1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed that “largely due to socialism” Cuba had the “least inequality between black and white people” while speaking on a Vox podcast in 2019.
Joining host Ezra Klein – who has taken trips sponsored by Chinese Communist Party-linked group in exchange for “favorable coverage” of the regime – on his podcast “Conversations,” Jones asserts that Cuba should be a role model to America for integrating schools.
“Are there candidates right now or even just places that you think have a viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda, and if so, what is it,” Klein asks Jones, prompting her to laugh.
After admitting she’s “definitely not an expert on race relations internationally,” she posits that “if you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ… it’s not a democracy – the most equal, multi-racial country in our hemisphere it would be Cuba.”
She attributes the alleged absence of inequality to socialism:
Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere. I mean the Caribbean – most of the Caribbean it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small, they’re countries run by black folks, but in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear.
The unearthed podcast follows The National Pulse revealing Jones authoring an op-ed praising Cuba and the role of education as “the cornerstone of the revolution.”
“It manifests in what Cuba has accomplished, through socialism and despite poverty, that the United States hasn’t,” she writes before identifying an advantage of the communist revolution as bringing about the “end of codified racism.”
