Speaker:

Gisela Arandia Covarrubias, UNEAC, the Cuban Union of Artists and Writers

Gisela Arandia Covarrubias is an author and researcher on issues of race and identity based out of UNEAC, the Cuban Union of Artists and Writers. She has made many contributions through the course of a long career, and currently is head of the Ejecutivo, ARAC (Articulación Regional Afrodescendiente de América Latina y el Caribe, Capítulo Cubano), the Cuban civil rights organization. She is also known for organizing Cuba y los pueblos afrodescendientes en América, an important conference in 2011. She manages the UNEAC end of the Concha Mocoyu Yoruba Cultural Center, an innovative project which brought foreign funding down to the neighborhood level in Havana in order to support a critically needed self-apprenticeship of the African roots.

She holds a degree in Journalism and has been a researcher and writer about race and black people in Cuba since 1989. She published her book “Afro-Cuba Today” in 2013 (Spanish edition, Poblacion afrodescendiente cubana actual, Havana, UNFPA, 2012). She also researches black feminism, black communities in poor neighborhoods and the impact of mass media on the self-esteem of afro-descendent people. She does action research and combines academic work and social activism. Between 1991 and 1997 she was a Research Associate of the Center for United States Studies at the University of Havana. In 1995 she was at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1997 she was at the Center for Cuban Studies, Florida International University on a Rockefeller Fellowship and studied the black Cuban community in Miami. She has participated in many international conferences on Afro-descendants in Africa, Latin America and the Unites States.