Cuba and Consent
My essay, Cuba and Consent, was included in a chapbooks series published by The Head and the Hand Press in partnership with The Venceremos Brigade. It’s available for pre-order here!
The essay weaves together some of my own experiences around consent, and explores how the framing of the conflict between the United States and Cuba as being rooted in the Cold War ignores a much longer history of US colonialism.
The seed was planted for this piece two years ago when I went to Cuba as part of the 50th Venceremos Brigade. While I was there, I was reading Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture by Nora Samaran – where she talks about nurturance culture as the opposite of rape culture (which is centered around domination). As I listened to leading Afro-Cuban scholar, Esteban Morales Domínguez, talk about the dynamic between the United States and Cuba, and the United States’ unwillingness to accept economic remuneration for land like many other countries – it clicked for me how colonialism, imperialism and other systems of domination are on larger scale about acting without the consent of a group or people.
Excerpt: I think this type of experience is what tends to come to mind often when we think about consent. But consent can be at play in interactions between two people – sexual harassment, assault or other kinds of manipulative or abusive behavior. Or on a societal level as one group of people subjugating another to their benefit without their consent – colonialism, slavery, systemic racism, caste systems, and capitalism. The behavior we normalize at an interpersonal level can translate to national and international relations.
The root of the problem however, is that the desire to dominate or get what you want at the expense of others has become normalized as “okay” or even “being successful.” Domination culture is so often at the heart of what corrupts love, intimacy and connection. That’s something I’ve understood for a long time, but I had not understood how central it is to the US’s relationship with Cuba as well.
Interestingly, in the late 1800s Americans knew that’s what this was about. But somewhere along the way, the United States successfully shifted the narrative to be about communism instead of imperialism.
1899 – Puck Magazine, Image Source: Library of Congress
In a cartoon, released during the year following the Spanish-American War – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines are portrayed as school children with “Uncle Sam” standing over them with a pointer. The caption reads “School Begins: Uncle Sam (to his new class of Civilization) – Now, children you’ve got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead of you, and remember that, in a little while, you will feel as glad to be here as they are!”
If there’s any confusion about the trajectory that is anticipated for the “new class”, the “class ahead” includes Alaska, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas – all territories that became U.S. states. Behind them a chalkboard announces, “The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent, until they can govern themselves.”
In short, imperialist policy is at its core about acting without the consent of a people or nation.
