Karen Bass, Cuba, and Cold War-era Simplifications: A Critical Look at How the Media Covered the VP Selection Process and the History of Black Internationalism

By Matthew Alexander Randolph, Ph.D. Student, and Mikael Wolfe, Assistant Professor, Stanford University

Karen Bass has served as the U.S. Representative from California’s 37th Congressional District since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously represented the state’s 33rd Congressional District from 2011 to 2013 after six years in the California State Assembly. 

From Karen Bass to Kamala Harris


Senator Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential running mate is groundbreaking, indeed historic. Harris is the first Black woman to join a presidential ticket after running herself for president. This is of course cause for celebration, especially since it now makes her the Democratic frontrunner for president in 2024 or 2028, should she and Biden be elected in November.

Because the selection process was unusually public after Biden promised to pick a woman in March, the media vetted many potential candidates he was considering for months. Some media provided near daily “veepstakes” reports on who was still likely in the running, while others even ranked each candidate’s likelihood of being selected as news events changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign. In the wake of the nationwide protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder in late May in particular, the pressure on Biden to choose a Black woman intensified. This elevated the prospects of several Black women beyond such already high profile candidates as Kamala Harris and Susan Rice.

One of them was Congresswoman Karen Bass of southern California, who is Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. During late July and the first week of August, Bass’s “stock” in the veepstakes rose dramatically, with some media placing her right alongside Harris and Rice. But once the media examined Bass’s personal background and long record as State Assemblywoman and then Congresswoman, her stock fell just as rapidly.

Despite all of her impressive accomplishments on the most pressing domestic issues of the moment to the American public (COVID-19, race relations, health care, etc) -- equaling or surpassing Harris’s in terms of what Biden sought in his VP-- she possessed just one “liability” that the media fixated on: Her past travels to Cuba, most of them done in the 1970s and 80s before she even entered electoral politics, along with a few positive statements that she made about Fidel Castro while in elected office. According to the New York Times, Biden wasn’t all that concerned about this liability, since he planned to win the election in the Midwest, not Florida, where Cuban Americans still hold much electoral influence. More important to him was the fact that, unlike Harris, he hardly knew Bass.

While Biden himself may not have made much of Bass’s Cuba liability, centrist Democrats certainly did, and this likely worried his campaign advisers. The context in which she had engaged with Cuba did not matter to them. The mere fact that she had said anything positive at all about Castro and set foot in Cuba to help build houses - an act of solidarity that she would be praised for doing virtually anywhere else - literally and figuratively raised a red flag for them.

Yet it was not only centrist Democrats who jumped on this Cold War-like bandwagon. Unsurprisingly, Bass’s relationship with Cuba was also flattened by the right, such as the conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, who accused her of supporting an “evil” regime. Even the liberal San José Mercury News, one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s major newspapers, evaluated her political stock similarly, doing so alongside the real stock of Apple Computer. Apple got an upward arrow for a fifty percent jump in value while Bass got a downward arrow because “news reports and videos show she praised Scientology, Fidel Castro and a top member of Communist Party USA. Paging Kamala Harris.” No other context was provided.

If liberals, centrists, and conservatives, whether Democratic or Republican, had bothered to look into that context, they would have found out that Black progressives like Bass have long traveled to Cuba, not simply to support “Cuba’s Communist dictatorship” but to learn from the island’s social programs.

Although some media gave Bass a chance to respond to the red-baiting, it was only so she could defend herself and disavow her past: “I’m not a socialist, I’m not a Communist. I’ve belonged to one party my entire life and that’s the Democratic Party, and I’m a Christian.” (Most Cubans, even members of the Communist Party, identify as Catholic). But this repentance was insufficient, for she had committed the unforgivable sin of consorting with a long despised “enemy.”

Bass’s relationship with Cuba had little to do with her work as Congresswoman, but it’s telling that the media felt that Harris’s controversial record as District Attorney of San Francisco and then State Attorney of California was deemed less of a liability, especially in the wake of a reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement. And to a certain extent they were right. Shortly after Harris was selected, Trump forthrightly stated that he would have preferred Bass in his ongoing effort to define Biden as a “puppet of the radical left,” particularly since Florida is a must-win state for Trump.

A couple questions thus arise: Why was Karen Bass as a progressive Black woman not afforded the same nuance as Harris during the VP selection process? Was this just another case of anti-Castro red-baiting sinking the chances of a true progressive joining the Democratic ticket this year, regardless of her race? At first glance, it would seem so. After all, Bernie Sanders came under fire from his moderate rivals, including Biden, for praising Castro’s mass literacy campaign of 1961 (at the same time that he criticized Castro’s authoritarianism, which his rivals ignored of course). The Sanders-bashing for his Castro comment occurred during the week leading up to Biden’s impressive victory in South Carolina, from which Sanders’s campaign never recovered. Black voters, especially those over 45 who make up the major Democratic primary voting block in the state, overwhelmingly voted for Biden over Sanders.

On closer inspection, however, it is unlikely that Sanders’s positive comment about Castro turned many of these voters off. Black Americans’ views of Cuba are in general far less negative than those of whites (and for many, quite positive, about which more below), let alone those of Cuban Americans (85% of whom identified as racially white in the 2010 US census, compared with 65% in Cuba itself in 2012). So while Sanders’s comment probably didn’t help him, neither was it a deal breaker for South Carolina’s Black voters. They had many other reasons for preferring Biden, including more familiarity with him as Obama’s loyal vice president. The same is surely the case with Bass; if Blacks, especially those over 45, preferred Harris, it is unlikely because of the Cuba issue.

The truth is that anti-Castro red-baiting in the United States is mostly a white phenomenon. As such, the complex and nuanced Black American relationship with Cuba, especially among progressives and radicals, is either ignored or else flattened. From the perspective of the predominantly white US political class, Castro could never be forgiven for overthrowing a US-backed dictator and spreading the idea throughout Latin America “of taking matters into one’s own hand,” as Kennedy’s special adviser Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. lamented in 1961. Among such matters was a top-down campaign of “anti-racism,” which desegregated public spaces and committed to full equality for all in a “raceless” socialist society. For Black Americans, seeing Castro do away with Cuba’s version of Jim Crow within a matter of months in 1959 was inspiring.


A Tradition of Black American Exile in Cuba


There is always a danger in simplifying a story about the past, and the relationship between the United States and Cuba is no exception. It is reductive and ahistorical to suggest that any progressive Black person who traveled to revolutionary Cuba, as a young Bass did in the 1970s and 80s, was conspiring against the U.S. government. Rather than simply label Cuba as the “enemy”, it is helpful to appreciate how Black activists fighting for racial equality and justice in the United States had their own reasons to travel to Cuba.

Indeed, left-leaning Black Americans who went to revolutionary Cuba beginning in 1959 cannot be painted with the broad brush stroke of socialism or communism. Impressed with how race seemed to operate differently there, these travelers sought to learn from the successful dismantling of racial practices and institutions in the Caribbean nation. The Cuban model for race relations offered something more promising than the crippling segregation and inequality at home.

As historian Devyn Spence Benson has explored in Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, in spite of the Cuban Revolution’s official commitment to antiracism, racial issues persisted. Afro-Cuban activists’ concerns about their political neglect often went ignored. White Cubans dominated the revolutionary government’s leadership, and sought to emulate white independence hero Jose Martí’s notion from the 1890s of there being no black or white Cubans, just Cubans.

The push for a collective Black identity separate from the Cuban mainstream troubled the revolution’s goals for societal unity and order across racial lines. Castro and most other white Cuban leaders were wary of the potential rise in Black political consciousness, whether it was homegrown or reinforced by North American Black exiles and visitors.

To be sure, Cuban authorities welcomed Black progressive activists for their shared critique of US imperialism. At the same time, they did not exhibit equal enthusiasm for the infusion of US ideas about Black Power in Cuba. In this context, revolutionary Cuba offered Black Americans refuge from US racial oppression, yet it also presented new challenges.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, members of Black political organizations as varied as the NAACP and the Black Panther Party, sought to learn from Cuba, finding refuge in the island nation when they faced backlash for their fight for racial justice at home. According to Timothy B. Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie, before the Black Power Movement, civil rights leaders like Robert F. Williams vociferously challenged the racial status quo in the United States throughout the 1950s. Williams’s resistance to racial violence forced him to look abroad for refuge, fleeing first to revolutionary Cuba, and later to Communist China.

Huey P. Newton, as well, the founder and visionary of the Black Panther Party, lived in exile in Cuba from 1974 to 1977. Newton experienced first-hand the ambivalence of Cuban authorities toward Black Americans, which gradually wore down on his spirit. Although he later reflected positively on his time in Cuba, he initially expressed his frustration with his exile to fellow Black Panther Elaine Brown when she traveled to see him. Newton was disappointed over not having the opportunity to meet Castro in person. As recorded in Brown's memoir A Taste of Power, Newton struggled with his lack of belonging while in exile, lamenting that “it’s not helpful to the Cubans to have me here” as a “no-man in a non-man’s land.”

In 1959, after his rebel army entered Havana and ended the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Castro ushered in a new revolutionary era in Cuban history as well as in the Cold War. A year later, in September 1960, unwelcome at elite hotels in New York City, Castro and his Cuban delegation to the United Nations opted to stay at Hotel Theresa in Harlem. He received visits from a range of Black American political leaders, including Malcolm X (pictured with Castro here) and New York NAACP President Joseph Overton. (Image Credit: Harlem World Magazine)

A photograph from June 28, 1984, depicting Black American political activist and Reverend Jesse Jackson’s visit to Cuba, a watershed diplomatic moment in persuading Castro to liberalize state restrictions on religion. However, even during the period of religious restrictions before Jackson’s visit, Cubans still identified as Catholics (and a minority as Protestants). It is telling that Karen Bass felt the need to affirm her Christianity when being red-baited, showing how most Americans erroneously think Cuba is still an atheist state. 

Complicating the History of Cuba and the Cold War


The United States and Cuba could not have differed more politically during the Cold War, but both countries suppressed Black political activism in their own ways. Newton's disillusionment with Cuba in the 1970s anticipated Bass’s as she transitioned from activist to politician in the 1990s. The historical engagement of progressive Black American politicians and activists with Cuba must be seen in this far broader and more nuanced context.

Is it not patriotic to want one’s country to be the best version of itself and look abroad for answers to the problems of racism and political exclusion? Since 1959, Black Americans have traveled to Cuba in the hopes of improving Black people’s lives in the United States. Sometimes these travelers found that Cuba fell short of their progressive vision when it came to racial equality, but so has the United States, in both the past and the present.

Taking into account the history of Black internationalism complicates simplistic framings of Cold War era U.S.-Cuba relations that persist to this day. During this year’s VP selection process, both major political parties reduced Cuba under Castro to a Communist boogeyman. The complexities of U.S. foreign relations and the Black freedom struggle never surfaced as journalists selectively vetted Bass’s past.

At bottom, any US politician who challenges the bipartisan line that Castro is an evil dictator who did nothing positive for his people, not even for Afro-Cubans, will be red-baited--a geopolitical double-standard given that praise for US-backed dictatorships rarely provokes the same reaction. But race does factor in because of the special historical relationship Black American activists have with Cuba, and on this count, the predominantly white US political class and media, including liberals, failed miserably.