The hysteria that gripped the U.S. seemed to have escaped Cuba entirely. When I confirmed this rumor, he howled. But Castro's original Revolution deserves some credit. When he took power in 1959 he outlawed racism. While surely it exists still in hearts, and blacks are often targeted as perpetrators of petty crimes, this younger generation of Cubans seems generally to have embraced Castro's view.
Interracial couples are as common as their homogenized counterparts.
There is no minority housing in any of the towns we visited. Indeed, even when Castro came to the United Nations shortly after he took power, he made a point of staying in a Harlem hotel. Certainly it may have been a show, as many journalists have declared over the years, but show me an American politician who's done likewise. Even more importantly, Castro's legacy, above all others, will be that he returned to the Cuban people a notion that they could control their own destinies, a sense of pride and nationalism. For hundreds of years they'd been colonized and oppressed by the Spaniards.