Dr. Devyn Spence Benson on Afrocubanas: Community Knowledge, Scholar Activism, and Transnational Black Feminisms

In honor of Black History Month, BWSA is recognizing a different book in Black Women’s Studies every day in February using #28DaysofBWS on Twitter. Some texts will also be featured on the BWSA blog with author interviews or book excerpts. Follow us on Twitter and check back daily for new reading recommendations!

Our first author interview for #28DaysofBWS is with Dr. Devyn Spence Benson. Dr. Benson is the editor of the translated book, Afrocubanas: History, Thought, and Cultural Practices. Buy your copy of Afrocubanas here! This interview has been edited for clarity.

Nneka D. Dennie: Thank you so much for joining me this afternoon, Devyn! I'm really excited to speak with you about your new book, Afrocubanas. I have a couple questions for you to help us think about how this book is in conversation with other works and to help us think about the impacts of some of the networks that you participated in in shaping those books. But just to start with, can you tell me a little bit about how the original Spanish language book came to be and why it was important to you to translate it?

Devyn Spence Benson: Sure. Thank you for this. And I just want to thank, so much, the Black Women's Studies Association for being interested in this book and wanting to do an interview. I'm really excited to share my work and to share the experiences and the work of Black Cuban women with a wider audience, especially an English-speaking audience. The book comes out of a grassroots movement in Cuba. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Cuban economy goes into a dramatic economic decline. It's called the “Special Period,” and it's actually called officially the “Special Period in Times of Peace,” but the “Special Period” for short. And what this means is that without the Soviet Union to support the economy, the Cuban economy, which until the 90s had at least been doing okay and been able to support its citizens, was then going into this sort of dire economic crash. There's not enough food in any of the stores. There's not enough oil or gasoline for electricity, so there's lots of rolling blackouts all over the country. There's not enough medicine, there's not enough oil for transportation. So many people are taking bicycles 15 and 20 miles to work, even though they haven't had anything for breakfast. It's supposed to be worse than the Great Depression here in the United States. And it was like just an economic disaster.

 Then the government, to respond to that, decides that they're going to change the economy. In some ways, they begin moving towards a more market-oriented economy. They legalized the dollar. They allow remittances from Cubans who have left the island. They do joint business ventures with foreign companies to bring in more revenue. And this really started the increase in the type of tourism. Now, anybody who studies the Caribbean knows how important tourism has been for many of the economies in the Caribbean. But really, it had been traditional tourism. What tourism typically looks like had not been the type of tourism in Cuba. There had been revolutionary tourism, like people who wanted to come down and cut sugarcane, but you don't make a ton of money off of that. So this really changed the type of tourism, and so you start seeing huge hotels going up. You start seeing Spain, Canada, the U.K., obviously not the United States, but lots of countries, France, China, investing in Cuba. With all of this happening, the newest jobs and the best jobs at that moment become being in the tourist industry, like being a tour guide or being someone who works behind the front desk, and Cubans are highly educated.

Even before this, Cubans spoke multiple languages. Cubans knew about the world. They were global citizens. We shouldn't think that Cubans didn't know about the world just because the United States has an embargo. Cuba has interacted with the rest of the world for a long time. But then what happened was people started talking about something called the “return of racism,” because immediately in this new economy, Black Cubans did not have the same opportunities. No one wanted to hire a Black Cuban to be your tour guide or to be your taxi cab driver or to be the front desk clerk.

They said that you had to have buena presencia, or a good presence. You had to look a certain way, which typically meant white. Or you had to have capital or you had to have an apartment or a house that was in a really good neighborhood so that you could turn it into a sort of Airbnb, or a casa particular, or turn it into a paladar like an in-house restaurant, because that's what they needed for all the incoming tourists. You needed to have places for them to stay and places for them to eat.

Because the revolution had given everyone their houses, most people had houses. But if your house had been in a congested, tight Black neighborhood before, it was still in a congested and tight neighborhood. And so that wasn't the ideal place to sort of have a small Airbnb. All of this meant that with the “return of racism” or with these social consequences of the economic crash, Black activism increased dramatically. In my first book, I talk a lot about how I don't actually think “the return of racism” is the right term to call this. I would say that racism persisted throughout the revolutionary period. And what this economic crisis did is that it shined a new light or it put it in a new venue, more in the economy.

Okay, so we've got the “return of racism.” And what happens is Black people in general can't find good jobs, but then Black women in particular are facing the new economic situation in a particular way. They definitely weren't hired to be the front desk clerks because you had to be white and have straight hair. But it was also that with more and more tourists coming, there was an increase in sex tourism. And so then all of a sudden, Black women's bodies became stereotyped as prostitute bodies. A variety of women participated in sex work because of the fact that their economic situation was so dire. But it became sort of the stereotype that only Black Cuban women participated in sex work.

If you ever saw a Black woman trying to go into a hotel or walking down the street with someone who was lighter skinned, the police would stop them and ask them if they were a prostitute, literally harassing people. I’ve had that experience happen to me when I was walking with the director of study abroad from [the University of North Carolina]. I'm not a Cuban woman, but I'm still a Black woman. I was walking with a white, older man and the police officers assumed that I was the prostitute and he was a foreigner. Because of that [trend], this group of women started meeting to challenge these ideas. It was a combination of meeting in each other's homes and meeting in the community to challenge stereotypes about Black women that had been in existence for a long time, but were really becoming a part of the status quo.

They were also challenging the ways that Black women had been left out of the national canon and the national history. They were also challenging their economic situation. They were supporting each other. This group called the Afrocubanas Group—sometimes I call it the Afrocubanas Working Group or Project, but just think of it as a community activist group—was founded by four Afrocubanas, Daisy Rubiera Castillo, Inés María Martiatu Terry, Sandra Álvarez and Carmen González. When they started the group, they then started meeting in each other's homes to have conversations about what was going on. But also, it evolved into an intellectual project. That's when they started saying, “we want to publish things,” because they were already having community forums or workshops to talk about the topics that I've described.

They published their first book in 2011, and the book was called Afrocubanas: Historias, Pensamientos, y Prácticos Cultural. It came out with the Editorial Social Sciences Press, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, and did really, really well. Within two weeks, the five thousand copies that it printed were gone. To sort of sum up the answer to your question, what's important is that [the Spanish-language book] came out of this moment where there was anti-racist activism going on in Cuba and this was the only group that combined that with anti-sexist activism or intersectional activism that wanted to come together specifically about Black women's experiences.

NDD: Awesome, thank you Devyn. One of the things that you mentioned that’s standing out to me are these gendered implications of buena presencia for Black women and for Black women's labor. I think it's really significant because that's one of those things that I think is a somewhat universal experience of Black women. I'm thinking specifically of the Crown Act that was recently introduced [in the US House of Representatives] to ban natural hair discrimination in the workplace. That's just really telling, to me, that there's specifically a name for it when we think about what's happening in Cuba. That's really fascinating to see that connection there.

Can you tell me more about how participating in networks with Afro-Cuban women and grassroots organizations influenced your approach to this book? It sounds like they were really important to how the original version came into existence. But I'm wondering what those networks meant as well for how you engaged with the book and how you engaged in the process of publishing the translation.

DSB: In some ways, the connections that I made with the Afrocubanas Working Group became the foundation for all of my experiences in Cuba. When you're doing research in another country, you begin to build a network. You begin to build a group of collaborators. And this was my main group of collaborators, my main network. Some people who work on Cuba have really tight relationships with the University of Havana or with the Instituto de Historia, the Institute of History, and I have some relationships with those as well. But it was interesting that because Daisy Rubiera befriended me and brought me into the circle, this became the space that I navigated in whenever I was in Cuba. That meant that we have done a lot of collaborations together, both before and then for this book. Daisy Rubiera and I presented a paper in 2013 at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Because it was being held in Canada, Daisy was able to go up. We presented a paper on Afrocubanas, oral histories, and testimonios as a site of knowledge. I was already thinking about this because I wanted to use oral histories when I was writing my first monograph, and Daisy Rubiera had authored two different oral histories or testimonios—like testimonies or memoirs— in Cuba, with Black Cuban women. She was someone who I looked up to, as someone who did work on saying, “You know what? We can use oral histories and we can use the testimonies of Black women to create a counter archive—to create counter narratives about the Cuban experience.” So we presented on that. Another way [grassroots collaboration] was important for my first book, Anti-Racism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, was as I was doing my work about the 1960s and the campaign to eliminate racial discrimination. I'm a historian, so I'm using mostly documents as well as oral histories, but most of the documents that I had from the early 1960s were written by men. The book was coming out of research that was being formed in the cradle of Black feminism. And yet the book, the actors in the book, tend to be men, right? And these are people who, who Daisy Rubiera is like, “You've got to make sure you read the book by Juan René Betancourt, you have to make sure you read the book by Walterio Carbonell.” So she's helping me find these sources. But we both know that there are not as many written sources about Black women from that time period.

And so I wrote an epilogue about Afrocubanas as being the most recent, or the newest form of anti-racist, but also anti-sexist and intersectional activism that was happening in Cuba. If my book is tracing Black activism from the 60s all the way to the present, it's mostly about the 60s. But then the epilogue is about the present. And I feature the Afrocubanas Working Group. So because I had spent so much time with them, because I had gone to conferences working with Daisy Rubiera, because I've conducted oral histories with Inés María Martiatu Terry—one of the other co-founders of the group— when Neil Roberts asked me, “Do you know any good books that should be published in English from Spanish?” I immediately thought of Afrocubanas. I find the book to be extremely compelling because it's so unique. There isn't another book that exists like it in Cuba. It's the only book with the title Afrocubanas. It's the only book written by and about Black Cuban women's experiences.

The thing is, Daisy and I had [already] tried to publish the book other places in English. Translation is an expensive project, so in order to get someone to translate a book, and then to get a press to publish it, you usually need a translation grant. We had applied for those and hadn't won them. We'd been rejected. And so we were just holding on to the application. When Neil Roberts asked, we pulled out that same application. Then it became a collaborative experience to do the translation. The series editors, Neil Roberts and Jane Anna Gordon, chose the translator, and it wasn't someone I knew. They chose the translator, Karina Alma. She worked on the first version of the translation, and then I went back and read that translation. There were a lot of things in the translation that were Cubanisms. I would read a sentence like, “that didn't sound quite right,” and I'd go to the Spanish one. I'd [realize] “Oh, that's because this word means such and such when people use it locally in Cuba, but probably doesn't mean such and such in other Spanish dialects that people might speak.” Because of that, I then emailed Daisy, or someone else, or based [it] on my own knowledge [when] we need[ed] to really change this, so that was the sort of collaboration for that.

It also became a collaboration when you think about the fact that the book is based on women who live all across the island, and they don't all know each other. Many of them do know each other, or have heard of each other's work, but they don't all know each other personally. Part of the collaboration was to get permissions to be able to actually reach everybody, all across the island. Inés María Martiatu Terry, one of the co-editors of the original book, knew most of the people, and a lot of people outside of Havana. Daisy and I didn't know them, and because Inés María Martiatu Terry had passed, we're scrambling like, “Can we find people on Facebook? Can we? Do we know somebody who knows somebody?” So that was a really interesting process as well. But each time when I talked to an Afrocubana [asking] did they want to participate, did they want the book to be published in English, there was an enthusiastic yes. There was a sense that “Yes, we definitely want to share these ideas with the English speaking world.”

NDD: One of the things that you emphasized pretty strongly just now was the importance of collaboration at every stage of this project, and it seems to me that there's a really intimate connection between the scholarship that you're producing and the activism that people were already participating in, in Cuba. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about what scholar activism means to you, and what recommendations you would offer to junior scholars who are attempting to strike a balance between their academic work and their need to try to be involved with some really pressing activist movements right now, whether it's Black Lives Matter, End SARS, or prison abolition, or even stuff that’s more local to their communities or their institutions like unionizing with graduate student workers.

DSB: One of the things that, for me, is one of the most important tenets of Africana Studies—I'm a scholar of Africana Studies; I sit at the intersection of Africana Studies and Latin American Studies, but you really see this in Africana studies— is that it comes out of a history of civil unrest and social activism, and therefore that's a key component, and continues to be a key component of Africana Studies. My understanding is that most Africana [Studies] scholars understand activism to be a big part of what they do. Now, obviously, activism from the ivory tower can look really different. Many scholars march in the streets, and attend protests, and work in local communities. But it can also look [many] different ways. Sometimes that's just about how important it has and continues to be for Black Africana [Studies] scholars to collaborate with communities. Not everybody does that. Not everyone values community knowledge. There are plenty of people who can go to Cuba, just work in the archive, and write a book from the archive. Or they could they go to the Library of Congress and use US State Department dispatches about Cuba and write a book about Cuba from US government archives. So not everyone works in the archive, or works in collaboration with community activists, and communities. I do think that for me, from the very beginning, I knew that because my work was about Black people, and for Black people—I knew that I wanted to collaborate with communities.

What that means, also, for my career is that I think sometimes you have to make challenging choices. My first book was the book that got me tenure. Right now, I should be using my time to write my second monograph, so that then I could be promoted to full professor, which is only 3% of women of color. That number is divided among women of color, so Black, Latina, Native American, Asian American, so on and so forth. I definitely would like to be a part of that 3% one day, and yet, I decided that I wanted to work on this translation. This probably took about two years. It's the project that I've been doing since I got tenure. So for me, it was an act of social activism to do that, because I know that this book isn't going to get me promoted to full [professor]. But it's something that I felt I owed and was indebted to this community for welcoming me in and supporting my scholarship in my first book in a particular way. There was a way that it was a collaborative relationship from the very beginning. They helped me with my first book, and then I can say, “You know what? I can help by getting this book that you all have published out into an English-speaking audience.” It's sort of like we're working together, because the whole goal is to get ideas about Black lives [and] Black experiences out into the world. In this case, it's about Black Cuban women’s experiences.

What advice do I have for pre-tenure scholars and graduate students as they think about merging activism with their work? I think you have to follow your heart. I think you have to follow your heart and stay true to the things you believe in. That sometimes can be challenging, because people are going to ask, “Well, why are you doing something?” And I think that as long as you are doing what feels right for you and your community…for me, there's a lot of crossover between my academic work from activism work, which is what I said before. I feel like that's a part of Africana Studies. But I think it's also a part of Black feminist work, right? It’s that for Black feminists, there's never been a way to sort of detangle the personal and the political. There's never been a way to sort of pull apart knowledge making and working in communities. So I would just say stay true to the tradition. Stay true to the Black feminist tradition. Stay true to the Africana tradition, continue to do this work in collaboration, and your scholarship is going to be better, but you're also going to feel like you're doing the work that you were called to do.

NDD: That is very helpful advice. I think that you're really able to point out this sort of tension that we might sometimes feel between what we owe to the academy and what we owe to our communities. And that's a real dynamic that a lot of junior scholars might experience in Black Studies and related fields when the work that we're doing isn't because we want to get tenure or isn't necessarily because we want to climb the academic ladder. It's because we want to do the work in a way that's going to make a difference for our people. And so I think that's something that you were really able to elucidate pretty clearly.

I'm curious if you can speak a little bit about some of the contributions that Afrocubanas makes to how we think about Black feminism and transnationalism?

DSB: I think one is in Cuba in particular. The intervention that I think it makes into Cuban history, and you know, the history of ideas and Cuban Studies, is really this sort of new racialized and gendered language. As I said before, it was really radical and groundbreaking for them to call the book Afrocubanas. Most of the time when you see the term “Afro-Cuban,” it's a term that, in Cuba, is often used to describe cultural practices, so Black or African-descended cultural practices. Fernando Ortiz uses the term to talk about cultural practices, and that's how it's always been. It's like Afro-Cuban folklore, or Afro-Cuban music or cultural practices. Then in the United States, Afro-Cuban has been used to describe the group of people of African descent in Cuba by North American and US scholars. But most Cubans, at least until recently, didn't go around calling themselves Afro-Cuban. They would call themselves Black, or mulatto, or mestiza, like their skin color, but they would mostly say “I'm just Cuban.” The idea of a hyphenated identity was sort of frowned upon and looked at as something that was divisive for the nation, or something that was an African American thing. But that's changed because of this rise of the new anti-racist activist space in Cuba. You see Cubans really connecting their work to movements of afrodescendientes across the hemisphere. You see Cubans embracing the term “Afro-Cuban.” And in this case, you see Black Cuban women embracing the term “Afrocubana,” and really saying, “You have to see us this way. This is who we are, we want to be named. And we want our experiences to be highlighted, revealed, uncovered.” When you look at the Spanish version of the book, you can't get away from the title. It's in bright red on a yellow book. Afrocubanas. You can imagine the shock that this would have had in bookstores all across the country. So I think for Cuban studies, one of the interventions is that sort of new, racialized and gendered language—the calling out that there is a positionality that is Afrocubanidad, or Black Cuban womanhood.

For Caribbean thought, for Africana studies, and for Latin American Studies, I think it continues in this tradition of making an epistemological intervention of where the personal is political, and that knowledge can look a variety of ways. Fitting in the same tradition as Cherie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back, you see that this book is a hybrid book. It doesn't have just one type of essay. There's a reason that it's divided into three sections: history, thought, and cultural practices, but even that doesn't describe the types of essays. Some are your traditional academic essays, and some are poems, and some are self-reflections, and some are testimonios, and some are creative writing pieces. And some are musical pieces. It's incredible to think that they're saying that all of this counts as Black knowledge. All of this counts as knowledge. One of the editors of the original book, Inés María Martiatu Terry, talks about how the hybrid nature of the book might make it look unintelligible for some, but that it's not because it actually brings together all the different ways Black women live, love, and survive. I think that that epistemological intervention continues, like I said before, the tradition of Africana Studies and Latinx Studies, and that we see it being like those other types of books that have this combination of a variety of texts. Highlighting that, I think, is really important.

I'm not sure if I would call [this] an intervention, as much as I would call it something that I think makes the book really unique. The scope—the geographic scope, but also the generational scope—really brings in Black women from across the island. So big cities, little cities, rural spaces, urban spaces. [It’s] also a book that includes young women who are publishing some of their first pieces, and includes older women who are retirees and who've been in the struggle, you know, their entire lives. I think it’s really, really interesting to think about this intergenerational space of Black Cuban women's activism. The editors felt like all of that was valuable, and that we needed to really think about what all types of women brought. And the same thing for sexuality. There are pieces about women from a variety of different sexualities that I think is important. Not as much as maybe some people would want, but I think it has a first step in that direction.

NDD: The fact that this is now available in English and published in the United States is necessarily going to introduce the text to a different audience. I'm wondering if you can speak about what you want the text to accomplish with American audiences in particular. I think that you've elaborated really clearly on the significance of having this text published in Cuba and having that work be available to claim an Afro-Cuban identity for Cubans on the island, who may have previously discussed Afrocubanidad as folklore or culture and not necessarily as people. But I'm curious about what you want this book to accomplish with American audiences, and if there are any particular vignettes from the text that you think best encapsulate what you want to accomplish with American audiences.

DSB: What I’m really interested in, and one of the things I'm a big proponent for, is global or transnational Black feminism. I want US audiences always to have a wider scope and be able to talk about Black feminism in the United States, and Black feminism globally and transnationally. I think for people who are interested in Black feminism, that reading about this is going to add another layer so that they can see so many of the similarities between the challenges that Black women face in the United States and Cuba. Then they can also see the ways that many of the challenges that Black Cuban women face are intensely local, and are about their experiences living in a former colony of Spain that was for a long time a part of the neo-imperialist US sphere, and then living in a revolutionary space that breaks away from that US sphere. When we think about Black feminism, I want US readers to think about it in conversation with the world. I'm really excited for the different ways that people will be able to read this and connect with it, and recognize how Cubans and Americans have a lot more things in common than maybe people would think. That can be a bridge for future conversations and collaborations between not only just scholars and academics, but regular everyday people. I know so many people who sometimes are still afraid to travel to Cuba. Or they still see Cuba as this communist space. And I think when you read a book like this, and you get to have an experience with real people's lives and real people’s struggles, real people's understanding of how they see themselves, that it demystifies a place that, for the United States, has been a mystery for so long. It's exciting for Black women to be at the forefront of doing that work.

NDD: Are there particular examples from the book that you think highlight, or might be well-suited to make some of these connections between Black women in the US and in Cuba?

DSB: There are a couple of chapters in the book that I think are really interesting that people might want to take a look at. One is the chapter on hair by Carmen González Chacón. Chapter 16 is really incredible. This is a piece that's somewhat of a creative writing piece, but then transitions into a personal testimony piece, that transitions into sort of an academic essay. So she starts off talking about what it means to get your hair your hair hot combed. She [explains], “It's the tap tap of the comb while they’re cooling it off, and then they run it through your hair. And then, you go to the beach, and you messed up your hair from the hot comb, and then your mom is fussing at you. And so you have to wash the sand out. And then you have to go back and have it hot combed again.” She's describing these early childhood experiences with Black hair that I think so many Black women can relate to; we all remember many of those experiences with the hot comb, with moms fussing about getting our hair messed up because they just did it, and so on and so forth. That's one of the pieces that I think is really interesting and that people I think will draw to.

There's another chapter in there that I think everyone should definitely take a look at, and this one's from the history section. “Women ‘of Color’ in Santiaguera Colonial Society: A Commentary” and “Reconstructing Ex-Slave Belén Álvarez’s Story,” chapters two and three, are both about Black women in colonial Cuba. I think [they’re] fascinating because they talk about Black women being getting capital and buying freedom for family members. They talk about Black women starting small businesses. They talk about all the ways that Black women resisted and survived, and sometimes actually try to wait to thrive during the colonial plantation society. I found that [those] to be really important, and a way of talking about Black women's agency, resistance, and survival, that is just beautiful, in a way that I think women will draw to.

One of the essays that I think is really different is Irene Esther Ruiz Narváez's essay on Black women in sports, which is super cool because it talks about all the different ways that Black women since the revolution have brought international fame to Cuba, both regionally but then also internationally by winning in different sporting competitions. I’m a sports fan, so for me, it was just like, “Oh, this is so awesome!” to be able to think about Black women volleyball winners, and Black women in track and field, and Black women doing all these really incredible sports feats, and what that meant for the Cuban national identity. Because to win an Olympic medal or to go compete as a Cuban was something that was really important to the women. They talk about that, so I really liked that essay too.

I think all of these are things that US readers will draw to and find things that feel familiar, but that also feel a little bit different. And I think that's what's exciting.