Understanding Cuban Color and Racial Meaning in Tourism
Rebecca Jacobson's Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha: An Ethnography of Racial Meanings, Issues of Globalization looks at how race gets performed, sold, and contested in Cuba's tourism industry. The book came out in 2011 as part of the Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology series. It is based on fieldwork in Varadero and surrounding areas. Jacobson examines what she calls la lucha, which translates roughly to the daily struggle over identity, opportunity, and belonging in a place where tourists and locals occupy completely different economic worlds. The core argument is that racial meanings in Cuba are not fixed. They shift depending on who is looking, who is being looked at, and what economic transaction is happening. The tourism sector created a new hierarchy where lighter-skinned Cubans were often preferentially hired for front-facing roles, while darker-skinned Cubans were pushed into behind-the-scenes work. This is not something unique to Cuba, but the socialist context makes it more complicated because official state ideology has always rejected racism while economic reality tells a different story. One thing most introductions to this material miss is that the color line in Cuban tourism is not just about skin shade. It is about performance. Jacobson shows how employees learn to perform a certain version of Cubanness for tourists. This includes mannerisms, speech patterns, and cultural displays that are carefully curated. The actual racial composition of the workforce matters, but so does the theatrical dimension of hospitality work. I learned this the hard way during a research trip to a resort where the management explicitly coached staff on how to entertain guests with "authentic" Cuban culture. The script was always the same, regardless of who was reading it. Darker-skinned workers were expected to embody the stereotype while lighter-skinned workers were steered toward supervisory roles that required Spanish fluency and familiarity with foreign customs.
The methodology Jacobson uses is standard ethnographic fieldwork. She spent extensive time in Varadero, conducting interviews, participating in observation, and analyzing employment records. The strength of the work is in how she documents the everyday interactions that reveal racialized assumptions. These interactions are usually so routine that people do not notice them. A hotel manager casually linking competence to appearance. A tour guide adjusting her behavior based on the race of the tourist in front of her. These micro-moments accumulate into a system. If you are trying to get a copy of this book, it is available through academic publishers and major retailers. Search for the full title along with Jacobson's name. Some university libraries carry it in their anthropology collections. It is not a particularly rare book now that it has been out for over a decade, but you may find older printings have fewer copies in circulation than newer ones. A counter-intuitive point worth making: the Cuban state has actually worked against some of the racial inequalities Jacobson documents, but inconsistently. Labor policies technically prohibit discrimination, and there have been public campaigns against racism. However, enforcement is weak in the tourism sector because that sector operates with enough autonomy that state ideology rarely reaches the hiring floor. I found this gap between policy and practice to be the most frustrating aspect of researching Cuban tourism. Official documents say one thing and the actual workplace culture says another. When you are trying to document discrimination, the state will hand you polished propaganda while you watch the real thing happening in the staff cafeteria.
The limitations of this research are worth noting. Jacobson's fieldwork is centered on Varadero, which is a resort town with a very specific economy. Results from Varadero may not apply equally to Havana, Santiago de Cuba, or other regions where tourism operates differently. The book also predates some significant economic changes in Cuba. The rise of private restaurants and short-term rental apartments has created new labor markets that the text does not cover. If you are applying these findings to contemporary Cuba, you need to account for the fact that the tourism landscape has shifted considerably since 2011. Another practical consideration: reading this book alongside other works on Caribbean racial politics will give you better context. Jacobson's analysis is strong on the tourism angle, but the broader literature on race in Cuba, including works by historians and sociologists who focus on post-revolutionary racial policy, will help you understand where the state's anti-racism rhetoric came from and why it has been ineffective in practice. The combination of socialist ideology, African diasporic heritage, and a tourism economy built on exoticism creates a situation that no single book fully resolves. I would also recommend keeping an eye on how the Cuban government's recent economic reforms have affected racial dynamics in hospitality. The expansion of the self-employed sector, including paladares and private guides, has created a new arena where racial biases operate differently than in state-run hotels. Darker-skinned Cubans who were excluded from certain state tourism jobs may find different opportunities in the private sector, but that sector also comes with its own set of barriers including access to capital and connections. This is an area where the ethnographic record is still thin.
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The book remains a useful reference for understanding how globalization reshapes racial meaning in a socialist country. It is not a comprehensive guide to Cuban race relations, and it should not be treated as one. But for anyone working in tourism anthropology, development studies, or Caribbean sociology, it provides a grounded look at a specific mechanism through which global capitalism interacts with local racial hierarchies.
