Proximity Is Not Protection

On Marco Rubio, the Racial Draft, and the Dangerous Delusion of Adjacency

The work of Arturo Dominguez has had me thinking about this topic for the past few weeks, but after Marco Rubio’s embarrassing display, it felt necessary to say something more. History and genetics tell a different story of the Cuban people—one that no amount of posturing toward white supremacy can erase. Cuba is, and has always been, a Black country that speaks Spanish.

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There is a Chappelle’s Show sketch from 2004 called the Racial Draft. The premise is simple and vicious: racial groups gather in a stadium and trade people away, NFL-style. The Black delegation gives up Colin Powell—on the condition that white people also take Condoleezza Rice. Tiger Woods gets drafted, loses every endorsement immediately. The crowd roars. It is one of the funniest things ever put on television, and the reason it is funny is because it is true. We all know someone whose political alignment has already transferred their loyalty. Someone who has traded their people for proximity to a power that will never actually claim them.

Which brings me to Marco Rubio.

Can Latinos just be rid of him? Can someone invoke the Racial Draft and ship him somewhere—anywhere—where his performance of whiteness will be someone else’s problem? Because after his speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026, it is no longer possible to pretend this man is merely a political opportunist. He is something worse. He is a collaborator. And if history has taught us anything about collaborators, it is that they are always the last to understand that the hierarchy they serve has no intention of keeping them.

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I. What He Actually Said 🎭

Rubio stood before European leaders and delivered a thirty-minute love letter to Western civilization that managed to be both sweeping and surgical in what it included and excluded. He called the transatlantic alliance a defense of “a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history.” He traced that civilization through a lineage of exclusively European genius: Mozart, Beethoven, Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. He described America as “a child of Europe” and credited its character to English settlers, Scots-Irish frontiersmen, and German farmers. He invoked his own ancestry from Piedmont-Sardinia and Seville.

He said not one word about Cuba. 🇨🇺

He warned against “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” He demanded that allies “rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.” He told Europeans to stop being “shackled by guilt and shame” over colonialism and to reject attempts to “atone for the purported sins of past generations.” He mourned the decline of “great Western empires” brought low by “anti-colonial uprisings” and “godless communist revolutions.”

He received a standing ovation.

Let that settle.

A Cuban American man—the son of economic immigrants from a Caribbean island where the majority of the population carries African ancestry—stood in Munich, Germany, and delivered a speech indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the identitarian far right. He used the phrase “civilizational erasure,” which is core language of the Great Replacement theory. He framed decolonization as civilizational decline. He insisted that Western civilization is not “one among many.” He performed whiteness with the desperate fluency of someone who knows, on some level, that his membership is conditional.

And the room clapped.

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II. The Country He Erased 🗺️

Here is what Marco Rubio does not want you to know about Cuba.

Cuba is, genetically and culturally, an African country that speaks Spanish.

The official Cuban census claims 64 percent of the population is white. Scholars uniformly reject this. The University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies estimates 62 percent of the population is Black or mulatto. Cuban geneticist Dr. Esteban Morales Domínguez puts the figure closer to 72 percent non-white. The Minority Rights Group International, factoring in decades of white emigration, concludes Afro-Cubans now constitute closer to 70 percent of the island.

The genetics are even more damning. A landmark autosomal study by Marcheco-Teruel and colleagues found that even self-identified “white” Cubans averaged 6.7 percent African ancestry. Mitochondrial DNA analysis—the maternal line, the one that traces through mothers—shows 45 percent African and 33 percent Native American lineages across the entire Cuban population, against just 22 percent European. The paternal lines are roughly 80 percent European. This is not ambiguity. This is the genetic fingerprint of colonial conquest: European men fathering children with enslaved African and Indigenous women across four centuries.

Cuba’s culture is Afro-Cuban culture. Son cubano—the island’s national music, the root of salsa and mambo—evolved from changuí, built on Bantu-origin clave rhythms and African call-and-response patterns. Rumba originated among poor Afro-Cuban workers in Havana and Matanzas in the 1880s, drawn from Abakuá and Congolese traditions. The clave rhythm underlying virtually all Cuban and Latin music is Yoruba and Bantu in origin. Santería—the Yoruba-derived religious practice that permeates Cuban spiritual life—is practiced across racial lines by millions.

Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation describes Cuban culture as an inseparable synthesis of African and Spanish traditions. Not one over the other. Not one despite the other. Both, always.

And Rubio’s own family? His parents came to the United States in 1956—more than two and a half years before Castro took power. They were economic immigrants during the Batista era, not political exiles. The Washington Post exposed this in October 2011, and PolitiFact rated his exile narrative as false. His mother made at least four return trips to Cuba after the revolution. His family’s roots trace to the Canary Islands on his maternal side—and Canary Islanders carry 17 to 30 percent North African ancestry from their Guanche forebears. Genealogical databases tag his ancestry as including African, African-Caribbean, Indigenous, and triracial heritage.

At Munich, he identified his ancestry through Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi from Piedmont-Sardinia and Jose and Manuela Reina from Seville. He made no mention of Cuba as a formative cultural or ancestral space. The erasure was surgical. It was also, genetically speaking, a lie of omission so large it swallows the entire speech.

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III. How 85 Percent of Cuban Americans Became “White” 📊

The racial self-identification of Cuban Americans is one of the most striking statistical distortions in American demographic data. On the 2010 Census, 85 percent identified as white—far higher than any other Hispanic group. This number does not reflect genetic reality. It reflects who left Cuba, when they left, and what they were running toward.

The first wave of Cuban emigrants after the revolution—the so-called Golden Exiles of 1959 to 1962—was 97 percent white, according to sociologist Susan Eckstein’s definitive study Cuban Privilege. These were the island’s elites: sugar mill owners, executives, professionals, landholders. They were disproportionately light-skinned because Cuba’s racial hierarchy had funneled wealth and education upward along color lines for centuries.

The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations welcomed them as Cold War trophies, providing extraordinary material support through the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center—cash transfers, job retraining, healthcare, and professional relicensing programs that, as Eckstein documents, exceeded those available to American citizens.

The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 gave every Cuban who reached American soil an automatic path to permanent residency—a privilege extended to no other nationality in the Western Hemisphere. Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey captured the asymmetry: one is compelled to ask not why other immigrants cannot be more like Cubans, but why the government cannot treat other groups like Cubans. The answer was always race and Cold War utility, intertwined.

The Golden Exiles arrived in Miami during Jim Crow and were able to replace departing white Miamians in positions of economic and political power because they were perceived as white. And when the Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 Cubans in 1980—15 to 40 percent of them Afro-Cuban, working-class, and poor—the existing exile community recoiled.

“We had invented a Cuba in which everyone was white. When the Marielitos came, we were forcibly reminded that Cuba is not a white island but largely a Black one.”
— A Little Havana resident

Black Cubans in the diaspora faced racism from both white America and the white Cuban enclave. The practice of blanqueamiento—whitening—traveled intact from Havana to Miami. Between 1899 and 1930, Cuba deliberately imported 750,000 Spanish immigrants for the explicit purpose of whitening its population—a state-sponsored demographic project to dilute African heritage on an island where African heritage was the foundation of everything. That project failed genetically. But it succeeded ideologically. And the ideology boarded the planes to Miami.

This is the infrastructure Rubio inherited. This is the scaffolding on which he built a career. And this is the fiction he performed in Munich.

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IV. The Rolling Stones Are a Blues Cover Band from Dartford 🎸

Of all the tells in Rubio’s speech, the most revealing may be the most casual. He cited “the Beatles and the Rolling Stones” as evidence of European civilizational genius. This is the kind of claim that only works if you have never asked where the music came from.

The Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy Waters’ 1950 blues song “Rollin’ Stone.” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reconnected in 1961 at a Dartford train station because Jagger was carrying records by Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, special-ordered from Chess Records in Chicago. Their early repertoire was almost entirely covers of Black blues artists. Keith Richards has been explicit: if you do not know the blues, there is no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll.

When the Stones appeared on American television’s Shindig in 1965, they made it a condition that Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf appear with them. The show’s producers had no idea who the Stones were talking about.

“It took people from England to hip my people—my white people—that a Black man’s music is not a crime to bring in the house.”
— Muddy Waters

The broader record is unambiguous. Sister Rosetta Tharpe—a Black woman gospel singer from Arkansas—was playing heavy distortion electric guitar in the late 1930s, a full decade before any white artist touched the form. Chuck Berry set the template for every rock lead guitarist who followed. John Lennon said it plainly: if rock and roll had been given another name, it might have been called Chuck Berry. Little Richard introduced the standard rock beat. He taught Paul McCartney his trademark vocalizations. The Beatles opened for him in 1962.

“The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits.”
— Willie Dixon

Without the African diaspora, there is no modern popular music. There is no blues, no jazz, no rock and roll, no R&B, no soul, no funk, no hip hop. There is no salsa—because Afro-Cuban son is the root of salsa. There is no samba, no bossa nova, no reggae. There is no Rolling Stones. There is nothing for Rubio to cite.

Rubio claimed these fruits as evidence of European genius while erasing the roots entirely. He did this in a speech about civilizational purity. The irony is not subtle. It is structural.

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V. Proximity Has Never Been Protection 🔒

There are few forces as intoxicating—and as self-deluding—as proximity to whiteness.

It feels like movement. Like ascension. Like proof that you have outrun something. It offers access: better neighborhoods, better schools, better rooms, better conversations. It offers distance from whatever this country has historically treated as disposable. But what it does not offer is permanence.

That is the destabilizing part.

It is profoundly destabilizing to not understand where you actually stand in the world. When your social position is conditional—granted in one context, revoked in another—you begin to confuse access with belonging. You mistake tolerance for equality. You start to believe the rules will not apply to you because you have learned how to stand close enough to power.

I prefer the clarity of Blackness.

There is no ambiguity in it. You participate in society. You contribute. You pay your bills. You follow the laws. You raise your children. You build businesses. You serve. And yet you understand—structurally—that your membership has always been conditional. That equality in theory is not equality in practice. There is clarity in knowing you are not the default. That clarity, while painful, protects you from certain illusions.

Proximity, on the other hand, breeds illusions. It tells you that if you distance yourself enough from those people, you will be spared. That if you speak the language without an accent, vote the right way, marry the right person, live in the right zip code, you have crossed some invisible line into safety. It tells you that you are the exception.

And that is where the danger begins.

Because when you treat politics like a game—like branding, like aesthetics, like team loyalty—you forget that policy is enforcement. You forget that rhetoric becomes budgets, that budgets become agencies, that agencies become vans outside apartment complexes at six in the morning. You forget your abuela’s warnings about power—that it smiles until it does not. That it protects until it does not. That it always, eventually, clarifies who it was built for.

And so you make reckless decisions. You vote as if consequences are abstract. You vote as if the target will always be someone darker, poorer, more accented, more foreign than you. You vote believing your proximity has purchased immunity.

Then enforcement widens.

Then Spanish accents trigger suspicion regardless of citizenship. Then citizens are stopped to sort it out. Then fathers are detained because databases are imperfect. Then mothers disappear into systems that operate faster than appeals can.

And suddenly the exception feels fragile.

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VI. The Last People on the Trains 🚂

History does not lack for examples of this delusion.

In 1921, a decorated German Jewish World War I veteran named Max Naumann founded the Association of German National Jews. The organization advocated total Jewish assimilation into the German nation. They supported expelling Eastern European Jews. They fought against the international boycott of German goods after Hitler’s rise. They called upon Jews to vote yes in the 1934 plebiscite consolidating Hitler’s power.

A contemporary joke had them ending their meetings with the Nazi salute shouting “Down With Us!”

They believed Nazi antisemitism was rhetorical—a tool for stirring up the masses, not a blueprint. They believed their loyalty made them different. They believed proximity had purchased safety.

They were dissolved on November 18, 1935, following the Nuremberg Laws, for attitudes deemed hostile to the State. Germany’s most pro-Nazi Jewish organization, banned as anti-state. Naumann was arrested by the Gestapo the same day. Most members and their families were later murdered in the Holocaust. Their extreme loyalty bought them nothing.

The Judenräte—the Jewish councils established by the Gestapo in occupied ghettos—ran the same calculation on a more horrifying scale. Council members initially received exemptions. They were among the last transported.

But they were still transported.

“They demand me to kill children of my nation with my own hands. I have nothing to do but to die.”
— Adam Czerniaków, head of the Warsaw Judenrat, suicide note, July 23, 1942

Chaim Rumkowski of the Łódź ghetto believed productivity would make Jews indispensable. The ghetto lasted longer than most. But in August 1944 it was liquidated entirely. Rumkowski was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The productivity of his workers had nothing to do with the endgame.

A 2025 statistical study of temporary exemptions in the Netherlands confirmed that while exemptions slightly reduced deportation probability, all exemptions became invalid between November 1942 and September 1943. Everyone was eventually at risk.

The hierarchy does not care how useful you have been. It does not care how loudly you cheered.

Proximity to power is not protection. It is a temporary exemption that is always, eventually, revoked.

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VII. The Despicable Arithmetic 🧮

There are people in the current administration who are slimeballs. There are people who are fools. There are people who are merely transactional—opportunists chasing power with no particular ideology beyond self-interest. These are ordinary failures of character.

Rubio is something else.

He is a traitor in every direction it is possible to betray. He has betrayed America by providing the diplomatic voice for an administration that traffics in white nationalist rhetoric while dismantling the rule of law. He has betrayed Latinos by standing on a world stage and performing a version of Western civilization that erases the very heritage that produced him. He has betrayed Cuba by citing Piedmont-Sardinia and Seville while refusing to name the island—with its African rhythms, its Yoruba altars, its generations of Black and brown people who share his blood whether he claims them or not. He has betrayed the basic intellectual premise of his own speech by attributing the Rolling Stones to European genius when the Rolling Stones would not exist without Muddy Waters, a Black man from Mississippi.

And he has done all of this knowingly. That is the part that makes him despicable. Not ignorance. Not carelessness. Calculation. He knows the history. He knows the genetics. He knows the culture. He has made a decision—every day, in every speech, with every alignment—to trade his people for proximity to a power that will never actually claim him.

Who would ever trust this man?

He is not a conservative. He is not a diplomat. He is not a statesman. He is a man performing a racial identity he cannot genetically, historically, or culturally sustain—and the performance requires the erasure of everyone who shares his actual heritage.

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VIII. What the Abuelas Know 👵🏽

Proximity to whiteness does not dismantle hierarchy. It reorganizes it. It invites you to participate in the policing of those further from the center, in exchange for temporary distance from harm.

But it has always been conditional. Revocable. Transactional.

This is not about white Cubans alone. It is about any community that has convinced itself it can negotiate permanent safety from a structure designed to produce tiers. It is about the psychology of exceptionality—the need to believe you have ascended beyond your people, beyond history, beyond vulnerability.

That self-delusion is not harmless. It destabilizes coalitions. It fractures solidarity. It makes people vote against their own structural interests because they are chasing proximity instead of power.

Power does not invite you closer because it sees you as equal. It invites you closer because you are useful.

There is a difference.

There are Black and brown people in your own circle—relatives, siblings, partners—who are watching this unfold with a quiet, controlled fury. Not because politics is personal preference. But because consequences are collective. Because your gamble was not limited to you.

The abuelas know. They have always known. Not because they studied political science. Because they lived it. Because they watched power smile until it stopped. Because they counted their children—one, two, three, four, five, six—and knew that the counting itself was a form of resistance against a system that could take any of them at any time.

The tragedy is not that people wanted safety.

The tragedy is that they mistook adjacency for arrival.

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I will say more about this—about Cold War politics, about anti-Blackness within Latino communities, about the seduction of exceptionality, about the specific mechanisms of blanqueamiento—because this argument deserves more than one essay can hold.

But the core remains simple.

Proximity is not protection.

It never has been.

And pretending otherwise has consequences that the man performing whiteness in Munich will never bear alone. They will be borne by the people he erased.

They always are.

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