Lisa Brock
Academic Director
Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College

Lisa Brock,
Liberal Education Chairperson
Ph.D., History
lbrock@colum.edu

Lisa Brock, Ph.D. is a professor of African history and Diaspora studies at Columbia College Chicago. Her articles on South Africa, Mozambique, African-Americans, Cuba and Blacks in the Diaspora have appeared in such journals as Cuban Studies, Contributions in Black Studies, Issue: A Journal of Opinion, Souls, Peace Review, and Temas: Cultura, Ideologicía, Sociedad and in book collections such as Africa’s Media Image. Her book,  Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution (Temple University Press), was published in 1998 and her writings are regularly a part of the website: AfroCubaweb. She has served on the planning committees of the African Studies Association, given papers at the Latin American Studies Association, American Historical Association, the National Association of Black Journalist (and many others) and is on the Editorial Collective of the Radical History Review. She sees herself as operating in an interdisciplinary arena and has given lectures and served as visiting professor at numerous institutions such as the University of New Mexico, Clemson, Columbia University and many many others.

Since the early 1990s, Brock has been researching and writing on African-American and Cuban relations. She has joined a host of other intellectuals and scholars, who while trained in African, African-American, Caribbean or Latin-American areas, has shifted their focus into the broader and more internationalists "Black Atlantic" or African Diaspora Studies. This field is exploding and Brock sees herself as a part of this movement. She speaks often on her work and is working now on a second book entitled: Black in Two Americas: Comparative Identity, History and Struggle in Cuba and in the United States. As an historian and activist, Brock views history as a way to enter contemporary discussions.

Publications

Reconnecting Cuban lies
By Lori S. Robinson

Between Race and Empire: African- Americans and Cubans before tbe Cuban Revolution Edited
by Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes (Temple University Press, $22.95)

WE’VE BEEN DUPED. African-Americans have let the dominant power structure brainwash us into thinking that what happens outside the U.S. borders is none of our concern. In the case of some African countries, at least, we saw past the law. But foreign policy in non-African countries? Forget it. Black folks have too much to worry about here, even if the people in question live on an island only 90 miles away.

African-Americans didn’t use to have such a self-absorbed, myopic point of view. Between Race and Empire: African- Americans and Cubans before tbe Cuban Revolution documents that historic, intimate connection. Editors Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes have gathered essays from eight North American and three Cuban scholars which prove that even during slavery and Jim Crow, Black Americans cared about Cuba and vice versa. "Except for Haiti, no New World society received as much attention from Black North Americans in the nineteenth century as did Cuba," writes contributor David Heliwig.

Between Race and Empire informs readers about a shared history we should know. Writes Castañeda in the epilogue, "In this historical moment, we hope that this book, by looking into our common past, will help us negotiate a common future."

For nearly two centuries, African Americans and Cubans have influenced each other in a number of ways, as shown in this collection of eleven essays. Brock writes, "Although racism and empire thrust African-Americans and Cubans into each other’s assigned physical spaces, it was who they were before and after segregation and exploitation that most influenced their cultural relations."

The nineteenth-century African American leader Frederick Douglass called for U.S. blacks to volunteer for Cuba’s war against Spain. Negro American newspapers supported the Afro-Cuban struggle, and the magazine Minerva, published in the 1880s, provided a forum for Cuban women of color.

The most fruitful connections were made through sports, specifically baseball. Brock and co-contributor Bijan Bayne reveal in the essay "Not Just Black: African-Americans, Cubans and Baseball" that the name of the first African American baseball team, in 1885, was the "Cuban Giants," that African Americans and Cuban teams played against each other in the United States and in Cuba, and that American blacks even tried to pass as Cubans.

Just as African Americans asserted themselves in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties, Cubans, who also looked to Harlem as a Negro mecca, also articulated their African heritage and quest for equality through the written word. Gustavo Urrutia’s forceful column, "Ideales de una Raza/Ideas of a Race," ran in the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina from the late twenties to the thirties and urged racial pride, as did the like-minded writings of Pldcido, Regino Boti, and Regino Pedroso. Nicol6s Guillén, whose "Motivos de Son/Son Motifs" became a classic of Cuban literature, enjoyed a fruitful friendship with Langston Hughes, who influenced and encouraged his work.

As Geoffrey Jacques outlines in "Cubop! Afro-Cuban Music and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Culture," the Cuban imprint on American musical styles was evident as far back as 1909. This influence is obvious in the mambo dance craze popularized by Pérez-Prado and Machito in the forties. Bandleader Mario Bauz6, percussionist Chano Pozo, and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie fused bebop with Afro-Cuban rhythms.

The contributors to this excellent study have uncovered a rich legacy of two peoples who not only fought racism and imperialism but also interacted in the process.

- Eugene Holley, Jr.

The 40-year political conflict between the United States and Fidel Castro’s Cuba has camouflaged a history of relationships between the two countries that was significant and important. Part of mat history is the little-known but revealing interactions between the Afro communities of the two countries. That relationship was intellectual as African Americans looked south for support and justification of their ideas; cultural, as Cuban music influenced by the rhythms of Africa had an important role in the evolution of American jazz; and social, as baseball players and other Cubans came to the United States and experienced a racism dissimilar from that in Cuba. These essays mark an Unusual collaboration between American and Cuban scholars and attempt to show a pan-Afro racial kinship that went beyond national borders and centered on common experiences shaped by slavery and prejudice. The book is valuable for American and Latin American academic collections as well as public libraries with Cuban andlor African American patrons. - Mark L. Grover Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT