The America that Brazil Does Not Want to Join

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Issue Sep 09-15 2026: Brazil does not identify as Latin American. Not for geographical reasons, but due to a historical project. This country was built upon the desire to be European and, more recently, the dream of being North American.

So noted Vanessa Mulet in Correio Braziliense of Brasilia. She also wrote that Cuba is going through a profound crisis. Sanctions and restrictions have been piling up for decades; power outages last up to 20 hours a day; there are shortages of food and medicine. It is a documented humanitarian crisis. And Brazil, to a large extent, has watched in silence. There are Brazilians who have always stood in solidarity with Cuba and recognize its resistance, but that is not the dominant voice.

The discomfort regarding Cuba is neither new nor innocent since Brazil does not identify as Latin American. Cuba is unsettling because it represents the opposite: a nation that resisted American imperialism for decades, sent fighters to the African continent to support liberation movements, and saw its contribution to the fight against apartheid acknowledged by Nelson Mandela.

Silencing Cuba is a political stance. Pretending it is not our neighbor in diaspora and resistance is, too. This Eurocentrism did not arrive yesterday. It was cultivated as state policy, as school curriculum, and as an elite aesthetic. The Brazilian far-right merely made explicit what had always operated beneath the surface: aligning Brazil with a civilizational project that denies its own makeup. And when someone dares to name this mechanism, the response is an attempt to delegitimize the person calling it out. They call her a communist. They call her a leftist. As if defending human dignity were a political party affiliation.

The controversy surrounding Paulo Freire, a global authority on education whose title as Patron of Brazilian Education the far-right attempted to revoke, is yet another expression of this refusal: attacking someone who demonstrated that education is never neutral aligns with a project that seeks to prevent the dominated classes from reading the world critically. The issue was never about having an ideology or not. It is about whether that ideology is inclusive or exclusionary.

While Brazil turned its back on Latin America, Black women were building the continental consciousness that the country rejected. In Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano (For an Afro-Latin American Feminism), Lélia Gonzalez named this consciousness “amefricanidade” (Amefricanity): the African diaspora as the thread uniting the continent, regardless of the colonizer’s language, a dimension that Brazil stubbornly refused to acknowledge.

In 1992, around 300 women from 32 countries gathered in Santo Domingo for the 1st Meeting of Black Latin American and Caribbean Women, establishing July 25th as a milestone of resistance. Sueli Carneiro and Angela Davis demonstrated that the subaltern status of Black women is not circumstantial; it is structural. The erasure that produces this status operates methodically: Black women played fundamental roles in political transformation processes that official memory refused to acknowledge.

The Brazil that fails to recognize itself as Latin American is the same Brazil that attempts to erase Paulo Freire from curricula, that records revolutionary women without names in its archives, and that cast white actresses to portray Chiquinha Gonzaga—whose Black ancestry was erased in that depiction. It is not enough to vanish from the records; there is a drive to “whiten” even in fiction. These are gestures of the same refusal: denying one’s own makeup, plural, African, Indigenous, and mestiça. Recognizing Latin America begins with recognizing those who have always belonged to it. Black women have always known this. Brazil still needs to learn.