The Passing of a Black Giant in Cuba: A Tribute to Walterio Carbonell
Posted April 15, 2008

Widely regarded as the father of a Black Consciousness movement in Cuba, the Cuban ethnologist and historian, Walterio Carbonell, died on Sunday, April 13, 2008, at the age of 88. For Cuba, whose Black population now comprises 62 percent of the total, it is a great loss. Carbonell was regarded as one of the most profound Cuban intellectuals for the latter half of the 20th century. His work, On the Origin of National Culture, published in Havana in 1961 but immediately banned by the Castro regime, made him an instant icon to Black Cuban racial dissidents. The book was published in France only a few weeks ago.

His searing criticism of the Cuban regime’s handling of the racial question, caused him to be arrested in 1968 and interned in a hard labor camp for years. Released, he was interned again, but this time in a psychiatric institution where his health was permanently damaged. In declining health ever since, the government nonetheless continued to fear his influence over a younger generation of dissident Blacks who grew up ignorant of his works. He was literally rediscovered in Cuba three years ago, when, in 2005, the foreign press mistakenly and prematurely announced his death, causing a minor uproar that plucked him out of obscurity.

His discreet burial, on Monday, April 14, before some 50 aggrieved friends and relatives, had an ironic twist: among the wreaths laid on his grave, one was from Communist Party chief, Fidel Castro, and another from President Raul Castro, a fact that many of his followers were quick to read as a post-mortem attempt at co-optation.


Dr. Carlos Moore, a Cuban anthropologist and political scientist who resides in Brazil, has been a vocal critic of Cuban's racial policies for over four decades. A former professor at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, he is the author of “Castro, the Blacks and Africa, ” “ This Bitch of a Life,” the biography of Nigerian legend Fela Kuti, and his own autobiography, “Pichón: A Memoir of Race and Revolution in Castro´s Cuba,” which will be published in fall 2008 by Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press. Dr. Moore can be reached at carlosmoore61@yahoo.com.