
That's what I can tell you. And, racist practices are not visible, which is why it is harder to work on the problem. Because people behave in a way in their private space and in another way in the public space. It would not occur to anyone in the public space to run over, discriminate against, mistreat a person in Cuba because of the color of their skin. But, you may find that within the family, a family member that does not accept that there is a bi-racial marriage within their family. But, that is another part of the problem (M.M.G.).
White grandmothers, who still think of themselves as aristocrats from past times, will say 'That girl is too pretty to be with him'. And, things like that.
They do not do it purposefully to be evil, but it is thoughts that have racist content (Participant C.R.C.).
We say there is not. But you can not know everyone. And, I do know people who are racist, because I had the 'pleasure' of meeting one: I was with a guy, but we had to see each other secretly because his mother is racist. He isn't, but his mother is (Participant Y.S.G.).
People say they aren't racist in my family, in the family of a white person. But when a white woman starts seeing a black man, Phew! There, in the family, the mother's heart is pained (Participant R.D.C) When asked about their understanding of the term "racism" and whether they had knowledge of the claim "There is no racism in Cuba," several participants lucidly and directly lay out the familial tensions that exist because of racism.

Chapter Conclusion
Responses of 67-year-old Ernesto Arminan, the director of the Folkloric Ballet of Oriente, highlighted the significance of nostalgia in the race rhetoric of Cuba.
April 1959... four months after the triumph of the revolution. We were the first dance company that the revolution created and it was made up of people of color. Before that, everything was made up of the aristocratic class and only white people went to the theater (Arminan).
Resistance to discuss or acknowledge the operation of racism in modern Cuba is tightly bound, for elders, memory. And, for younger generation of participants resistance seems tethered to membership, loyalty to Cuban Revolution lore. The negotiations and engagement involved in the the conceptual evolution of race rhetoric must find a place for the role of these rhetorics of nostalgia's ties to the country's nation narrative.
As the eradication of racism was one of the claimed victories of la patria ; collectively, the project participants clarified the stages of the often contorted, contradictory, breached birth of a race rhetoric in modern Cuba. And, "There is no racism in Cuba" refers to the participants understanding of state-enforced segregation.
The statement signifies the learned announcement, the participants' way of saying that segregation, refusing access to black Cubans, is no longer legal. "There is no racism in Cuba" means in the law, all Cubans have the same rights. Project participants also revealed: • Participants have developed ways to codify and transfigure language to fulfill the dual exigence --to preserve the legacy of the Cuban Revolution while indirectly chronicling the observed/experienced racial discrimination.
• Participants reveal consequences of absent public meaning-making spaces for racial identity and experiences with racism, spaces that would also support calls for redress. For most participants, this sustained suppression (or censorship) negatively influenced their ability to build personal testimony.
• Murky definitions, a lack of clear personal conceptualizations, and a collapsed consensus on the meaning of the term "racism" are the result of this missing public fora to generate and disseminate race rhetoric that reflect the true material conditions of black Cubans.
In the same week that I met Arminan, I met a 40-something woman in the Internet Park. When she learned of my study, she wanted to participate. She said: "You can't voice record me. You can't photograph me. I teach at the government military facility, so it would be bad for me professionally". Out of concern for her, I explained that it was probably best that we did not proceed. I said, "if I can't record you, I would be concerned about accuracy, the transcription. But, I thank you for your willingness." She placed her hand on my arm, stopped me from standing: "I will talk slow." As she said things out loud, her testimony would begin its "rhetorical life"; there would be a chronicling of lived experiences with racism that was not powered by heroism of now-deceased camouflaged-clad Cuban revolutionaries of the 1950s. Instead, she sat on the park bench, starting with discrimination she witnessed at the military academy, and contributed to an oft embattled story that both adoringly embraces and quarrels with nostalgia.

DISCUSSION AND PROJECT CONCLUSIONS
"There is no racism in Cuba," a Cuban tour guide's declaration, a contextualizing utterance on a bus filled with American senior citizens and the spark that lit the inquiry of this dissertation project, is a declaration that has traveled across two centuries, transfigured and re-envisioned, to accommodate a shifting exigence of rhetors and affirmed identities of its recipients. This chapter discusses the study's findings about, the project, "There is no racism in Cuba".

A Way to Say It: The Multiplicitous Use of the Term "Racism" in Modern Cuba
Questions guiding this project ask: • How do Afro-Cubans use race rhetoric in a social ecology in which discourse about race is considered counter-revolutionary or treasonous?
• What are everyday Cubans willing to say about their experiences and understanding of race and racism when they are physically situated in a space that is historically deemed raceless?
In modern Cuba, race rhetoric is operationally embattled. Part of the ambivalence is the product of a split conceptualization of the term "racism": "There is no racism in Cuba", a the central, test phrase of this study, is a declaration "functioning as a racialized speech act in a nation's racial paradigm" (Gilyard ix).

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Indicated in the project participant responses to questions about race and racism (specifically, the units "Afro Cuban" and "There is no racism in Cuba") is the aforementioned split categorization system. It is the operation of this system, constructed around the term "racism", that shapes the island nation's racial paradigm.
In this system, the use of "racism" is relegated to negotiations seeking to name observable race-based disparities, while simultaneously preserving the nostalgic observance of Cuban Revolution victories.

Racism: Categories of Use
As conceptualizations of "racism" significantly function in the sustaining, evolving and defining of a modern Cuban race rhetoric, I posit a forked system for understanding two significantly different uses of the term. 170

Categories of Use Model
Figure 7: Categories of Use Model for "Racism" in Modern Cuba.
In this model, "racism" with capital "R" represents participant understandings of the term that involve dated governmental enforcement of public segregation and suggest "institutional" or "constitutional" racism. The term "racism" lowercase "r" represents Cubans differentiating between personal and state employed acts of racism and explains (for Cuban participants) the existence of racism that is merely social, compelled solely by individuals, and that is, post-1959, wholly divorced from the state.
The categories of use model applied to the term "racism" (in the Santiago, Cuba study) provides insight into the operation of race rhetoric on the island because the model delineates the ways in which the one term is multifunctional in one isolated social ecology. The model allows for the exploration of temporality and consequentiality of a single term (Edbauer-Rice, 2005); significant are these variations within the race discourse represented by the participants' collective response and in the island's general public use of race rhetoric. First, the term "racism" in modern Cuba is a prompt for evocations, plotted on a spectrum that ranges from lore to experiential. Secondly, the rhetoricity of the term "racism", how the term engages Cuban and American publics today, is interpreted by the respective historical lens of those publics, which leads to meaningful communication misses and incongruities.

"RACISM": Access Granted to Black Compatriots by the Cuban Revolution
When we talk about racism in Cuba today, we are talking about a racism that is not instituted from the power. It is a cultural racism that is installed in the subjectivity of people but that does not have a backing from power (Participant MMG).
During the interview, Garcia explains Cubans' usage of the term racism by highlighting what it does not signify to Cubans. Racism that is "instituted from power" is described in the model as Category #1 or "Racism". Some participants described this Racism as "constitutional racism". Untested by shifts in time, immovable from the pages of 60-year-old annals and legislation, Racism in "There is no racism in Cuba" forfeits its role as an adaptive signifier, or as a participant in the normal subjectivity of discourse; most importantly, this phrase, "There is no racism in Cuba" cannot be effective or accurate as race rhetoric addressing the social reality of black Cubans of today.

"racism": Manifestations of Race-based Discrimination in Modern Cuba
Participants report observations and share testimony of "racism," lowercase "r", that is race prejudice reflecting the worldview of individuals. The discussion about this category of racism is the portion of the project field work that most completely abandons earliest assumptions (of Americans and Cubans) that patterns, guided solely by a socialist/communist overcast, would arise from this data set; and, the collective response would be monolithic. Testimonies regarding "racism" (lowercase) varied, indeed. Many responses were raw, produced from participant observation and/or experience. Most commonly, the model's Category #2 racism, is believed to be located within families, racism that strains interracial dating and matrimony. To avoid linking its existence with revolutionary governance, this category of racism carves out discursive terrain occupied only by Cuban family members or individuals operating with agency that is believed to be set apart from that of the State: "People say they aren't racist in my family, in the family of a white person. But, when a white woman starts seeing a black man... Phew! There in the family, the mother's heart is pained (Participant C.B.D.).
Even those reporting "racism" in the professional arena describe the acts as isolated prejudices of individuals: "There are places like centers of work where there are black people who have the intellectual capacity, they could occupy a higher position. But, because they are black, they are discriminated against. Blacks are seen as less (Participant Y.M.P.).
Observable material disparities were noted under this category: "Whites were ahead and we had to run behind. Now, there are many possibilities… . But, let's see.
To rent a house...who has the best houses? We have had to run a little more and there is always going to be a difference" (Participant P.F.S.).
Also, at times, Category #2 "racism" has a nonspecific conceptualization as a catch all term, describing the operation of homophobia, race prejudice, sexism, etc: "If two women are lesbians, and you are against something like that, racism also applies" (Participant E.R.P.).
Under this category, "racism" addresses microaggressions, rhetorical acts that assault and construct well-known stereotypes about the African descendants of Cuba.
Category #2 racism accounts for the paucity of black representation in Cuban mass media, as well: "People's prejudices remain in considering (blacks) inferior, ugly, uneducated, or unable to perform in certain roles such as television, movies, etc. But, it is not a practice from power, on the contrary (Participant M.P.G.).
As they descriptively deliver accounts and testimony that construct the spatial boundaries of this category of racism, the participants simultaneously deny that there is no Racism (uppercase). More importantly, that the Cuban brand of racism is not institutionalized: Officially, there is no racism in our country. Officially. Officially there is none.
But yes: Officially, means that the state, the Cuban state, the government, the institutions can't declare openly a racist practice because that would imply legal actions and judicial action. Because constitutionally, it is decreed that in our country racism has no place. Now, one thing is the official and another is the familial or maybe the personal. (Participant A.V.I.).
The revolution in Cuba took all possible measures to achieve justice and equity. Therefore, racist practices are associated with people's subjectivity and not from policies or mechanisms that allow racism to be exercised from power (Participant M.M.G.).
Tracking the rhetorical life of the term "racism" in Cuba reveals a narrative about the country's use of rhetoric as a fuel mobilizing ideologies and unifying publics, rhetoric to intentionally conflate and corral a century of identity politics on the island. And, perhaps most importantly, this tracking points to ways that the rhetoricity of the term is made to avert or mask disparate social realities that are race-based.

(American) Outsider -(African-descendant) Within
One of the project's questions asks: • Specifically, with the American field researcher as an embodied (embattled These individual exchanges potentially serve as anecdotal evidence, revealing the complexities of field work and the unruly operation of researcher positionalityeven in a highly-structured project design. Perceived as a microcosm of U.S.-Cuba communication efforts, such data exposes breaches and incongruities likely born from the 60-year separation between the two countries. In this way, the project also reveals a need to calibrate race rhetoric, understanding sameness and differences in conceptualization, as an intentional step in future diplomatic adjustments. In other words, a joint conference addressing "racism" is, from the onset, a fail if there are vast differences in everyday uses of the term. This project data illustrates field work issues that arise when either participant or researcher essentialize or conflate "black experience" narratives, when sameness (on either side) is the problematic assumption.
While my positionality, specifically the participant's perceptions of my current relationship with power in my own country, was of import in the study, "There is no racism in Cuba" is a claim that is timeless, generative, and possesses the agency to invoke and assemble across generations. "There is no racism in Cuba," having been material for national identity narratives of historic leaders in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries necessitates examination of the temporality of its circulation (Warner 2002; Gries 2015). "No single text can create a public; a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. Not texts themselves create publics, but the concatenations of texts through time" (Warner 90). Reaching back through time, even beyond dominant ideologies of the 1950s, the claim has, in part, assembled compatriots around a generative accord that maintains racial identity erasure and a perceived profitability of essentialism.

Scholarship
Project questions ask: • Which are the rhetorical strategies and discursive configuring that sustain the rhetoric of solidarity or national identity tropes?
• what Hooks refers to as "a humane critical response" that is vital to discursive negotiations of blackness that is named, made evident, visible and taken into account.
While Hooks suggests, "Without a way to name our pain, we are also without the words to articulate our pleasure" (Hooks 2). Critical race theorists have long cautioned that the consequences of this type of deficiency are not merely rhetorical (Smitherman, 1977;Gates, 1988;Gilyard, 1999;Villanueva, 2000).

The Absence of a Critical Black Voice or a Self-Identifying Black Historical Agent
In modern Cuba, the public sphere is devoid of a critical black voice; the absence of self-identifying, black historical agents' creates a living nation narrative that is cyclically/generationally missing this perspective. Also, this generative nation narrative evolves without watchful chronicles of race-based discrimination. Fanon (1963) warns that the colonial legacy is one that assigns identities, erases language, and conflates cultural legacies in the service of situating the dominant, imperialistic, patriarchal dominance/rule (208). The consequence of these rhetorical acts clearly have lasting material implications for African-derived people, but this continued practice also constrains the crystallization of a national consciousness, one that is as inclusive as it is self-selecting.
Many of the study participants' remain anchored, fixed, defensively claiming that the model's rhetorical categories of R/racism align with how race-based oppression currently operates in the island's complex social ecology, that somehow racist individuals (racism) do not power the Cuban institutions (Racism). This model is the modern Cuba race paradigm that Gilyard (1996) describes; this is, seemingly, the presiding race rhetoric of modern Cuba. Further, it is within these negotiations that the "Other", or black Cubans, relinquish agency, ceasing to be a historical agent and making way for "totalizing and universalistic theories" that, according to Giroux (1991) creates a different subject as the center of power, a subject that "simultaneously appears to exist outside of time and space". In other words, a stripping of African identity is a tactic, born from colonialism, that creates a protected space for uncontested, imported dominance to be cultivated. In Cuba, this rhetorical act is in service of bolstering the legacy of revolutionary government, resulting in solidarity rhetoric that has remained unchanged for decades.
Further, lacking a critical response to racism and, consequently, lacking racial identity language, many of the participants discuss race in terms of phenotypic characteristics only; some suggest whites are racist and blacks are racist, too, never moving the conversation beyond colorism and never suggesting racism as a wielding of power: "In Cuba, there are fixations on skin color and hair...because it's such a mestizo country. There is racism by category of color. That is to say, light-skinned discriminating against those who are bit darker" (Participant S.R.P.). Critical race theory responsively calls for an examination and transformation between this very pronounced relationship between racism and power. Such an investigation must also include the "construction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of Yet, historicizing the claim, "There is no racism in Cuba," revealed that this was not always the case; there were pivotal events, historical and political, that shaped this shift in naming. In the 1890s, it was the Afro-Cuban intelligentsia who served as the voice of resistance, challenging claims that indicated that the island had achieved a racial democracy (De la Fuente 33). However, a scarcity of Cuban fighters for the Ten Years War (1868-1878) necessitated the strategic rhetoric that cleansed Cubans of racial identity and class distinctions, advancing a unifying solidarity that would support recruitment efforts. This strategy, in part, was operationalized by national heroes, including José Martí, who insisted that claims of individual racial identity were treasonous. Martí stated: To insist on someone's Blackness or whiteness could then be easily construed as a racist and un-Cuban act. As Martí put it, 'the Negro who proclaims his racial character … authorizes and brings forth the white racist… . Two racists would be equally guilty, the white racist and the Negro. This constant allusion to a man's color should cease' (De la Fuente 28).
In the fighting spirit of la patria or the revolucionario , there is a historical pattern of using this erasure rhetoric to organize patriots, who are tied to the land and a singular identity. The indictment, that it is treasonous, or "un-Cuban", to assert a racial identity, may be a century-old rhetorical strategy, but it has operated as a "complex, distributed event" that continues to hold prominence today.

Conclusion
In Blind: Talking about the New Racism , Victor Villanueva extends upon Kenneth Burke's assertion, which suggests that rhetoric is epistemological and "has the power to lead us to some understanding of 'truth'" (referencing Burke's Four Master Tropes): We are affected, often not consciously, by the language we receive and use, by trope. And, that means that we are ideologically affected. What I mean is that our assumptions about how the world works are influenced by -might even be created by -the language we receive and use. Large things. World views. Now, if that's the case, then we're also affected by the language we don't use… . If we no longer speak of "racism," racism gets ignored. It's more than just etiquette, pc; it's a matter of epistemolögy and ideology (Villanueva, 2006, 5).

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The Santiago study brings attention to a modern social ecology where "racism gets ignored" in this way, unengaged and sustained by a ideological tradition of erasure and silencing. This project delineates the rhetorical accommodations that have been made (r/Racism), contorting and splitting modern Cuba's race rhetoric in the service of past revolutionary achievements. As it exists today, the public discourse, anchored in a shared national identity, does not reflect an equitable, shared socio-economic experience of Cuban compatriots, regardless of race.
On one of the days a researcher and I scheduled interviews at a Santiago hospital. Although we presented the required documentation, we were turned away. It is important to also note that we are both brown-skinned women. Frustrated because she had taken several buses to meet me, the center's researcher hissed: "I knew this would happen! In these white neighborhoods… . I knew this would happen." I asked, "So this is considered a white neighborhood?" She softened the scowl on her face and said, "Oh. It used to be, but everyone can live here now." But, everyone does not live there and such disparities are not openly discussed.
So significant are naming, claiming and testifying to African descendants and it is this very performative element of identity that has been targetedly wiped in Cuba.
In Talkin and Testifyin , Geneva Smitherman discusses "the magic power of the word" as a giver of life in some African-based belief systems (78). She says, "Nommo," or life force, is how a thing is spoken into being. Keith Gilyard (1996)