Credit: Erin C.J. Robertson
AfroLatino Travel isn’t a conventional travel agency—there’s no booking of flights and Airbnb pads or promoting of travel glitches. Instead, the group curates trips to Latin America, which has 150 million Afro-Latin@s comprising more than one-third of its population, according to Afro Latino Travel’s site, and the Caribbean. It bills itself as, “the premier travel and culture resource of the African diaspora in the Americas.”
For Memorial Day weekend, the globetrotting club—founded by travel junkies Dash Harris, Lamar Bailey, Javier Wallace, Mark Armand Promax, and Gabriela Watson Arauz—led a group of tourists on a six-day adventure trip in Cuba.
Cuba is not African-influenced. Its core root is Africa,” Harris, who is Panamanian-American and has traveled there four times already, tells USA TODAY. “I was absolutely floored by how the African and Afro-descendant connections have held so strongly in day-to-day life.”
And that’s exactly the understanding AfroLatino Travel seeks to impart to fellow explorers with recommendations such as Callejo de Hamel, Havana’s Afro-Cuban center, or museum Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba where visitors can learn about the Santería religion, which has ties to Yoruba mythology.
Partnering with travel groups like Miss Rizos in the Dominican Republic, Proyecto Iwa Pele in Peru and DIAFAR in Argentina, AfroLatino Travel can suggest African-rooted sightseeing in locales: Mexico, Brazil, Panama and Colombia.
The collective has a busy summer ahead with trips planned to Veracruz and Guerrero, Mexico as well as Panama and Colombia’s Black Coast and then to Cuba, again.
Visit AfroLatino Travel’s site, and check out colorful photos from the travel collective’s Cuba trip:
?La pollera Congo?? @frenchieglobal #panama #afropanama #afrolatinotravel
A photo posted by @afrolatinotravel on
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