NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5393

Text File | 1992-07-27 | 4.0 KB | 89 lines

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Subject: Finney Responds to Benjamin/Blacks/Cuba
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Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

                   A Response by Michael Finney

  to "Blacks Don't Walk Easily in Cuba," by Jody Benjamin (PNS)


I'm a Black American who's lived in Cuba for the past 21 of my 42
years, born and raised in San Francisco, California.  I was forced
to flee the U.S., not only because Black folks don't walk easily
in that country--they don't survive easily either.  On several
occasions, I remember having to run quite uneasily from the police
in my country.  And in my 21 years here, I've walked the streets
of Cuba more easily than I could imagine walking the streets of
any other country.

Jody Benjamin was stopped four or five times in two weeks.  I've
been stopped twice in the same day--perhaps several hundred times
since I've been here.  Rarely has there been a lack of cordiality
on the part of the police officer: "Good day.  Good afternoon.
Could you show me your I.D.?" Never has there been a threat of
violence--even on several occasions when I argued with the
policeman due to my own exasperation and/or anger at being delayed
or wrongly placed under suspicion.  Yes, I might go to jail for
disturbing the peace if I insisted on arguing.  Yes, I would be
subdued if I resisted arrest.  But those possibilities have always
been far-off scenarios--never present as an imminent outcome.
Yes, I've run into and heard about a few policemen here with nasty
attitudes--but nothing like a Los Angeles cop with a nasty
attitude.  (I spent many summers in Watts during my childhood and
adolescence.  There, Black people felt only dread for the police.
I've never seen that dread here.)

At the heart of Jody Benjamin's reaction is, in fact, a testimony
to what it's like being Black in the USA.  He was stopped on
several occasions by the police.  That made him uptight in a
special kind of way.  Not uptight because he was delayed or
annoyed, but rather because he immediately transposed his U.S.
experience to a Cuban setting--an automatic reaction.  African
Americans in the USA know that being stopped by the police could
lead to a number of distasteful or tragic outcomes: racially
motivated insults, unnecessary manhandling, murderous violence or
death justified by a policeman having "thought" he saw a weapon
flash.  (How many unarmed Black youths have met that fate?)

Mr. Benjamin also seems to have forgotten to what extent police
brutality in the USA has been at the center of local and national
organizing in the Black community during the past thirty years.
In the mid-sixties, the Black Panther Party's armed community
patrols, aimed at putting a stop to daily police abuse in
California Bay Area Black communites, launched that organization
into the national limelight.  And now, Los Angeles has again
focused national attention on a problem that government and
independent findings say is worse than ever.

In light of this, to suggest that in the field of race relations,
the Cuban and U.S.  governments may have more in common than they
believe, is not only a gross misrepresentation of daily reality
both here and in the USA, but also a surprisingly superficial
manner to deal with an issue as complex and anguish-filled as
racism.  No, Cuba's is not a perfect, totally harmonious
multi-racial society.  But it's way far away from the inner city,
racist sickness stalking Third World America.

Havana, Cuba
July 23, 1992

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