More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (review)

Susan Greenbaum's provocative book about Afro-Cubans in Tampa is a rich mix of intense historical research and information gained through a long, devoted association with Tampa's black Cuban community. More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa contains analyses specific to the city's Afro-Cubans as well as across its multiple racial and ethnic groups. In her introduction, Greenbaum makes it clear that she has a mission. Its goal? To debunk the prevailing myth of enduring racial solidarity, perpetuated by white Tampa Latins, that has plagued much of the scholarship and even local nostalgia about Tampa for more than a century. She also wants to make it known that Afro-Cubans and African Americans in Tampa interacted, indeed cooperated, a fact that has been obscured by yet another myth of insurmountable cultural differences. The prevailing, uncomplicated image of interracial and interethnic relations in the former "Cigar City" has virtually erased both the true story and the real protagonists of a much more intricate story that has long gone begging—until now.

The introduction and first five chapters provide a calculated yet not dispassionate examination of the facts—the survival tactics, resistance strategies, and social evolution of Tampa's Afro-Cubans—from 1886 through the creation of La Unión Martí-Maceo, a separate mutual aid society that was founded when their white Cuban compatriots took the unsegregated Liceo Cubano for themselves. Greenbaum notes that white Cubans (and most historians) explain the creation of La Unión Martí-Maceo by accepting as fact that white Cubans had to capitulate to Jim Crow pressures to segregate. Not totally rejecting this "official" rationalization, Greenbaum argues that this simplistic analysis does not take into account other logical considerations. By highlighting white Cuban agency in the matter, Greenbaum makes it clear that this myth of victimization has served more to assuage white guilt than to preserve any semblance of truth.

In chapters 6 and 7, Greenbaum exposes yet another fallacy about black Cubans in Tampa. Despite popular belief, Afro-Cubans did indeed interact and ally with their African American compeers. Never losing sight of their minority status in the Latin enclave, Greenbaum adeptly situates Afro-Cubans in the context of the greater society, both black and white, and again explains how this myth of self-segregation from African Americans is a reflection more of white Cuban anxiety than of reality.

Chapters 8 and 9 provide an inside, critical view of the difficulties Afro-Cubans faced because of dislocation, due mostly to a brutally racist urban renewal project and economically motivated out-migration. In illustrating the options Afro-Cubans had for surviving this maelstrom, she includes those available to them by integration into African American society and participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Greenbaum tells of current heroic efforts by Martí-Maceo's membership to survive the onslaught of development fever—the latest of many ills to befall Ybor City and blacks. Yet, rather than take on a tragic tone, "Out of Time," the book's final chapter, is an accurate if poignant testimony to black advocacy, agency, and dignity, even in the face of near extinction. Greenbaum sees these as the true legacy of black Cubans in Tampa.

In More than Black, Greenbaum has recovered and validated the experience of a people whom time, convenience, and deliberate forgetfulness have tried to erase from American immigrant and Cuban history. As one of the few scholars who has ever examined the effects of diverging systems of racial classification—the Iberian and the Anglo—on black people in the United States, she deserves a great deal of credit. Her book and her model of scholarly activism are an inspiration.