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Obama’s win challenges Castro ideals

The Obama conundrum threatens the Castro brothers’ dysfunctional dynasty. Democracy and capitalism, the duo’s argument goes, is only good for the white and the comfortable preying on the black and poor.

Then this son of a black Kenyan dad and a white Kansas mom gets 53 percent of the vote in a country where black Americans are only 12 percent of the population. He wins over the suburbs, grabs the youth vote, sweeps the Hispanic vote, attracts about half the white and elderly vote and overwhelmingly claims the Jewish vote despite Hussein for a middle name.

Explain that to 11 million Cubans—the majority black or mestizo—who have been spoon-fed the regime’s “racist U.S. imperialists” propaganda for five decades.

Imagine the monumental challenge of this historic moment for a regime in which Afro-Cubans hold virtually no high-level posts beyond a handful of old black generals who fought with Fidel and Raul Castro.

There’s no glass ceiling for Cuban blacks and women on the communist island—it’s a fortified white male wall of condescending machista malice built on scare tactics.

Forget the immensity of the civil rights movement, the rise of a growing black middle class, the election of black Americans and their appointment by both Democratic and Republican presidents to top Cabinet posts. Nah, just watch “Mississippi Burning”—the Cuban regime’s favorite TV rerun. That’s the revolutionary drill.

Omar Lopez Montenegro, the 54-year-old executive director of human rights for the Cuban American National Foundation, calls Obama’s election the debunking of the Tarzan syndrome.

“There’s a fundamental condition to the issue of race in Cuba,” said Lopez Montenegro, who is black and was repeatedly detained in Cuba for civil disobedience until he left in 1992. “It’s that the Cuban population has been trapped in the Tarzan syndrome—the white superhero who has to defend blacks in Africa because, you know, those poor little blacks can’t do it themselves.

“That Tarzan was Fidel, and now it’s Raul, and it’s also the political class there.”

Let’s not discount that racism and discrimination exist—and not just in this country but in the dark recesses of cold hearts everywhere. But nowhere have there been more efforts to eradicate racist attitudes and generational poverty—through affirmative action, Pell grants for poor college students, housing and employment rules that ban discrimination—than here.

It’s a stark contrast to Cuba’s “revolutionary equality,” where almost everybody is poor and struggling—except the predominantly white ruling class.

Obama stands not only as the symbol of five decades of progress. He’s the everyman as healer in a white world, in his black skin, marked by the dire poverty he witnessed as a small child living with his stepdad and mom in Indonesia.

Those of us who worry that Obama would reward a despotic regime by ignoring its horrendous human rights record must dare to dream about the power of symbolism, the challenge that skin color poses for the Castros.

Obama’s win has “dealt a mortal blow” to the Castros’ Tarzan complex, Lopez Montenegro said. “They can’t say to folks that a democratic future belongs only to whites.”

In one seismic shift, as Cuba’s two old white dudes were left searching for their Tarzan tiger skins to cover their lies, Obama proved democracy belongs to all of us.

Myriam Marquez is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may write to her via e-mail at mmarquez@miamiherald.com.