...mixed in with a lot of downright speculation. But I suspect it's as good as any other explanation, this isn't exactly the sort of thing you can collect statistics on with any sort of confidence.

There is a difference between Hispanic and Anglo racism. I think it's because the attitude of the Catholic Spaniards to their slaves was different from that of the Protestant Anglos to theirs. The Spanish were just as brutal and exploitive to their slaves as anyone else, but I don't think they had to justify their treatment of them by demoting them to a sub-human status. They were slaves, but they were still people, and they adopted many facets of black culture, such as music, much more readily than their counterparts in North America. Caribbean creoles embraced African music and dance and to some extent, African animistic religion, much earlier and much more completely than in the North. This may be because the Spaniards never made a serious attempt to convert their slaves to Catholicism as the Anglos did to convert theirs to Protestantism. Catholicism was more ready to compromise on doctrinal grounds with local forms of religious worship than the Protestant faith.

Cubans were dancing the Guaguancó long before the USA adopted Jazz or the Blues, and unlike in the US, there was never a different kind of music for blacks and whites. Both melded early and evolved together into a distinct national style.

I can't talk about Mexicans, I don't know any, but among the people I know most, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, I have seen subtle differences in how they relate to blacks. The Puerto Ricans seem the least racist of all, probably because the amount of black blood in that nation is higher and distributed much more uniformly amongst all social classes.

I've never lived in modern Cuba, and I'm not very familiar with the Miami Cuban community, but amongst the Cuban colony in Tampa that I grew up in, established around the turn of the 20th Century, racism was certainly present but it was distinctly different from the racism we experienced in the Cracker community. Cubans did not want to mix socially with blacks, but otherwise had a live-and-let-live attitude towards them. Jim Crow and the KKK were simply incomprehensible to them, and they felt far superior morally to the Anglo community and what they felt was their barbaric oppression of colored people. Cuban whites also felt much more comfortable around Cuban blacks than they did about American blacks, who they felt had to be on the verge of violent revolution because they were so brutally treated.

In spite of their own genteel and concealed racism towards blacks, the Tampa Cubans were aghast and terrified at the racism of Southern whites, and always feared it would one day be unleashed upon them. I picked up on these attitudes early, from family and friends, although by the time I reached the age where these things mattered to me the nation was already well into the Civil Rights revolution and those ugly days were quickly receding into the past.

As for myself, I always felt myself above racism and contemptuous of those who practiced it, but my contact with blacks was very limited. The books of Robert Heinlein, who whatever his other flaws was a courageous foe of racism, played no small part in this. There were no blacks in my high school, and only a handful of upper-class ones in college, but when I went in the Navy I was amazed, and very pleased, at how many of my shipmates were black, even among those I was subordinate to! The military was a thoroughly integrated environment by the time I got there, although in the late 60s there were few blacks with sufficient time in to have been promoted to senior positions.

My sincere respects and admiration to Chief Bosun's Mate Samuel Douglas, wherever he may be:

"Boy, I've been on the Dewey longer than you've been in the Navy,,and I've been in the Navy longer than you've been in the world; and you ain't a pimple on a seaman's ass."