How did witnessing Cuba's prioritization of academics and the arts influence you as a filmmaker and scholar?

The first time I travelled to Cuba was during the 90s, during a time of economic crisis euphemistically called “the special period” that was caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and exacerbated by the US government’s embargo of the island. At that time, I had spent most of my life in schools where I was the one working class Black girl who had been picked to be educated among wealthy White children. My family, who treasured education, taught me to think of myself as a lottery winner. In the context of the US and its rationing of quality education, I was. Being in Cuba was the first time I understood that education should be and could be universal. I toured schools attended by children of all skin tones. Not one had a police officer or a metal detector. I met AfroCuban physicians and professors who had $0 in student loan debt, because education in Cuba is free from daycare to doctorate. Access is based on merit, not your family’s access to generational wealth. Seeing that public education really could be universal eventually inspired me to bring that democratizing spirit to my scholarship. I founded the educational arts organization Progressive Pupil to make Black studies for everybody using public engagement and media.

I was also transformed by the extent to which Cuban artists are supported by public funding. Although now I’m focused full-time on my creative work as a writer/producer of television and film, at when I first began traveling to Cuba I had convinced myself that I could never be a full time artist. In a time before Ava, Shonda, and Issa, it was very rare to see a Black woman leading a project from behind the camera. Also, I was from a working class family. The prospect of being a “starving artist” after my grandparents sacrificed so much to make my education possible made me feel selfish and nonsensical. While in Cuba, I observed how much of the publicly funded arts celebrated the country’s African heritage. There were even publicly funded hip hop festivals that encouraged exchanges between international and Cuban artists. In addition, this art was clearly a form of community-building from the block level to the nation level. Once I returned to the US, I could see how much African American art of all forms functioned in a similar way. I realized that I did not have to be successful in the mainstream in order to create work that was impactful and unifying.

What were the benefits and difficulties of filming a documentary in Cuba?

We were such amateurs (and I say that with love). We arrived in Havana without a couple of borrowed prosumer cameras expecting to just film what we experienced. It was much less a cinema verité approach and much more a home movie approach. Having the goal of sharing what we experienced with people in our communities who had not had the opportunity to travel there very much increased our reflectiveness and mindfulness throughout the whole trip. Some of us were surprised—given all we had heard about the restrictions on free speech in Cuba—by how open so many people were with us on camera. Both the US and Cuba have a long way to go in terms of achieving racial equality and honoring human rights. However, many everyday Afro-Cubans we met during our trip were open about their frustrations and aspirations for their country.

Your trip to Cuba took place in 2002, and Black and Cuba was released in 2015. Could you share about the process and timeline of making the film in the intervening years?

Ha! The actual creation of documentaries does not take a very long time. It’s the process of funding these films that tends to drag on for most filmmakers. In between our 2002 journey through Havana and Santiago and the release of the Black and Cuba, I wrote, directed, and produced the short documentary about the journey entitled Beautiful Me(s): Finding Our Revolutionary Selves in Black Cuba (2008). As Beautiful Me(s) made its way through film festivals and campuses, I received a lot of feedback from audiences asking for more historical context about the connections between African Americans and AfroCubans as well as more footage of our time in Cuba. That inspired me to return to the project and adapt it into a feature-length documentary.

What scholarly and artistic works influenced the message and style of Black and Cuba most significantly?

Some of the influences are shouted out in the film, particularly The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and Assata the memoir by Assata Shakur. As I wrote in the Black Camera scholarly article, “Black and Cuba: Liberating African American Studies and the Tools of Third Cinema,” my filmmaking is very much influenced by the tenets of Third Cinema. Third Cinema is a creative movement that encourages artists from historically colonized communities to develop an approach that contrasts the “Hollywood” style, which is anchored mostly in the fantasies of dominant cultures, and the “independent” style, which emphasizes the significance of the individual auteur while frequently reflecting the aspirations of the most privileged members of marginalized groups. As a queer Black femme filmmaker who rarely saw myself or my communities depicted with nuance at the cineplex or the arthouse theater, Third Cinema was a revelation to me. I discovered I could autonomously create work with the emancipatory aims of building community and amplifying the voices of people with intersectional identities. Of course, this has its own challenges in terms of funding and recognition. However, while we executed a grassroots distribution strategy for Black and Cuba, I found whenever we approached community-based institutions in neighborhoods like Detroit, South LA, or Harlem — we were welcomed with open arms, standing ovations, and sold out crowds. When we approached Tribeca or Beverly Hills — not so much. I think this gap in where and how the film was received illuminates how important the Third Cinema approach can be to developing work that explicitly and democratically discusses race, class, gender, and sexuality.

The AfroCuban population is largely ignored in American media. What is to be gained by recognizing and documenting this significant portion of the Cuban population?

First, recognizing and documenting AfroCubans combats the overall whitewashing of the Latine diaspora that remains prevalent in both mainstream and Spanish speaking media, educational institutions, and everyday discourse. The fact is many Latine folk — from Canada to Chile — identify as Black and/or are mocha skinned. It is not the exception. It’s the norm. Second, heightening the visibility of AfroCubans reveals how the US embargo of Cuba has a racist impact in that it disproportionately harms people of African descent. Third, documenting the political culture of Black Cuba illustrates that opinions about the Cuban Revolution or US foreign policy toward that country within the predominately White-identified Cuban American community—especially those of the Boomer generation—are not necessarily shared by the majority of people still living on the island.

In light of protests across the U.S. last summer and the major protests in Cuba at present, do you have any plans to revisit your documentary, or the nation of Cuba?

There is a Spanish-language version of the film with which I would love to do a grassroots tour through Cuba. One of the takeaway messages of Black and Cuba is that the African American and AfroCuban communities can triumph over racial injustice in part by collaborating and learning from our respective struggles. I think our racial reckoning in the US over the past year and Cuba’s current reflection on the limits of the effectiveness of capitalist reforms illuminates the validity of that message even more. As steep as the mountain still is, venceremos.