Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized the importance of Haitian and British Caribbean migrants to early twentieth-century Cuba. Although they loomed large in Cuban racial debates and sustained one of the largest sugar industries in the world, the migrants themselves received disproportionately less attention than the analyses of racial ideologies, sugar production, and empire in which they were evidentiary fodder. With Black Labor, White Sugar, Philip Howard joins a growing group of scholars both within and outside Cuba who are analyzing migrants and migration more explicitly, a reflection of increased interest in Caribbean migration, transnational history, and Cuba outside Havana. Howard traces the racial and economic exploitation of the migrants and their varied efforts to assert control over their lives through the first decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, he makes new claims about the extent of migrants' labor organizing in the sugar industry and adds to ongoing historiographic debates about race and mobilization in the Cuban Republic.Howard explains migration to Cuba as a convergence, not just of economic and political conditions but also of racial debates and worker consciousness within Cuba. For students of race in Cuba, the 1913 legalization of Caribbean labor migration is second only to the 1912 violent repression of the all-black Partido Independiente de Color for what it reveals about ideas of race, citizenship, work, and political power in the Cuban Republic. Howard, more than any other previous scholar, posits an explicit connection between the two. He shows that an influential report on labor and migration by the Cuban Agricultural Department was written during the 1912 repression and actually made subtle references to the unfolding events as it recommended allowing Caribbean migration. From this perspective, immigrants were brought in not just according to the arithmetic of population and wage rates but also based on a calculus attuned to an emerging, assertive black Cuban consciousness.Howard's analysis of sugar workers follows the same logic. Planters employed the management tactics from slavery to successive groups of workers until economic crisis and Cuban xenophobic nationalism closed Cuban borders in the 1930s. Initially, Caribbean migrants were recruited amid rising Afro-Cuban mobilization. Soon, Howard argues, immigrant workers, especially Jamaicans, adopted the class consciousness of worker internationalism and anarcho-syndicalism, followed later by the race consciousness of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. By the 1920s, poor economic conditions in Cuba reduced Jamaicans' willingness to migrate; likewise, their reputation for mobilization made them less desirable to sugar planters, who increasingly turned to Haitians, maintaining the pattern of employers hiring the most exploitable labor. Although he treats different immigrant groups separately, Howard suggests that when it came to their participation in formal organizations and efforts to assert autonomy workers of all nationalities participated.Black Labor, White Sugar was published on the heels of Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita's book on the British Caribbean presence in Cuba, but the texts focus on different themes. Howard goes into more depth about workers' experiences and ends with the deportations in the 1930s, whereas Whitney and Chailloux Laffita spend more time on British Caribbean migrants' identities and individual interactions with British imperial and Cuban national state structures, an analysis that focuses more on the process of repatriation and hovers more in the 1930s and subsequent decades.One of the biggest challenges in writing about migrants in the Cuban sugar industry is discerning the extent of their involvement in various labor organizations and their reception of radical ideologies. Organizations throughout Cuba published pamphlets invoking migrant workers in the eastern part of the island, but few sources provide any smoking guns about migrants' actual responses. Did field workers' cane fires represent a “nascent expression of the workers' consciousness” and a gesture of support to ongoing anarcho-syndicalist organizing (p. 141)? While in Cuba, did Marcus Garvey discuss the US occupation of Haiti, as he had in speeches elsewhere? If so, were any Haitian immigrants there to hear him and understand his speech? Did Haitian writer Jacques Roumain's 1944 fictional account of a Haitian cane cutter accurately reflect the class consciousness of workers a decade before? In each of these cases, Howard responds to the ambiguous and circumstantial evidence in the affirmative, albeit cautiously. He thus makes what are perhaps the strongest claims yet for immigrant workers' participation in formal unions and radicalism. Alongside other textured histories of labor and mobilization in eastern Cuba, Black Labor, White Sugar is sure to engender lively debate.