VI.

Politics

The Maroon settlements in the days of slavery were attempts to form black states; they were, in effect, states within states. Haiti, where slaves led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines captured the governing apparatus in 1804, was only the second independent country in the western hemisphere (the first being the United States) and the first one ruled by blacks. As such, it became a symbol of black independence and a catalyst for black nationalism. Blacks in many other countries participated in politics within the prevailing political structures, but in some nations such activities were restricted. In Cuba, for example, a law forbade the organization of political parties based on race or color after 1911, and the military efforts of the Afro-Cuban leaders Pedro Ivonet and Evaristo Estenoz to reverse that decision ended in disaster in 1912. Government troops killed 3000 Afro-Cubans in Oriente Province, putting an end to black political resistance in Cuba. In Brazil, the Frente Negra Brazileira (Brazilian Black Front), founded in São Paulo in 1931, served as the national political voice of Afro-Brazilians, but faded along with other political parties during the Vargas dictatorship of the 1930s and 1940s. In the British, French, and Dutch Caribbean, blacks have participated in politics for more than a century, and today hold local political power. Governments controlled by people of African ancestry have been in power in the Netherlands Antilles, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Antigua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Jamaica. The Marxist government of Cuba has declared Cubans an Afro-Latin American people and has formed close ties with Angola, Ethiopia, and other African states.

Other Caribbean countries have also established contacts with the free nations of Africa, both directly and through United Nations agencies and other international organizations. Caribbean-African cooperation, however, has more frequently been based on shared ideology than it has on race or color.