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More Than Black : Afro-Cubans in Tampa

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Dr. Greenbaum, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida (Tampa), has written a complex and highly readable work on Tampa's Afro-Cuban community from the late 1800s to the
present day. The book fills in intellectual territory on the interplay of race adn ethnicity.

The book centers around , a turn-of-the-twentieth-century mutual aid society (the Marti-Maceo Society, La Sociedad la Union Marti-Maceo) formed by Afro-Cubans residing in and around West Tampa and Ybor City.

The book largely addresses teh internal and external construction of race and ethnicity. Tampa's Afro-Cubans are a case in point: they were "black" by America's Jim Crow standards but they themselves focussed on their Cuban-ness, even when rejected by white Cubans seeking the "wages of whiteness." Unfortunately, the Southern obsession with race controlled how the community at-large regarded Afro-Cubans. Greenbaum goes to much-needed lengths to disassociate ethnicity from race, since "race is a uniform you wear, and ethnicity
is a team on which you play"

The first chapter contains takes to task scholars who attribute "racial democracy" to western hemispheric countries in which race is professed to be irrelevant to one's social status, in contrast to the United States' black-white dichotomy. Greenbaum argues that such claims are weak.
But the spiritual and intellectual heart of this book is the Marti-Maceo Society. Afro-Cubans nurtured this society, part medical insurer, part mutual aid, part social, in ways analogous to other immigrants, in addition to setting them apart from the African American community which lay nearby.

Towards the end, Greenbaum slams the urban renewal and revitalization movements of the late twentieth century. She raises important points about the the obscuring of Ybor City's Afro-Cuban history so as to given the area a "Latin," i.e. "white" past that will be suitable for fun-seekers and prospective residents.