Our Beautiful 4-Year-Old Says She Wants to Be White
And sometimes rejects her Daddy because ‘he’s chocolate’
Our daughter is a mixed-race little Cuban girl living in Spain.
Daddy is Afro-Cuban black and I am British white. The terms I use are perfectly acceptable in British society and in Cuba, and this is how we describe our family. I apologise to any American readers who would use different terms.
Loren has a huge Cuban family, of varying skin colours darker and lighter than hers. In Cuba, people don’t pull punches on how they describe skin colour. ‘Jabao’ means a guy who is mixed race and maybe a little yellow-toned. ‘Trigueno’ is a lighter-skinned, bronze colour. Mulatto (mixed-race) and prieto (very black) are all words used within my husband’s
Cuban family and circle of friends.
Cuba’s population is very multiethnic and intermarriage between many groups is widespread. Accurate figures for its demographics are hard to come by. The University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies found that 62% of the population is black, while the official 2002 census states that 65% are white.
Former president, Raul Castro, in the National Assembly, pushed the issue of black, mestizo and female representation in the Cuban parliament…
