So, to hold up Cuba and The 1619 Project as mirrors to one another is not to offer the same critique of The 1619 Project as that articulated by the authors of The 1776 Report. Nor is it meant to rehash the arguments of the mainly older, mainly white historians whose cherished facts about the American Revolution Hannah-Jones has reframed.
No, the questions that keep lingering for me are different. Reading Cuba and The 1619 Project together made me wonder what the latter would have been had Hannah-Jones integrated into her analysis of race and slavery in the United States the perspective offered by Ferrer of race and slavery in Cuba and throughout the Americas. What if Hannah-Jones had integrated the history of slavery in other parts of the Americas before 1619 not simply as “more information,” as she writes in her preface, but as a core part of the book’s argument? And what would it have cost The 1619 Project to wrestle with and incorporate histories outside of its current frame?
To have expanded The 1619 Project’s incisive exposé from the United States to the Americas would only have strengthened the case Hannah-Jones makes. So, why wouldn’t she have told this expanded story; the story that Barack Obama told in Havana in 2016, that the Americas—Cuba and the United States, in particular—have a shared history of race and slavery, and that these histories are linked?
For one, Hannah-Jones might have had to title her book “The 1492 Project” instead, even if that would have engaged in the same narrative mythmaking involved in the choosing of any single moment as original. The history of African enslavement in the Americas, after all, did not begin in what would become the United States. Instead, it began with Spanish and Portuguese colonization.
Enslaved Africans, Ferrer tells us, first arrived in Cuba during the mid-16th century. Indigenous communities were decimated by violence and disease, even as Spaniards, only after serious debate, concluded they were humans who had souls that were worthy of conversion. The decimation of Indigenous populations and the new letter of the law mandating that Indians be treated more humanely was, in part, what led Spaniards to bring enslaved Africans to the Americas.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the numbers of Africans in Cuba paled in comparison with what they became during the industrial boom of later centuries. Yet, however few there were, their presence instigated and embedded patterns of capitalist exploitation, racial inequality and violence, and cultural mixture and erasure—and did so decades before the arrival, in 1619, of more than 20 Africans off the coast of Virginia, on a vessel named the White Lion. And they weren’t only in Cuba. Enslaved Africans were also brought to Spanish territories that later became Mexico, Panama, Peru, and so on.
Maybe, just maybe, Americans are beginning to understand, largely through the work of Indigenous scholars and activists, as well as historians of colonial Latin America, that Christopher Columbus did not “discover” “America.” As Ferrer notes, he didn’t even set foot on the land that became the United States.