The Cubans are white. I know that seems odd to say, but Cuba was a sugar plantation where white Americans sold equipment and steam engines that transformed the industry productivity dramatically increasing production by 400 percent in the 1840s and 50s. The Southerns made plans to take over Cuba and buy it from the Spanish, who were in debt so needed the cash. The President had all the US ambassadors in Europe meet in the Hague to plan on how to buy Cuba from the Spanish. The Southern rich planned to annex it as a giant slave farm, as only a third of it was so far developed. But the that long connection to Cuba didn’t stop until Castro. The point it that the Europeans who ran Cuba until they left considered themselves the “Cubans” and all the black slaves to be “not Cubans,” or second class citizens, since they were enslaved on plantations like the American slaves. Hence they think they are white, showing direct lineage to white Spain, rather than the enslaved black citizens. It’s like white southern Americans calling themselves “patriots”, a code word for “real white Americans”.