Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898-1948 978-1108423465, 1108423469

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Series information......Page 5
Title page......Page 7
Copyright information......Page 8
Dedication......Page 9
Contents......Page 11
Figures......Page 13
Acknowledgments......Page 15
Introduction......Page 21
The Afro-Caribbean Diaspora and Caribbean Migration......Page 25
The Cuban Nation and Its Black Caribbean Outsiders......Page 28
Black British Subjects and the British Empire......Page 32
The United States, the Caribbean, and Cuba......Page 34
Unbound History......Page 35
The Structure of the Book......Page 37
1 Historical Groundings: Unsettled Times, Unsettled People......Page 41
Cuba's Racial Fears in the Nineteenth Century......Page 43
Unsettled People: Intra-Caribbean Migration History......Page 49
An Unsettled Republic: Cuba, 1898-1912......Page 53
Conclusion......Page 62
2 Black British Caribbean Migration to Cuba, 1898-1948......Page 65
Routes and Groups......Page 74
Migrants' Settlement and Regional Hegemony......Page 79
Gender and Migrant Labor......Page 84
Migrant Groups in the 1930s......Page 90
Conclusion......Page 94
3 Migration, Racial Fears, and Violence, 1898-1917......Page 96
Racial Fears Awaken......Page 103
The Jobabo Massacre......Page 109
4 The Limits of British Imperial Support: Diplomacy after Jobabo and Cuban National Interests......Page 117
Diplomacy and Politics after Jobabo......Page 118
''A Public Burden to the Nation''......Page 130
Imperial Hopes and Afro-diasporic Self-Reliance......Page 138
Crisis across the Caribbean Sea......Page 143
Labor Challenges and Workers' Agency......Page 151
Another Diplomatic Saga, 1921-1924......Page 156
6 The Racial Politics of Migrant Labor: Company Town Control, and Repatriations, 1925-1931......Page 171
The Racial Politics of Labor......Page 172
Repatriations and Company Town Control......Page 184
Conclusion......Page 194
British Colonial Caribbean Policies......Page 195
Reorganizing Consular Establishments......Page 200
Conclusion......Page 210
8 The Nationalization of Labor and Caribbean Workers, 1933-1938......Page 213
The 50% Law......Page 217
Contentions and Divisions under the 50% Law......Page 223
Repatriations and Agricultural Production......Page 228
9 ''The Best and Most Permanent Solution''?: Repatriation or Assimilation, 1938-1948......Page 234
Migrants and the 1940 Cuban Constitution......Page 236
World War II and British Subjects in Cuba......Page 238
The 1943 Stockdale Report......Page 243
Challenges after Stockdale......Page 247
A Question Settled?......Page 256
The White Cuban Nation and the Black Outsider......Page 260
Black Subjects of the White Empire......Page 272
Epilogue......Page 289
A Note on Archival Sources......Page 297
Cuba......Page 298
St. Lucia......Page 299
United States......Page 300
Newspapers and Periodicals......Page 301
Contemporary Published Sources......Page 302
Books, Articles, Dissertations, Audiovisual Materials......Page 306
Index......Page 321

Citation preview

Black British Migrants in Cuba

Black British Migrants in Cuba offers a comprehensive study of migration from the British Caribbean to Cuba in the pre–World War II era, spotlighting an important chapter of the larger trajectory of the AfroAtlantic diaspora. Grounded in extensive and rigorous multisited research, this book examines the different migration experiences of Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders, along with the transnational processes of labor recruitment and the local control of workers on the plantation. The book also explains the history of racial fear and political and economic forces behind the marking of black migrants as the “Other” and the resulting discrimination, racism, and violence against them. Through analysis of the oppositional and resistance strategies employed by British Antilleans, the author conveys migrants’ determination to work, live, and survive in the Caribbean.  . - is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora General Editor: Michael A. Gomez, New York University Using the African Diaspora as its core defining and launching point for examining the historians and experiences of African-descended communities around the globe, this series unites books around the concept of migration of peoples and their cultures, politics, ideas, and other systems from or within Africa to other nations or regions, focusing particularly on transnational, transregional, and transcultural exchanges. Titles in the series Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948

Black British Migrants in Cuba Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948

JORGE L. GIOVANNETTI-TORRES University of Puerto Rico

University Printing House, Cambridge 2 8, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York,  10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108423465 : 10.1017/9781108526128 © Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Giovannetti, Jorge L., author. : Black British migrants in Cuba : race, labor, and empire in the twentieth-century Caribbean, 1898–1948 / Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres. : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge studies on the African diaspora | Includes bibliographical references and index. :  2018023425 |  9781108423465 (hardback : alk. paper) |  9781108437585 (pbk. : alk. paper) : : Blacks–West Indies, British–History. | Migrant labor–Cuba–20th century. | Sugar workers–Cuba–Social conditions. | West Indies, British–Emigration and immigration–Social aspects. | West Indies, British–Emigration and immigration–Economic aspects. | West Indies, British–Relations–Cuba. | Cuba–Relations–West Indies, British. :  .   |  305.896/072909041–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023425  978-1-108-42346-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my mother Ruth Torres Caquías Con todo el amor del mundo And to my other mentors Because they cared

Contents

List of Figures

page xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction 1. Historical Groundings: Unsettled Times, Unsettled People

1 21

2. Black British Caribbean Migration to Cuba, 1898–1948

45

3. Migration, Racial Fears, and Violence, 1898–1917 4. The Limits of British Imperial Support: Diplomacy after Jobabo and Cuban National Interests

76 97

5. “Cuba Got Mash Up”: British Antilleans between Cuba and the Empire, 1921–1925

123

6. The Racial Politics of Migrant Labor: Company Town Control, and Repatriations, 1925–1931

151

7. Transactions in Colonial Caribbean Governments and Consular Policy, 1925–1933

175

8. The Nationalization of Labor and Caribbean Workers, 1933–1938 9. “The Best and Most Permanent Solution”? Repatriation or Assimilation, 1938–1948 10. Race, Nation, and Empire

193 214 240

Epilogue

269

Bibliography Index

277 301

ix

Figures

0.1 “Caribbean Dominion” flysheet 2.1 Provinces, cities, towns, sugar mills, and ports of Cuba, 1900–1940 2.2 Jamaican, Antillean, and English migration to Cuba, 1899–1933 2.3 Migration of Jamaican men and women to Cuba, 1912–1928 2.4 Jamaican and Haitian migration to Cuba, 1912–1933 6.1 Cuban “disguised” as Jamaican 6.2 Cubans blame US sugar company control for turning their country into “foreign land” 6.3 “At the edge of an abyss” 6.4 Rural Guards in the lands of Chaparra sugar mill 7.1 “Writings of protest”

xi

page 2 46 51 66 72 158 159 160 167 189

Acknowledgments

The making of this book took more time than I had planned. Many obstacles got in its way to completion. Some were self-inflicted, I admit. But others were external. Over the years, I dodged some, confronted others, and got to this “final lap.” Then, as if wanting to test my endurance, the ultimate external obstacle – some call it “mother nature” – reached the Caribbean as I gave the “final” touches to the manuscript. My deadline looming, Hurricane Irma threatened me with a power outage that fortunately did not happen. It certainly made me work faster, while clicking “save” every minute. One week later, as I sat to write these lines, Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico with a force unseen in almost a century. Consequently, here I am, without electricity and writing in the dark, yet thinking of the many people who brought light to this project and to me personally as I worked on it. How, then, could temporary darkness undermine so much light and energy? How could I not finish, submit the manuscript in time, and thank them? At the risk of faulty memory in the middle of a devastated island, here I go. I began this project in London, under the able supervision of Jean Stubbs as my director of studies. My gratitude to her is unmeasurable. She has been the source of incredible intellectual support, and of solid and relentless criticism, and remains a unique role model. In many ways she took a gamble with me, and kept betting on it against the odds. She understood, better than many, the pitfalls of working from the Caribbean. From the region, she produced her own study on Cuban labor history mentored by Eric Hobsbawm, and published by Cambridge University Press. I hope this book, product of her mentorship, can honor that legacy, and serve as a jackpot for her gamble, and a token of gratitude, always incomplete. xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

Over the years, many institutions and organizations made this project possible with their financial backing. Research in the United Kingdom and the Caribbean was supported at different moments by the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of London, the Society for Latin American Studies, the Royal Historical Society, the University of North London–London Metropolitan University, and the British Academy. My initial research in Cuba was possible thanks to the Cuba Exchange Program, at Johns Hopkins University, and its director, Wayne Smith. UPR’s Atlantea Program supported further research in the eastern Caribbean and the United States. My various research ventures to the United States were possible thanks to the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida; the Program of Latin American Studies, Princeton University; New York University’s Faculty Resource Network; UPR’s iINAS Program (PR Award P031S100037); University of Michigan’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; and the New York Public Library. I received institutional affiliations from the University of Havana; the Casa del Caribe (Santiago de Cuba); the Institute of History of Cuba (IHC); the Institute of Caribbean Studies (UPR); the Latin American–Caribbean Centre, University of the West Indies, Jamaica; and Universidade Candido Mendes, Brazil. I am thankful to all these institutions and the many individuals behind them for facilitating my work. My research travels were supported also by individuals who opened their pockets with loans and donations, particularly in the early stages of the project. Others opened their houses to provide a room, and in the process they also opened their hearts and minds to offer human support and intellectual stimulus. I want to single out the López González family, and especially Rocío López González in Puerto Rico and Spain; Irma McClaurin, John Dumoulin, and the late Helen Safa in Gainesville, Florida; the monks at St. Anselm’s Abbey, Washington, DC, especially Abbot Aidan; Tanya Shields in Maryland; and Connie Sutton and Tony Lauria in New York. Their generosity was a lesson in life that I have tried to emulate. As a student of history, I am indebted to librarians and archivists in many places; those who helped me directly and those working backstage. Without them, and their commitment, we cannot do our job. My heartfelt gratitude goes to the staff in all the libraries and archives listed in the bibliography, but special thanks are due to Carl Van Ness and Richard Phillips at the University of Florida, Gainesville; Lauren Brown and Timothy Mahoney at McKeldin Library, University of Maryland; Mitch

Acknowledgments

xv

Yolkensen, David Wallace, and especially Ken Heger at the US National Archives and Record Administration; Fernando Acosta Rodríguez at Princeton; Angela Careño and the late Nancy Cricco at NYU, Emilyn Brown, now at Harvard; Steven Fullwood at the Schomburg Center, NYPL; and Antonio Sotomayor at the University of Illinois. In Cuba, special thanks go to Coralia Alonso, Bárbara Danzie, Cecilio Delgado, Julio López, Jorge Macle, Mayra Mena, Ester Calderín Friol, Ines Baró Valle, and Marta Casals (ANC); Eugenio Suárez, Miriam González, Yolanda González, Lourdes Capote, Mirta Padrón Torrens (Camagüey); Mireya Durán, Esperanza Velázquez, Ángeles Aguilera, Teresa Pérez Quesada (Holguín); Jorge Cruz, Cristina Chapman, Ana Gloria González, Esteban Grant, and Aroldo González (Banes); Marina Pichs Brito, Madelys Velázquez, Tamara Gamboa and Sonia Morell (Las Tunas); Esteban Yero Rosales (Jobabo); María Antonia Reynosa and Rebeca Calderón (Santiago de Cuba); and Margarita Canseco (Guantánamo). Although she is not a librarian, I thank Olga Tarín Zayas for sharing her private newspaper collection of El Eco de Tunas. At the UPR, for this project, I need to single out the late Carmen Gloria Romero, the amazing Manuel Martínez Nazario at the General Library, and Josué Caamaño and Miriam Lugo at the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas. Beyond the archives and libraries, there is a human network of academics and nonacademics who helped me in the different Caribbean territories I visited building the story contained in this book. In Cuba, I am grateful to Lourdes Franco, Edwin González, Ileana Sanz, Samuel Furé Davis, Pedro Luis Ferrer, Lena Ferrer, the late Fe Iglesias, Marial Iglesias, Belkys Quesada, and Oscar Zanetti in Havana; José Novoa, José Abreu Cardet, and William Edwards Oakley in Holguín; Víctor Manuel Marrero, Enrique Leyva, Clara Goodridge, and Prudencio Eloy Caballero in Las Tunas; Oscar Abdala in Santiago; and Ángel Velázquez in Santiago-Guantánamo. Some Cuban academic friendships became more enduring, fruitful, and rewarding, and they have a very special place in my heart: Tomás Fernández Robaina, Rafael Duharte Jiménez, Olga Portuondo, Hernán Venegas, María de los Ángeles Meriño, Aisnara Perera, and the late Jorge Ibarra and his wife Ana. I value my conversations with them, and miss the ones we will no longer have. Also in Cuba, in that Caribbean place called Baraguá, I will remember the Jordan-Lovell family for a level of hospitality that I can only attempt to pay forward. In Dominica, Lennox Honychurch opened doors and shared much wisdom. In Jamaica, the very special Annette Insanally was always supportive and enthusiastic. In St. Lucia, special thanks go to Gregor Williams and Jeremiah Louis-Fernand.

xvi

Acknowledgments

That human network extended to other places, with colleagues and friends providing support, encouragement, and criticism, and serving as interlocutors for the multiple topics and angles covered in this study. In London, Clem Seecharan, Kathy Castle, and Mary Chamberlain read and criticized the first incarnation of this study. In the UK, thanks are due to Rita Christian, Katrin Hansing, Gad Heuman, Antoni Kapcia, Pedro Pérez Sarduy, Patria Román, Keith Negus, Yvonne Slater, Richard Smith, Ildi Solti, Lyn Thomas, Emma Webb, Kate Young and Charlie Legg. My “cohort” at the “BL,” from opening to closing time, made research and writing more pleasant: David Onnekink, Kevin Jones, Julia Kuehn, Britta Martens, Harriet Knight, Polina Mackay, and Guy MacDonald. Then there is that narrower, yet more international, network of colleagues and friends researching the Caribbean and Cuba, whom I met during my apprenticeship in Caribbean studies. Juan José Baldrich, Jorge Duany, Humberto García Muñiz, Juan Giusti Cordero, Emilio PantojasGarcía, and Jorge Rodríguez Beruff are people from whom I continue to learn about the Caribbean and more. Throughout my career I have been privileged enough to know and learn from some influential scholars in the fields of Cuban and Caribbean studies from different generations whose work inspired me. Some of them are no longer with us, but I want to publicly recognize their influence on my work; gracias go to Ken Bilby, Nigel Bolland, Lyn Bolles, Val Carnegie, Arcadio Díaz Quiñonez, Richard Hart, Harry Hoetink, Bobby Hill, Tony Maingot, Luis Martínez-Fernández, Teresita Martínez-Vergne, Sam Martínez, Sid Mintz, Lou Pérez Jr., Richard and Sally Price, Lara Putnam, Francisco Scarano, Deborah Thomas, and Dale Tomich. Throughout the years, I learned much from those with whom I coincided in archives, libraries, conferences, and academic institutions, sharing the pleasures and pitfalls of research, writing, and academic life. Thanks to Carlos Altagracia, Jossiana Arroyo, Manuel Barcia, Michiel Baud, Yarimar Bonilla, Adrian Burgos Jr., Barry Carr, Matt Casey, Audrey Charlton, Matt Childs, Avi Chomsky, Jon Curry-Machado, Alejandro de la Fuente, Paulo Fontes, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Lillian Guerra, Isar Godreau, Héctor López Sierra, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Félix Matos-Rodríguez, Marc McLeod, Gillian McGillivray, Pedro Meira Montero, Andrea Queeley, Dan Rood, César Salgado, Pedro San Miguel, David Sartorius, the late Chris Schmidt-Nowara, Michael Stone, Frances Sullivan, Jesús Tapia, and Robert Whitney – who belongs to a unique breed of scholars. Speaking of unique people, Frank Guridy, Reinaldo Román, Lanny Thompson, and Kevin Yelvington are very

Acknowledgments

xvii

special friends who have read and heard me far too many times, and I will always be grateful for their unwavering collegiality, friendship, and solidarity. Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Reinaldo Román, Juan José Baldrich, Hedy Nieves Crespo, and Evie Dean-Olmsted kindly agreed to read selected chapters at a crucial stage, providing great feedback. At that crucial stage, I am thankful to Matt Casey for his support and his own excellent study published by Cambridge University Press (Empire’s Guestworkers) from which I gained knowledge and encouragement. In recent years, I have been fortunate to participate regularly in the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, where too many colleagues and friends to mention here have provided insight and criticism. I am grateful for the close reading and critical input they have provided in that pueblo mágico, and to Elliot Young and Pam Voekel for creating a unique space. Julie Greene, Lou Pérez Jr., and Lara Putnam have done far too much to see the materialization of this book, and I appreciate not only their great scholarship and inspiring work, but also their enthusiasm for mine, which kept me going. Camillia Cowling shared with me numerous journeys for, and behind, this book. I cannot count how many of our conversations are embedded in these pages, but I can say without doubt that her insight and company made a difference in the book and its author. Thanks also to my British Cuban family, Jon, Eldy, and Ash; in Corsham, London, the Callejón de Hamel and the Malecón, or even an airport transfer – they always brought me the dose of happiness I needed. At home and abroad, I need to thank my unconditional friends, Ancito Negrón, Yvette Nevares, and Lymarie Rodríguez Morales. Despite the external forces and individuals obstructing my work at the UPR, its often inhospitable environment for scholarly work coexists with micro-networks of academic excellence and inspiration. They include colleagues like Luis Aníbal Avilés, Astrid Cubano, María del Carmen Baerga, Blanca Ortiz, Luis Ortiz, Jaime Pérez, Don Walicek, and the members of my department (some mentioned above). In the College of Social Sciences, I am grateful to Carlos Guilbe, a great colleague who kindly agreed to help with the map. Betsaida Vélez Natal, of the Graduate School of Sciences and Technologies of Information, gracefully worked on the index under a tight schedule. Also, in my most recent “home” advancing undergraduate research, I want to thank the iINAS team: Carmen Maldonado-Vlaar, Zobeida Díaz, Josmarian Rios, and Karinette Rivera. At Cambridge University Press, I want to thank Debbie Gershenowitz for having a vision for this book, Michael Gomez for welcoming it to the

xviii

Acknowledgments

Cambridge Studies of the African Diaspora series (and for his own work), and Kristina Deusch for her diligence and support. I appreciate their enthusiasm and solidarity. Ruth Boyes, John Gaunt, and Divyabharathi Elavazhagan ran the editing and production process gracefully. I am thankful to the anonymous readers of the manuscript who pushed me to think harder in many directions, some of which I could not fully develop here. Their close and careful reading made this a better book; its shortcomings are only mine. Evidently, this book happened only because many people believed in me and trusted that I would somehow transform my ideas and research into some sort of publishable object. That belief is reasonable for people – like most of those just mentioned – who have some familiarity with academic labor. But for those unfamiliar with academia, who vaguely know that I “teach” and “write,” that belief is an act of faith. For that faith, I want to thank my family, who blindly care massively about my work, understand my needs, and endured my absences – even when I was “home.” To Mami, abuelita (who is no longer with us), Davo, Gino, and Carlo, thanks for just “being there.” That gratitude extends to the Nazario and Giovannetti-Rivera branches of the tribu, and my great neighbors, Angie and Manolo. The category of blind believers also includes Tania David Jiménez, who arrived in my life unannounced, and with company. She, along with Laura and Kamila, changed things forever in ways they will never know. They became the ultimate source of light and energy, and not just in post-hurricane darkness. I hope you keep shining. Gracias.

Introduction

A peculiar incident took place in Cuba in 1944. David Nathan, from Trinidad and Tobago, proclaimed the first anniversary of a panCaribbean nationalist “Dominion Government.” This suggested the independence of the British Caribbean colonies, from Trinidad and Barbados to Jamaica and the Leeward and Windward Islands. A handbill in Spanish declared the “First Native Government of these territories since the beginning of European invasion to America in 1492,” and that “No longer should we be afflicted when foreigners call us colonial subjects.” The “Caribbean Dominion,” according to the document, was approved by King George VI, the British monarch, and the governments of New Zealand and the United States. Signed by the “Caribbean Dominion Assembly of the Inter Caribbean Labor Party,” the handbill included a photograph of the “First Congress of the representative workers,” which took place in Camagüey, Cuba, on May 20, 1943, and highlighted the presence of British representatives. Nathan’s initiative seemed to have been well received by Cubans in Camagüey, where the “Caribbean Dominion” flag was displayed during the Labor Day parade.1 How did this happen? How exactly did Cuba become the place from where a pan-Caribbean independence from Britain came to be declared, in Spanish? This otherwise isolated story encapsulates the trans-territorial connections emerging out of the experience of black British Caribbean migrants in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1

Flysheet, “Caribbean Dominion,” in National Archives, United Kingdom, Foreign Office Papers (hereafter NA, FO) 371/38075; Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, London, May 8, 1944, NA, FO 371/38075, AN 1936.

1

2

Black British Migrants in Cuba

 . “Caribbean Dominion” flysheet. Source: NA, FO 371/38075.

Introduction

3

1940s, when Nathan made his bold statement in the context of the Labor Day celebrations, four decades of British Antillean migration to Cuba had brought together the Cuban and Caribbean working-class histories in connection with Britain and the United States. This book tells that history; one of more than 140,000 British Caribbean migrants who traveled to Cuba and lived there from 1898 to 1948, experiencing instances of panethnic and labor solidarity, but more often virulent antiblack racism and discrimination. They arrived to Cuba from different British colonies in the region, and from places like Costa Rica and Panama, shaping a “circumCaribbean migratory sphere.”2 David Nathan’s advertisement contains, or hints at, many of the aspects surrounding the history of British Antilleans in Cuba contained in this book. First, there is a border-crossing experience that transcends the conventional political, colonial, and linguistic divisions of the Caribbean. This obviously includes migration and the presence of British Antilleans in Cuban territory, but also cross-labor solidarities through interisland alliances and their inclusion in the Labor Parade in Camagüey. Language barriers were crossed, with a handbill produced in Spanish. Nathan’s 1944 border-crossing initiative was not in a vacuum; while living in Guantánamo in 1938 he joined forces with Trinidadian activist Arthur Cipriani favoring the struggles of British Caribbean workers against the “abuses of the capitalist class.” He claimed to have the endorsement of workers in the colonies as well as those “residing in foreign countries” such as Cuba.3 That is the pan-Caribbean setting behind the story of British Antilleans in Cuba. Second, and constantly present in the history of British Antilleans in Cuba (and also in the handbill), are the empire and its representatives: the “English Commissioner” and the “Consulate General.” In the announcement, the British Empire is portrayed in contradictory fashion, as the colonial empire from which Nathan’s “Dominion Government” seeks emancipation, but also as the source of official sanction with King George VI’s approval of the flag. The endorsement is also conveyed through the photograph in the handbill, in which the representatives are accompanied by more than two dozen British Caribbean workers (including at least two women). This apparent contradiction between allegiance to the empire and contesting its authority will be examined in this study. 2 3

Putnam, Radical Moves, 3–5. Bolland, On the March, 199. According to Bolland, before 1944, Nathan had sent an earlier declaration of independence to the US.

4

Black British Migrants in Cuba

Third, the handbill indicates the existence of interisland alliances among British Antilleans as workers, but also unity against specific (British) and general (post-1492 European) colonialism in the region. Along with the contradictions highlighted above, this book will discuss the multiple ways in which British Antilleans challenged British colonial authority. Moreover, British Caribbean migrants were the driving force behind the success of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Cuba. This organization provided a platform against the manifestations of antiblack racism that were part of the long history of European colonialism. Finally, while the rationale for US inclusion in Nathan’s flyer is not explicit, it signals to its ubiquitous presence in Cuban and Caribbean history. During the period covered by this book, the United States made four full or partial military interventions in Cuba and was involved in the island’s commercial and political affairs in multiple ways. Also, US corporations owned many of the sugar plantations where the British Antilleans worked, and Jamaicans and Eastern Caribbean islanders had diverse interactions with North Americans in their roles as sugar managers and employees, as plantation security, or as members of US military forces deployed in the island. The twentieth-century Cuban plantation society provided the context for the alliances mentioned above, but also for divisions among British Antilleans and the inevitable tensions between local and foreign workers that unfolded in Cuba. The history of British Antilleans in Cuba opens windows into different interconnected fields and historiographies, including Cuban history, the history of Caribbean migrations, Afro-Caribbean diaspora studies, and re-examinations of the British Empire, all framed in the context of the “American century.”4 Such a scope is certainly challenging, even daunting. Yet not engaging with the wider connections embedded in the experience of British Caribbean migrants would only replicate a nationally framed Cuban history and conceal the processes that make this history sociologically relevant. By examining events in local Cuban settings, patterns of regional migration, and North Atlantic connections with the United States and Britain, the book highlights key features of Cuban, Caribbean, and African diaspora studies. Below, I will discuss some important themes that are present throughout the book, and refer to the major players

4

Williams, From Columbus to Castro, 419–442.

5

Introduction

involved in them. This will set the scene for the chapters that follow and the scholarly context in which this book inserts itself.

 -     Writing from the perspective of the Caribbean experience in Britain in the 1990s, Stuart Hall discussed the issue of “Caribbean identity.” He stated that those “who have completed the triangular journey back to Britain” and “speak of the emerging black British diaspora” have been “twice diasporized.” In Hall’s narrative, it was only after being “wrenched from their own cultures” in Africa for insertion in “the colonizing plantation relations of slavery” that people of African descent in the Caribbean migrated – this time voluntarily – to the British imperial center to become the “black British diaspora.”5 Over the geometric image of the triangular trade generally identified with the work of Eric Williams, Hall superimposed the people of African descent who moved through two lines of that triangle: first, from Africa to the Caribbean, and second, to Britain after World War II. For all that conveys about the larger history of the African diaspora, the triangular image obscures segments of people who moved elsewhere outside the triangle, departing from its vertices and branching off from the sides. These segments include thousands of men and women of African descent and their offspring who, after experiencing colonial slavery, gained their freedom in their respective nineteenth-century Caribbean locations and migrated mostly to Hispanic territories in Central America. These people became “diasporas” before they or their descendants proceeded to Britain. Prior to the postwar migrations to Britain stressed by Hall, Afro-Caribbean peoples were already diasporized – literally dispersed – as migrant workers around the Caribbean and beyond. They became part of what Michael Gomez identified as the “widespread circumventions of the African-descended.”6 This includes tens of thousands of black British Antilleans who built railways and the Panama Canal in Central America, worked in the banana plantations of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and labored in the “American sugar kingdom” of the early twentieth-century Hispanic Caribbean. In other words, something (or many things) happened between the Caribbean vertex of 5

Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” 6–7.

6

Gomez, Reversing Sail, 162.

6

Black British Migrants in Cuba

Hall’s triangle and the British one, as segments of traveling people scattered throughout the Caribbean.7 This intra-Caribbean dispersion takes place in Lara Putnam’s “circumCaribbean migratory sphere,” which includes Cuba, the setting for David Nathan’s opening anecdote. For her, early twentieth-century episodes of intra-Caribbean migration were influential in the development of black internationalisms and understandings of race and nation that shaped both parallel and subsequent politics in other sites, including previous and future migrant “homes.”8 Our knowledge of the histories – and movements – at that Caribbean vertex of the larger triangle become central for our understanding of subsequent experiences of Caribbean peoples in other destinations. It is during that historical period, often eclipsed by the larger triangular narrative of the later “black British diaspora,” that migration acquired new significance for those living in the region.9 It was, as Putnam suggests, “a turning point in the imagining of the African diaspora.”10 For blacks in contemporary Britain with roots in the region, the Caribbean is not only, as Hall put it, “the first, the original and the purest diaspora,” the initial destination of forced dispersion from Africa.11 The Caribbean is also a place of dispersion in and of itself, constituted by its own internal migrations and the mobility of its people at a crucial historical juncture in which people of African descent tasted (and tested) freedom. It is not surprising that those regional episodes of mobility appear, at times discretely, in the works of Caribbean writers in Britain, from C. L. R. James and George Lamming to Andrea Levy and Caryl Phillips. The century after the emancipation of slavery in the British Caribbean (1838–1938) was characterized by unprecedented levels of human movement within and outside the Caribbean. Both the quantity and spread of this mobility are staggering. Considering only the British Caribbean colonies, a conservative estimate suggests that nearly half a million people – possibly more – moved from one place to another in those hundred years. The outward movement from Barbados between 1861 and 1921 has been estimated at 103,500.12 Barbadians moved everywhere: northbound to islands like Antigua and Santa Cruz, and

7 9 10 12

8 Giovannetti, “Migración en las Antillas,” 545–613. Putnam, Radical Moves, 7–8. Thomas-Hope, “The Establishment of a Migration Tradition,” 66–81; Patterson, “Migration in Caribbean Societies,” 106–145. 11 Putnam, Radical Moves, 234. Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” 6. Roberts, “Emigration from the Island of Barbados,” 275.

Introduction

7

southbound to Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana, and Suriname, even reaching as far as Brazil.13 There was also the westward migration to the Panama Canal.14 Windward and Leeward Islanders migrated to the southern Caribbean, but also went to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Central America to work in mining and agricultural enterprises.15 Jamaicans moved to virtually every Central American republic in the tens of thousands, working in railway construction, banana plantations, and the French and US efforts to build the Panama Canal. They went also to the Dutch Antilles, and even crossed to the Pacific, to build a railway in Ecuador.16 In addition, more than 100,000 British Caribbean migrants moved out of the region to the United States in different capacities.17 This is, by all accounts, a dispersed population. The movement to Cuba constitutes part of that dispersion – an important one – that occurred just before the mass transatlantic migration invoked by Hall. More than problematizing the triangular diasporic image, the experience of black British Caribbean migrants in Cuba can help us rethink scholarly understandings of diaspora. If we take, for example, Robin Cohen’s list of common features of diaspora and hold it up to the experience of British Antilleans in Cuba, challenging questions emerge.18 For example, in the chapters that follow, it will be evident that black Caribbean migrants had a “troubled relationship” with their host society (Cuba), where they were perceived as outsiders, and treated as such. But given that British Antilleans displayed allegiance to the British Empire as well as strong ties to their islands of origin, one could ask, were they 13 14 15

16

17

18

Roberts, “Emigration from the Island of Barbados,” 252; Lowenthal, “The Population of Barbados,” 453–455; Greenfield, “Barbadians in the Brazilian Amazon,” 44–64. Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900–1920; Newton, The Silver Men; Greene, The Canal Builders; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves. Richardson, “Freedom and Migration in the Leeward Caribbean, 1838–48,” 391–408; Richardson, “Human Mobility in the Windward Caribbean, 1884–1902,” 301–319; Chinea, Race and Labor in the Hispanic Caribbean; del Castillo, La inmigración de braceros; Myers, “Post-Emancipation Migrations and Population Change in Dominica: 1834–1950,” 87–109; Report of the West India Royal Commission, 50. Proudfoot, Population Movements in the Caribbean, 79; Newton, The Silver Men; Greene, The Canal Builders; Allen, “Twentieth Century Migration from the EnglishSpeaking Caribbean”; “Ecuador,” Jamaica Times, December 8, 1900, 5; “Ecuador,” Jamaica Times, January 26, 1901, 2; “Ecuador,” Jamaica Times, February 1, 1901, 14; “Ecuador: The Long Looked For Report,” Jamaica Times, March 22, 1901, 7; “From the Sea to Quito: The Railway in Ecuador,” Jamaica Times, September 9, 1900, 5. Proudfoot, Population Movements in the Caribbean, 88; Hahamovitch, The Fruit of Their Labor; Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land; James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia; Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations. Cohen, Global Diasporas, 17.

8

Black British Migrants in Cuba

dispersed from multiple “homes” or from one single empire? Did they see their intra-Caribbean dispersion as part of a larger history as sons and daughters of Africa or as “subjects” of the British Empire? Did memories of either possible “homeland” (Africa and Britain) crystalize through their involvement in churches, organizations like the UNIA, British imperial organizations, or the game of cricket? To confront Cohen’s features more directly, which of their possible “homes” (Africa, Caribbean islands, or British Empire), if any, had their “collective commitment” or held their idealizations while being dispersed? To what reasons can we attribute any “strong ethnic group consciousness” emerging among the migrants while in Cuba? Was that consciousness in response to the antagonism and “lack of acceptance” by the Cubans? Or was it because of a “common cultural and religious heritage” as people of African descent or as British subjects? Or was it both? This book offers evidence that contributes to our understanding of the intra-Caribbean diaspora. Much like the Afro-Cubans and African Americans studied by Frank Guridy, the migrants in this study did not use the term “diaspora,” yet they did engage in diasporamaking actions and generated trans-territorial connections that forged a common history.19 In many ways, that history relied upon pan-Caribbean connections like those stressed by Nathan’s initiative, but also through organizations such as the UNIA.

        To understand why British Antilleans had a troubled relationship with Cuba, their host society, we need to know more about the Cuban society in which more than 140,000 black British Caribbean migrants landed. What historical and ideological factors contributed to its national formation, and in what ways? What was happening during the four decades of Cuban history in which these migrants participated? How can one make sense of the racial, ethnic, and national politics they encountered – and triggered – upon their arrival? The reception afforded to black migrants in Cuba and their marking as racial and ethnic others should take into account both the long nineteenth-century background before mass migration took place and the multiple events and processes that unfolded as they lived in early twentieth-century Cuba.20

19

Guridy, Forging Diaspora, 4–7.

20

Holt, “Marking,” 1–20.

Introduction

9

The nineteenth-century background includes what scholars have labeled the “black fear” in Cuba or the “terrified consciousness” of the Caribbean.21 While the slave plantation economy thrived, colonial authorities and Creole elites lived on edge, concerned about an uprising by the enslaved, an invasion of foreign blacks, or a combination of both. The Haitian Revolution and independence in 1804 gave strength to those anxieties, which intensified with events in Cuba such as the Aponte (1812) and Escalera (1844) conspiracies.22 The Baptist War (1831–1832) and the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica, and the narratives around them, also contributed to racial fears, antiblack feelings, and the obsession with racial balance in Cuba.23 This “terrified consciousness” in the Caribbean was then parallel – and complementary – to the beginning of the idea of Cuba as racially “white,” which was advanced by some thinkers in the nineteenth century.24 The struggle for independence in Cuba between 1868 and 1898 witnessed its share of racial paranoia. The fact that enslaved workers were freed during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) and the growing participation of blacks and mulattoes as the conflict escalated to its final war (1895–1898) heightened the concerns of Spanish colonial authorities. The brewing racial unity within the independence struggle was met by, and had to contend with, Spanish colonialist representations of insurgents as black savages and characterizations of their movement as racial war.25 The “specter of racial strife,” Louis Pérez Jr. has noted, also existed among observers in the United States who were concerned about the racial composition of the insurgency.26 One relevant aspect of the social construction of the black fear is that during the independence conflict Afro-Cuban 21

22 23

24

25

Duharte Jiménez, Seis ensayos de interpretación histórica, 83–94; Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean,” 53–80; Camacho, Miedo negro, poder blanco. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood; Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba. Conde de Alcudia [Antonio de Saavedra y Jofré] to Captain General of Cuba, May 25, 1832, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Asuntos Políticos (hereafter ANC, AP), leg. 35, File 36; Miguel Tacón, “Circular,” January 3, 1835, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Gobierno Superior Civil (hereafter ANC, GSC), leg. 1641, no. 82521; Bruno Badan to Domingo Dulce, government of Cuba, October 28, 1865, Archivo, Servicio Histórico Militar, Ultramar, Cuba, Asuntos Políticos (hereafter SHM, U-C, AP), leg. 90 (roll 24), November 1865; Domingo Dulce to Excellency Minister of State, October 30, 1865; SHM, U-C, AP, leg. 90 (roll 24), no. 3 [October 1865]. Saco, Paralelo entre la isla de Cuba y algunas colonias inglesas, 17; Saco, Mi primera pregunta, 6–7. See Opatrný, “El estado-nación o la ‘cubanidad’,” 321–416; and Portuondo Zúñiga, José Antonio Saco, 161–166. 26 Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba. Pérez, The War of 1898, 14, 29.

10

Black British Migrants in Cuba

independence leader Antonio Maceo was connected with – and lived in – Jamaica and Haiti, Caribbean territories associated with blackness and revolt that eventually became the source of migrant labor.27 The Cuban reception of British Antilleans has to consider the historical background described above, but also the social and political developments taking place as they arrived en masse on Cuban shores. The period from 1898 to 1948 was not lacking in disruptive events and processes: revolts, political and military interventionism, economic and market woes, and two world wars were all unsettling for the Cuban social and political landscape and influenced the sugar industry where most migrants labored. For most of the early Republican era, Cuban politics were dominated by two political parties, Conservative and Liberal, both with links to the struggle for independence.28 After 1902, with foreign investment dominating the economy, local politicians concentrated on gaining access to state power. Elections acquired tactical importance, domestic turmoil was not uncommon, and political revolts turned into a tool to manipulate electoral outcomes. The Liberal Party revolted against Tomás Estrada Palma’s re-election in 1906, triggering US military intervention and the eventual provisional government until 1909.29 The Liberals took power in 1910 with José Miguel Gómez as president, only to have its main political challenge in the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC, Independent Party of Color). The PIC’s black and mulatto leadership demanded equality and their “rightful share” within the Cuban nationstate, but Afro-Cubans were generally perceived as threats to the ideas of a white nation. Moreover, as Aline Helg has argued, Cuban blacks were framed as the source of fears tied to, among other things, foreign blackness and rebellion. Accused of divisionism and racism, as well as outside influence from Haiti and Jamaica, the PIC was thwarted from participation in electoral politics. They organized a revolt in 1912, and Gómez crushed it with full force, killing thousands of blacks and militants in the process.30 Gómez’s display of state violence and power did not favor the Liberal Party, and Conservatives won in 1912, with Mario García Menocal having two consecutive terms as president until 1920. His long tenure did not go without turmoil. The Liberal Party led a revolt known as “La Chambelona” during the 1917 elections, one that – as will be

27 29 30

28 Zacaïr, “Haiti in His Mind,” 47–78. Ibarra, Cuba, 1898–1921. Lockmiller, Magoon in Cuba. Helg, Our Rightful Share; Portuondo Linares, Los independientes de color.

Introduction

11

examined – had racial undertones and became an excuse for racist violence against migrants. It is in this unsettled sociopolitical context that tens of thousands of black migrants from the Caribbean arrived in Cuba, being both the necessary labor force for Cuba’s sugar production and the incarnation of the country’s deepest racial anxieties. The “black fear” survived 1912, the repression of the PIC, and the mass killing of its militants and sympathizers, to manifest itself through antiblack racism targeting Caribbean migrants. Articulated by social groups in Cuba in various and changing ways, this fear anchored itself to the notion that black outsiders would unsettle or pollute the nation, or that they would attack white women, retarding the island’s racial “progress.”31 Even when workingclass Cubans showed intermittent solidarity with the British Antilleans as laborers and black Cubans joined them in the UNIA, elite nationalist discourse accusing migrants of “Africanizing” Cuba or criminality was dominant.32 Particular moments of sociopolitical crisis in Cuba intensified discriminatory discourse and racist actions became more open and explicit. Social and political revolts such as those in 1912 and 1917, the economic crisis in 1921, and the labor unrest in the 1930s were all instances in which foreign blacks became scapegoats. The changing socioeconomic landscape in the decades covered here provides a timeline against which we can better understand the experience of British Antilleans. In Cuban sugar plantations, British Antilleans worked along with other foreign workers, including Chinese, Haitians, and Spaniards. Together, they were the solution to the labor demands of plantations producing for North American and European markets. Haitians in particular shared with Jamaicans the predicament of being perceived as the embodiment of Cuba’s long-held racial fears.33 That is not to say that both groups were equally perceived all the time, but rather that, in a general way, and at specific historical junctures, these two groups were merged into one black Other. Their presence on Cuban soil raised concerns among those who envisioned Cuba as a white Hispanic nation. 31 32

33

Helg, Our Rightful Share, 17–18. Ortiz, “La inmigración,” 54–64; Roig de Leuchsenring, “¿Se está Cuba africanizando?”, 18, 27; Roig de Leuchsenring, “Lo más negro de nuestra actual africanización no es el negro,” 22. Other migrant groups, such as the Spaniards, considered white, and the Chinese, were subjected to different types of itinerant prejudice and discrimination than the one experienced by black immigrants.

12

Black British Migrants in Cuba

The shared history of racial Otherness for British Antilleans and Haitian migrants, as well as their parallel history as workers in the Cuban sugar industry, allows for a joint historical narrative of both groups in Republican Cuba (1902–1959). In fact, mainstream historiography of Cuba has done just that; while differences between both groups were stipulated, historians in Cuba wrote mostly about la migración antillana, putting all Caribbean migrants into one general category.34 A subsequent scholarly trend, mostly by historians outside Cuba, emphasized the joint history of Caribbean migrants, focusing on the comparison between Haitians and British Antilleans.35 Comparative analyses provide great insights into the history of Caribbean workers in Cuba, but they conceal meaningful particularities of the history of each group and important transterritorial processes and forces at play in Cuban history. Singular examinations of particular migrant groups and their experiences, as in the recent work by Matthew Casey for the Haitians, could help scrutinize unique connections and unveil specific histories.36 Accordingly, my attempt in this book is to examine the particularities of British Antilleans in Cuba and intervene simultaneously in historiographies of Cuba, the Caribbean, the British Empire, and the African diaspora. To take from Rex Nettleford’s Caribbean spatial metaphor, the exercise is one of “inward stretch” and “outward reach.”37 On one hand, I identify distinctions within the British Antillean group in their Cuban experience, contrasting Jamaicans and Eastern Caribbean islanders. On the other, I locate their story in the wider “migration tradition,” which includes sojourns in Central and South America, military service in the British West India Regiment, and North Atlantic connections from cities like New York and London to agricultural labor in the rural United States.38 The outcome, I hope, is a more nuanced picture of important aspects of Caribbean migration history.

       The inward focus on British Antilleans in Cuba allows for an outward reach to the politics of the British Empire with regard to its “subjects” in 34 35 36 38

Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana, 1900–1931,” 3–75; Álvarez Estévez, Azúcar e inmigración, 1900–1940. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 599–623; Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar. 37 Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers. Nettleford, Inward Stretch, Outward Reach. Thomas-Hope, “The Establishment of a Migration Tradition.”

Introduction

13

the colonies and foreign territories. A frequent assertion in the historiography of Caribbean migration to Cuba is that British Caribbean migrants had relative advantages over other foreigners because of British consular representation. Yet consular representation itself has remained largely unexamined. Moreover, the interaction of black subjects with British imperial authorities during this period is basically untouched by existent studies. A blind argument that British Antilleans were better off than other migrant groups because they were afforded diplomatic representation limits our understanding of their experience. It makes it look as if such representation existed unequivocally, coming altruistically from the consuls, and always achieving beneficial results for the migrants. It does not recognize the migrants’ agency in prompting consular action.39 The book by Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita, Subjects or Citizens, discusses British Antilleans’ role in seeking consular representation. Focused on the 1930s and 1940s, they are mostly concerned with whether the migrants should “become Cuban or remain ‘British’.”40 The excavation of the larger history of interactions between the migrants and British consular officials therefore remains incomplete. The findings in this book will provide a more comprehensive examination, discussing earlier decades (1910s and 1920s) and focusing on key incidents influencing British officials’ dealings with black British subjects in Cuba. I cover the trajectory of the British Antilleans’ affirmation of their rights as British subjects in Cuba from 1898 to 1948 and the various reactions at different levels of British colonial administration: consuls in Cuba, administrators in the Caribbean, and civil servants and politicians in London. This assessment allows for a consideration of the divergent histories within the British Antillean group, looking at the policies of different colonial island governments in Jamaica and the Leeward and Windward Islands. In other words, rather than taking the experience of migrants from the British Caribbean as one, this study makes important intra-colonial distinctions that have hitherto been ignored. It also considers how the interaction between migrants and island officials, the Colonial and Foreign Offices, and people in London was tied to wider regional processes of labor management in the region and to the political economy of sugar production. The interaction of British officials with their colonial “Other” opens a window into the racial politics of the British Empire in Cuba, the 39 40

Perhaps the only examination focused on this dimension is a short monograph on British Caribbean migrants in Central America. Anderson, Imperial Ideology. Whitney and Chailloux Laffita, Subjects or Citizens.

14

Black British Migrants in Cuba

Caribbean, and beyond. This issue becomes one of great importance, especially when viewed as a critical prehistory to the better-known debates about blackness and Britishness in post–World War II Britain.41 British Caribbean migrants had a very clear idea of the British Empire and its Caribbean colonial domain, something that is evident in David Nathan’s handbill. They also had a notion of what it meant to be a British subject.42 Migrants believed in their entitlement to imperial representation and proactively claimed their rights as subjects. But the demands of black British subjects clashed with British consuls’ belief that their principal role in Cuba was dealing with commercial matters. Moreover, black migrants’ assertion of imperial allegiance as British subjects challenged a taken-for-granted equation of Britishness and whiteness. In other words, British Caribbean migrants were problematic not only for the idea of a white Cuban nation, but also for the idea of a white British Empire, one that was “exclusionary of its colonial wards” and under which blackness and Britishness became “mutually exclusive.”43

  ,  ,   The other important theme to consider in this history is the role of the United States, and not just because their alleged recognition of Nathan’s “Caribbean Dominion” flag in 1944. The growing US influence over the Caribbean during the nineteenth century created an infrastructure – railroads, the Panama Canal – that enabled commercial and geopolitical expansion.44 US agricultural enterprises in Central America and the Caribbean, from bananas to sugar, benefited from, and were part of, that expansion. The intra-Caribbean migrations at the Caribbean vertex of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora – mentioned above – are connected to this US influence in the region. In 1898, after Cuban wars for independence ended, and Spain was out of the picture, the US military intervention inserted Cuba more firmly in their scheme of imperial expansion. It was under the unsolicited shadow of the United States that Cubans wrote their Constitution as an independent nation, but the 1901 Platt Amendment allowed US intervention in Cuban affairs whenever deemed 41 42 43 44

Fryer, Staying Power; Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back; Hall, “Racism and Reaction,” 23–35. Knight, “Jamaican Migrants and the Cuban Sugar Industry,” 109. Gilroy, “The End of Anti-racism,” 71–83; Gikandi, Maps of Englishness. McGuinness, Path of Empire; Greene, The Canal Builders.

Introduction

15

necessary. The US military occupation that hauled Cuba into the twentieth century provided advantages for foreign investors and their economic and commercial interests, including the construction of railways and access to a war-ravaged territory for the development of agribusiness. Large foreign corporations such as the Cuba Company, the Cuban American Sugar Company (CASC), and the United Fruit Company (UFC) acquired land and began the development of large sugar plantations.45 These sites attracted a multiethnic labor force, including British Antilleans, which became the backbone of an export-led agricultural economy serving global markets. Simultaneously, entrepreneurs, plantation managers, and other workers from the United States and elsewhere continued their experiment managing migrant labor, one that would continue on the mainland after World War II.46 US regional presence in the early twentieth-century Caribbean was also ideologically loaded for the people of Cuba and the British Caribbean. Cubans faced US skepticism about their capability for self-government, one that was accompanied by discriminatory ideas about “civilization” and race.47 This predicament had implications for the Cuban discourse of racial equality and the different ways Hispano-Cubans and Afro-Cubans dealt with it in the political and cultural landscape.48 US understandings of race were prevalent in the division of labor within foreign-owned plantations where British Caribbean migrants worked. But in an interesting counterpoint, the blueprint of US expansion in Cuba and the Caribbean served for the development of organizations of African-descended people such as the UNIA.

  This is clearly an unbound history of regional and Atlantic ramifications. Afro-Caribbean diaspora, the Cuban nation, the British Empire, and US 45 46 47

48

Hoernel, “Sugar and Social Change in Oriente, Cuba, 1898–1946,” 215–249; Santamarina, “The Cuba Company,” 41–83. Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land. On intervention as a civilizing mission, see Pérez, The War of 1898, 23–56. At the moment of establishing the republic, nonwhite leaders of the Liberation Army (Quintín Banderas, Máximo Gómez, Ricardo Batrell) remained at the margins. See Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 170–194, James Figarola, Cuba, 1900–1928, 21–132. On the wider racial contours of manifest destiny, see Maingot, The United States and the Caribbean, 14–28. Guerra, “From Revolution to Involution in the Early Cuban Republic”; Guridy, Forging Diaspora.

16

Black British Migrants in Cuba

imperialism are all part of it. As a study of intra-Caribbean migrations moving across imperial and national territories, this book inserts itself into the field of transnational history. I recognize the potential anachronism of the term “transnational” for a historical period in which nations and empires overlapped. This study deals, after all, with people from various (non national) territories within one British Empire migrating to an independent nation (Cuba) with its sovereignty subjected to the imperialist ambitions of a foreign nation (the United States). The dilemma between the transnational as a well-defined and thriving field of study and questions about its conceptual precision for previous historical contexts has been noted by various authors.49 Here, like John French, I choose to emphasize the advantages of the qualifying prefix in transnational, understanding that the processes and connections that I examine transcended and breached the Cuban nation.50 The focus of the book is on the substantive issues behind the term itself, including the study of social relations linking various locations and social fields across geographic, cultural, and political borders.51 More importantly, transnational patterns are not as new as the scholarly trend would suggest, and students of migration have stressed the importance of continuities with past experiences for the understanding of contemporary phenomena.52 This is true for the Caribbean region where “highly relevant precedents” for many “aspects of transnationalism” were present with regard not only to people’s mobility, but also to how human flows and cultural relations responded “to certain common forces and like processes originating in the capitalist West” and affecting the region.53 Much of the US geopolitical and economic influence mentioned before is framed in that larger history. My study emphasizes processes, as experienced by British Antilleans in Cuba and the Caribbean: working-class mobility, labor control and exploitation, social and racial discrimination, pan-African solidarities, colonial and imperial power, and resistance to it. As Michael Hanagan insists, I try to follow these processes “wherever they lead.”54 But the 49

50 51 52 53 54

Including some of those cited below. My own reluctance to use the term “transnational” is clear by my use of the word “transterritorial” in previous publications. Here I will yield to “transnational” and if precision is needed I will qualify throughout the text with other terminology. French, “Another World History Is Possible,” 6–7. Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound, 7. Foner, “Transnationalism, Old and New,” 363–377. Mintz, “The Localization of Anthropological Practice,” 126–127, original emphasis. Hanagan, “An Agenda for Transnational Labor History,” 459, 466.

Introduction

17

emphasis on process, as part of Hanagan’s agenda for transnational labor history, should not undermine the importance of nation-states. Aviva Chomsky reminds us that nation-states have a “role in transnational and global histories even if decentered or demoted.” There are ways in which national borders and state institutions affect migrant workers, codify differences, and surveil their arrival and labor discipline, structuring their mobility, jobs, and more.55 Accordingly, Julie Greene seeks a balance between “connecting hemispheric and global processes” and identifying how transnational forces interact with the nation-state, producing an uneven and complex history with “spheres moving beyond the control of nation-states even as other spheres become more tightly contained.”56 In the chapters that follow, a strong Cuban nation-state emerges through migration policies and the nationalist discourse of politicians and intellectuals, and also in the Cuban historiography that I engage with. But as William Robinson asserts, an “essential task” of transnational studies “is to decipher the transnational essence in social phenomena that appear as national.”57 Cuban history provides plenty of opportunity for that. That transnational task, according to Neville Kirk, involves methodological challenges such as knowledge of the history of various places, language skills, and immersion in “a multitude of secondary and primary sources.”58 Those have been, in fact, central aspects of a Caribbean studies practice that has advocated for regional awareness and bordercrossing scholarship and that continues to press for new and challenging questions.59 This book will hopefully contribute to that collective enterprise.

     The book is divided in ten chapters structured chronologically, but with some thematic overlapping at times. Chapter 1 provides a background of the histories of racial fear in Cuba and of intra-Caribbean migration

55 56 57 58 59

Chomsky, “Labor History as World History,” 27. Greene, “Historians of the World,” 14–15. Robinson, “Beyond Nation-State Paradigms,” 573–574. Kirk, “Transnational Labor History,” 20. Carnegie, Postnationalism Prefigured; Giovannetti, “Caribbean Studies as Practice,” 74–87; Putnam, “Borderlands and Border Crossers,” 7–21.

18

Black British Migrants in Cuba

during the long nineteenth century.60 It also discusses key aspects of Cuban history during the first decades of the twentieth century, regarding race and nation.61 Chapter 2 offers a different introduction with an overall coverage of Caribbean migration to Cuba from 1898 to 1948. The chapter challenges existing generalizations about Antillean migration (or migración antillana) by establishing distinctions between the experience of Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean migrants in contrast with other migrant groups, particularly Haitians and Spaniards.62 Chapter 3 covers the unprecedented growth of Caribbean migration to Cuba in the 1910s, responding to the increase in sugar production. I give attention to debates around the socioeconomic aspects of migration and specific policies and regulations. The racial tensions during the revolt, and the repression, of the PIC in 1912 and the Liberal revolt of 1917 are considered, particularly as they contributed to a hostile environment for black British migrants, including racist violence against them in Jobabo in 1917.63 Chapter 4 looks into the major diplomatic conflicts between Cuba and the United Kingdom and the role of British consuls after the Jobabo massacre and during abuses against migrants in the early 1920s, leading to the publication of two British White Papers on the ill-treatment of migrants in 1924.64 The chapter reveals, first, how the plight of British Antilleans working in the Cuban sugar industry was connected with the global political economy of sugar, and, second, some of the racial tensions of British imperial ideology. After the booming years of sugar production in the 1910s, Chapter 5 analyzes its collapse – the sugar crisis of 1921 and

60

61

62

63 64

For an overview of racial fear in the Caribbean, see Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean,” 53–80. For its manifestation regarding Haiti in Cuba, see Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, and Sklodowska, Espectros y espejismos, from a literary perspective. On the overall history of intra-Caribbean migration, see Thomas-Hope, “The Establishment of a Migration Tradition,” 66–81; and more recently Giovannetti, “Migración en las Antillas,” 595–613. Some of the scholarship on this topic includes Bronfman, Measures of Equality; de la Fuente, A Nation for All; Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba; Helg, Our Rightful Share; Pappademos, Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic. On the way in which all British Caribbean migrants have been conflated as one group analytically, and on the comparison between different groups of migrant labor, see Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana, 1900–1931,” 3–75; McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens”; and more recently Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar. On the racial politics after 1912, see Chomsky, “The Aftermath of Repression”; Pérez, “La Chambelona.” The 1924 crisis seems to have been ignored by most of the scholarship (including Howard’s Black Labor, White Sugar) despite being documented in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government and Further Correspondence.

Introduction

19

its effect on the life of the migrants. If the sudden arrival and presence of black outsiders in the 1910s triggered racist and nationalist hostility against them, in 1921 their redundancy as workers in the sugar industry became a justification for discrimination. The abuses against British Antilleans by Rural Guards and the administration of various sugar mills are examined, while looking at the actions (or lack thereof ) of the British colonial government on their behalf. Chapter 6 covers the socioeconomic and political changes in Cuba during the late 1920s, its influence in labor migration and workers’ activism. The experience of eastern Caribbean migrants in one of the largest sugar enclaves in the Caribbean – that of the CASC – is scrutinized with attention to the struggles of Leeward and Windward Islanders in their company towns and with their competitors in UFC territory.65 Chapter 7 also looks at the late 1920s, but focused on changes within the British colonial sphere regarding reduction and restructuration of the consular service in Cuba and policies in various islands of origin of British Antilleans. I look at the actions of British Antilleans, their strategies in seeking diplomatic support, and how their correspondence with British officials reveals competing notions of imperial responsibility and freedom of movement in the region. Chapter 8 builds on the distinctions between Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean migrants as well as the policies of the British government to provide a more nuanced analysis of the 1930s. I revisit the comparative experience of Haitians and British Antilleans during the turbulent years of economic depression and the implementation of the 1933 Nationalization of Labor Law, taking into consideration the different experiences of Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean workers. Chapter 9 expands the narrative of Caribbean migration to Cuba that concludes with the deportations of the 1930s, and looks at the experience of the migrants until 1948. Using the rarely examined report by Sir Frank Stockdale (1943), I examine its consequences for British Caribbean migrants – particularly those from the Windward and Leeward Islands – and how wider British colonial policies determined their fate in Cuba. Chapter 10 considers the shared racist beliefs behind the Cuban national formation and British imperial ideology regarding black migrants and their own ideas of whiteness. The endurance of Cuban 65

For the UFC, the available studies include Zanetti and García et al., United Fruit Company; and James, Banes. The CASC has been examined in McGillivray, Blazing Cane.

20

Black British Migrants in Cuba

aspirations for whiteness is exposed along with confrontations between colonial subjects and imperial authorities over the role of empire and race. The chapter contributes to the conceptual understanding (and complexities) of race, ethnicity, nation, and empire, all important aspects of Caribbean history. An Epilogue concludes, highlighting the resilience and agency of British Antilleans confronting discrimination in the sugar plantation, the wider Cuban society, and the empire. It reflects on the relevance of this history for the larger history of African–Caribbean diaspora and two recurrent problems in Caribbean and Atlantic history: racial and ethnic discrimination in processes of human mobility and border-crossing. Migration experiences are historically specific, Mary Chamberlain reminds us, and migrants respond to specific material and ideological factors within a particular historical moment.66 But by pointing to continuities in the experience of the African–Caribbean diaspora, I want to stress – to paraphrase Fernand Braudel – how the past and the present illuminate each other, no matter how commonplace that statement would be.67 It is, I believe, a political imperative. A cursory view of world events over recent decades indicates the persistence of problems such as discrimination against migrant workers and racism and violence against people of African descent. This book will not predict when workers will be discriminated or when blacks are likely to be abused. But it will provide a window to the specific historical conditions and discourses that propelled violent discrimination and served as basis for prejudiced behavior. It will illuminate us regarding the complex constellation of forces that served as the background to racism and discrimination, but also regarding the individual and collective practices that migrants employed to challenge, survive, and thrive despite these obstacles. At this moment in the history of the Americas, I think that bit of historical knowledge is worth having at our side.

66 67

Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return, 32–33. Fernand Braudel, On History, 37.

1 Historical Groundings Unsettled Times, Unsettled People

The history of British Antilleans in Cuba falls within two concentric historical frames suggested in the Introduction. One is the larger Atlantic framework which includes the forced migration of Africans into Caribbean slavery and the twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean migrations to North Atlantic metropolitan centers. The second framework is both chronologically shorter and geographically smaller, comprising the century after slave emancipation in the Caribbean (1838–1938). To provide a necessary background, this chapter concentrates on the latter framework, a historically unsettled period characterized by dramatic political transitions, social unrest, and unprecedented mobility within the region – and, indeed, worldwide. At the sociopolitical level, events in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century kept European colonial powers on their toes. From the Haitian Revolution to the sequel of abolitions of slavery by different colonial powers (from the 1830s to the 1880s), the region witnessed the collapse of its primary system of labor. This caused dislocating effects in each island, including contentions and conflicts around the shortage of labor, the fear of re-enslavement, and access to land in the British Caribbean where slavery fully ended in 1838.1 The 1844 “Guerre Nègre” in Dominica and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 are illustrative examples.2 In the Spanish Caribbean, where slavery survived, the colonies experienced changes in labor systems, strengthening of slave 1 2

Holt, The Problem of Freedom. Honychurch, The Dominica Story; Chace Jr. “Protest in Post-emancipation Dominica,” 118–141; Heuman, “The Killing Time.”

21

22

Black British Migrants in Cuba

regimes, and increased surveillance of the enslaved. Spanish colonial authorities in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico implemented policies to suppress slave revolts and ensure colonial stability, while in Cuba they took action against conspiracies in 1812 and 1844.3 The slave system was being challenged from below in ways that revealed the aspirations for freedom among those in captivity.4 In Cuba, those aspirations later crystalized in the role played by the enslaved and free people of color in the long struggle for independence (1868–1898).5 The sociopolitical volatility of the post-emancipation century was accompanied by demographic instability, with people within the region living unsettled lives moving across territorial and colonial frontiers searching for freedom or a better life. Around half a million British Caribbean islanders left their islands of origin to go somewhere else;6 with the possible exception of some Andean countries and the Southern Cone, British Caribbean workers probably set foot in every country of the hemisphere at any given time between 1838 and the 1930s. Freedom from slavery also meant freedom of movement, and intra-Caribbean migrations after the 1830s suggest that people exercised plenty of the latter. From intra-colonial migrations to Trinidad and Tobago and British Guiana, to the more adventurous crossings into the Spanish colonies or the Latin American republics, British Antilleans created migratory circuits in the Caribbean and, at times, functional networks that facilitated their mobility, search for jobs, and survival. This sociopolitical and demographic instability, along with Cuba’s own social and political changes in the early twentieth century, constitute the historical context for the story that follows. Below, I outline the historical and sociopolitical processes contributing to racial fear in the 3

4

5 6

Altagracia, La utopía del territorio perfectamente gobernado; Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico, 211–222; Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, 36–37; Scarano, Haciendas y barracones, 65–78; Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion; Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood. Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition, 135–137; Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 13. For an overview of the political changes in the Hispanic Caribbean, see MartínezFernández, Torn between Empires. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba. This conservative estimate combines the figures from the censuses for Cuba (1899, 1907, 1919, 1931) and the Dominican Republic (1920), and also those provided by various authors of monographic studies for the different territories. Figures for Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, and the United States were taken from Proudfoot, Population Movements, 79, 88. Statistics of contract laborers for Panama are from Velma Newton’s The Silver Men, and for Guatemala and Honduras from Opie, Black Labor Migration; and Chambers, Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration, respectively.

Historical Groundings

23

Caribbean. I then provide a brief account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intra-Caribbean migrations that serve as the innermost concentric frame for this study and as a preface for the Caribbean migration to Cuba. I conclude by discussing key aspects of early twentiethcentury Cuba that set the scene for the arrival for thousands of British Antilleans.

’       Regionally, the Caribbean’s nineteenth century started with the establishment of Haiti, an independent black nation without slaves in the middle of a hemisphere ruled by white European colonialists enforcing black slavery. The consequences of Haiti’s existence cannot be underestimated; that nation’s “cardinal sin,” Sidney Mintz reminds us, was that it “freed its people (all of its people, including slaves) by revolution, at a time when slavery was still an acceptable custom for the Europeans” – and, indeed, for people in the Americas.7 The Haitian Revolution and independence had a major impact on the geopolitical and economic landscape of the Caribbean. Cuba, one of Haiti’s closest neighbors, would inherit the regional supremacy in sugar production from the fallen French colony. “The Haitian Revolution,” Ada Ferrer argues, “hastened and hardened Cuba’s sugar revolution and the brutal practices of enslavement that came with it.”8 Simultaneously, Haiti’s existence left Caribbean colonizers and slaveholders throughout the region with the “haunting vision” that another black revolt could happen anytime.9 In Anthony Maingot’s analysis, the events in Haiti triggered a “terrified consciousness” in the Caribbean with important racial dimensions. The Haitian Revolution was a “living example” of “black freedom,” but also of “black rule”; one that challenged the region’s normative order. The consequence, he argues, was a racial fear that transcended “the end of actual hostilities over power and ideology” in Haiti itself, becoming an enduring “dominant metaphor” for whites in the Caribbean.10 Moreover, the enemy was “named” as black, racially defining the “danger object” for most Caribbean societies.11

7 8 10 11

Mintz, “Labor and Ethnicity,” 50. Emphasis in the original. 9 Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 10. Mintz, “Labor and Ethnicity,” 50 Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness,” 54–57. Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness,” 54–57; Bourke, Fear, 189–192.

24

Black British Migrants in Cuba

The “terrified consciousness,” once grounded in racial markers, included Haiti, but also Jamaica and other territories that were brewing in sociopolitical instability and were considered “blacker.” In Cuba, the fear of colonial authorities and planters was felt as early as 1812 during the Aponte Conspiracy, when it was reported that those accused of the plot owned portraits of Haitian leaders.12 In the 1820s, authorities from eastern Cuba had “founded fears of some illicit introduction of the slaves involved in the revolutionary conspiracy in the Island of Jamaica.”13 A peripatetic chain of communications across the region in the 1830s warned Cuban authorities against “measures to revolutionize” Cuba from Santo Domingo with the assistance of the “Government of Hayty.”14 When the 1831 “Baptist War” led by Sam Sharpe in Jamaica broke out, the general commander in Santiago de Cuba immediately offered assistance to crush the insurrection, indicating a heightened alert regarding events in nearby islands.15 In 1836, the Cuban governor general took measures against an alleged “invasion” of “five thousand blacks from Jamaica,” or other actions of “similar nature” in the Cuban coastline.16 An intensification of agricultural production during the nineteenth century, especially in sugar, was inevitably accompanied by the need of forced labor and a harsher slave regime. The Cuban representative in the Spanish Courts, José Antonio Saco, denounced the equation of black enslaved labor and Cuban agriculture in the 1830s. He lamented that Cuba was being “flooded with African slaves” and advocated instead for a white plantation workforce.17 Much against Saco’s wishes, by 1841 the population of nonwhites had surpassed that of whites in Cuba – a

12

13 14 15 16

17

Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion; Franco, La conspiración de Aponte. For the wider Caribbean context of the conspiracy, see Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815.” Francisco Zayas and lieutenant governor of Holguín to general government of Cuba, March 22, 1824, ANC, AP, leg. 125, no. 24. José Bellido to governor of Cuba, Havana, December 18, 1830, ANC, AP, leg. 215, no. 89. Conde de la Alcudia [Antonio de Saavedra y Jofré] to the captain-general of the island of Cuba, May 25, 1932, ANC, AP, leg. 35, no. 36. Miguel Tacón to governor of Matanzas, Cuba, January 20, 1936, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas, Gobierno Provincial de Matanzas (hereafter AHPM, GPM), leg. 21, no. 22. Saco, Paralelo entre la isla de Cuba, 17; Saco, Mi primera pregunta, 6–7.

Historical Groundings

25

demographic change caused by the complementary processes of increasing sugar production and growing illegal trade of enslaved Africans.18 Other than sugar, one by-product of the successful Cuban slave economy was rebellion; Africans and Afro-Creole captives did not submit easily to forced labor. In the eyes of colonial administrators, however, domestic revolts and alleged conspiracies were often linked to events in Haiti and Jamaica.19 Even the possibility of unrest in the palenques (maroon settlements) of the eastern coast (Moa) was tied to foreign connections with neighboring islands.20 In 1840, the Cuban captaingeneral voiced his racial and political concerns about both Jamaica and Haiti, where a “greater part of their inhabitants are freed persons of color, very disposed to contact with the maroons and inclined towards rebellion for the idea of liberty.”21 The wider Caribbean and hemispheric context was not very encouraging for either slaveholders or metropolitan powers. The fear of slave revolt among planters and political classes was alive from French Louisiana, to Jamaica, to Brazil.22 Major uprisings in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823) and northern Brazil (1835), and the Haitian occupation of eastern Hispaniola (1822–1844), were all “living examples” that legitimated racial fears in the region. In 1844, the Spanish colonial government uncovered a slave conspiracy (or set of conspiracies) that resulted in an “intense period of search, seizure, torture, confession, trial and punishment” of hundreds of suspects. Some were tied to a ladder and flogged in a method of punishment that, paradoxically, gave name to the conspiracy itself: La Escalera (“The Ladder”).23 The ruthless retributions show the underlying fears and concerns of the white political and economic elites. Antiblack feelings increased, with elite intellectuals such as Saco, Ramón de la Sagra, and Francisco de Frias advocating ideas of “whitening” in face of what they saw as a racially unbalanced population.24 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 22; Le Riverend, Historia económica de Cuba, 317–331. On the number of slave revolts during the early nineteenth century and regional awareness, see García, Conspiraciones y revueltas, 24–25. Miguel Tacón, Conde de Villanueva, and Juan Bautista Topete, “Acta de Acuerdo,” Havana, 20 de enero 1836, ANC, Donativos y remisiones, leg. 448, exp. 36; see also Duharte Jímenez, Nacionalidad e historia, 53–61, 99–114. Cited in Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood, 73. Lachance, “The Politics of Fear,” 162–197; Sheller, “The ‘Haytian Fear’,” 285–303; Chalhoub, Visões da Liberdade, 193. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood, 209–232 (quote at 219–20). See the sections “Agricultura y esclavitud” and “Esclavitud y sistema colonial,” in de la Sagra, Cuba: 1860, 189–218. On the reformists of that period in relation to race and

26

Black British Migrants in Cuba

The “whitening” discourse was a direct counterpart of the black fear among Spanish authorities and Creole elites. It translated into policies of white colonization in Cuba (as well as in Puerto Rico) such as the creation of the Junta de Población Blanca to control the racial composition of the country and encourage white migration.25 Yet its task clashed with the ongoing consolidation of the slave society and the fact that in spite of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Cuba experienced an increase in the illegal importation of enslaved Africans. From 1835 to 1864 the estimated number of imported African captives is 387,216, averaging 12,908 annually. In the second half of the century, as the slave-based sugar economy thrived, illegal traffic of African captives continued with a total of 123,327 imported in the 1850s alone.26 Indentured Chinese laborers were also brought into the equation of the nonwhite population from the 1840s, with an estimate of more than 120,000 arriving in Cuba between 1847 and 1874 in conditions analogous to slavery.27 Concerns of racial balance and divisions are evident in the security provisions forbidding Rural Guards from association with “people of color” and assuring that planters kept white employees in proportion to the slave population.28 Clearly, since the nineteenth century, Cuba’s socioeconomic and demographic changes generated profound contradictions about immigration and racial and ethnic formation. In the 1850s, colonial authorities used the “Africanization scare” and the fear of slave revolt to consolidate their political grip on the island and repress dissidence among Creoles.29 But colonial officials were themselves haunted by domestic racial and political tensions and by events outside

25 26 27

28

29

immigration, see Naranjo Orovio and García González, Racismo e inmigración en Cuba, 85–96; and Portuondo Zuñiga, José Antonio Saco. Naranjo Orovio and García González, Racismo e inmigración, 45–67; Corbitt, “Immigration in Cuba,” 288–297. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 53. See Moreno Fraginals, La historia como arma, 118, 131; Turner, “Chinese Contract Labour in Cuba,” 79–81; Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 117–119; Yun, The Coolie Speaks, 17, 21, 28–35. The trip for indentured Chinese was also a terrible experience, and Yun (at 19) indicates that 16,346 Chinese died in the voyages. Pedro [illegible], brigadier governor [Matanzas], “Proyecto de reglamento de la Guardia Rural de la Jurisdicción de Matanzas,” February 1, 1857, p. 6, ANC, Miscelánea de Expedientes (hereafter ME), leg. 4238, no. Ad; Miguel Nadal to military and political governor, Matanzas jurisdiction, AHPM, GPM, leg. 23, no. 98. The Rural Guard was created by the Spanish colonial government to secure order in the countryside. Ibarra, Ideología mambisa, 24–25; Martínez-Fernández, Torn between Empires, 61–66; Urban, “The Africanization of Cuba Scare, 1853–1855,” 30; Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 15.

Historical Groundings

27

Cuba’s boundaries. When the Morant Bay rebellion exploded in Jamaica in 1865, Domingo Dulce, the civil superior governor, responded immediately on October 19, sending three warships to Kingston and increasing surveillance of slaves “in case one of them tries to exploit the news.”30 On October 28, Bruno Badan, Spanish consul in Kingston, wrote to Dulce saying that the “diabolic plan” of the Jamaican insurgents was frustrated.31 In the aftermath of the Jamaican revolt, the captain-general of Cuba received warnings from Spanish diplomats in the United States highlighting the imagined regional dimension of the fear of a “general insurrection of slave countries.” Conflicts instigated by blacks in the US South (Virginia and the Carolinas) as well as correspondence from Haiti were, in the eyes of this official of the Spanish legation in Washington, DC, evidence of the “hostile spirit of black populations” and the “complicity that is being spread” that could lead to “revolutions similar to the one that has just been verified in Jamaica.”32 As racial fears inundated the political and ideological mindscape, sugar production increased from 428,769 metric tons in 1860 to 720,250 in 1868, comprising 28.57 percent of the total world production.33 The work of the enslaved remained a viable alternative in sugar plantations, despite the existence of other forms of labor and the technological changes in sugar production.34 The prominent role of enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles in the production of Cuba’s main crop meant that the call for anticolonial freedom in 1868 had to be tied to freedom from bondage. But once blacks and mulattoes joined the insurgency, Spanish authorities easily defined the independence struggle along racial lines. The “terrified consciousness” reappeared during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), but more intensely during the “Little War” (1879–1880) led mostly by nonwhite insurgents who rejected the 1878 Pact of Zanjón. The actions of black and mulatto leaders such as Antonio and José Maceo, Guillermón Moncada, Quintín Banderas, and Mariano Tones 30 31 32 33

34

Domingo Dulce, civil superior government, Cuba, to [Exmo. Señor Ministro de Estado], ASHM, U-C, AP, leg. 90, no. 1 (microfilm reel 24) [October 1865]. Bruno Badan, Spanish consulate, Kingston, Jamaica, to Domingo Dulce, Cuban government, ASHM, U-C, AP, leg. 90 (microfilm reel 24) [November 1865]. Gabriel G. [R]aisara to Governor and Captain-General of Cuba, December 29, 1865, ANC, AP, leg. 227, no. 19, pp. 2–3. Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio, vol. 3, 35–40. On the uneven process of development and technological changes in the late nineteenth-century Cuban sugar industry, see Iglesias García, “The Development of Capitalism in Cuban Sugar Production, 1860–1900,” 54–75. Bergad, “The Economic Viability of Sugar Production.”

28

Black British Migrants in Cuba

provided substance to the Spanish portrayal of the conflict as a “race war.”35 Antonio Maceo himself explicitly challenged the racial characterization of his struggle, stating that the revolution aimed at the “fall of the Spanish Government,” and did “not have the character that some extremists would like to give to it.”36 By the 1880s, Spanish officials were still concerned with foreign racialized threats such as an alleged plan by the “Black League of the Antilles” aspiring for the “predominance of the colored race in the Antilles.”37 The league, which was directly associated with Haiti and Jamaica, supposedly influenced the “thought of Maceo,” and intended to take over white properties in the region.38 Parallel to the struggle for independence and the anxieties over black and mulatto leadership, a different war was being fought by more anonymous human beings working under slavery. Rebecca Scott has aptly shown the efforts of enslaved people to gain their freedom, yet recognizing that slavery – with all its associated features – remained alive in Cuba until the very “last minute.”39 Scott notes that planters’ consideration of “some form of abolition seems to have been based in large measure on their perception of the social and political risks of maintaining slavery.”40 Therefore, by the late nineteenth century, the racial concerns that had previously triggered the strengthening of slavery had moved to seeing “some form of abolition” as a safety valve. In both cases, the fear persists, even when the strategies of white elites and the colonial government to avoid the possibility of black revolt were different or even contradictory. The abolition of slavery in 1886 did not put an end to racial concerns, nor to the ideology of racism that had accompanied the institution for years. As Gordon Lewis noted, “Ideological systems long survive the concrete economic conditions that originally give rise to them.”41 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 70–89. Antonio Maceo to Sr. Don Antonio Norma, 14 September 1879, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter AGI), Sección de Diversos, leg. 7, no. 525. Conspiración de la Raza de Color, descubierta en Santiago de Cuba el 10 de diciembre de 1880 siendo Comandante General de la Provincia el Excmo. Sr. Teniente General Don Camilo Polavieja (Santiago de Cuba: Sección Tipográfica del Estado Mayor, 1880), AGI, Libros Antiguos, s. XIX, n. 77 [belongs to Sección de Diversos, leg. 8]. Mr. Du Defair, 10 December 1880, manuscript, AGI, Sección de Diversos, leg. 8 [nos. 68–70]. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba; Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 94–114. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 119. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought, 169.

Historical Groundings

29

Post-emancipation labor politics were filled with racism. Many of those who obtained their freedom remained as agricultural workers and it is well known that the plantation remained a racialized space throughout the Caribbean, and Cuba was not an exception.42 While the workforce in the plantations after slavery became more ethnically diverse (Spaniards, Chinese) and may have produced a cross-racial labor force, this did not mean automatic racial harmony. In fact, the efforts of encouraging white labor migration (and the discourse of whitening or blanqueamiento) which contributed to that diverse labor force also included rhetoric against blacks, accusing them of being “vagrants,” “bandits,” and “a plague of enemies of society.”43 But neither the end of slavery (which eliminated the fear of a slave revolt) nor the blanqueamiento immigration policies (destined to quell fears of racial imbalance) were obstacles for the Spaniards who persisted in their strategy of racial fear again in 1895 during the last war of independence. This strategy was challenged by “intellectual leaders of Cuban independence [who] had made racial equality a theoretical foundation of the Cuban nation.”44 Although racial prejudice did exist within the Liberation Army, in practice what Spanish troops were fighting on the island’s battlefield was a multiracial army in which peoples of all shades and colors were taking part.45 Consequently, the last war of independence was fought under competing and coexisting discourses of racial fear and multiracial solidarity.

 : -   The movement of thousands of British Caribbean migrants to Cuba falls within the larger period of intra-Caribbean migrations from 1838 up to the first decades of the twentieth century. The migrants from the British Caribbean were crossing not only political frontiers, but also linguistic ones, as they ventured into Hispanic territories of the Americas. A survey of those movements is relevant in this historical background to locate the migration to Cuba in perspective with the wider trajectories and dispersion of black British Caribbean migrants. 42 43 44 45

Giovannetti, “Grounds of Race.” Instituto de Historia, Historia del movimiento obrero cubano, 1865–1958, Tomo I: 1865–1935, 49–51. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 162. Duharte Jiménez, Nacionalidad e historia, 60–61; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 32, 83–88, 154–169; Ibarra, Ideología mambisa, 67; Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 129–153.

30

Black British Migrants in Cuba

In the post-emancipation British Caribbean, in places like Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana, the decades after 1838 witnessed internal mobility and the growth of a peasantry.46 In the smaller eastern Caribbean islands, where the planters had greater control of the land, former slaves defined freedom through migration to places such as Trinidad and British Guiana where – unlike the old sugar colonies – there was a more thriving sugar production after the mid-nineteenth century.47 People from Barbados migrated to British Guiana and Trinidad during the 1830s and 1840s, despite the efforts of the colonial government to restrict outmigration and retain the plantation labor force. Barbadians also went to St. Croix, Antigua, and elsewhere in the eastern Caribbean. Estimates of net outward movement from Barbados between 1861 and 1891 are of 29,000 (21,800 men and 7,600 women).48 In Jamaica, although there was land available in the immediate aftermath of emancipation, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed gradual changes that affected the peasants. Expansion and investment in the banana industry and the associated land transactions curtailed alternatives for further development of the peasantry.49 Economic and infrastructural enterprises surrounding the Antilles and sponsored mainly by US capital – railway construction, banana plantations, and the Panama Canal in Central America – became employment alternatives. By the 1850s, British Caribbean workers were traveling to Panama to work on the construction of railways. Subsequently, Suez Canal builder Ferdinand de Lesseps headed the French effort to start the construction of the Panama Canal in 1881, an initiative that attracted a “stampede” of immigrants from Jamaica.50 Velma Newton estimated that between 1881 and 1889, about 60 percent of the labor force in the Panama Canal and Railroad Projects was from the British Caribbean.51 In the eastern Caribbean islands with less diversified agricultural economies mostly dependent on sugar, the economic depression of the 1880s had a marked effect. For a labor force that had been already looking for working alternatives abroad, the situation became more acute. Labor options in 46

47 48 49 50

Eisner, Jamaica, 1830–1930, 210–235; Hall, Free Jamaica, 1838–1865, 157–181; Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Marshall, “Notes on Peasant Development in the West Indies since 1838,” 252–263. Richardson, “Freedom and Migration in the Leeward Caribbean, 1838–1948.” Roberts, “Emigration from the Island of Barbados,” 275; Lowenthal, “The Population of Barbados,” 453–455. See Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 336–379. 51 Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 63–100. Newton, The Silver Men, 47.

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31

British Guiana and Trinidad were limited by the competition of Indian indentured workers.52 Many eastern Caribbean islanders ventured to central and northern South America in search of work, only to face hardships when operations stopped. The failure of the French attempt in the Panama Canal (between 1888 and 1889) due to financial, engineering, and administration troubles and challenges with disease in the tropics affected many Caribbean working lives.53 While some Caribbean migrants went to other Latin American countries searching for work, it is reported that thousands of St. Lucians were stranded in the canal and Jamaicans were starving and destitute in hospitals and train stations awaiting repatriation.54 The number of workers from various islands with no return passage in the Colón area of Panama has been estimated at 13,000, and 7,500 Jamaicans received government assistance for their return.55 In the final years of the nineteenth century, many laborers from Dominica went to the gold fields of Venezuela and to Cayenne, French Guiana; and Leeward Islanders started their movement to the sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic.56 The West India Royal Commission of 1897 reported on Barbados that the “whole island is already occupied and developed” and “very thickly populated.” It concluded, “Emigration is a natural and, in view of complaints as to want of labour elsewhere, at first sight a promising suggestion.”57 At the turn of the twentieth century, additional destinations offered more alternatives for British Caribbean migrants. In 1900 and 1901, Jamaicans were contracted to build the railway from Guayaquil to Quito in Ecuador and migration from the Leeward Islands to the Dominican Republic increased during the 1900s.58 The Panama Canal project abandoned by the French was taken over by the US Isthmian Canal

52 53 54 55 56

57 58

Saul, “The British West Indies in Depression, 1880–1914,” 3–25. Haskin, The Panama Canal, 8–9, 217–218. Richardson, “Human Mobility in the Windward Caribbean, 1884–1902,” 311; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 96–97. Putnam, The Company They Kept, 45. Report of the West India Royal Commission, 50, 123. It was reported that, by 1892, some of the migrants were in “a poverty-stricken condition in Venezuela” and “anxious to return to their native country”; del Castillo, La inmigración de braceros, 36–41. Report of the West India Royal Commission, 29, 31. On the movement to Ecuador, see “From the Sea to Quito: The Railway in Ecuador,” Jamaica Times, September 9, 1900, 5; “Jamaicans in Ecuador: A Full Account of Their Adventures and Mis-adventures,” Jamaica Times, February 9, 1901, 14. On the Dominican Republic, see del Castillo, La inmigración de braceros.

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Commission in 1904, and its construction lasted until 1913. For the construction period and its immediate aftermath, estimated departures to Panama from Barbados and Jamaica totalled 151,000, with more than 3,000 from other British colonial territories.59 Estimates of labor migration from Jamaica to Costa Rica in the first two decades of the twentieth century are of 22,362.60 British Antilleans also migrated north to the United States to communities such as Harlem in New York. Net Jamaican migration to the United States from 1881 to 1921 is calculated at 46,000.61 It must be noted that, along with the economic crisis of the British Caribbean colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of environmental disasters – hurricanes, droughts, and the Jamaican earthquake of 1907 – contributed to the emigration from different colonies. Also, with the outbreak of the World War I, British subjects from the Caribbean left their islands to join the British West Indies Regiment.62 One common feature of the migrants’ experience in all of these places was that of social, racial, and economic inequality. At different times, laborers in Venezuela and Panama were left in a destitute condition, and those in the Canal Zone worked under a discriminatory system of payment based on racial difference.63 In the various enterprises where the black migrants worked, as well as in their contact with the societies in which they arrived, they were exposed to socially discriminating practices

59

60 61 62

63

The estimated departures from Barbados were 60,000, and from Jamaica 91,000, according to Newton, The Silver Men, 88. The numbers from other British colonial territories are from O’Reggio, Between Alienation and Citizenship, 41, but are also recorded in Newton’s book (85), suggesting a larger number from the Eastern Caribbean, especially St. Lucia, Grenada, and Dominica. It is important to note that even after the completion of the construction of the canal, the departures of Jamaicans to Panama were significant, with an average rate of 1,500 per year until 1930. Proudfoot, Population Movements in the Caribbean, 79–80. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 139. A total of 15,204 soldiers from the British Caribbean were active in the war with the British West Indies Regiment. Some 397 of them served as officers. Islanders from virtually all the colonies were active, but the major groups were from Jamaica (10,280), Trinidad and Tobago (1,478), Barbados (831), and British Guiana (700). Some 1,256 soldiers died, the majority due to sickness, and 697 were wounded. Joseph, “The British West Indies Regiment, 1914–1918,” 94–124; Howe, Race, War, and Nationalism; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War. Greene, The Canal Builders, 123–158; Myers, “Post-emancipation Migrations,” 94; Newton, The Silver Men, 131–159.

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and racial violence.64 Soldiers on the European war front confronted discrimination within the army ranks manifested in their general treatment and the tasks they were assigned to do, but also in their encounter with white officers and soldiers.65 The story of British Caribbean migration and mobility after 1838 is certainly one of labor oppression and discrimination. But migrants were not passive or content with their place in the post-emancipation world. From a mutiny of soldiers of the British West Indies Regiment and the labor activism in Central America to the organizational practices in Harlem and the Panama Canal, Caribbean migrants challenged social discrimination and struggled for economic survival.66 Their mobility throughout the region as workers was inevitably part of the history of capitalism and imperialism in the Caribbean, but it was also an assertion of freedom and independence. The multiple migrations of the century after slave emancipation (1838–1938) became a way for people of African descent in the British Caribbean to challenge the colonial sociopolitical order by seeking opportunities outside the empire. The Cuban experience would mean new and difficult challenges, but also a space to construct their own Afro-diasporic history.

  : , – Racial fears and Caribbean human mobility collided in Cuba in the early twentieth century, a period with its own unsettling events: US military interventions and governments (1898–1902, 1906–1909), partial military intrusions (1912, 1917), social and political revolts (1906, 1912, 1917), economic crises (in 1920 and the 1930s), and widespread labor unrest and mobilization (1933). It was during this wavering period that the sugar industry boomed, demanding the foreign black labor that had been available and moving throughout the region. 64

65 66

García Muñiz and Giovannetti, “Garveyismo y racismo en el Caribe,” 158–159; Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, 31–40; Echeverri-Gent, “Forgotten Workers,” 286; Newton, The Silver Men, 131–168; Putnam, The Company They Kept, 44. Howe, Race, War and Nationalism, 91–115, 131–133, 160–167; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War, 79–99, 122–151. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, 52–61; Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 147–206; Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 11–91; James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 122–94, Reid, The Negro Immigrant, 121–141, 146–160. On the mutiny of the British West Indies Regiment during the World War I, see Howe, Race, War and Nationalism, 155–171; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War, 122–151; and the documentary film by Appio, Mutiny.

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Below I will briefly outline some important aspects of this postindependence chapter in Cuban history. The multiracial struggle for independence and the possibility of triumph over the Spaniards was shattered by US intervention in the war in 1898. Cubans had to decide their future as a sovereign nation under US influence. As if the racist imprint of Spanish colonialism was not enough, the US presence brought its own brand of racism to Cuba. Racialized notions of civilization fueled US skepticism about the capabilities of Cubans for self-government.67 This situation represented an obstacle for the accomplishment of racial equality during the struggle for independence and guaranteed a space for the racist ideas entrenched after centuries of Spanish colonial slavery. Moreover, the racial politics of the Cuban white elites accommodated the US discourse of civilization and white superiority. The policies of Cuba’s first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, favored the Hispano-Cuban side of Cuba’s ethno-national heritage, including the sponsorship of European migration.68 His government also leaned towards the US’s political agenda for Cuba, facilitating the continuation of policies implemented under US military administration. This included support for foreign investment and for the expansion and consolidation of US economic interests in the country, particularly in sugar, railways, and tobacco. The outcome would have a disproportionate impact on Cubans of African descent, and on their enfranchisement, employment options, and access to land.69 Land appropriations that started under the US military government facilitated the expansion of railways and the sugar industry. Railway entrepreneur William Van Horne had acquired lands through his

67

68 69

Pérez, The War of 1898, 29, 37, 44; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 187–194. On the racial antecedents and contours of US manifest destiny, see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 281–284; and Maingot, The United States and the Caribbean, 14–28. Skepticism about the capabilities of Cubans for self-government was also present during Spanish colonial rule. See Duharte Jiménez, Nacionalidad e historia, 10. Also, at the moment of establishing the republic, nonwhite leaders of the Liberation Army were marginalized, which suggests either similar apprehensions from white Cubans, compliance with the ideas of the new colonial power, or both. See Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 170–194; and James Figarola, Cuba, 1900–1928, 21–132. Guerra, “From Revolution to Involution in the Early Republic,” 132–162. Guerra, The Myth of José Martí, 127–138.

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relationship with military governor Leonard Wood, and by 1902 was actively involved in the construction of the eastern railway network.70 The UFC bought lands in northeastern Cuba around the Nipe Bay area at extremely low prices for the construction of the Boston and Preston sugar mills. In 1900, the UFC owned 7,803 acres of land cultivated in sugar cane, and by 1914 the area under its control (Banes, Nipe Bay, and Saetia) comprised 255,000 acres, of which 58,000 were planted in sugar cane.71 By 1899, Mario García Menocal (a former general of the Cuban Liberation Army educated at Cornell University) had selected the lands where Robert Bradley Hawley’s CASC would develop two of the largest sugar mills in Cuba and the Caribbean: Chaparra and Delicias. That Boston and Chaparra sugar mills (run by the UFC and CASC respectively) had their first crop in 1902, the year of the establishment of the Cuban Republic, symbolically attests to US economic control in the island.72 The United States signed a treaty whereby they acquired land in the Guantánamo Bay area to develop a naval military base.73 In all, it is estimated that US capital investment in Cuba rose from $80 million in 1902 to $220 million in 1912.74 People in the Cuban countryside were perhaps the most affected by US economic intrusion, particularly in the eastern half of the island where the process was especially damaging for Afro-Cubans.75 In Camagüey, for instance, in 1906, the provincial governor reported that whites owned most of the farms in the province (2,383), with an “insignificant” amount of property (171 farms) in the hands of the “element of color.”76 Afro-Cubans remaining in the countryside were also marginalized by the preference for Spanish migrant workers by some employers.77 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

Deere, “Here Come the Yankees!”, 737; On Van Horne’s investments during the first years of the Republic, see Smith, Robert Fleming, 1845–1933, 125–126. Adams, Conquest of the Tropics, 244, 247. On the development of railways during the early years of independence, see Zanetti and García, Caminos para el azúcar, 195–266. On the Cuba Company particularly, see Santamarina, “The Cuba Company and Cuban Development, 1900–1959.” On the UFC, see Zanetti and García, et al., United Fruit Company; and James, Banes. For the CASC, see Agricultura y zootecnia: Edición extraordinaria. For US control in the tobacco industry, see Stubbs, Tobacco in the Periphery, 22–27. Yglesia Martínez, “Organización de la república neo-colonial,” 65–67. Hoernel, “Sugar and Social Change in Oriente,” 229. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 105–110. Manuel R. Silva to Charles E. Magoon, 30 November 1906, ANC, Fondo 189-Secretaria de Presidencia (hereafter ANC, SP), leg. 28, no. 13. On Afro-Cuban labor marginalization in rural and urban areas during the republic, as well as their movement to the cities, see de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 105–128.

36

Black British Migrants in Cuba

In 1905 and 1906, for instance, Manuel Rionda, one of the leading sugar entrepreneurs, put his efforts into bringing workers from Galicia and the Canary Islands.78 Despite the multiracial labor force on some plantations, Afro-Cubans working on them were permanently reminded of the existent racial order. The guards of Edwin Atkins’s sugar estate in Cienfuegos were mostly Spaniards who, as suggested by Rebecca Scott, echoed “the white militia of the southern United States.”79 To the east, between 1908 and 1912, virtually all the guardias jurados of the UFC in Banes were either white Cubans or Spaniards, and the CASC security was also predominantly white.80 The politics of early independent Cuba also had their own racial order, as the first political crisis in early independent Cuba unfolded. In August 1906, members of the Liberal Party started a revolt against the re-elected government of Estrada Palma, now in the Moderate Party. Because most of the followers and clientele of the Liberal Party were blacks and mulattoes, it is not surprising that most insurgents were nonwhites.81 It follows that the conflict was framed within the discourses of civilization and race prevailing in the country, including the portrayal of blacks as rebels. That August, one planter wrote to the US Department of State accusing the leaders of being “disgruntled politicians” and their principal followers “Negroes.” The “better class of people” was not mixed with the insurgents.82 In September, the acting US chargé d’affaires remarked that “negroes are rising up” “robbing” and “sacking shops,” and that the

78

79

80

81 82

Manuel Rionda to Messrs Czarnikow, McDougall & Co., New York, January 30, 1905; Manuel Rionda to C. Czarnikow, London, December 14, 1906, Braga Brothers Collection, Special Collections, George A. Smathers Library, University of Florida, Gainesville (hereafter BBC), RG II, S. 5, Box 1. Scott, “Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Cuba,” 707. See also Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 121. The racial composition of the Rural Guard, Scott argues, appears to have changed with time to include “veterans of color,” and she quotes sugar entrepreneur Edwin Atkins’ perception that by 1912 half of the force in Santa Clara was “composed of negroes.” Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 211, 325, n. 64. For the UFC, see the correspondence in the Manager’s Letter Books, 1908–1912, United Fruit Company Papers, Museo Municipal Histórico de Banes, Banes, Holguín, Cuba (hereafter UFCP). For the CASC, see the images Agricultura y zootecnia, 88–89. In Santa Clara Province, 71 percent of the insurgents were identified as blacks. Ibarra, Patria, etnia, y nación, 190. W. A. Page to Elihu Root, US secretary of state, August 28, 1906, National Archives and Record Administration, United States (hereafter NARA), RG 59, Numerical and Minor Files of the Department of State, 1906–1910 (hereafter RG 59, NMFDS), File 244/57 (M862, Roll no. 37).

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“war” was assuming “its most dangerous phase.”83 Another report by November 1906 linked the “colored element” with the Liberal Party and the revolt, noting that the Liberals needed the “ignorant classes” for their political combinations.84 The rumors about black rebels during the 1906 revolt were, according to Rebecca Scott, more a “projection of white fears onto a stage in which people of color were in fact very visible.” While she highlights “crossracial clienteles,” even those were hierarchical, such as the one described in reports of “24 men of color, led by a white Chief.”85 The resurgence of the imagery of the black insurgent – proven or not – speaks to the endurance of the racial fears, but also indicates the racial tensions in Cuba after (or despite) the multiracial struggle for independence. According to US intelligence reports, landowners manifested their antipathy against “Liberals and Negro Domination,” which they considered a “political nightmare.” In rural areas, the report added, “there is distrust and fear.”86 As Aline Helg and others have argued, by 1906, black and mulatto veterans were not having their “rightful share” of political power, something that would become more evident after 1906.87 The 1906 Liberal revolt and Estrada Palma’s failure to guarantee stability led to US intervention that year and a provisional government. Under the intervention, blacks were discriminated, and ideological influence on notions of race and civilization impacted Cuban society.88 AfroCuban politicians such as Martín Morúa Delgado and Juan Gualberto Gómez presented a strong challenge to discriminatory practices in the country at the time.89 The discrimination against Afro-Cubans, if anything, actually triggered the activism of blacks and mulattoes.

83 84 85

86 87

88

Jacob Sleeper to Elihu Root, US secretary of state, September 8, 1906, NARA, RG 59NMFDS, File 244/98–105 (M862, Roll no. 37). Manuel R. Silva to Charles E. Magoon, provisional governor, Havana, November 30, 1906, ANC, SP, leg. 28, no. 13. Scott, “‘The Lower Class of Whites’ and ‘The Negro Element’,” 187; Manuel R. Silva to Charles E. Magoon, provisional governor, Havana, November 30, 1906, ANC, SP, leg. 28, no. 13. A contrasting report cited by Jorge Ibarra indicates that blacks were prone to follow leaders who were “not usually white.” See Ibarra, Patria, etnia, y nación, 190. Ibarra, Patria, etnia, y nación, 200. See Helg, Our Rightful Share, 117–139; Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 46–67; Scott, “‘The Lower Class of Whites’ and ‘The Negro Element’,” 187. On a discussion of race in the 1906 revolt, see Logan, “Conspirators, Pawns, Patriots, and Brothers.” 89 Duke “The Idea of Race,” 87–109. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 120–123.

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Black British Migrants in Cuba

The US intervention from 1906 to 1909 witnessed an increase of AfroCuban assertiveness in reclaiming their sociopolitical space; one that followed the path of earlier efforts through the black press, the Directorio de Sociedades de Color, the Committee of Veterans, and Afro-Cuban societies.90 In 1907, a “Committee” launched a “Pronouncement to the Cuban People and Citizens of Color.” Empowered by their “citizenship” – their membership of the polity – this Committee proclaimed that the “coloured race in Camagüey will not be a social element without direction” and that they would work “towards the moral, political and economic dignity of the individuals of our race.”91 Their pronouncement apparently triggered the rather complex and revealing reaction from another “Committee” stating that “people of color” had a space in the Liberal Party and warning that a separate organization of “pilgrim character” would have “fatal consequences,” including the loss of the “protection of the white element.”92 By 1908 it was clear that a separate option was needed and Evaristo Estenoz, a veteran of the wars of independence, founded the Agrupación Independiente de Color. Estenoz’s group would later become the PIC, running their own newspaper, Previsión, but obtaining only a small share of the popular vote in the elections of November 1908. The PIC continued seeking equal rights and representation for people of color in Cuba. The party understood that blacks were being “ignored” and “excluded systematically from participating in the public affairs of the country.”93 While the pro-white migration policies in the country reflected the racial preferences of the elites, the PIC advocated immigration of “all races, without any preference.” Their political program also called for improvement in working conditions, abolition of the death penalty, improvements in prisons, and changes to advance fairness in the justice system. It was also understood that Afro-Cubans should be

90 91

92 93

Deschamps Chapeaux, El negro en el periodismo cubano del siglo XIX; Pappademos, Black Political Activism, 65–70, 134–142. Emilio, Céspedes, Federico Montane, et al. [Comité], “Manifiesto al Pueblo Cubano y a los Ciudadanos de Color,” August 27, 1907, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Camagüey (hereafter AHPC), Fondo Jorge Júarez Cano (hereafter JJC), Carpeta (Folder) 58, no. 122. El Comité, “Manifiesto a los Ciudadanos de Color del Pueblo Cubano,” (September 6, 1907), AHPC, JJC, Carpeta (Folder) 58, no. 126. “Negroes’ ‘Declaration of Independence,’ Given to Gov. Magoon by Estenoz,” Havana Post, October 1, 1908, NARA, RG 59-NMFDS, File 1943/164–165 (M862, Roll no. 206).

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present in the diplomatic corps in order for Cuba to be represented “as it is,” with all its different racial components.94 The struggle of the PIC was not well received within the broader Cuban society. To begin with, its entry into the electoral process represented a challenge to the established parties, particularly the Liberal Party, which had more of an Afro-Cuban following. Thus the PIC created divisions among Afro-Cubans, with some remaining loyal to the Liberal cause and others supporting Estenoz. Then, in what seemed an unsolvable predicament, the PIC’s focus in seeking inclusiveness of black and mulattoes within a purported multiracial society was framed as anti-patriotic divisionism and, paradoxically, as racism. For many, the end of slavery and the multiracial struggle for independence signaled the achievement of racial equality, and an organization like the PIC was not needed. But for Estenoz and the PIC leadership, real equality was far from being accomplished. One could argue that the very existence of the PIC meant the failure (or incompleteness) of the project of racial equality central to Cuba’s national formation. In the end, the PIC was declared illegal in 1910 with an amendment to the electoral law, which banned all political parties and groups organized along racial lines. The formal presentation of the amendment in the Senate was made by Afro-Cuban politician Martín Morúa Delgado, something that galvanized the already existing divisions. Immediately, the PIC denied the alleged racial exclusivism and declared its openness to “all the elements” in society, welcoming “as many white men as wish to join its ranks.”95 In face of the “Morúa Amendment,” there was some negotiation for a change in the organization, eliminating the word “Color” (becoming Partido Independiente Nacional or Independent National Party) as some kind of compromise, but most of the PIC’s members showed strong convictions and started mobilization and activism to repeal the amendment and participate in the November 1912 elections.96 Consequently, members of the PIC suffered political persecution and repression, including the imprisonment of their leadership. With the “Morúa Amendment” in place obstructing the electoral participation of the PIC, the organization resorted to open revolt against

94

95 96

See Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 46–67; and also the appendix “Programa Político del Partido Independiente de Color,” at 192–195, originally published in Previsión, October 15, 1908, 3. Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 74. Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 76–77; Helg, Our Rightful Share, 179–191.

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the government. Given the existence of the Platt Amendment and the previous experience of US intervention during the 1906 revolt, the PIC leadership aimed at forcing US intervention as a way to oust the Liberal Party.97 But the response to the revolt by José Miguel Gómez’s administration was open repression, now legally sanctioned by the Morúa Amendment, and ending with a carnage that wiped out the lives of thousands of Afro-Cubans during the summer of 1912.98 The history of the PIC has been examined by various scholars with differing interpretations, and there is no need for a detailed examination here. While Alejandro de la Fuente maintains that the discourse of racial equality created spaces for Afro-Cuban agency and limited the possibility of discrimination, the history of the PIC shows that the limits were on the possibility for black collective action.99 However, one aspect of its history is relevant here: how the PIC and the revolt they launched were represented and inserted into the ideological framework of racial fear, and how, as such, they were linked to external influences. Detractors of the PIC stated the party’s incongruence with the racial equality and harmony advocated by José Martí. Yet the ways in which the organization’s actions and revolt were identified with the historical black fear and outside “blacker” influences were strengthened and somehow justified by the Cuban myth of racial equality. Since all Cubans – blacks, mulattoes, and whites – were considered to be equal in theory,100 the blame for any internal disturbance could not be attributed to domestic forces. Any narrative of the revolt had to put the blame on outsiders, black outsiders precisely from Haiti and Jamaica (the territories of origin of the migrants studied here). The identification of the PIC with outside influence started with its leadership; Estenoz was reportedly born in the Dominican Republic and labeled a “black adventurer from Jamaica.”101 Different sources claimed that the movement was inspired by foreign elements, either from Jamaica, 97 98

99 100 101

Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 77–80; Pérez, “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color,” 530–531. Estimates are of 3,000 to 5,000, depending on the source. On the PIC, see de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 66–78; Fermoselle, Política y color en Cuba; Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 46–109; Helg, Our Rightful Share; Orum, “The Politics of Color”; Pérez, “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color”; Portuondo Linares, Los independientes de color. For the contending interpretations, see de la Fuente, A Nation for All; Helg, Our Rightful Share; and Scott, Degrees of Freedom. Martí, “Mi Raza,” Patria, April 16, 1893, in Obras Completas, vol. II, 21499. Cited in Fermoselle, Política y color en Cuba, 94.

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the Dominican Republic, or Haiti.102 Arthur Beaupré, US minister in Havana, wrote to the US Department of State with reports of “many strange negroes in Cienfuegos, many from Haiti and Jamaica,” which were echoed by the commercial press abroad.103 A local newspaper reported on a meeting held by Estenoz in “Jamaica,” a town in Guantánamo, but also a name that invoked fear among headline readers.104 An article in Diario de la Marina that discussed “the clandestine invasion of Jamaicans and Haitians” in the east ended by associating them with PIC leader Pedro Ivonet.105 The governor of the province of Oriente reported to the Secretary of Government that among the insurgents in his province there was one man of “Haitian nationality” who was “in charge of bringing the expeditions of arms and ammunition for the rebels.”106 The wider racialized perception of the revolt reached Jamaica itself, where the Jamaica Times reported, It has been persistently said that [there are involved] in the uprising many fighters from Jamaica as well as from Hayti [sic] and Santo Domingo. Fancy writers have gone so far as to spread the idea that the black populations of the West Indies are all [in]volved, with the idea of making a big federation of the black race.

Such perception was not distant from the fears of the late nineteenth century. The Jamaica Times writer, however, acknowledged that there was “some truth in the assertion that there are black people of other countries mixed up in the present turmoil.”107 Another Jamaican newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, reported that Estenoz was “a native of Jamaica,” “anxious for notoriety, although of considerable intelligence and some military ability.”108 One day before its report on Estenoz, the same newspaper argued against the claims of Jamaican involvement in the revolt, saying that “neither Haytian [sic] nor the Jamaicans care a fig

102 103

104 105 106

107 108

Fermoselle, Politica y color en Cuba, 144–145. A. M. Beaupré to US Secretary of State, 2 June 1912, NARA, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State–Internal Affairs in Cuba (hereafter RG 59, GRDS-IAC), File 837.00/657 (M488, Roll no. 6); “Cuba Situation Is Serious,” Tobacco, 53:7, June 6, 1912, 1, 19. “Los independientes de color: El mitín de Jamaica,” El Camagüeyano, March 6, 1912. “Baturrillo,” Diario de la Marina, June 4, 1912, 4. Governor, Oriente Province, to the Secretary of Government, May 27, 1912, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Santiago de Cuba (hereafter AHPSC), Fondo-Gobierno Provincial de Oriente (hereafter GPO), leg. 1790, no. 6. Johns de Pool, “Cuba’s Present Rebellion: Its Sources and Dangers,” Jamaica Times, July 6, 1912, 5, 8. “Cuban Revolt,” Daily Gleaner, June 12, 1912, 1.

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whether Cuba remains a Republic or not.”109 Charles Carvalho, the Haitian consul in Santiago, rejected the accusation of Haitian involvement in Cuba. “Haytians [sic] never interfere with politics in Cuba or anywhere else outside the country,” he wrote, while assuring that the “8,000 Haytians [sic] resident in that province” were honest workers.110 There is actually little evidence to prove Haitian or Jamaican involvement in the political uprising of the PIC. However, the evidence presented here supports a strong perception that black foreigners were involved, and that fear of the black outsider was triggered during the revolt. “The black uprising of 1912,” wrote Rafael Duharte Jiménez, “seemed to materialize the fear that had chilled the Creole planters ever since 1791.”111 Aline Helg has also documented the connection of the mobilization of the PIC with white anxieties and the nineteenth-century history of black fear. From concerns about the vulnerability of “white women to black attacks” and the fear of “another Haiti,” to Pedro Ivonet’s equating the prosecutions of PIC members to the trials of the 1844 Escalera Conspiracy, the connection with past fears was established.112 Clearly, the century-long ideology that an uprising within Cuban boundaries (whether from the slaves, ex-slaves, or disenfranchised blacks) would happen because of outside influences had remained ingrained in the Cuban psyche even after the end of slavery and a multiracial struggle for independence, or probably because of it. No black Cuban would upset the nation’s racial utopia, only foreigners such as Jamaicans or Haitians.

 It is a paradox that when the fear of black outsiders reached its twentiethcentury zenith in Cuba with the 1912 conflict, the country witnessed an increase in black foreign migration. The unsettling historical racial fear and the human mobility of black Caribbean migrants meet at that twentieth-century juncture, and there is where the story of this book unfolds. The killing or imprisonment of thousands of black Cuban workers for their “racist” revolt had set the stage for the need of foreign Caribbean 109 110

111 112

“The Revolution Grows in Cuba,” Daily Gleaner, June 11, 1912, 1. “The Revolution Grows in Cuba,” Daily Gleaner, June 11, 1912, 1. Carvalho had previously condemned the murder of one Haitian in Guantánamo. Charles V. Carvalho to R. Manduley, May 27, 1912, ANC, SP. 110, no. 2 [Primera Pieza]. Duharte Jiménez, Seis ensayos de interpretación histórica, 100. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 169, 174, 180

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43

labor – which was, ironically, the very embodiment of the black rebel outsider. Contrary to the notion that the “black fear vanished” with the massacre of blacks in 1912,113 the PIC revolt – as another “living example” – reactivated the threat of black revolts caused by an imagined black outsider. This would have consequences for the thousands of black foreign laborers who arrived in Cuba searching for work and opportunities. Building on Aline Helg’s “icons of fear” (the Haitian Revolution, African religion and culture, and Afro-Cuban sexuality), historian Marc McLeod suggested that “white prejudice towards Afro-Antilleans appeared as an extension of long-standing beliefs about the Afro-Cuban population.”114 Considering the background presented here, I would add that for white Cubans, the prejudice against Afro-Antilleans was also grounded in fear of the black outsider, a fear actually linked to Helg’s first fear of the Haitian Revolution, and to a wider “terrified consciousness” in the Caribbean. Afro-Cubans and Afro-Antilleans shared a common trait – “blackness” – but the mass arrival of the latter group on Cuban shores in the 1910s personified a long-held and evolving preoccupation and anxiety about the black outsider. The fear of black Caribbean migrants that underlines the story that follows combines elements of the two types of political fear outlined by Corey Robin. The fear “preys upon some real threat,” he argues, and is not “created out of nothing.” Both the racial conflict of 1912 and the sudden presence of thousands of migrants after that year were “real” – a “living example,” in Maingot’s words. It will be shown that fear was also used as a political tool, not only by political leaders, but also by Cuban intellectuals and the national press. When black migrant labor was needed, the fear faded. But we will see how, depending on socioeconomic changes and specific political goals, the fear was refashioned in discursive practices: black migrants as criminals, as rebels, as vectors of disease, or as economic burden. Robin argues that this modality “involves a collective’s fear of faraway dangers” that could be a “foreign enemy, separate 113 114

Duharte Jiménez, Seis ensayos de interpretación histórica, 100. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 601. On the “icons of fear,” see Helg, Our Rightful Share, 17–18. Particularly in moments of conflict, Cuban elites generalized concerns about blackness, be it Cuban or foreigner. The extension of beliefs about one black group (Afro-Cubans) to the other (Afro-Antilleans) did happen. But if one considers the long history of racial fear associated with the black outsider, and of historical vilification of Jamaicans and Haitians, black migrants were in many ways the source of fear itself – however manufactured by the discourses of the Cuban elites.

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from the collective”; that is, in this case, outsiders not belonging to the nation as conceived by the elites. Also, like Robin’s second type of political fear, Cuban apprehensions about black migrants arose “from the social, political, and economic hierarchies” that divide societies, their “vertical conflicts.” The narratives about Jamaicans and other Antilleans set them apart from the polity and perpetuated their inequality and their status as outsiders.115 Such is the predicament of a diaspora, arriving in an inauspicious social context, and having to survive within it. That is what black British Caribbean migrants faced, in a place where they were feared and discriminated from the moment of arrival. How did they face such a situation? How did they survive in the hostile Cuban environment? How exactly did Cuban society perceived them and at what moments? What racial encounters and cross-ethnic exchanges defined their politics (or lack thereof )? How and in what terms did they develop communities and solidarities within Cuba and beyond in order to endure their experiences as migrants? These are some of the questions that frame the story in the following chapters.

115

Robin, Fear, 16–19.

2 Black British Caribbean Migration to Cuba, 1898–1948

Early twentieth-century Cuba received more than 140,000 British Antilleans to work mainly – but not exclusively – in the growing sugar industry. This chapter presents an overview of this migration, looking at issues such as labor recruitment and settlement and the general experience of the migrants. Caribbean migration to Cuba is generally portrayed as a bellcurve process that peaks with new legislation on immigration in the 1910s and the boom of the sugar industry in those years, and then drops with an economic depression in the 1930s and mass deportations of foreign workers.1 Such an interpretation relies mainly on the quantitative data on migration as movement: that is, people that moved in and, to some extent, out. But before the years of mass migration, and often overshadowed by it, there was a significant presence of black Caribbean migrants in the first decade of the century, particularly in eastern Cuba. Also, while people moved in and out, others stayed after the 1930s. This study covers migrants as much as migration, and therefore seeks to examine British Antillean experience beyond the time frame based on statistics that privilege movement.2 I want to provide a wider picture that looks critically at periods of mass migration (between 1912 and the 1920s), but also at the preceding years, and those following the depression and the expulsions of foreign labor in the 1930s. This approach 1 2

See, for instance, Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana,” 3–75; Álvarez Estévez, Azúcar e inmigración; González Suárez, “La inmigración antillana en Cuba,” 50–61. I will use the word “migration” to refer generally to the movements of people in and out of Cuba. However, for the purposes of precision, in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, I will use the word immigration when referring to official statistical figures documenting movement into Cuba, or when it is that particular movement that the source is referring to.

45

46

Black British Migrants in Cuba

 . Provinces, cities, towns, sugar mills, and ports of Cuba, 1900–1940. Source: Prepared by Dr. Carlos Guilbe, Department of Geography, University of Puerto Rico.

demands a critical analysis of the quantitative data on migration, combined with qualitative information, to provide a more complex picture beyond arrivals and departures, into the details of the migrants’ life inside Cuba. In 1913 President Gómez left office, but only after authorizing the Nipe Bay Company to import several hundred Caribbean migrant workers. His successor, President García Menocal, continued the practice of executive decrees for labor recruitment, and in 1917 authorized the entry of cane cutters until two years after the end of World War I.3 As important as these landmarks are, black Caribbean presence in Cuba – and the feelings and opinions about it – preceded these years of mass migration. Despite the relatively low levels and unclear classification upon arrival (as “non-specified Antilleans”), the earlier presence, before the authorizations 3

Pérez de la Riva argues that the authorization was for 3,000 workers, while Oscar Zanetti, Alejandro García, and associates maintain that it was for 1,000. Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana,” 28; Zanetti, García, et al., United Fruit Company, 212. [“Ley de Inmigración,”] Gaceta Oficial, “Parte oficial,” year XVI, no. 30, volume II, August 4, 1917, 1941; “Decreto No. 1717 [Inmigración de trabajadores],” Gaceta Oficial, November 2, 1917, 7464–7465.

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mentioned, must not be underestimated. It is only because of the mass migration facilitated by the government after 1913 that the arrivals of the first decade of the century can be perceived as minor. But in its own context, from 1902 to 1912, before Gómez’s decree, “non-specified Antilleans” were the largest immigrant group to Cuba from the Caribbean, and the second-largest group from the whole hemisphere, after those from the United States. Both groups were only surpassed by the staggering numbers of Spanish migrants in those years. Between 1902 and 1907 alone, Cuba received 3,359 “non-specified Antilleans,” and 75 percent of them (2,503) arrived in only two years (between 1905 and 1907).4 An examination of the early years of the century reveals not only the significance of Caribbean migration at that point, but also some characterizations of the black migrant that would become salient afterwards. In 1900 the authorities in Santiago de Cuba made efforts to contain the “increase in Jamaican immigration” in the city, “composed in the majority of people of bad life and customs,” keeping the neighborhood in “alarm” with their “scandals.” Most complaints to the police were allegedly about these migrants.5 That same year, Caribbean migrants were the focus of tensions between foreign corporations and Cuban politicians’ nationalist concerns. William Van Horne, head of the Cuba Company in charge of constructing the eastern railway, wrote to José Miguel Gómez, then governor of Santa Clara Province, denying reports that he intended to import Jamaican workers. Pleasing Gómez and Cuban political elites, he noted that his company intended to recruit workers from “Galicia and from Canary Islands” who could eventually become “permanent residents of the country.” Van Horne added that he would not bring anyone who could not “become a good citizen,” or was “objectionable in any community.”6 “Great excitement prevailed” in Cuba around the prospect that “four or five thousand Negroes” would be recruited to work on the Central Railway.7 Earlier arrivals of black

4 5

6

7

Censo de la República de Cuba bajo la administración provisional de los Estados Unidos, 1907, 60. Verbal motion by Enrique de Messa in Actas Capitulares, ayuntamiento, Santiago de Cuba, April 25, 1900, Archivo Histórico Municipal, Santiago de Cuba, Actas Capitulares (hereafter AHMSC, AC), year 1900, Book 120, File 156, r.v. William C. Van Horne to José Miguel Gómez, November 3, 1900, Cuba Company Papers, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park (hereafter CCP), S. 1, Box A (1900–1905). “Notas sueltas: No se introduzcan negros,” La Lucha, July 29, 1901, 2; “Our Labourers Not Wanted,” Jamaica Times, September 7, 1901, 3.

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Black British Migrants in Cuba

Caribbean migrants did the groundwork for the organizational efforts that would later become central in the migrants’ experience. As early as 1902, British Caribbean migrants had founded the Salvation Army church in Santiago de Cuba.8 The impact of their presence in those early Republican years is highlighted by the reaction of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who wrote in 1906 condemning the criminal nature of nonwhite migrants.9 These earlier years of migration, therefore, remain important to fully understand the British Caribbean migration experience. In 1899, census records identify a total of 1,712 persons as being born in the “West Indies.” Of these, a total of 1,043 were classified as “colored,” 40 percent of them were women (419), and most were in the province of Santiago de Cuba (892). While many were classified as “laborers” (314), others were active as merchants, carpenters, tailors, and seamstresses.10 The increases and fluctuations of Antillean migration that took place around the time of the US provisional government (1906–1909) must not be overlooked either. In the year 1905–1906, “non-specified Antillean” immigration tripled, reaching 1,550, only to decrease in the first year of US administration, and then increase during the subsequent years of US control: 3,728 in 1908 and 3,359 in 1909.11 After Spain and the United States, which was ruling Cuba in those years, the “non-specified” Antilles were the single most significant source of migrants to Cuba. The data show the collision of interests between the United States and Cuba regarding migration, with both needing laborers, but with the latter preferring an ideal migrant (or settler) that had to be white. Racial preoccupations were not present for the North Americans; after all, they were not importing black workers into their own land. Between the end of US intervention in 1909 and 1912, when Jamaicans and Haitians were officially and distinctly categorized in immigration records, the arrival of “non-specified Antilleans” declined slightly. But according to other evidence, their entry into Cuba and the concerns around their presence continued; they were considered “harmful,” the

8 9 10 11

Wiggins, The History of the Salvation Army, Vol. V: 1904–1914, 39. Ortiz, “La inmigracion.” War Department, Office of Director of Census of Cuba, Report on the Census of Cuba, 1899, 220, 472–473. Censo de la República de Cuba bajo la administración provisional de los Estados Unidos, 1907, 60; Census of the Republic of Cuba, 1919, 184.

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49

source of potential “conflict” and “unequal” competition for local laborers.12 Tensions between Jamaicans and Cubans in Preston included an incident on May 20, 1909, in which the former were reproached for playing baseball when the latter were commemorating Cuban independence.13 Around that time, one traveler documented the problems of “deficiency of labor” on the island and stated that the “most easily available source” is “the Jamaican negro.” He emphasized, however, that Jamaicans were “not a valuable acquisition” since employers considered them less efficient than other migrant workers, namely Spaniards and Canary Islanders.14 In contrast, one case within the UFC lands in Banes illustrates that Jamaicans were valued enough by plantation management to at least defend them against the arbitrary actions of Cuban authorities. The incident itself involved some stolen money, and in February 1910 the UFC manager, Harold Harty, denounced the fact that the authorities took action against “two coloured Jamaican workmen” who were arrested “without any evidence.” The houses of Jamaicans were searched, but the authorities did nothing with other individuals who were allegedly present at the time of the deed, but “were Cuban citizens.”15 Cuban authorities were concerned with the presence of black Caribbean migrants on the east coast and how their recruitment was affecting Cuban workers. A letter to the Secretary of Justice on August 1911 denounced the fact that the large sugar mills in the UFC’s area of influence were “importing black workers from Haiti and the other Antilles” through their ports in Nipe Bay. The letter admitted that there were “no means to apply the Immigration Law” in that district to prevent the “entry of that ethnic element.” This left Cuban workers unprotected from “harmful competition.” The writer further denounced the unacceptable state of affairs in which a “certain number of Haitian and Jamaican schooners dedicated to piracy” operated in eastern Cuba, introducing “all types of criminals and adventurers.”16 Throughout the early months of 1911, Cuban authorities in Oriente remained concerned with illegal migrants belonging to the “lowest of the social scale,” linked to the spread

12 13 14 15 16

“Desde Banes: Mala inmigración,” La Lucha, March 8, 1909, 11. “Desde Nipe: El 20 de mayo en Preston,” La Lucha, June 8, 1909, 12. Forbes-Lindsay, Cuba and Her People To-day, 125–126. Harold Harty to William Mason, British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, February 19, 1910, manager’s letter books, 1909–1911, UFCP, p. 226 M. Varona to Secretaria de Justicia, 21 de agosto de 1911, ANC, SP, leg. 121, No. 12.

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of disease from the mainland and characterized as a “danger” with “grim consequences for the national collective.”17 In 1912, immigration records started to document the arrivals from Haiti and Jamaica. This move possibly responded to two interconnected factors: first, the need for a more precise registry of foreign workers entering the country as the government yielded to the demands of labor by sugar planters; second, the nation-state’s need to identify and monitor the foreign ethnic groups that for so long had caused fear among Cuban elites because of their association with social disturbances such as the PIC revolt that year. Whatever the rationale, the first recording of 1,269 Jamaicans suddenly arriving in Cuba is simultaneous with a sharp decrease in recorded immigrants coming from the “non-specified Antilles” (201), a group declining by 90 percent in recorded arrivals. The number of immigrants from Haiti for 1911 and 1912 was initially less than those from Jamaica, but overall the 1910s witnessed a dramatic increase in recorded black Caribbean immigration from these two neighboring territories. For example, Jamaican migration more than tripled in only one year, from 1,834 in 1915 to 7,133 in 1916. Later, again in only one year, the number of migrants more than doubled from 9,184 in 1918 to 24,187 in 1919, and then reached its highest level in 1920 with 27,088 Jamaican migrants.18 Between 1916 and 1920, Cuba received more than half of the total Anglo-Caribbean migration of the first three decades of the century (75,871 out of 142,275). Influenced by the news of economic bonanza in those years (dubbed the “Dance of the Millions”), thousands in the British Caribbean decided to go to Cuba in search of better opportunities. The testimonies of some of the migrants, recorded by Erna Brodber, provide an indication of the general awareness of the migration process that existed during that period.19 One migrant who went to Cuba in 1919 responded, “Oh. Yes. Plenty people travelling there.”20 Another migrant who arrived in 1920 said, “In those days? 17

18 19

20

Secretaria de Gobernación, Habana, to Governor of the province of Oriente, May 31, 1911, AHPSC, GPO, leg.785, exp. 33. See also W. Mason to Civil Governor of the province of Santiago de Cuba, January 18, 1911, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 785, exp. 31. Census of the Republic of Cuba, 1919, 184; Alonso and Ernesto Chávez Álvarez, eds., Memorias inéditas del censo de 1931, 290–91. Brodber, Life in Jamaica. All the interviews are cited with the pseudonym, tape reference number, page, and location at the Documentation and Data Center, Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (hereafter DDC, SALISER). Full references for the interviews are available in the bibliography. “Mona in Retrospect,” 22KMd, 6, DDC, SALISER.

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51

29000 28000 27000 26000 25000 24000 23000 22000 21000 20000

Number of Migrants

19000 18000 17000 16000 15000 14000 13000 12000 11000 10000 9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Year

Jamaicans

Antilleans

English

 . Jamaican, Antillean, and English migration to Cuba, 1899–1933. Sources: Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros (1906–1933); War Department, Office of the Director of the Census of Cuba, Report on the Census of Cuba, 1899 (1900); Censo de la República de Cuba, bajo la administración de los Estados Unidos, 1907 (1908). “Antilleans” here refers to the category of “non-specified” Antilleans.

Yes, man. Yes, Man. Everybody of my age.”21 The movement of people, together with the news of the growing sugar industry, motivated others: “Oh people were going to Cuba you know and there was a boom there. The cane crop was there you know and people leave Jamaica and go to Cuba. So I went along.”22 Emigration to Cuba took place in various ways. From Jamaica, some people traveled in sailing boats, which might carry over fifty people, 21 22

“Mr. W,” interview 20KMb, 8, DDC, SALISER. “Rev. John B,” 75StTMa, 7, DDC, SALISER.

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Black British Migrants in Cuba

and the journey would take three days.23 Other travelers apparently managed to make a faster journey in the Royal Mail steamboats. One of them said, “Well, it only take a night. We leave here [Jamaica] and by daylight the next morning we were in Cuba.”24 Another migrant recalled that “in those days” the most common trip to Cuba was in a sailing boat, and “the only way you could go is on a logwood boat and a sugar boat.” Steamship was not that common, he remembered, and there was one boat, the Nemisis, which “had a little motor.” But his trip was in the Varona and was “just sails – took us I would say about 7 days to get up the 90 miles deh.”25 According to testimonies of some migrants, the process was relatively easy, and the passage may have cost fifty shillings. One migrant who traveled from Kingston Harbor to Santiago de Cuba said that basically they only needed to pay the passage and have “a dollar or whatever” for the arrival on Cuban soil. In those days, with English money “you can’t get anything to buy for nobody will tek it from you.” Getting the passport to migrate was not a problem either: “No. No difficulty. You only give your name. So many days, and you go to Sutton Street for it, pay down your 5/-, send you to King’s House and the Governor sign it.”26 On arrival in Santiago de Cuba, the migrants were tested for “malaria fever” or “any fever or any plague” in the quarantine station. When the migrant could “prove that everything is fit,” then the officials there “let you pass out and go on land.”27 The migrants then were either recruited to work in the sugar industry or made their own efforts to get a job. One migrant from St. James, in Jamaica, traveled to Santiago de Cuba at the age of seventeen because “at that time them was taking people to Cuba.” Once in Santiago, he narrates how people were recruited to work: Get a job? Man will carry you and give you job. After you come, men come right in the lodging or the hotel or where you stop come give you job and come and ask you if you want work. Not Cuban alone. Jamaican and Cuban. You see the Jamaican know the languages and the Cuban want me to go and do such a work so he come and say: “How much of you is here? We want about 50 odd, 25 men to go and do such and such a work. You will?” We say “Yes.” He say, “Alright, I will pay you fare if you will come. Come I will pay you fare.”28

23 24 25 26 27 28

“Mona in Retrospect,” 22KMd, 6, DDC, SALISER. “A Cart Driving Mother,” 16KFd, 4, DDC, SALISER. “Man-Boy,” 5CMb, 13–14, DDC, SALISER. “Mona in Retrospect,” 22KMd, 7, DDC, SALISER. “Man-Boy,” 5CMb, 14, DDC, SALISER. “Gemini,” 64StjMb, 6–8, DDC, SALISER.

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The journey was described by one of the migrant laborers as “a very hectic ride,” leaving in the afternoon, traveling during the night, and arriving in Cuba in the morning. He remembered being “seasick and throwing up,” landing in Santiago de Cuba in the evening and sleeping “on two barrel until next morning. Two barrel push together and I slept there.” He described how people were going to Banes, but he decided to go to Ciego de Ávila where he had a cousin. He “couldn’t manage” the cane-cutting work and decided to work as a timekeeper in one sugar estate.29 This case illustrates both the pre-existing kinship networks that facilitated migration and the agency of the migrants regarding employment options. Other migrants tried to avoid the hard labor in the cane fields. One of Brodber’s informants indicated that he was recruited by someone asking him if he could “cut cane.” He was twenty-two years old at the time, and went to Cuba, but “didn’t figure the work out there.” When he witnessed what “cane work” implied, he said to himself, “‘No bwoy, this thing too tough for me’. Listen, me dear, I still hold on and then I change over and from thence 1920 the last I cut any cane.” He opted to “work in factories, curing sugar, sewing sacks, painting,” and “different works,” illustrating again the resourcefulness of British Antilleans.30 Another migrant from Clarendon, who went to Cuba at the age of nineteen, also worked in the factory. “When the time is cold,” he said, “we get into the factory. We work around the centrifugals because you warm inside.”31 Not only did migrants travel in different ways, and opt for a variety of occupations, but also some made choices as to which employer they wanted to sell their labor to, with some honoring contract arrangements with specific plantations, and others seeking employment on their own. A newspaper report about the situation in Santiago de Cuba highlighted the process whereby recruiting agents (some of whom were Jamaicans) warned migrants arriving with specific labor agreements: “Don’t go to —: it is a prison for Jamaicans.” Some of the migrants “hearing this in their own language and tongue simply quailed and half of them deserted.” The remaining workers “bucked up courage” and stuck to their arrangement with the recruiting agent.32

29 30 31 32

“Rev. John B,” 75StTMa, 8, DDC, SALISER. “Mr. Bert,” 76StTMb, 1, DDC, SALISER, 1. “Man-Boy,” 5CMb, 29, DDC, SALISER, 29. “Present Conditions in Cuba: The Observations of a Jamaican in the Neighbouring Republic,” Daily Gleaner, April 11, 1917, 10.

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These voices, available thanks to Brodber’s research, provide insights into the Jamaican experience in Cuba beyond the raw migration statistics. These accounts give a human face to the quantitative data I will be presenting. But also, the examples of migrants’ agency and proactive choices illustrate an earlier manifestation of Charles Carnegie’s “strategic flexibility,” whereby migrants were open to “take advantage of whatever comes along” and build “multiple options” for their improvement.33

   There were different migration routes to Cuba. Many went from their islands of origin, while others who had migrated elsewhere in the Americas went to Cuba instead of returning home. According to the available data, between 1913 and 1924, more than 5,673 British Caribbean islanders traveled to Cuba from countries such as Panama, Costa Rica, and British Honduras (now Belize). British Caribbean migrants were often called ingleses (“English”) in Cuba. It is likely that those classified as “English” were also British Antilleans, which will elevate the number of those coming from Central America to 6,708. Of these migrants, 3,571 came from Panama, 1,249 from Costa Rica, and 172 from British Honduras or Honduras. Some 1,717 more are registered as coming from Central America without further specification. Together with these groups, a total of 619 migrants categorized as Central Americans entered in 1919 and 1920.34 In those years, immigrants from everywhere were going to Cuba and while those classified as Central Americans might have been citizens of Panama or Costa Rica, it is not unlikely that many may have been descendants of British Antilleans born there.35 This possibility emerges out of the fact that the population data for some of the British Caribbean colonies in 1921 and the 1940s indicate a great number of people being born in Central American countries.36 Among these were the sons and

33 34 35 36

Carnegie, Postnationalism Prefigured, 106–107. See the reports of Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros for the years 1913 to 1924. See Putnam, The Company They Kept, 66–69. For instance, in Barbados by 1921 there were 449 residents born in Central America, and in 1946, the total of number people born in Central America was 731 (722 in Panama). In Jamaica, a total of 1,802 residents in 1921 were born in Central America: 1,403 in Panama, 313 in Costa Rica, and 86 in other Central American countries. In 1943, there were in Jamaica 3,416 people born in Panama, 681 born in Costa Rica, and 562 born in

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daughters of migrants born in the Canal Zone, also known as the “Panamericans.”37 For example, Ms. Emelina Anderson, living in Baraguá, Ciego de Ávila, in the 1990s, was born in Costa Rica in 1910 to Jamaican parents (Catherine Ellis and John Anderson) and had come to Cuba by 1920 when she was nine or ten. In Baraguá, she attended the Episcopal Church and was taught at school by William Preston Stoute, himself a former worker, teacher, and labor activist on the Panama Canal.38 Beyond the connection with Central America, other British Antilleans went to Cuba from a number of places. Between 1915 and 1921, a total of 7,711 Jamaicans arrived from the United States, some from the Dutch Antilles, and 110 are registered as arriving from Hawaii in 1918. A total of 148 came from the Dominican Republic in 1916, the year when US military intervention began there.39 The census of 1919 indicates a dramatic increase in Jamaican immigration, registering 23,754. The number of “non-specified” Antilleans remained low (261). Yet, when that same census recorded the foreignborn population from different nationalities, the numbers of British Antilleans living in Cuba suggest a different reality than what can be interpreted from immigration statistics: 22,620 born in the “West Indies” and 18,539 born in Jamaica.40 For non-Jamaicans, one figure (261 immigrants) may be actual registered arrivals, and the other (22,620) may indicate those already in Cuba at the moment of the census, but the difference is significant. Perhaps it responds to an accumulation of those arriving in previous years, or to arrivals through specific company town ports (CASC or UFC) that may have counted as part of the general population but perhaps were unregistered as immigrants in the census. Much like first-generation guestworker programs, companies like the CASC reported the arrivals of their (supposedly) temporary labor force directly to state officials, indicating those coming in and those sent out after the expiration of their labor term.41 In any case, the presence of

37 38

39 40 41

other countries of Central America. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, Vol. III, 79, 235. Interview with Teófilo Gay Watkins, Baraguá, Ciego de Ávila, Cuba, February 11, 1999. Interview with Emelina Anderson Ellis, Baraguá, Ciego de Ávila, February 12, 1999. On William Preston Stoute, see Giovannetti, “Historia visual y etnohistoria en Cuba,” 241–243. Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros, 1915–1921. Census of the Republic of Cuba, 1919, 184, 310. Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land, 18–20. Some Haitians fell under that category. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers.

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41,159 British Antilleans registered as living on Cuban soil represented 12.2 percent of the foreign-born population (second only to the Spanish). Then, the year 1920 was an all-time high for the immigration of the three principal incoming groups (Spanish, Jamaicans, and Haitians), and in that year alone a total of 27,088 individuals came from Jamaica. Depending on the source consulted, the increase in Jamaican immigration for that year was between 11 and 13 percent on the previous year.42 The mobility was constant, and in all directions, as one informant expressed: “People were going to Cuba backward and forward.”43 The records of movement of passengers for 1920 are witness to that, with a total of 22,348 (4,740 fewer than immigration records) and 22,285 listed as departing from Cuba.44 The sugar crisis of 1921 affected that increasing trend, the migrant community already in Cuba, and the migration process as a whole. Immigration decreased in very much the same dramatic way as it had increased in previous years. In 1921, only 12,469 Jamaicans entered Cuba, a decline of more than half compared to those who had entered the previous year (27,088). In 1922, Jamaican immigration continued dropping to only 4,455.45 The memories of one migrant who went to Cuba in 1923 clearly illustrate the collapse of the sugar industry: “I didn’t go and find any sweetness you know; because I heard what was going on there so I went and was trying to catch some of that good. And when I went there everything just tumble down on me. It was all finished you see.”46 Obviously, the migrants were keen observers of what surrounded them, and very likely were “strategically flexible” to take decisions accordingly, based on opportunities, or lack thereof.47 Therefore, despite a limited increase in Jamaican migration for 1923 and 1924, the movement from Jamaica experienced a gradual decline: 4,747 in 1925, 2,508 in 1926, 2,348 in 1927, 974 in 1928, 243 in 1929, and only thirty-eight in 1930.48 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

There is a difference of 433 immigrants between the census records and data recorded by the US government at that time. See Census of the Republic of Cuba, 1919, 184; and “Immigration into Cuba by Nationalities, 1902–1903 to 1933,” in C. R. Cameron, “Trends of Migratory Movement in Cuba” (1935), NARA, RG165-Military Intelligence Division (hereafter MID), 2655-Q-99 (M-1507, Roll#5). “Mr. Bert,” 76StTMb, 2, DDC, SALISER. “Movimiento de pasajeros en el año 1920,” in Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros, for 1920, p. 21. Alonso and Chávez Alvarez, Memorias inéditas del censo de 1931, 290–91. “Rev. John B,” 75StTMa, 10, DDC, SALISER. Carnegie, Postnationalism Prefigured, 106–111. Alonso and Chávez Alvarez, Memorias inéditas del censo de 1931, 290–291.

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While Jamaican migration was in decline, however, there is evidence that movements from other British Caribbean colonies were increasing during the 1920s. Migration from the Leeward and Windward Islands was certainly much less than that from Jamaica. Yet neither the dramatic numbers of Jamaicans nor the fact that data on eastern Caribbean islanders is limited should prevent the examination of the latter subgroup of British Antilleans. Moreover, it is my view that the consideration of Leeward and Windward Islanders illuminates our understanding of the general British Caribbean experience in Cuba. Analyzing eastern Caribbean migration is complicated because of the aforementioned ambiguous category “non-specified Antilleans,” but also due to the lack of systematic quantitative data. There is no information on British Leeward and Windward Islanders in either the census or the immigration reports for the years 1919, 1922–1923, 1925, and 1928–1938. However, a combination of the available quantitative data with other archival sources makes it possible to outline some of the trends from the eastern Caribbean British colonies. This problematizes generalizing assessments that put all Caribbean migrants in a single group without distinctions, but also stresses the inner complexities of the British Antilleans as a group. For the zafras (harvests) of 1923–1924, 1924–1925, and 1925–1926, the CASC in northeastern Cuba recruited workers exclusively from the eastern Caribbean. For those years, this company was authorized to introduce between 2,000 and 3,000 laborers each year.49 In a 1931 report, the Cuban military supervisor of the Immigration Department reported that arrivals on Cuba through the ports of Oriente included 2,059 Barbadians in 1927 and 1,400 in 1928. He added that on the day he was writing (October 2), 4,500 Barbadians were still in the country.50 Although there is limited information on the census immigration charts about eastern Caribbean islanders, the listings of passenger arrivals in the reports of immigration and movement of passengers provide interesting

49

50

Eugenio Molinet, administrator, Chaparra Sugar Company, to Cuban Secretary of Agriculture, December 10, 1923; G. de Aranguren to Eugenio Molinet, 14 December 1923; Eugenio Molinet to Secretary of Agriculture, November 12, 1924; E. A. Brooks to Secretary of Agriculture, October 13, 1925; G. de Aranguren to E. A. Brooks, November 9, 1925; ANC, Fondo 302-Secretaria de Agricultura, Comercio y Trabajo (hereafter SACT), leg. 4, no. 45. A. J. Molina to Immigration Commissioner, Havana, October 2, 1931, ANC, SP, leg. 121, no. 68.

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Black British Migrants in Cuba

information. The contrast in the figures is remarkable, with large numbers of non-Jamaican British Antillean passengers arriving during years in which this group is rarely registered as immigrants. For example, in 1920, there were 1,775 British Antillean passengers, but 131 immigrants. In 1921, British Antillean passengers were 5,529 and immigrants were 591. In 1923 and 1924, non-Jamaican British Antillean passengers were 7,841 and 768 respectively; no immigrants were recorded in the census.51 In 1926, the British Consulate in Santiago de Cuba reported that along with 75,000 Jamaican migrants, there were 8,000 from Barbados, 2,000 from Grenada, 1,500 from Trinidad, 1,500 from St. Vincent, 500 from Antigua, 500 from St. Kitts, and 1,000 from St. Lucia and Martinique: in all, at least 15,000 eastern Caribbean islanders.52 Two reasons explain these contrasts. First, many eastern Caribbean migrants were entering Cuba unrecorded, directly to company towns, as “temporary” agricultural workers for the CASC and the UFC, through ports other than the one in Santiago de Cuba. Second, for the migrants, the specific recruitment strategies of these companies represented a different set of opportunities and options than those available to the Jamaicans, particularly in the 1920s. As late as 1946, British consul general M. E. Vibert reported that among the British Caribbean migrants in the province of Camagüey desiring repatriation were 1,140 from Barbados, 420 from the Leeward Islands, 360 from the Windward Islands, and 180 from other islands (presumably British colonies).53 In the province of Oriente, Vibert reported 3,870 from Barbados, 2,160 from Nevis, 1,800 from Antigua, 1,950 from St. Kitts, 720 from Montserrat, 265 from St. Vincent, 275 from Grenada, 360 from Dominica, 450 from St. Lucia, and 180 from other islands.54 That is, if Vibert’s report is accurate, a total of 19,530 non-Jamaican British Caribbean migrants in Cuba in 1946. This shows that the total British Caribbean experience in Cuba was clearly more than, and different from, a Jamaican experience.

51 52

53 54

Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros, 1920–1926. British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, to A. S. Jelf, colonial secretary, Jamaica, May 19, 1926, Jamaica Archives and Record Department, Spanish Town, Jamaica (hereafter JARD), 1B/5/77/150 [1926]. People from the British Cayman Islands and the Bahamas also migrated to Cuba. “Estimated Number of British West Indians Desiring Repatriation (Excluding Havana),” Annex No. 3, in M. E. Vibert to Her Majesty’s Principal, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, NA, FO 1001/1.

Black British Caribbean Migration to Cuba, 1898–1948

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’     Where did the migrants go after their arrival in Cuba? The developments of the sugar industry in the provinces of Camagüey and Oriente in the early twentieth century led Cuban historian Juan Pérez de la Riva to see the two provinces as a single geoeconomic region.55 Equally, during that period, particular sugar mills and plantations in the east could be considered separate geo-social and economic units enjoying a significant degree of regional hegemony and relative independence from the national context. They were company towns, “settlement[s] built and operated by a single enterprise” where “virtually everything associated with the settlement, including houses, store, school, and even the chapel, was subordinate to the business enterprise.”56 Two clear examples of sugar company towns in Cuba were those under the control of the CASC (Chaparra and Delicias) and the UFC (Boston and Preston), all located in northeastern Cuba. Horace Davis noted that “the purpose of the company town is to attract, hold and control labor,” and it is this feature of the company town that I want to examine.57 Specifically, I will describe the impact of the hegemony of the Cuban company towns on the patterns, trends, and policies of black Caribbean migration. Santiago de Cuba was by far the leading port of entry for black Caribbean labor in general, including those from the British Antilles.58 But with the economic developments and the requirements of the sugar industry, some companies preferred to exercise major control over their activities, from cane growing and sugar production to shipping to refineries in the United States. The recruitment of labor was among those aspects over which companies wanted more control, particularly given the sugar industry’s dependence on foreign labor. Companies with a privileged geographic coastal location used it to their advantage. Some ports became the exclusive exit for the final product (sugar), but also the entrance of those responsible for it (cane cutters). These ports became private entry points for thousands of migrant laborers beyond the purview of state officials. The port of Puerto Padre, under the control of the CASC, was one of these exclusive ports. The CASC administered the sugar production, railway tracks, and electric infrastructure in the region of Puerto Padre, 55 56 58

Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana,” 21. 57 Garner, “Introduction,” 3, 4. Davis, “Company Towns,” 119. Knight, “Jamaican Migrants,” 103.

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along with a refinery in Gramercy, Louisiana. Both the Chaparra and Delicias sugar mills would become two of the leading centrales in Cuba, with Chaparra having a first zafra in 1902 and Delicias in 1912. In 1924, the company reported having an ethnically mixed labor force consisting of “5,046 Cubans, 324 Spaniards, 685 Jamaicans, 2,726 English [sic], 1,088 Haitians, 956 Dutch, and 170 of various nationalities.”59 Of this labor force, the “English,” which refers to eastern Caribbean migrants, were the ones that the company considered their “special preserve [sic] of labor recruiting.”60 According to their own figures, the eastern Caribbean islanders were, after the Cubans, the second-largest ethnic group in the CASC plantations. Labor recruiting actively took place in the eastern Caribbean sometimes against emigration regulations, and at least in one case (Dominica) a member of the local political elite allegedly served as emigration agent for Chaparra.61 Once recruited, the workers were brought directly to the company’s exclusive port in Puerto Padre. Migration figures available indicate this particular trend that, to some extent, took place beyond the reach of Cuban authorities. The exclusivist nature of the port emerges clearly in the data. In 1921, 589 of the 591 British Antilleans coming directly from the eastern Caribbean entered through Puerto Padre. All of them were men, registered as field workers, and reported as having a secure job upon arrival. In 1923, there are no data for British Caribbean migrants, but all of the 450 persons entering through Puerto Padre were field laborers. In 1924, a total of 1,185 British Antilleans came into Cuba with a secure job on arrival. Virtually all of them were single persons and were coming directly from their country of birth in the eastern Caribbean, and all but one entered through the port of Puerto Padre.62 All the 1,623 persons

59 60

61

62

Agricultura y Zootecnia, 40. For other information on the administrative structure of the CASC, see Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 74–120. R. B. Wood to Walter S. Bartlett, 15 November 1928, Archivo Histórico Provincial de las Tunas, Las Tunas, Cuba (hereafter AHPT), Fondo 5, The Cuban-American Sugar Mills Company (hereafter CASMC), leg. 37, exp. 444, no. 191. J. R. H. Bridgewater, an unofficial member of the Legislative Council of Dominica, who also held a position on the Executive Council, was accused in 1920. Not surprisingly, when new regulations on emigration were introduced in 1924 in the eastern Caribbean islands, Bridgewater was one of those opposed to it. See “Minutes, Executive Council, 3rd February 1920,” Executive Council Minutes, Dominica, 1918–1923, 65–67. Roseau, 1918–1923, National Archive, Roseau, Dominica (hereafter NAD); “The Labourer’s Emigration Act [Editorial],” Dominica Guardian, April 10, 1924, p. 2. For this year, the data indicate another thirty-eight West Indians entering through Havana, but they are not registered in the actual immigration figures.

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entering through Puerto Padre in that same year, including the 1,184 from the eastern Caribbean, were classified as field laborers. Later in 1926 the pattern is the same: 886 British Antillean males entering Cuba as migrants, and all but one entering through Puerto Padre. Most of them were single, all of them were registered with a sure job on arrival, and 300 of them had been in Cuba before.63 In 1926, records indicate that the subaltern workforce in Chaparra and Delicias was 51 percent foreign.64 These data suggest a regular pattern of active labor recruitment policy by a company with full control of both its region and the kind of labor force it wants. The UFC exhibited a similar pattern of hegemony over its region and policies of labor recruitment. Located to the east of Puerto Padre, the UFC began in the sugar-producing business in 1901. The region under its control consisted of the Bays of Nipe and Banes, and the municipal regions of Antilla, Banes, and Mayarí. Both of their sugar mills, Boston and Preston, like their neighbors in Puerto Padre, occupied a leading position in terms of Cuban sugar production. The UFC also had a convenient geographical location that allowed for practices for labor recruitment similar to those of the CASC. Its labor force was also ethnically diverse, but unlike CASC’s special arrangements in the eastern Caribbean, most of UFC’s workers were brought from Haiti and Jamaica. Precisely the UFC’s subsidiary, the Nipe Bay Company, is often identified as the corporation responsible for the “first” importations of Antillean workers in 1913. However, Jamaican workers were used by the UFC from very early in the twentieth century. By 1907, Jamaicans who arrived through the southern coast of Cuba were being hired and brought to UFC plantations.65 As noted before, their recruitment generated tensions with local labor as early as 1909. For the year 1911 there are 354 Antilleans and 226 “English” entering through the port of Nipe, and two years later,

63

64

65

Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros, 1921–1926. Unless otherwise indicated, quantitative data of migration, the migrants, and the ports of entry are obtained from these reports, for the years indicated. See chart on Oriente Province, in República de Cuba, Cuadros estadísticos en relación con los ingenios y su zafra en 1925 a 1926. Received in American Embassy, Habana, June 23, 1927. Unfortunately, the data do not provide information on ethnic background to distinguish how many of those foreign workers were from the Caribbean and how many were from other places such as Spain. Copies of these documents were generously provided by Louis Pérez Jr. Zanetti, García, et al., United Fruit Company, 211.

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in 1913, there were 559 Jamaicans and 507 “English.” But it is after 1917 that a pattern of company town control like the CASC emerges. In 1918, a total of 1,701 field laborers entered through the port of Nipe, almost all of them black Caribbean workers: 1,664 Haitians, twenty Jamaicans, and three from other islands. Of the 4,160 immigrants entering Cuba through Nipe in 1919, 3,525 did not pay for their own tickets (paid by “other,” presumably the company) and a total of 1,789 are registered as field laborers. In 1920 all of the migrants entering through Nipe were classified as field laborers (5,583) and another person or a company paid for their tickets. In 1925 and 1926 all the field laborers arriving through the port of Nipe were Haitians: 6,660 field laborers in 1925 and 1,939 in 1926. Again, in 1927 all the people entering through Nipe (6,265) were field laborers and in 1928 the 9,216 field laborers arriving in the UFC region were Haitians. The port of Antilla, also in the UFC-controlled area, received 2,000 field workers in 1929 and all of them came from Haiti. The data for some years (1919, 1920, 1927) does not lend itself to a clear correlation of ethnicity, occupational status, and port of entry. But given the clear pattern of territorial hegemony emerging from the data, the fact that most arrivals were field workers and that the tickets of most of them were paid for by “other” (i.e., the company), it would be safe to infer that most of them were Haitians, Jamaicans, or Leeward and Windward Islanders. For another year, 1925, the reports of immigration and movement of passengers do not indicate field laborers entering Cuba through the port of Nipe. However, in their study United Fruit Company, Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García recorded 5,976 field laborers entering the properties of the UFC during that year. Between 1923 and 1930, the company received government authorization to import a total of 57,300 field workers. Zanetti and García did not find data for 1929 and 1930, but were able to confirm the entry of at least 49,509. No ethnic background is specified, and while many workers were surely from the anglophone Caribbean, there were many Haitians as well.66 66

Zanetti, García, et al., United Fruit Company, 217. In my research with the remaining records of the UFC in Banes in the 1990s, I was not able to find much information on the company’s migration policies. At that time, the records were held in the basement of the Banes Museum in conditions unsuitable for research, pending transfer to another archive. The whereabouts and fate of the collection and its condition are unknown to me at the moment of the final editing of this book. Therefore the works of Zanetti, García and their associates, and that of Ariel James, are to be considered unique sources to our knowledge of the UFC.

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Other sources do not disclose the number of Caribbean laborers, but they indicate that by 1926 the foreign subaltern labor force in Boston was 38 percent and in Preston 50 percent. Overall, 49 percent of the UFC’s labor force was foreign.67 Other ports of Cuba were also used exclusively for the importation of black migrant labor. In 1917, for instance, of the 777 migrants arriving through the southeastern port of Manzanillo in Oriente, 759 were field laborers, and 688 were Jamaicans. For 1920, of the 185 immigrants arriving in the same port, 150 were field workers and 86 were Jamaicans. This trend is hardly surprising if one considers the location of sugar mills near the port of Manzanillo, and of course the closeness to Jamaica. Another case is that of the New Niquero Sugar Company, related to the CASC, which had control of 67,000 acres of land in Oriente, including their “internal railroad system, and its location on the seaboard gave it an advantage in reduced freight costs.”68 The port of Manzanillo, together with the south-central port of Júcaro in the province of Camagüey, received in 1919 some of the immigrants classified as “Central Americans” referred to above: 192 through Júcaro and 125 through Manzanillo. In the south of Cuba, near to the port of Júcaro, is the Baraguá sugar mill, a classic company town, which either for company preferences or due to the social networks of the migrants themselves ended up receiving a significant number of migrants from Panama.69 Another port that received impressive numbers of black Caribbean field laborers during the late 1920s was Sagua de Tánamo. The Tánamo sugar mill, founded by the Atlantic Fruit and Sugar Company (AFSC) was located near the port, and its general administrator relied heavily on black migrant workers for its production.70 For the crop of 1925–1926 the company reported 26 percent of its 163 subaltern workers being foreign. It is revealing, however, that the next year, in 1927, a total of 2,862 arrived through Sagua de Tánamo: 558 were registered as British 67 68

69

70

República de Cuba, Cuadros estadísticos en relación con los ingenios y su zafra en 1925 a 1926, charts for the Province of Oriente. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 81. Ayala’s study establishes the links of the New Niquero Sugar Company, together with the CASC and other sugar enterprises, under the control of the United States’ National Sugar Refining Company group. This also raises the question whether the “Central Americans,” particularly those entering through Júcaro, were descendants of British Antilleans going to Baraguá. Comisión de Historia del Central “Ecuador,” “Monografía de la historia del Central Baraguá”; Giovannetti, “Historia visual y etnohistoria en Cuba,” 241–243. Vega Suñol, “La colonización norteamericana,” 217–219; González Suárez, “La inmigracion antillana en Cuba,” 55.

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Antilleans and 2,304 as Haitians. Either the total labor force of the AFSC increased dramatically in one year (by 94 percent), or foreign workers were underreported in 1926. In 1929, a total of 2,290 Haitians entered through Sagua de Tánamo; all of them illiterate single male field workers who had been in Cuba before, with secured employment on arrival and their tickets paid for by someone else.71 Again, the pattern of control over the process of recruitment and selection of the labor force was made in a calculated manner by the companies. Contrasting these company town recruitment practices with the process through Santiago de Cuba allow for a more complex view of British Antillean migration to Cuba. Not all Antilleans went to Cuba in the same way, through the same process, or acquired the same employment. It also helps our understanding of differences between eastern Caribbean migrants and Jamaicans during episodes of repatriation and deportation from Cuba. Workers in more secluded company towns were sometimes spared forced repatriations orchestrated by the state, while simultaneously they were exposed the indiscriminate policies of plantation managers and their private security. Their job was probably more secure, but their “strategic flexibility” in seeking labor options elsewhere was probably more limited.

    The control of company towns also had an effect on the gender distribution of labor in specific sugar mills. In the case of the CASC, according to the registers of immigration and movement of passengers, the migrants entering through the port of Puerto Padre during the 1920s were all men. The list of British Antilleans repatriated by the CASC to the eastern Caribbean in 1924 confirms that this company’s exclusive eastern Caribbean labor force was essentially male.72 The leading importer of eastern 71

72

The brief prohibition of emigration from Haiti in 1928 did not stop the flow of migrants to Cuba in the late 1920s. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 172–173; de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 102–103. See the registers of repatriation of laborers of the Chaparra Sugar Company (CASC) for the months of August, September, and October 1924 at ANC, SACT, leg. 4, no. 45. Some of the listed names appear to be repeated. There are some women listed, with their sons and daughters, or with their husband or partner. But the majority of those listed are men. These registers certified that the company was repatriating the exact number of migrants they brought in to receive back the deposit left with the government for their temporary labor recruitment. This also left them in good standing with state officials to request permission the next year.

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Caribbean labor into Cuba (the CASC) had almost complete control of the workers entering their lands, a control that included gender selection. The “almost” part of the CASC control, by the admission of company’s management, was related to the way men and women accessed their territory. In 1931, the manager of Chaparra Sugar Company, R. B. Wood, assured the British authorities that they had “never brought in any women from any of the British islands, or, as a matter of fact, from anywhere.” But he added that “women arrived here [in Chaparra] of their own free will and . . . paid their own passage, staying on the estate against the desires of the management.”73 Large sugar company towns with access to ports recruited men, at times unrecorded in Cuban statistics. As Wood suggested, women migrated on their own by other means to join their partners. The situation in the UFC’s Preston sugar mill was apparently similar in terms of male recruitment and women’s agency. Leland Jenks’s field notes of his 1934 visit confirm the company’s claim that they did not bring women, “but they would come over in small boats and soon be on the plantation.”74 Unlike the surreptitious arrival of women in northeastern company towns, the specific migration of Jamaican women was registered in the Cuban statistics. They had a relative stable migration trajectory, in contrast with men, and were active in different occupations, mostly as domestic servants, seamstresses, and dressmakers. As Lara Putnam has shown for previous circum-Caribbean migratory destinations, women’s work sustained the regional workforce and was a crucial part, albeit unacknowledged, of the export economy.75 The stable trajectory of women migrants can be inferred by the figures that the UFC’s manager provided to the British authorities in 1916, indicating that they had “about 1,350 Jamaicans” on their properties, including “819 men, 288 women, and 269 children.” Not only do the surprising number of children suggest a level of stability in the migrant community or the eagerness of reuniting Jamaican families on Cuban soil, but also the adult gender distribution for the UFC plantations is revealing. While Jamaican women constituted only 15 percent of total Jamaican

73 74

75

R. B. Wood to Mr. C. N. Ezard, British Legation, March 12, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. Leland Jenks, “Notes on Santiago and United Fruit Company at Preston,” (1934), Leland H. Jenks Papers (MC213), Mudd Library, Princeton University (hereafter LHJP), Box 1, Folder 5, Interview and Trip Notes, 1934, June. Putnam, The Company They Kept, 7.

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Black British Migrants in Cuba

25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0

Men

Women

 . Migration of Jamaican men and women to Cuba, 1912–1928. Source: Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros (1912–1928).

immigration for 1916 (see Figure 2.3), they were 26 percent of the adult Jamaican population on UFC properties.76 Three years later, in 1919, the gender distribution of Jamaican-born people living in Cuba is roughly similar: 77.6 percent were men and 22.4 percent were women.77 Examining the migration of Caribbean women to Cuba from a gender perspective opens a window onto unexamined aspects of the history of intra-regional mobility, including the different circumstances of their arrival and their incorporation into the labor force. In 1918, one “informant” for the Jamaica Times wrote about the risks for women migrating to Cuba. There was “a fair amount of risk” for women traveling “without duly arranging with her husband” because of the constant mobility of Jamaican workers “from one working centre to another.” If the women were “temporarily stranded” they could “be left in great danger from unscrupulous men.”78 This informant’s view confirms that women did migrate on their own to Cuba to join their partners. But other informants told Brodber that “hundreds or thousands” went to Cuba single, and some got married in Cuba.79 Whatever the case, the piece in the Jamaica Times exposes male views of women’s vulnerability, and, as a public warning in the newspaper, it can also be interpreted as a controlling

76 77 78 79

“Memorandum in regard to the conditions of West Indian Labour in Cuba,” in Stephen Leech to Rt. Hon. Viscount Grey, Foreign Office, September 8, 1916, NA, FO 277/190. Census of the Republic of Cuba, 1919, 312. “Just from Cuba: Some Up-to-Date Facts,” Jamaica Times, June 8, 1918, 18. “Gemini,” 64StjMb, 15–16, DDC, SALISER.

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device, however well intended. The concern for the women was manifested by other men, who argued that Jamaican women going to Cuba would break “the conditions,” and by another testimony from a different source which revealed the story of a “girl” who was “lost to respectability” upon arrival on Cuban shores.80 In 1921, a “responsible source” warned British authorities about “young girls” arriving in Cuba and ending up in “houses of ill-fame.” Agents from these houses went to the boats to “tempt the girls away.” Once in these houses, it was difficult for the “girls” to leave, as they became “practically slaves.” The information received by the British further stated that it was “most undesirable” for young women to travel to Cuba, “especially for those of the very light mulatto class.” There was “very little employment” for women and the work they could find as “domestic servants” implied that they had to “sleep outside the house, and that is where the trouble begins.”81 One writer, Alfred J. Anglin, felt ashamed at the fate of some of these women in the hands of “Cuban men and fellows of other nations of the worst class and character, but well dressed.” Resenting the way Jamaican women associated with “these finelooking rogues,” Anglin asserted that although there are “honourable exceptions,” “all women from Jamaica are looked upon as common by the natives of Cuba especially those of Santiago.”82 The letter highlights the prevalent perception of foreign Caribbean women in the east as “common,” meaning by this “shared” by different individuals. Another writer from Cuba warned women to “look well to your purse” before migrating: “As soon as you land in Santiago, without someone to protect you and you fall short of money, you begin to find advantage taken of you by some of the natives.”83 Indeed, some evidence suggests that Caribbean migrants were involved in prostitution, including a man from the French colony of Guadeloupe who “maintained constant relations with prostitutes from his country” or

80

81

82 83

“The Philosopher,” 47STAMb, 25, DDC, SALISER; “Appendix III: Moral Environment of Immigrate Girls in Cuba,” in Margery Corbett Ashby to the Secretary, Colonial Office, June 24, 1921, NA, FO 369/1597. “Appendix III: Moral Environment of Immigrate Girls in Cuba,” in Margery Corbett Ashby to the Secretary, Colonial Office, June 24, 1921, NA, FO 369/1597. Emphasis in original Alfred J. Anglin, “How Some Women Disgrace Jamaica. When They Reach Cuba. Things Seen and Heard by One on the Spot,” Jamaica Times, January 26, 1918, 10. “Some Notes from Cuba: Women, Beware of Coming,” Jamaica Times, May 11, 1918, 11.

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a certain “English mulata” who was allegedly “accustomed to seek minors, fellow country women, whom she induces into her licentious life.”84 But it would be naive to limit women’s socioeconomic life as migrants only to the realm of prostitution, either because of their own volition or due to the circumstances narrated from a male perspective. The official records of immigration and movement of passengers identify the two principal occupations for migrant women from the Caribbean: seamstresses and dressmakers. In 1921, a total of 2,805 Jamaican women entered Cuba. That same year, 1,687 Jamaicans – no gender specified – were categorized as seamstresses and dressmakers and 681 as domestics. If one assumes, as most evidence indicates, that these were women’s principal occupations, the figure for 1921 leaves only 16 percent (437 out of 2,805) not performing any registered economic activity. Based on that assumption of gender/profession correlation, figures for subsequent years are equally revealing of women’s incorporation in the labor force. In 1923, when 1,554 Jamaican women migrated to Cuba, a total of 1,014 Jamaicans were seamstresses and 328 were domestics. For 1924, of 1,723 Jamaican women, a total of 1,430 were classified as seamstresses and dressmakers (842) and as domestics (588). In 1927, the pattern inverts somehow, with fewer Jamaicans registered as seamstresses and dressmakers (121) and more now active in domestic service (856). Yet, following the gender–labor correlation established above, the high percentage of labor incorporation persists with 977 women (81 percent) performing some kind of work, out of a total 1,196 women who migrated that year. The data indicate that while women migrants were fewer than the men, their economic role was an important one. A case in point is Celia Campbell, better known as Ms. Jones, who, in Gloria Rolando’s film My Footsteps in Baraguá, as well as in my own conversation with her, emphasized how much and for how long she had to work, cleaning and ironing for North Americans in the Baraguá sugar mill.85 The complexities of the process for the women were also highlighted by a Jamaican carpenter who arrived in Cuba in 1912, when he commented, “They go to do servant work. Work for . . . they work for wife of the big planters, you

84 85

See two letters from Vicente Bigual to the chief of secret police, Oriente, Cuba, November 24, 1927, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 787, files 3 and 6. Rolando, My Footstepts in Baraguá; interview with Celia L. Campbell, Baraguá, Ciego de Avila, Cuba, February 11, 1999; entry for 11 February 1999, Jorge Giovannetti, journal notes (Cuba).

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see.”86 Most of the qualitative evidence I have consulted suggests that domestic work was the principal area of women’s labor, despite the high percentage of migrants registered as dressmakers and seamstresses for some years. These latter activities materialized in the possession of a sewing machine, which was “indicative of some spark of ambition.” During the late 1920s, the administration of the UFC used the possession of such a device as a criterion for relocating migrants in homes within the “company’s property.”87 The presence of women migrants in Cuba during the first three decades of the century is also suggested by the birthplace figures of the British Caribbean colonies. As early as 1921, a total of 591 persons residing in Jamaica had been born in Cuba, and in 1943 the total was of 6,713. Cuba held the second position as the place of birth for most Jamaicans on the island in 1943.88 A similar situation did not occur in other British Caribbean colonies, which might suggest the effect of the gender labor migration policies of the CASC. But still, in 1946, a total of eighty-six persons in Barbados were registered as born in Cuba.89 In that same year, in Grenada and St. Lucia, there were twenty-two and twelve persons respectively registered as born in Cuba.90 Even with the control exercised by the CASC on its agro-industrial complex, today, almost a century later, the existence of a community of descendants of English Caribbean migrants in Chaparra and Delicias is undeniable evidence of the presence of women in these company towns. After all, can such a community emerge only with men? While it may have happened that women arrived in the CASC region in the years for which data are not available, it is likely that Caribbean women made their way to Chaparra and Delicias migrating independently (not through controlled labor recruiting) or from other plantations in search of better salaries or benefits or to reunite with their kin.

86 87

88 89 90

“The Philosopher,” 47STAMb, 25, DDC, SALISER. Leland H. Jenks, “Interview with William Schuyler, General Manager of United Fruit Company Interests in Cuba,” 1934, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5, Interview and Trip Notes, 1934, June, p. 3. “Table 4, population by birthplace, Jamaica, 1921 and 1943,” in Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, 235. “Table 4, population by birthplace, Barbados, 1921 and 1946,” in Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, 79. “Table 6, population by birthplace, Grenada, 1921 and 1946,” and “Table 13, population by birthplace, St. Lucia, 1921 and 1946,” in Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, 398, 416.

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     British Caribbean migration to Cuba in the 1920s fluctuated in different directions. Jamaican immigration plummeted with the crisis of 1921, while that from the Leeward and Windward Islands to specific sugar plantations appears to have increased early in the decade. In 1924 Jamaican immigration numbers went up slightly, but the second half of the decade witnessed a gradual decline. As the decade concluded, recorded migration from the British colonies was less than 100 per year. By 1930, rather than dealing with a history of migration (the process), one is dealing with the history of the migrants (the people). While the movement of people stopped, thousands of British Antilleans remained living and working on Cuban soil, struggling to survive, hoping for repatriation, or facing forced deportation. Parallel to the experience of British Caribbean migrants in the late 1920s and 1930s is that of Haitians. The comparison between the two migrant groups, particularly in the 1930s, has received significant attention from various scholars, often emphasizing how Haitians were the object of victimization and prejudice while British Antilleans had the advantage of diplomatic representation.91 While this study centers on British Antilleans, the presence of Haitians as another contingent of Caribbean migrants in Cuba cannot be ignored. Attention to the particular trends, distinctions, and complexities of British Antillean migration allows for revisiting existing explanations and a more nuanced examination of this comparison. Historians Barry Carr, Philip Howard, and Marc McLeod have highlighted the position of Haitians at the bottom of the hierarchical Cuban social structure vis-à-vis other racial and ethnic groups in early twentiethcentury Cuba. They have contrasted the experiences and position of Haitians and British Caribbean migrants to argue that the former suffered more from the impact and consequences of the 1930s economic depression and the 1933 Nationalization of Labor Law (Ley del 50%) that declared that 50 percent of workers had to be Cuban.92 Indeed, when it

91

92

Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana”; Álvarez Estevez, Azúcar e inmigración; McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens”; Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation”; Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar. A recent study on Haitians provides new insights for the comparative analysis. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers. Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation,” 93; McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 613; Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana,” 72.

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came to deportations in the 1930s, Haitians were viciously treated, and could not rely on the apparent diplomatic protections that British Antilleans had (the issue of representation will be qualified later). However, here (and in subsequent chapters) I present some elements – statistical and otherwise – to be considered before generalizing about the Haitian– British Antillean comparison. The comparative analysis of Jamaicans and Haitians in the 1930s must begin by stating that these two groups were experiencing different migration trends during the 1920s. Haitian migration increased dramatically in the late 1920s. Haitian migrants came mostly from the south, but in the 1920s northern Haiti also became a point of outmigration.93 Jamaican migration was declining. Departures of both groups before the economic depression and the Ley del 50% were also different. The 1931 census data prove these different realities, indicating a total of 77,535 Haitians and 28,206 British Antilleans in Cuba for that year.94 Given these numbers, it will come as no surprise that the weight of the deportation policies in the 1930s – and its related discrimination – fell harder on Haitians. Quite simply, by the time the Cuban government started forced deportations, there were far more Haitians than British Antilleans in Cuba. Whatever diplomatic support the latter group may have had was perhaps not the factor that made a difference in the comparative fate of migrants when confronted with Cuban state policies. The census immigration data from 1920 to 1930 (see Figure 2.4) illustrates the different migration patterns of Haitians and Jamaicans and can help explain why in 1931 there were significantly more Haitians as part of the foreign Caribbean population in Cuba. Haitian immigration (150,420) was more than twice that of Jamaicans (65,800) for that decade. While Jamaican migration never really recovered from the crisis of 1921, Haitian immigration skyrocketed in 1924 to a total of 21,013 – an increase that parallels that during the “Dance of the Millions.” Moreover, the number of Haitians entering Cuba in the immediate five years before the crisis of 1930 (1925–1930) was larger (69,226) than the number of Jamaicans arriving during the whole decade (65,800). In addition to the difference in arrivals for Haitians and Jamaicans during the 1920s, one can also consider the difference in departures from Cuba for both groups. From 1924 to 1929, Jamaicans exhibit a relatively stable pattern of departures, while the pattern of Haitians is more 93 94

Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 68–72. Alonso and Chávez Alvarez, Memorias inéditas del censo de 1931, 218.

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Black British Migrants in Cuba 37000 36000 35000 34000 33000 32000 31000 30000 29000 28000 27000 26000 25000 24000

Number of Migrants

23000 22000 21000 20000 19000 18000 17000 16000 15000 14000 13000 12000 11000 10000 9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

Years

Jamaicans

Haitians

 . Jamaican and Haitian migration to Cuba, 1912–1933. Sources: for 1912 to 1930, Census of the Republic of Cuba, 1919, 184; Alonso and Chávez Alvarez, eds., Memorias inéditas del censo de 1931, 290–291; for 1931–1933, see Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros.

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inconsistent. While 10,771 Haitians left Cuba in 1927, there were far fewer Haitians leaving during the immediate years before the impact of the economic depression: 1,912 in 1928 and 1,720 in 1929. For 1931, recorded Jamaican departures (8,462) were more than three times those of Haitians (2,092), and in 1932 the number of Jamaicans leaving (4,254) was more than twice that of Haitians (1,846). The data presented here indicate that for the decade before the deportations and repatriations of the Ley del 50%, Jamaicans and Haitians were experiencing different trends. Not only were Haitian departures before the Ley del 50% of 1933 fewer than those of Jamaicans, but also Jamaicans had been leaving more systematically for years. These facts should inform any comparison of the two groups. Which social, cultural, political and economic factors may have influenced the contrasting histories of these two migrant groups? By the 1920s and 1930s, Jamaicans as a group had a well-established migration tradition and broader experience as migrant workers in other countries since the previous century.95 The earlier and stable departure trend suggests that they were “better trained,” as it were, in migrating strategies; perhaps they were conscious of when it was time to leave, or were more open to seeking other alternatives as migrants – more “strategically flexible,” in Carnegie’s terms. Matthew Casey has shown the long history of Haitian– Cuban connections, but perhaps their migration alternatives and labor options were more limited in the late 1920s. In fact, he argues that “the lowest wages that migrants received in Cuba were much higher than those available in Haiti.”96 Moreover, unlike the British Antilleans, Haiti and Cuba were under strong intra-imperial influence of the United States, with military intervention in the former (1915–1934) and political–economic domination in the latter. Haitians also managed to carve a space in the coffee industry during the 1930s that improved their options.97 Casey also indicates that there was a mixed reception for Haitian returnees in the 1930s, including difficult incorporation into the country’s society and economy.98 That the departures of Haitians did not increase dramatically until the proactive policy of forced deportations in the late 1930s suggests unwillingness to return without the visible rewards of migration that 95

96 97 98

See Thomas-Hope, “The Establishment of a Migration Tradition”; and further elaborations in Thomas-Hope, “Globalization and the Development of a Caribbean Migration Culture.” Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 253. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, Chapters 2 and 4. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, Chapter 7.

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Casey portrays in his study, or possibly (before 1934) that Haitians were unwilling to return to US-occupied Haiti.99 A 1937 report from a US official indicates that those who were repatriated from Cuba apparently moved to the Dominican Republic in search for opportunities, only to find the violence unleashed by the Rafael Trujillo’s racist dictatorship.100 Two other considerations discussed here and in other chapters may inform a revisited analysis of the experience of Caribbean migrants in the 1930s. First, further examination of the history of eastern Caribbean migrants in Cuba, contrasted with Jamaicans, can assist in going beyond a twofold comparison between Haitians and a generalizing category of British Antilleans (or West Indians, or antillanos). Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean migrants may have been better off than Haitians, but, as it will be evident later, the experience and migration trajectories of Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders had their own differences and contrasts. Distinguishing between three groups enhances our full understanding of the historical process of Caribbean migration to Cuba. Second, the figures here question the blind reference to the issue of consular support as a determining factor in comparing Jamaicans and Haitians. But also, information in subsequent chapters will problematize the extent and nature of diplomatic assistance that the migrants may have received.

 I have highlighted the complexities of the process of Caribbean immigration into Cuba during the early twentieth century. Clearly, not all the “antillanos ” went to Cuba in the same way, or had similar experiences. From individual migrants venturing independently and working on citrus farms to organized labor recruitment processes – not unlike protoguestworker programs – for specific sugar company towns, the histories varied enormously. Once the heyday of immigration was gone, each migrant group in their particular Cuban locality would have to face different realities and endure a different fate: remaining under the regime of a company town, exposed to forced deportation by the Cuban 99 100

Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 257–265. On the effect of Cuban repatriations in the Dominican Republic, see Major E. W. Timberlake, G-2 Report, November 19, 1937, NARA, RG 165, MID Correspondence, 1911–1941, Box 1806, File 2736-Q-19. On the factors generating the violence on the Dominican border in 1937, see Derby, “Haitians, Magic, and Money”; Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 144–180.

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authorities, or seeking other employment options away from sugar and away from the eastern provinces (or both). After the crises of the 1930s, the immigration of black laborers was virtually a thing of the past, but the black migrant was not. The 1943 census reported that the decrease in the “population of color” in the eastern provinces was, “without a doubt,” due to the emigration of “foreigners of color,” Haitians and Jamaicans.101 According to the records, however, the decrease still left a total of 39,870 foreign blacks on the whole island (from 122,326 in 1931), with most of them (93 percent) in Camagüey and Oriente. But reports from a British government envoy in 1943 admitted that the “total number of British West Indians in Cuba is not known” and estimated “at least 30,000,” including children. Other estimates, the British official cautiously stated, “place the total number as high as 40,000.”102 Still, in 1944, they noted that “40,000 would be an under estimate of the numbers of British West Indians in Cuba” and that in the “Province of Oriente alone there are some 26,800, including 6,000 Cuban born,” with 15,000 in Camagüey.103 The British estimates (which, contrary to the census, do not include Haitians, the other significant group of “foreigners of color”) seem to indicate that the presence of black migrants in Cuba was still relevant. Out of the total “black” population in Camagüey and Oriente in 1943, foreign blacks comprised 49 percent in the former and 14 percent in the latter. The next chapters move on to the stories of the actors involved in the migration processes that have been surveyed here.

101 102

103

República de Cuba, Informe general del censo de 1943, 744. Frank Stockdale, comptroller for development and welfare in the West Indies, “Report on Present Conditions of the British West Indian Community in Cuba,” July 21, 1943, 1, NA, FO 371/33832 (hereafter Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions”). George Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, April 4, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074.

3 Migration, Racial Fears, and Violence, 1898–1917

The fear of foreign blacks that dominated the nineteenth century lingered into the twentieth century. Cuban government officials and social elites remained apprehensive about anything black and foreign, including British Antilleans. The complaint against Jamaicans in Santiago de Cuba in 1900, at the very beginning of the century, summarized some of the concerns that would be directed against black migrants in the following decades. They were “people of bad life and customs,” always in trouble with the police, and in competition with Cuban workers.1 Notions of social and cultural incompatibility, involvement in crime, and economic competition would be prominent themes in the discourse against black migrants, along with accusations of being carriers of disease and promoters of social unrest. It is, then, ironic that from the 1900s onwards they entered the country in considerable numbers; and even at times when their numbers were not significant, they remained present in the Cuban social landscape and national psyche. Together with these concerns, Cuba also began the twentieth century with a shortage of labor, particularly for the promising sugar industry.2 Those envisioning the “opportunities” opened in Cuba at this new juncture specified the need for an “abundance of cheap labor” in order to succeed in the global sugar markets.3 Neighboring Caribbean islands

1

2 3

Verbal motion by Tomás Padró Griñan at the meeting of April 25, 1900, of the ayuntamiento, Santiago de Cuba, April 25, 1900, AHMSC, AC, year 1900, Book 120, Folder 156, r.v. Hitchman, “U.S. Control over Cuban Sugar Production, 1898–1902,” 92–93. Lacoste, “Opportunities of Cuba,” 155.

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were the ideal source of that labor, but Cuba was under US military rule and its immigration laws. The preferred labor was a “healthy, orderly class of laborers, either Americans, Spaniards, or Italians.” “It is not deemed desirably [sic],” stated the military governor, Leonard Wood, “to permit the importation of Chinese or the class of labor referred to in a recent conversation with the representative” of the Spanish American Iron Co.4 The “class of labor” that Wood had in mind was almost surely from the Caribbean. In the year 1900, Wood’s military administration was receiving “[n]umerous reports” of “Jamaicans and Haitians” who were “landing in Santiago.” US officials in Cuba were concerned that the island could become “a dumping ground of the refuse of the West Indies.”5 That same year, the UFC imported 300 Jamaican workers for railway construction in the Banes region,6 and the US authorities wrote to the company’s Jamaican offices reminding them about the “laws and regulations governing immigration” in a “territory under government by the military forces of the United States.”7 Jamaica was also an obvious source of workers for the Cuba Company’s railway operations. But Cuban antagonism against black foreign labor stopped the recruitment plans. Under fire, the company’s executive, William Van Horne, conceded that there was “a good deal of ground for the charge” that his company “gives employment to no Cubans.”8 Military Order No. 155 of 1902 officially imposed restrictions on certain immigrant workers, but some were already there, and others continued to arrive despite the new laws. Incidents involving Jamaicans illustrate the preoccupations among some Cubans. As the new Cuban Constitution was being drafted in 1901, “Jamaican” William George Emanuel claimed to be the “legal representative of the Africans in Cuba” and used the pages of Diario de

4

5

6 7

8

Leonard Wood, military governor, to the Spanish American Iron Co., New York, June 23, 1900, NARA, RG 140-Letters Sent, L.S. 2468. I am grateful to Louis Pérez Jr. for providing a copy of this and other materials. H. L. Scott, assistant adjutant general, telegram to commanding officer, Department of Santiago–Puerto Principe, Santiago de Cuba, July 9, 1900, NARA, RG 140-Letters Sent, L.S. 2674. James, Banes, 174. [Initials illegible] Richards, adjutant general, headquarters, division of Cuba, Havana, to the United Fruit Company, Port Antonio, Jamaica, July 3, 1900, NARA, RG 140-Letters Sent, L.S. 2571. William Van Horne to C. A. Johnson, Santiago de Cuba, September 29, 1900, CCP, S. 1, Box A (1900–1905).

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la Marina to urge formerly enslaved people to reject Cuban nationality in favor of African nationalities.9 Emanuel, who is otherwise identified as an Antiguan, had been active in an organization called Unión Africana, and even wrote to Military Governor Wood and US President William McKinley.10 His activities raised concerns, and a letter to another newspaper called upon the government to do something about this “Jamaican missionary” who could take workers away from Cuba. The fleeting incident opened a window onto some of the concerns that weighed upon a Cuban society in political transition; the availability of labor was paramount, but there were also worries about blackness and foreignness.11 The fears raised in Santiago’s ayuntamiento were seemingly confirmed by the alleged criminal activities of Caribbean foreigners in the eastern provinces. In Guantánamo, Juan Williams, “of English nationality, native of Jamaica, of the black race,” was sentenced to ninety days in prison in 1900. “Alicia Samuel y Fela, natural of Jamaica, of nineteen years old, single,” was sentenced to prison for not paying a fine of ten pesos for violating the “special Rule of hygiene” in Manzanillo in 1903, apparently her second violation of the code that regulated prostitution.12 Later, in 1907, UFC executives had to respond to the British consul in Santiago regarding the whereabouts of a Jamaican man, presumably an employee, who had been accused of stealing money.13 Another case in 1910, mentioned in the previous chapter, involved “two coloured Jamaican workmen” who were accused of stealing and wrongfully arrested. The response by the UFC administration highlighted the

9

10 11

12

13

William George Emanuel, “A LOS SEÑORES Dignísimos é Ilustradísimos DE LA CONVENCION CUBANA,” Diario de la Marina, January 26, 1901, ANC, Secretaria de Estado y Gobernación (hereafter SEG), leg. 2, no. 320 William George Emanuel to Leonard Wood, April 19, 1902, ANC, AP, leg. 2, no. 403. Sartorius, Ever Faithful, 198, 217. “A Algun Gobernante De Buena Voluntad,” El Nuevo País, September 23, 1901, col. 3, p. [?], newspaper clipping in ANC, Secretaria de Gobernación (hereafter SG), leg. 96, no. 738. See also Jefe de la Sección de Estado to Hermenegildo Alvear, February 27, 1902, ANC, SEG, leg. 2, exp. 398. Federico Pérez to Secretario de Gobernación, July 21, 1900, ANC, SG, leg. 229, no. 14145; Manuel [Yero] to Secretario de la Gobernación, November 10, 1903, ANC, SG, leg. 196, no. 6706. The Article 28 for the accusation of Samuel y Fela was, at least in Havana, legislation on hygiene and prostitution, a repeat violation. Alfonso, La prostitución en Cuba, 181. Harold Harty to William Mason, British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, August 1, 1907, manager’s letter books, 1907–1908, p. 466, UFCP.

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bias against Caribbean foreigners by pointing out that Cubans were not investigated for the theft.14 Despite existing concerns, migration was central to the process of state formation after the end of Spanish colonial rule. As early as 1899, a letter to Military Governor Wood from the local government in Santiago de Cuba expressed a need of immigrants for the speedy development of the country’s richness. The letter stressed that for this “delicate issue” the quality of the migrants came before quantity because the “interests of the fatherland” required “special care,” and government actions should translate into benefits for the country.15 Immigration restrictions were instituted by the US military government, and after Estrada Palma was elected president, the immigration policy of those first Republican years was guided by the idea of “whitening” and “civilizing” the newly born nation-state. To accomplish this, white European migration had to be encouraged, giving shape to the national ideal aspired to by Cuban political elites and the Estrada Palma administration. Black foreigners, identified as a threat since the nineteenth century, had to be rejected. In the mid-1910s the migration preference was for European workers. Spaniards were by far the largest immigrant group in that decade, with some 195,468 arriving between 1902 and 1910, more than two-thirds of them during the second half of the decade (134,315). In 1905 and 1906, sugar entrepreneur Manuel Rionda concentrated his labor recruitment efforts in Spain.16 When facing “troublesome” labor prospects for the harvest of 1906, Theodore Brooks of the Guantanamo Sugar Company requested permission to import Puerto Rican laborers. The government granted the request provided that the immigrants were of the “Caucasian race.”17 In July 1906, the Cuban government authorized 1,000,000 pesos to promote the immigration and colonization of families not just from Spain and the Canary Islands, but also from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the north of Italy.18 Starting in the summer of 1906, officials were 14 15 16

17 18

Harold Harty to William Mason, British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, February 19, 1910, manager’s letter books, 1909–1911, p. 226, UFCP. Leonardo Ros to General L. Wood, November 3, 1899, ANC, SG, leg. 93, no. 469. See Manuel Rionda to Messrs Czarnikow, McDougall, and Co., New York, January 30, 1905; Manuel Rionda to C. Czarnikow, London, December 14, 1906, BBC, RG II, S. 5, Box 1. Theodore Brooks to J. R. Villalon, Havana, Cuba, November 5, 1906; [Illegible] to Provincial Governor [Oriente], November 8, 1906, ANC, SP, leg. 115, no. 101. These European immigrants would not be charged any taxes for entering the country. Secretaría de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio, Gaceta Oficial (July 11, 1906), ANC, SP, leg. 121, no. 82.

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actively engaged in this effort, traveling to Sweden seeking to advance the Law of Immigration.19 The intention was to bring “Caucasian” migrants of “the Scandinavian, Saxon, and German ethnic type” who would be “educated in freedom” and become Cuba’s inhabitants.20 After the August revolt in 1906 and the subsequent US intervention, a revision of the law was suggested, still limiting the immigration to “satisfactory Caucasian families.”21 The immigration figures in the late 1900s indicate that this policy was unsuccessful. Two years later, in July 1908, the Cuban government commissioned Gonzalo de Quesada to travel to Europe and research the possibilities for emigration to Cuba.22 His studies on Western European countries were published between 1909 and 1912 without any real effect on immigration.23 While the planned European migration never materialized, the arrival of those considered undesirable by Cuban elites increased. Although far less than that of Spaniards, British Caribbean migration more than tripled in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century: from 479 in 1904–1905 to 1,550 in 1905–1906. This sudden increase in black presence, focused in the eastern half of the island, gave them a degree of visibility. It was at that moment that Fernando Ortiz outlined the criminal nature of the black and yellow races and urged measures to stop the entrance of what he thought were “noxious” groups. Ortiz advocated white immigration and argued that the migrants had to be spread throughout Cuba’s countryside “to avoid the formation of nuclei of foreigners of the same race, especially those who speak non-Spanish languages.” The “absorption” of immigrants was needed to “avoid collective crimes and the rooting of secret societies.” He concluded emphatically that “small migratory currents from many countries are preferable to a great migratory current from one type of people.”24

19 20 21 22 23 24

A. Lind to Secretario de Agricultura, July 7, 1906; A. Lind to Secretary of Agriculture, October 18, 1906, ANC, SP, leg. 115, no. 91. Francisco Y. de Vildósola to Provisional Governor of Cuba, October 25, 1906, ANC, SP, leg. 115, no. 99. Francisco Y. de Vildósola to Provisional Governor of Cuba, October 25, 1906, ANC, SP, leg. 115, no. 99. Carballal y Puentes, Sumario de las leyes de Cuba, 273. De Quesada, Páginas escogidas, 10. See Ortiz, “La inmigración,” 55–61. Emphasis in original.

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In the first decade of the century, important employers in the sugar industry such as Rionda and the Cuba Company accepted the preference of the political elites and avoided recruiting of nonwhite workers. The UFC still searched for “ordinary labourers” in Jamaica, according to various sources, but its officials also discouraged Jamaicans aspiring to obtain a “higher-class” position. Responding to an applicant, Harold Harty of the UFC stated that other than “ordinary labourers” (presumably the ones they were recruiting in Jamaica), those wanting other positions would “be of little use” unless they had “knowledge of Spanish.”25 But as presented in the previous chapter, neither the regulations nor the preferences of the elites stopped Caribbean migrants from searching for and acquiring jobs in Cuba between 1905 and 1910. In fact, before the often-cited authorization of 1913, allowing for the importation of thousands of Caribbean workers, Harty reported to his superior in Boston that 50 percent of his labor was “composed by Haytians [sic] and Jamaicans,” and complained about the difficulties of getting them to work on Sundays and early on Mondays.26 Much to the displeasure of Cuban political and intellectual elites, it was clear that as the country entered its second decade of nominal independence, a space for black migrant labor was being opened. Given the socioeconomic conditions in the region, the authorizations issued by the departing Liberal administration for the importation of workers accelerated a pattern of intra-Caribbean labor mobility that was predictable. The growing need for laborers and the simultaneous precariousness of the labor market were evident in the early 1910s. In 1910, eastern sugar planters foresaw the “scarcity of laborers” and brought “white families from Pinar del Rio.”27 An editorial in the Diario de la Marina referred to the lack of laborers and the decrease of Spanish immigrants to work in the fields in 1912.28 In January 1914, Manuel Rionda declared that he was not hearing “of anyone being short of cane cutters,” but one month later noted that the “only trouble” was their “scarcity.”29 While the efforts of 25

26 27 28 29

Harold Harty to Rev. L. Moodie, Priestman’s River, Jamaica, January 23, 1909; Harold Harty to W. A. Ellison, Priestman’s River, Jamaica, January 23, 1909, manager’s letter books, 1908–1909, p. 413–414, UFCP. Harold Harty to A. W. Preston, president, UFC, Boston, MA, USA, April 23, 1912, manager’s letter books, 1911–1912, p. 786, UFCP. J. M. Galdos to William Van Horne, October 12, 1910, CCP, S. 1, Box 8 [File 15]. Editorial, “Escasez de Braceros,” Diario de la Marina, May 9, 1912, 3. Manuel Rionda to Mr. Ogilvie, January 26, 1914, Manuel Rionda to Plácido, February 18, 1914, BBC, RG II, S. 3, vol. 13.

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labor recruitment continued to be spent looking for the “right class of men,” including Portuguese and Spanish “white labor” from Panama, it was evident that sugar entrepreneurs had their eyes elsewhere for a cheap labor force that was neither “right” nor “white.”30 When Rionda inquired about labor recruitment for his plantations in 1916, Victor Zevallos reported that migration prohibitions were making it impossible “to obtain the Government’s permit to bring workers from Haiti and Jamaica,” but added that they had someone in charge of looking into “how that people can be brought without asking permission.”31 Around the same time, other sugar companies reported that the “labor situation is becoming daily more serious due to the great scarcity of workmen and the high wages demanded.”32 The need for labor in Cuba was complemented by the situation in neighboring territories. In post-emancipation Jamaica, the sugar industry had been stagnant for decades and Afro-Jamaicans with land available for independent cultivation were reluctant to enter into the wage labor arrangements that the industry required. From 1900 to the 1920s, the number of sugar factories diminished and their output increased, but the adoption of technological improvements was slow and uneven. The Jamaican sugar industry could not compete with the Cuban one, and had problems gaining access to US markets.33 Since the nineteenth century, many Afro-Jamaicans had opted for peasant production and emigration rather than insert themselves into their island’s labor market, which, according to Reverend Egbert Ethelred Brown, offered “very little progress in the conditions of the laboring man.” Workers were treated as “beasts of burden” and as “living machines designed only to plant so many banana suckers in an hour, or to carry so many loads of canes in a day.” The “exodus to Cuba,” Brown concluded, was a “very serious comment upon the existing labor conditions” in Jamaica.34 Neighboring Haiti was experiencing a US military occupation

30

31 32 33 34

D. A. Galdós to Wm. W. Craib, executive agent, Jatibonico sugar mill, Cuba Company, September 26, 1913, CCP, S. 1, Box 9 [File 142]. Ironically, Spaniards working in Panama, deemed appropriate (i.e., white) by some in Cuba, were perceived in racially ambivalent ways (including as nonwhites) in the US-controlled context of the Canal Zone. Greene, The Canal Builders, 160, 163–164. Víctor Zevallos to Manuel Rionda, NY, October 14, 1916, BBC, RG II, S. 1, Box 29. Herbert C. Pettit to Wm. W. Craib, executive agent, the Cuba Company, September 10, 1916, CCP, S. 1, Box 22 [folder for 1916, File 66]. Cumper, “Labour Demand and Supply in the Jamaican Sugar Industry,” 37–86. Brown, “Labor Conditions in Jamaica Prior to 1917,” 349, 351, 354, 358.

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that would last nearly two decades, seriously affecting the Haitian peasantry and triggering emigration.35 The regional conditions were ripe for intensification in the transnational movement of labor. Jamaican and Haitian migrants started to appear in the record in 1912, signaling what was already an increasing trend. In 1915–1916 British Antillean immigration soared before Mario García Menocal gave his often-cited 1917 authorization for the importation of labor. In one single year, 1916, Cuba received 7,133 Jamaicans, more than the arrivals in the previous four years. But these black Caribbean workers faced a very hostile environment. Not only did the Cuban elites prefer white European immigration, but also the general climate was racist and xenophobic, particularly after the racial conflict of 1912. As an immediate precedent indicating to many that “race war” could actually happen, the PIC revolt gave renewed significance to well-aged nineteenthcentury racial fears. With a domestic “black revolt” in recent memory and with thousands of black foreigners arriving in the country, it is not difficult to imagine that tensions would emerge. Increased black immigration, a racialized electoral process in 1916–1917, and the outbreak of the Liberal revolt in February 1917 showed that long-held racial fears were alive, and black migrants were in a precarious position. What follows in this chapter tells the story of a massacre of British Antilleans during the Liberal revolt. It illustrates the prevailing hostile environment at the time of mass black Caribbean migration and leads to a discussion of the social and economic repercussions of their presence in Cuba.

   During the PIC revolt and the repression that followed, the concerns of Cuban elites and the government regarding race and revolt intensified. The historical association of social disturbance with blackness had also implied that black foreigners were behind domestic socio-racial conflicts. State officials in charge of the nation’s safety, as well as intellectuals and political elites, exposed this interpretation in multiple ways. In February 1912, the acting chief of the Rural Guard warned the government regarding the “introduction of individuals of the colored race from Haiti and Jamaica,” and suggested measures to prevent this type of immigration. The official added that “experience shows us that once established in this Republic,” 35

Castor, La ocupación norteamericana de Haití, 82–86.

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Jamaican and Haitian immigrants “turn out to be a pernicious element that always attempts to damage, with perverse ends, the cordial relations existing among the ethnic components of this society.”36 Intellectual commentators at the time also established links between political disturbances – such as the 1912 revolt – and foreign influences or black Antillean migrants. In the midst of the PIC revolt, Fernando Ortiz wrote about black revolts in Cuban history, and with examples such as the Aponte Conspiracy, sustained the idea that local disturbances were caused by foreign influences (Haiti). He described racism as a “fateful ghost” reaching Cuba through the “preaching of foreigners,” conveying the notion that racism was not part of Cuban society.37 In 1913, Carlos de Velasco scolded the government for authorizing the recruitment of black Caribbean workers for the sugar industry and linked black migrants to the Cuban revolts. He warned about the “social dangers” associated with Antillean migration, writing, “Some of these elements, which not so long ago disturbed the country with an armed uprising . . . are now agitated again and it is said that they are even conspiring.”38 The enduring notion of an existing national harmony (“cordial relations”) troubled by foreign “social dangers” or “preachings” defined the object of fear and impacted government surveillance. In October 1914, a communication from the Cuban under-secretary of government to the local administrator of Oriente Province expressed concerns about the arrival of Haitian general Edmond Defly, coming to Cuba from Curaçao. Defly was allegedly a “disturbing element” of “rebellious” character. There was speculation as to whether Defly would use his visit to Santiago de Cuba to provide “moral and material support for the revenge against the whites and [the] Constitution of a black Republic in Oriente.” Clearly troubled, the government official concluded the communication: “MUCH VIGILANCE [is] CONVENIENT.”39 Defly was suspected of smuggling weapons and was kept under government surveillance until his

36 37

38 39

Transcript of the letter, in Sub-secretary of Government [Luis Carmona] to Provincial Governor of Oriente, February 10, 1913, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 786, exp. 1. Ortiz, “Las rebeliones de los negros en Cuba,” 6–8. The source of the “preaching” about racism is undetermined in Ortiz’s text, with no reference if it was from the US or from the “blacker” Caribbean islands. However, what is important for the analysis here is the notion that racial tensions and antagonism were imported to Cuba, which is considered a harmonious place. De Velasco, “El problema negro,” 73, 75. Sub-secretary of State, Cuba, to Governor, province of Oriente, October 8, 1914, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 1709, no. 9.

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departure from Santiago to Jamaica in the vessel Viuda Alegre, with a “great majority” of the passengers being “Jamaicans (English),” and “3 Haitians.”40 Apparently, the Cuban government had associated Defly with Eugenio Lacoste, a surviving member of the PIC, who, according to newspaper rumors, was planning an uprising for October 10, 1915. But Lacoste died on October 2, and the fate of the much-feared Defly and his Caribbean colleagues is unknown.41 In 1915, the complaints about the immigration of Jamaicans and Haitians continued in the national and regional press, labeling them “vagabonds” and “adventurers,” of “bad habits” and “different manners,” and given to “criminal life.”42 The presence of the black migrants, both Haitians and British Antilleans, in the eastern part of the island after 1912 contributed to a revival of the racial fears among white Cuban elites.43 In 1916, Luis Marino Pérez wrote that the Jamaican blacks “do not contribute to our society with any civilizing impulse, have nothing to teach us [and] only bring us racism, which is incompatible with our social harmony.”44 Other newspaper articles paid attention to the number of Jamaicans arriving in the country and to the different diseases they allegedly brought to Cuba.45 This latter accusation was one that Jamaicans and Haitians shared, as Cuban authorities perceived Caribbean migrants as carriers of disease such as malaria and imposed quarantine measures upon arrival.46 While the social and racial undesirability of black foreigners was discussed publicly, black Cubans were the subject of an equally contentious domestic racial debate. In 1916, the then Cuban president Conservative Mario García Menocal was running for a second term in office. At the center of his political strategy was the issue of race and a propaganda campaign intended to attract Afro-Cuban voters over to the Conservatives. Anticipating defeat, García Menocal and his political machinery

40

41 42 43 44 45

46

See Chief, government police, to Governor, province of Oriente, October 15, 1914; Chief, government police, to Governor, province of Oriente, October 17, 1914, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 1709, exp. 9. On Lacoste, see Helg, Our Rightful Share, 240. “La inmigración en Oriente,” El Eco de Tunas, April 17, 1915, 2; “Problemas Obreros: Inmigración,” El Pueblo, June 4, 1915, 1. Chomsky, “The Aftermath of Repression,” 9–13. Marino Pérez, “La inmigración jamaiquina,” 293–394. “El jueves llegarán más de cien jamaiquinos,” La Lucha, March 6, 1917, 1; “Los haitianos y jamaicanos son los principales transmisores del paludismo,” El Cubano Libre, February 12, 1917, 1. McLeod, “We Cubans Are Obligated Like Cats,” 57–81; “Man-Boy,” 5CMb, 14, DDC, SALISER; Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 58, 218.

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turned to illegal practices and outright bribery to win the 1916 elections.47 Negotiations that included US mediation led to partial elections scheduled for February 1917 to clarify the results in the provinces of Santa Clara and Oriente. In this context, the Afro-Cuban vote became a more prominent subject in political debates, political manifestos, newspaper articles, and cartoons. Through La política cómica, a weekly illustrated newspaper, the proConservative sectors tried to manipulate the black vote with an intense campaign against José Miguel Gómez that recalled his government’s actions in 1912. A cartoon showed ghosts of PIC leaders Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonet saying to Gómez, “Do not ask for the vote of the black, José Miguel, they still shudder thinking of what you did to him.”48 Numerous cartoons and articles appeared in La política cómica in October and November 1916 during the weeks before the elections. The drawings portrayed black ghosts in the nightmares of José Miguel Gómez and black mourners at the graves of Estenoz and Ivonet with Gómez hidden behind the tombstone with a bloodied cutlass.49 The image of Gómez and his cutlass was repeated in other cartoons, as well as in written headline references to the “slashes by José Miguel” that made a direct connection between him and the killings.50 Another cartoon portrayed a mountain-shaped pile of human skulls in a large burial ground resembling Turquino Peak, a mountain in Oriente Province that was a principal setting of the 1912 revolt.51 While some cartoons were reminders of the slaughter of Cuban blacks, others made direct reference to the ongoing electoral process. One cartoon showed four blacks going to the ballot box with blackballs for José Miguel Gómez, who was behind the box hidden with his cutlass.52 La política cómica ’s campaign was successful and their pages reproduced articles from other newspapers reacting to it. One of the comments was from a person identified as black who originally wrote in El Día newspaper. The article began saying, “Blacks of Oriente! Read What Is Told 47 48 49 50

51 52

Pérez, Intervention, Revolution, and Politics, 10, 19–21. “Tiburón en Oriente: La sombra de Estenoz,” La política cómica, October 1, 1916, [5]. “El sueño de Tiburón,” La política cómica, October 22, 1916, [5]; “En la tumba de Estenoz,” La política cómica, October 8, 1916, [5]. “Recuerdo de una ‘cacería’, 1912,” La política cómica, October 15, 1916, [1]; “El macheteo de José Miguel Gómez: La raza de color,” La política cómica, October 8, 1916, [11]. “El macheteo de los negros,” La política cómica, October 15, 1916, [5]. “Las elecciones en Oriente,” La política cómica, October 22, 1916, [10].

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by One of Yours,” and noted, “What is being published in LA POLITICA COMICA is true.” The author acknowledged that some members of the Liberal Party (such as Campos Marquetti) deserved the Afro-Cuban vote. But regarding Gómez, the writer noted that Afro-Cubans could not “raise to the highest authority of our Republic the cynical men who proposed to send us directly to the grave.” “Brothers of the colored race,” the author continued, “do not make it possible for harsh events such as those of the year 1912 to take place again in our beloved Cuba.”53 Reminding “his race” about the fate of Pedro Ivonet, he appealed to them not to choose Liberal candidates and to re-elect President García Menocal based his credentials as veteran of the independence struggle.54 Other cartoons used the images of Afro-Cuban leader Estenoz and independence martyr Antonio Maceo supporting García Menocal.55 The propaganda of La política cómica is not to be underestimated. It was praised for its “immense success” across the island. Issues were sold out, and people in “Güines, Santiago de Cuba, Bayamo, Jamaica, Niquero, Puerto Padre, and Morón requested thousands of copies” that the publisher could not supply.56 In Jovellanos, readers asked for larger versions of the cartoons to be displayed on walls, and in Oriente a special edition was requested for distribution in the region where the “bloody racist epic” took place.57 Other publications joined the campaign against José Miguel Gómez before the elections, reminding people of the events of 1912. Ramón Vasconcelos published a second edition of El General Gómez y la sedición de mayo, criticizing Gómez for masterminding the massacre of black insurgents to secure re-election. Vasconcelos recognized the importance of Afro-Cubans as a political force (because they were “passionate, and get excited easily”), but also pointed out their exclusion from the Liberal ranks.58 The political climate was tense indeed, and blacks were at the center of that tension. Other writings in Labor nueva argued against any “race 53 54 55

56 57 58

Pedro González Barreda, “La palabra de un negro: Ecos de nuestra campaña,” La política cómica, October 29, 1916, [5]. Pedro González Barreda, “A la raza de color,” La política cómica, October 29, 1916, [3]. “El desquite de los negros,” La política cómica (October 29, 1916), [17]; “Desde el Cacahual,” La política cómica, October 29, 1916, [5]; “Candidatos del Titán,” La política cómica, November 5, 1916, [10]. Jamaica here refers to the town of Guantánamo with that name, not to the neighboring island. “El macheteo de José Miguel: La raza de color,” La política cómica, October 8, 1916, [11]. Vasconcelos, El General Gómez y la sedición de mayo, 23–24, 28–29.

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problem,” claiming Cuba’s transracial unity in “perpetual brotherhood.”59 On October 22, 1916, black commentator Vicente Silveira published an essay expressing concerns about the consequences of activating the “race issue” within political parties. According to Silveira, reviving the 1912 events was done with “the most depraved malice.” He argued for equality between blacks and whites, seemed to align with the Liberals, and noted that “in the end, victory in the elections will not be of whites or blacks, but of Liberals or Conservatives.”60 Silveira understood the political game of the Conservatives seeking the Afro-Cuban vote, and it seems that he also saw clearly that the propaganda would have effects beyond electoral politics. By the time of the February 1917 partial elections to settle the political impasse, the government had already begun to repress Liberal voters.61 Without any other recourse to avoid electoral fraud or to overcome the position of power of the Conservatives, the Liberals scheduled a revolt prior to the elections. Between February 12 and 17, the troops of General Gómez occupied Majagua and Jatibonico in central Cuba. The province of Camagüey was left without communication with Havana and “joined Oriente under Liberal authority.”62 Considering the events before the outbreak of the conflict, it must be clear that when the revolt started, two main concerns had been catapulted into the Cuban social arena: the fear of black Cubans and of the black immigrant. At the moment of the revolt, thanks to publications like La política cómica, the relation between blacks and the Liberal Party was established for many Cubans. Also, black outsiders (British Antilleans and Haitians) not only were being labeled carriers of disease, but had also been associated with, and made responsible for, any revolt or disorder taking place in Cuba – that was the historical legacy of black racial fear. The Chambelona, as the revolt came to be known, followed the logic of “foreign influence” expressed by Fernando Ortiz and others. These ingredients combined and contributed to social fears and misperceptions of the revolt. The insertion of the Chambelona into the racial-fear archetype seems to have been more evident as the revolt failed in its military objectives in Havana and lost any hopes of political success with the defeat and 59 61 62

60 Valle, “El problema actual,” 5. Silveira, “No echemos combustible,” 5. Pérez, Intervention, Revolution, and Politics, 21. See W. W. Craib to Stephen Leech, February 21, 1917, NARA, RG 84: Records of the Foreign Service Post, Diplomatic Posts, Cuba (hereafter RFSP, DP-C), Vol. 096 (1917) [File 800]; Academia de Ciencias, Índice histórico de la Provincia de Camagüey, 72; Pérez, “La Chambelona,” 5.

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imprisonment of Gómez on March 7. After this, the insurgency in the eastern provinces took on a life of its own; it became an outlet for the grievances of socially and economically marginalized peasants. Louis Pérez Jr. has noted that the “collapse of central insurgent authority had decentralized the leadership of the armed struggle and transformed a national movement into a protest largely regional and local in nature.”63 Yet, with no “family links, important political associations, and national stature, minor insurgent commanders in the field after mid-March could expect to receive from the Conservatives only the severest penalties.” “Their fate at government hands,” Pérez maintains, “was of little consequence to the party: since they were politically anonymous and nationally unknown, their condition would not attract national attention or general public sympathy.”64 As we will see, open repression took place in rural areas, claiming the lives of black British Antilleans and other usual suspects.

   By mid-March 1917, two women, Mrs. María Pría de Cuenco and Mrs. Hall, the wives of a Spanish retailer and a sugar manager respectively, told their stories about the revolt in the town of Jobabo to the El Camagüeyano newspaper. They emphasized how the situation worsened as the days went by and how rebel leaders Mariano Caballero Morejón and Fernando Fernández started the robberies, threats, and banditry. Mrs. Hall noted, The Liberals in arms were not the only ones doing the ravaging. The black Jamaicans like hordes of savages, assaulted the women, with knives in their hands and took the jewels and money they had; they stole the silverware and the precious crockery . . . In carrying out these thefts and outrages, the Jamaicans were helped out by some Spaniards working in the central . . .

Mrs. Hall condemned the actions of Caballero and Fernández and added, All the evil on the earth has concentrated, unfortunately, on that piece of Cuban land. If the constituted government surrounds Jobabo and burns it, it can be asserted that they have burnt the scum of Cuba! That community has lost their heads; all are equal; all are bad . . . Jobabo! I would like that name to disappear from the earth.65 63 65

64 Pérez, “La Chambelona,” 7–10. Pérez, Intervention, Revolution, and Politics, 67. “Los Bandidos Fernando Fernández y Caballero Morejón han cometido atrocidades en Jobabo,” El Camagüeyano, March 23, 1917, 5.

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The article in El Camagüeyano brought attention to the violent qualities of the revolt and to those performing the actions: Caballero, Fernández, the Jamaicans, and some Spaniards. The article was reprinted in other newspapers all around the island with sensationalist titles that emphasized a language of violence (“ferocity,” “savagery,” and “atrocities”) historically associated with blackness.66 The events narrated and the language used framed the revolt within the rhetoric and imagery of black fear. With a double racial emphasis, Diario de la Marina reported that the “majority of the insurgents that plundered that sugar mill were blacks and the immediate chief of those blacks is named Caballero Morejón.”67 Available records also confirm that the rebels under Caballero and Fernández were predominantly blacks and mulattoes.68 With these facts, and against the social and historical background of the revolt, by late March three stories must have circulated in Oriente and Camagüey: first, that the political revolt had turn into acts of banditry and savagery; second, that most of the rebels who seized Jobabo were either black or mulatto; and finally, that Jamaicans involved themselves in the revolt with acts of violence. It was in this context that government troops entered the region of the Cuba Company’s Jobabo sugar mill with a profile of the typical rebel, his social behavior, and his racial and ethnic features. On March 16, George H. Whigham, president of the Cuba Company, wrote directly to President García Menocal asking for protection at the Jobabo sugar mill.69 Another more urgent communication followed on March 26, stating that the situation was “EXTREMELY GRAVE” and with much destruction and looting. The communication called for “IMMEDIATE EFFECTIVE PROTECTION” to avoid “TOTAL

66

67 68

69

“Horrible Example of the Ferocity and Savagery of the Rebels at Jobabo,” La Discusión (March 25, 1917), n.p. Translation available in CCP, UM-CP, Series 1, Box 28, Folder 2; “El relato de las atrocidades cometidas por los alzados en Jobabo causa verdadera indignación,” La Lucha, March 26, 1917, 1, 4: “Los horripilantes sucesos de Jobabo,” El Pueblo, April 3, 1917, 1; “La ferocidad y el salvajismo de los alzados desataronse horriblemente en Jobabo,” El Pueblo, April 4, 1917, 1, 4. “La prensa asociada y la revuelta de Cuba,” Diario de la Marina, April 3, 1917, 1. My emphasis. Records of those who surrendered (presentados) during the summer of 1917 indicated the racial profile of the rebels. See AHPC, Fondo-Juzgado de Instrucción de Camagüey (hereafter JIC), leg. 376, exp. 4708; leg. 476, exp. 4709; leg. 376, exp. 4706, leg. 393, exp. 4919. George H. Whigham to Mario García Menocal, March 16, 1917, CCP, Series 1, Box 35 [folder for 1917].

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DESTRUCTION” of the Jobabo property.70 The president replied with the information he had on the developments in Jobabo and its surrounding area, and his understanding that some actions had been taken.71 Whigham responded to García Menocal insisting that protection was needed on the property “before more serious damage occurs.”72 As Whigham and the president exchanged communications, on March 27, a body of government troops led by Captain Melchor Batista entered Jobabo and, according to many sources, restored order in the town.73 But a week after Batista’s troops had seemingly controlled the situation, the troops of Captain Julio Cadenas – a personal acquaintance of the president – and Miguel Cutilla were dispatched to the Jobabo area to fight the rebels and protect the Cuba Company properties.74 Captain Cadenas arrived in the Elia sugar mill on April 3, and his troops took some new shirts belonging to two Jamaicans. The Jamaicans asked to have the shirts back, and, according to a witness, the captain refused and the men “were flogged with machetes, and send back to the camp.” The Jamaicans then talked about what had happened among themselves, but “a spy” who was present “reported the conversation of the Jamaicans” to Captain Cadenas. He “ordered two guards to take the two men, and they were led out and shot.”75 The day before these two murders at Elia, another

70 71

72 73

74

75

G. H. Whigham to Mario García Menocal, March 26, 1917, CCP, Series 1, Box 35 [folder for 1917]. Mario García Menocal to George H. Whigham, March 27, 1917, CCP, Series 1, Box 35 [folder for 1917]. According to Menocal, the troops had been sent to Elia and Jobabo on March 10, but they had remained in Elia sugar mill at the request of John Bullard, the administrator of the Jobabo sugar mill. The reports received by the president indicate that, in order to avoid further damages in Jobabo, Bullard agreed with the rebels that he would go to Francisco sugar mill, where US Marines were stationed, to ask for their intervention in Cuba. George H. Whigham to Mario García Menocal, March 27, 1917, CCP, Series 1, Box 35 [folder for 1917]. Stephen Leech, British Consul, to Pablo Desvernine, Cuban Secretary of State, May 15, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Captain Batista’s entrance to Jobabo was reported later: “La entrada del capitán Melchor Batista con sus fuerzas al pueblo de Jobabo,” El Camagüeyano, April 5, 1917, 4. Cadenas, then first lieutenant, and Second Lieutenant Pedro H. Iribarne were undergoing military training in the Mounted Services School at Fort Riley, and they were called into service because of the revolt, traveling to Cuba on February 22. Primelles y Xenes, Crónica cubana, 1915–1918, 262. Affidavit by Beatus Ebenezer White, signed at the British Legation, Cuba, before the British vice consul, George Plant, April 20, 1917, enclosed in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, May 15, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. With the exception of dates, and unless otherwise indicated, all the affidavits cited below were submitted before British vice

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Jamaican, Samuel A. Campbell, had been attacked by government troops between Berrocal and Jobabo. In his testimony, Campbell told he was “stripped” of his “pants which contained $150.00 in the waistband,” money that was stolen. He stated, “I have not heard that any Jamaicans were with the rebels, nor that any of them were asked to fight for them.”76 After his experience Campbell went to Jobabo without knowing that he would witness worse atrocities than those he had suffered. On April 4, the troops commanded by Cadenas and Cutilla arrived at Jobabo. Albert Britton, a Jamaican living in Jobabo, testified about the events: It was on the 4th of April when the next troop [sic] came into Jobabo and started to rob us and kill us. [T]he first occurrence took place at 12.30 on the 4th night when they killed three of my countrymen and one Nassau [Bahamas] man. I do not know one of the Jamaicans, but two I know – Felix Henry, a tailor, and Theophilus Seymour. I do not know the Nassau man’s name. On the 5th of April they robbed all the Jamaicans of their clothes and money.

He went on to say that he was peeping out of his door and “saw a mule coming up the street with a machine gun on its back, and a gang of men behind.” He “saw six Jamaicans” and could only identify “Henry Taylor.” According to Britton’s testimony, he went to his kitchen and “heard the gun start to shoot.” He heard the military officers “say that they would kill them all,” and when he could get out of his house, he “went and looked at them and saw them dead.” Britton mentioned that the troopers “also took a man out of the house [near] to mine and killed him but I could not reach the spot before they buried him. Another man got shot too.”77 Of the last two murders mentioned by Britton it is possible that one was that of “a man named ‘Charlie’[,] a Jamaican” who was ordered “to go and get feed for their horses. He came without his boots, and asked permissi[on] to go back and put them on, and he was instantly shot.”78 Joseph Barrett, who was at one point shot by the government troops but “was not struck by a bullet,” testified that he was robbed and was also ordered to get food for the horses. But before leaving the house to do the

76 77

78

consul Plant, at the British Legation, and enclosed in the corresponded from Leech to Desvernine cited here. Affidavit by Samuel A. Campbell, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Albert Britton, April 26, 1917. A literary rendition of a machine execution of black migrants in Cuba during the Republican period is included in Cabrera Infante, Vista del amanecer en el trópico, 79. Affidavit by Aaron McDormott, April 18, 1917.

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job, the troops “called another Jamaican from the building at the side.” This “boy got frightened and was going away, but they call[ed] him back and then they shot him on the spot.”79 The “boy,” whose name Barrett believed was “Gerat,” seems to have been the same victim who was named “Charlie.” Another witness mentioned a Charlie Gerard, who was killed by the guards.80 That “Charlie,” according to a third witness, was first shot in the neck by one of the soldiers “and fell down struggling and the other one [soldier] came up and shot him in the heart.”81 In his testimony on the shooting of “Gerat,” Barrett questioned “why the boy was shot,” and added that after the killing, “the soldiers compelled us to carry his body to the guardarays [sic].”82 While those murders were taking place at the mill on April 5, James Justin Anderson was shot and robbed on the road between Berrocal and Jobabo, the same area where Samuel A. Campbell was hurt on April 2.83 Aaron McDormott mentioned that originally nine British Antilleans were lined up to be machine-gunned in the morning of April 5, but “[o]ne was saved through his wife and the next was by another woman, and they turn back the third one.” The remainder, McDormott added, “were place[d] before the machine gun and were shot dead.” He noted that there were other shootings, but that he could not see them because he was “hiding underneath a house.” The man in charge of the machine gun, who had threatened to kill him, forced him to bury the dead.84 Rosamond Constance Reid, who heard the gunshots, testified hearing “the soldiers say ‘all Jamaicans’” while perpetrating the killings.85 Arthur R. Hall, a British subject and employee of the Jobabo sugar mill, was left in charge when John Bullard left. A witness to the events, Hall said that when the machine gun killings took place, one of the military officers “turned to me and asked me if I did not think these people needed a lesson.”86 Those who were not killed or wounded in Jobabo were ill-treated, robbed, or forced to bury their own kin. Henry Samuels testified that

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Affidavit by Joseph Barrett, April 30, 1917. Affidavit by Henry Samuels, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Aaron McDormott, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Joseph Barrett, April 30, 1917. Affidavit by James Justin Anderson, April 13, 1917. Affidavit by Aaron McDormott, April 18, 1917. Affidavit of Rosamond Constance Reid, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Arthur Reeve Hall, declared before Vice Consul Denys Cowan in the British Legation, Cuba, enclosed in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, November 13, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923.

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when he woke up on the morning of April 5, went to his door “and three soldiers came to [him] in rage” and threatened him: “take off the kahki [sic] pants or we will blow your brains.” Samuels decided to go into his room, but the soldiers “rushed in” on him “as if to kill” him, but his “wife called for mercy” because the family was present. Samuels’s life was spared, they took his pants, and “cut it in pieces and throw it away.” Later Samuels was forced to bury those who had been killed the day before. He also heard of another four Jamaicans who had been killed on the Santa Lucía estate, and “quite a few” others that the troops “meet travelling on the roads they killed.”87 At the time of his declaration on April 18, Samuel Campbell mentioned that there “are some Jamaicans who are still working for the Government cutting cane leaves to feed the horses. If they do not work willingly they are lashed with machetes by the Government troops.”88 Most of the British Antilleans who filed affidavits with the British Legation also mentioned the items that were taken by the government: money, clothes, suits and dresses, a bible, tables, chairs and more.89 All told, fourteen appear to have been killed. The victims were mostly Jamaicans, though at least one was from the Bahamas. The witnesses suggested that additional killings may have taken place, and other sources have numbered the casualties at twenty, thirty-six, and more. Louis A. Pérez Jr. has proposed that “some fifty persons were summarily executed by an army patrol on the property of the Elia and Jobabo estates.”90 British sugar expert Noël Deerr, at the time house superintendent at Jobabo, declared, I saw the rebel troops personally and never saw any Jamaican with them. I saw the stores of the town of Jobabo being sacked, and did not see any Jamaican present when this was going on. To the best of my knowledge and belief all the Jamaicans living at Jobabo behaved as law[-]abiding individuals during the period that the alzados were in possession of Jobabo.91

87 88 89 90

91

Affidavit by Henry Samuels, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Samuel A. Campbell, April 18, 1917. See the affidavits in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, May 15, 1917, NA, FO 371/ 2923. The number of twenty casualties is from Primelles y Xenes, Crónica Cubana, 1915–1918, 320, while that of thirty-six is from the Guión museológico, 16, Museo Municipal Rosendo Arteaga Guerra, Jobabo, Cuba. Pérez’s reference is from Intervention, Revolution, and Politics, 87. Affidavit by Noël Deerr, April 27, 1917.

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When mentioning the persons murdered by the government, Theophilus Harris said, “I do not know that they had done anything wrong.” Aaron McDormott did not find “any reason for the shooting” and said that “the rebels did not compel us to fight for them,” agreeing with Albert Britton’s declaration. Most of the other witnesses declared in a similar fashion.92 The British Caribbean workers were not only traumatized by what happened, but also bewildered by how the events unfolded. At the beginning, some were glad to see the government troops because they had been forced to work for the insurgents and they were “always ill[-]treated by the rebels,” but, as it turned out, the government troops “were worse than the rebels.”93 When referring to the arrival of the first troops in Jobabo, those under Captain Batista, the migrants testified that they “did not ill[-]treat the people. They took charge of the whole place, and the rebels had already gone. The rebels only asked us to cut food for their horses. No Jamaican had fought for the rebels, and the rebels did not ask them to fight for them.”94 Rosamond Constance Reid made it clear that it “was not the first body of Government troops who committed the outrages, but the second group who came on the 4th April. The first troop behaved well and quite differently.”95 Others declared accordingly, emphasizing the role of Captain Cadenas in the atrocities. If the rebels were already out of Jobabo, and if the Jamaicans were not involved with the insurgents, the question is why, with what rationale, and under what circumstances, did Cadenas’s troops decide to massacre the black migrants? When the rebels were in control of Jobabo, “they opened the stores and gave away the things to both Jamaican and native women who needed them.” This distribution was done exclusively by the rebels who “allow[ed] no men to go there and taking [sic] anything.”96 Arthur Hall, acting manager of Jobabo, mentioned that some stolen clothes were found outside a window when the government troops arrived, but no one in the town identified the guilty parties. Hall added in his declaration that during the looting in Jobabo, “some Jamaicans had goods given to them” and that the presence of “these goods in their possession may have

92 93 94 95 96

See the affidavits by Albert Britton, April 26, 1917; Theophilus Harris, April 18, 1917; and Aaron McDormott, April 18, 1917; as well as those of other witnesses cited above. Affidavit by Aaron McDormott, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Henry Samuels, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Rosamond Costance Reid, April 18, 1917. Affidavit by Joseph Barrett, April 30, 1917.

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led to their having been accused of looting.” He affirmed, though, that he “never heard of a single case of a British subject joining the rebels.”97 A brief history of Cuban centrales produced by a local eastern historian mentions that Cadenas carried out the murders in complicity with some merchants of the sugar central. The account further states that, at the moment of killing the migrants, Cadenas referred to the Jamaicans disparagingly as a “pile of blacks.” A chronicle written for the local museum in Jobabo suggests that some merchants and colonos (cane farmers) took advantage of the revolt and the arrival of Captain Cadenas to take the money that the workers had saved for their remittances, a plan that ended in the mass murder of some fifteen to twenty of them.98 This massacre, this single event, highlights what happened to those defined, and racially identified, as the object of fear during a context of political crisis. The killings triggered a diplomatic controversy between the British and Cuban governments that revealed both the importance and the limits of the diplomatic support that British Antilleans reportedly enjoyed.

97 98

Affidavit by Arthur Reeve Hall, before Vice Consul Denys Cowan, November 13, 1917. See Comisión Provincial de Activistas de Historia, Breves monografías de los centrales de Oriente, 86. Available in the Archivo Provincial Histórico, Holguín, Cuba (hereafter APHH), Fondo-Registro de Información, Miscelánea no. 11; Guión museológico, 17.

4 The Limits of British Imperial Support Diplomacy after Jobabo and Cuban National Interests

What happened in Jobabo was, among other things, the result of longheld racial fears in Cuban society. The victims of the massacre in Jobabo represented the foreign “black insurgent” allegedly upsetting Cuban society. In a context of social (and racialized) unrest with increasing Caribbean migration, black outsiders became a scapegoat and a perfect target for the military. There was no absence of racial divisions in early twentieth-century Cuba; they coexisted with a dominant discourse of multiracial national unity. If that national unity is taken as a given – however problematic – in early twentieth-century Cuba (in the “cordial relations” of the Rural Guard official, or Marino Pérez’s “social harmony”), it follows that any national trouble (i.e., disease, crime, social and political unrest) had to be caused or influenced by black foreigners. Not surprisingly, in crushing the rebellion, the Cuban military acted against a historically constructed enemy (outsiders), one that was easily identified by racial and ethnic markers. But the black outsiders killed in Jobabo were also British subjects. Consequently, an unprecedented diplomatic clash between the British and Cuban governments was triggered, one that set the stage for how both sides would deal with the increasing presence of black British subjects in Cuba. Ironically, the years between the massacre (1917) and its political resolution (1921) were also years of British Caribbean mass migration to Cuba. This chapter examines the immediate diplomatic aftermath of the “Jobabo incident” (1917–1921) and the reception of British Antilleans during and after that diplomatic conflict. This includes the economic crisis of 1921 and its effect on foreign workers, which 97

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would leave its own mark on British Antilleans, and in the history of British–Cuban international relations.

     What happened after the killings in Jobabo? Between April 18 and 20, the British consul general in Havana, Stephen Leech, collected the declarations of over fifteen witnesses to the events. On May 15, Consul Leech copied the affidavits to the Cuban Secretary of State, Pablo Desvernine, demanding “an immediate enquiry, and punishment of those responsible for the shooting of the British Subjects, as well as due compensation for their families or relatives.”1 The US government and its ambassador in Cuba, William Gonzales, were also informed of the incident by the British ambassador in Washington, DC, Cecil Spring Rice.2 There was no immediate response from the Cuban government, probably because officials were still fighting the revolt in the east and planning the inauguration of the “new” Conservative government scheduled for May 20. Diplomatic trouble with the British was not precisely welcomed. The revolt affected not only British colonial subjects, but also British political and economic interests. While the Jobabo massacre put the Cuban and British governments at odds, both countries agreed on President García Menocal’s declaration of war on Germany in early April. Britain was the second-largest consumer of Cuban sugar and demand increased because of the war. Cuba, on the other hand, was dependent on laborers from the British Caribbean colonies to produce its sugar. To complicate things further, the revolt had damaged the sugar industry’s infrastructure, including the eastern railway system and the Jobabo sugar mill. Both were North American endeavors, but heavily financed from London by Robert Fleming.3 The British demanded justice from the Cuban government, but their diplomatic effort unfolded in a complex scenario. For one thing, the British also needed Cuban sugar and protection for the smooth functioning of British investments in the island. The Cuba Company wanted Cuban compensation for damages to their equipment to resume 1 2 3

Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, May 15, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Cecil Spring Rice to US Department of State, April 30, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, vol. 094, File 310. Santamarina, “The Cuba Company and Cuban Development,” 5, 82; Smith, Robert Fleming, 125–126.

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production. A quick recovery of the sugar industry was also in the interest of the United States, which supported García Menocal’s government and its repression of the insurgents. And all sugar planters, local and foreign, were in desperate need of British Caribbean cane cutters. The Cuba Company’s claims were resolved first when the Cuban government granted them an advance of $1 million on April 21.4 By then a formal complaint on behalf of the black British subjects had not even been filed, and the murdered Jobabo workers were not part of the Cuba Company’s claims. George Whigham, the company’s president, seems to have been worried about the security of laborers, but probably because of fear of losing his workforce. Paradoxically, it was Whigham who asked García Menocal for a machine gun emplacement at the sugar mill. But by the time Whigham petitioned protection for the workers no less than fifteen of them had been summarily executed – precisely with a machine gun.5 None of the Cuba Company’s key administrators seem to have cared about the massacre, and clearly the corporation’s interests seemed more important. John Bullard, sugar mill manager, had been communicating with US ambassador Gonzales since April 24 regarding the claim for damages.6 But despite his contact with Bullard, Ambassador Gonzales only learned of the killings shortly before the formal British claim was made on May 15. According to a letter from Gonzales to the US Department of State on May 19, he was aware of the damage to the mill and asked them if they wanted him to make an official inquiry.7 It is not clear whether Gonzales inquired about the murders or the damages to the company’s property, but by that date both of them were irrelevant: the British had already notified the US Department of State about the killings and the Cuban government had taken steps to compensate the Cuba Company for the damages. However, the Cuban government had taken no action regarding an inquiry into and compensation for the murder of 4 5

6 7

Mario García Menocal and Leopoldo Cancio, “Secretaria de Hacienda,” Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, 16: 94, April 21, 1917, 5907–5908. Whigham’s request of troops and a machine gun came on April 16, after one of the Cuba Company’s agents in the Jatibonico sugar mill had mentioned it in a letter on April 13, 1917. William W. Craib to G. H. Whigham, April 13, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 36 [folder for 1917, File 10]; G. H. Whigham to Mario García Menocal, April 16, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 35 [folder for 1917]. John R. Bullard to William E. Gonzales, April 24, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, vol. 094, File 350. William E. Gonzales to US Secretary of State, May 19, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 094, File 350.

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British Antilleans. Consul Leech, with seven years of experience in Cuba, already had low expectations about a possible response, and “reason to suppose that the Cuban Government may attempt to defend themselves by alleging that the victims had been looting.” But “even if this were true,” Leech was “not prepared to admit” that charge, because it was “contrary to the statements sworn to at this Legation.” Moreover, “constitutional guarantees had not been suspended” and Jamaicans should have received the protection and justice required by law.8 In June, US ambassador Gonzales reported on the events to the US Department of State, mentioning the British government’s desire “to make no more of the circumstances than is absolutely necessary,” but that the British minister was already “annoyed by the delay” in responding.9 The Cuban officials remained silent during the entire summer. After talking with the president and Cuba’s Secretary of State, Leech wrote formally to the latter on July 10 insisting and elaborating on his demands. He reminded him about the Jobabo claim, and added more than twenty individual complaints by British subjects who had been shot, robbed, or attacked by government troops between March and June 1917. He submitted a memorandum with the cases and demanded action considering “the injustice” that his “countrymen have received.” In making his case, Leech emphasized Cuba’s entry into the “European conflict” and the fact that the island was “urgently in need of labour,” and of ending a “state of affairs which is having the effect of inducing many British Subjects who can do so to return to Jamaica for good.” Their return, Leech insisted, would “discourage other[s] from coming to Cuba.”10 Leech’s memorandum listed other abuses against British Antilleans, including troops entering their houses to beat them and take their belongings, and incidents of violence in several locations of Camagüey.11 Other British Antilleans were robbed in several parts of Camagüey, in Cespedes, in Cuatro Caminos, in the Florida and Francisco sugar 8 9 10 11

Stephen Leech to [A. J. Balfour, Foreign Office], May 22, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. William E. Gonzales to US Secretary of State, June 25, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DPC, Vol. 094, File 310. Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, July 10, 1917, NA, FO 277/191. The cases at Jobabo were those of Samuel Waith (March 4), Charles Weekes (March 6), Sydney F. H. Miller (March 15), Albertha Carthy (April 4), Wildred Dier (sic) (April 6), James Green (April 6), and George Manning and Nathan Greyson (no date provided, but probably early April). See memorandum enclosed in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, July 10, 1917, NA, FO 277/191. It is important to mention that some of the cases took place even before Captain Batista’s arrival on May 27, which indicates a wider pattern of military abuse and repression.

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mills, and in Morón.12 In Cuatro Caminos on April 22, soldiers raided a colonia and “fired at some 30 Jamaicans and subsequently robbed them of all their money and clothes.”13 In Ciego de Ávila, troops arrested several Jamaicans and stole from them. And on June 28, at the Cupey sugar mill in Oriente (now Holguín), several Jamaicans were beaten and jailed after a quarrel with guards.14 Anticipating the response to his letter, Leech insisted that “these complaints are not without foundation” as “many of them came from residents in different parts of the island and tell the same story.”15 Pressure on the Cuban government was growing, not only from Leech, but from the Cuba Company, which was concerned about the next harvest and the full payment of their $7 million claim.16 Along with the centrales, the railway lines – dominated by the Cuba Company – were vital to the recovery of the sugar industry. This was also a major concern of the British Foreign Office and the US State Department.17 From London, Robert Fleming had already pointed out to George H. Whigham that it was of “prime importance in the British interest to get the Railway in good working order in time for next year’s crop.”18 The Cuba Company’s claim certainly had supporters in high places, including US ambassador Gonzales, who was handling it, presumably 12

13 14

15 16

17

18

The cases were those of James W. Golding at Cuatro Caminos (March 6), Ebenezer Forest at Francisco Sugar Estate (April 10), George Lord and Samuel N. Jones at Florida (April 12) and Peter Burrel in Cespedes (no date provided). The case of Morón was reported by Alex Brown. See memorandum enclosed in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, July 10, 1917, NA, FO 277/191. Memorandum enclosed in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, July 10, 1917, NA, FO 277/191. For the cases in Cuatro Caminos, Ciego de Ávila, and Cupey sugar mill see memorandum enclosed in Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, July 10, 1917, NA, FO 277/191. The persons involved in the incident at Cupey sugar mill were Uriah MacDowell, Theophilus Watson, Theopilus Sealy, and Gothan Johson (sic) (June 28). There is no mention as to whether those shot in Ciego de Ávila were killed. Stephen Leech to Pablo Desvernine, July 10, 1918, NA, FO 277/191. George H. Whigham to C. R. Hosmer, Montreal, Canada, July 17, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 20, Folder 2 [File 41]. The advance of $1 million was only a small part of a claim that was intended to cover not only damages, but profits lost during or because of the revolt. George H. Whigham to C. R. Hosmer, Montreal, Canada, July 17, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 20, Folder 2 [File 41]. On the important links between railroads and the sugar industry see Zanetti and García, Caminos para el azúcar. Robert Fleming to George H. Whigham, June 18, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 29 [folder for 1917, File 37]. It should be mentioned that Whigham was a personal employee of Robert Fleming. He was appointed president of the Cuba Company after William Van Horne’s death (1915) to represent Fleming’s interests. See Santamarina, “The Cuba Company and Cuban Development,” 69–70, 82; and Smith, Robert Fleming, 125–126.

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because of North American interests – even when Fleming was the leading shareholder. Leech was also involved, and had written to Gonzales telling him that he was “authorized by the Foreign Office to support any representation” regarding the Cuba Company’s demands, “in view of the large interests held by British subjects” in the company.19 The British ambassador in Washington, DC had also written to the US Department of State, in the name of “His Majesty’s Government,” asking them to pressure the Cuban government in support of their claim.20 British advocacy for the Cuba Company conflicted with their demands for justice and compensation for the murdered British subjects. Leech thought that he could use the British Caribbean labor force as a bargaining tool with the Cubans in seeking compensation. But the Cuba Company, which Leech was keen to support, was also searching for the foreign workers with whom he planned to bargain with. Whigham had made an extensive trip throughout the island and reported to Leech on July 20 about the political and labor situation for the coming sugar crop. He was concerned that Spanish workers were leaving Cuba and “Jamaicans and Haitians were practically driven out of the Island by the treatment they received during the revolution, and it is quite likely that most of them will be afraid to come back.” He added that labor should “be controlled and disciplined” and called for an immediate “large importation of foreign labor.”21 The British needed the sugar, and the sugar producers needed “controlled and disciplined” labor, which meant the British Antillean workforce in Leech’s bargaining toolkit. On August 8, Desvernine wrote formally to Leech acknowledging his memorandum – presumably that of July 10 – and mentioned the war and the need for labor in Cuba as “of sufficient importance for this [Cuban] Government to take adequate steps in order that all cause of complaint shall disappear.”22 That month, Leech also visited his “personal friend,” José Martí, who was serving as minister of war, to discuss the “unjust campaign” against Jamaican laborers.23 Both Leech in Cuba and Spring Rice in Washington, DC were trying to use access to British Caribbean workers as a vehicle to press their demands, even when Leech 19 20 21 22 23

Stephen Leech to William E. Gonzales, May 22, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 094, File 350. Cecil Spring Rice to U.S. Department of State, July 16, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DPC, Vol. 094, File 350. George Whigham to Stephen Leech, July 20, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 28 [File 118]. Pablo Desvernine to Stephen Leech, August 8, 1917, NA, FO 277/191. Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, Foreign Office, August 15, 1917, NA, FO 277/191.

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suspected that the Cuban government was “attempting to trifle” with the British.24 In the early days of September, Spring Rice wrote to Robert Lansing, the US Secretary of State, complaining about the lack of attention given to the British complaints on the Jobabo murders. He mentioned that the whole issue was more difficult because Julio Cadenas was “one of the best officers in the Cuban Army, and [was] highly connected.” Spring Rice added that the “matter is aggravated in a purely material manner by the fact that labor is urgently required for the sugar plantations from Jamaica, which is the home of most, if not all, of the murdered British subjects.” The British ambassador also requested Lansing to instruct Gonzales in Havana “to give his firm support to Mr. Leech’s action.”25 Spring Rice then cabled Leech in Havana, telling him that the United States were “desirous” that he would “incite British subjects from Jamaica and Barbadoes [sic] to go over to labour in the sugar harvest.”26 Leech, for his part, consulted the Foreign Office, insisting that before any labor is encouraged to go to Cuba, “His Majesty’s Government should receive full satisfaction for the murder of British subjects in Jobabo.”27 Faced with US pressure regarding the need for migrant labor in Cuba, Cecil Spring Rice wrote a memorandum on September 15 to the US Department of State expressing the position of the British government “that before any action is taken to obtain laborers from the British West Indies” it is “essential that full and public satisfaction should be afforded for the murder of British Subjects at Jobabo and the adequate assurances should be obtained as to the future treatment of Jamaicans.”28 But while the British were stating conditions for allowing British subjects to go to Cuba, the Cuban government satisfied the United States and embraced their role as allies in the European war. An authorization for the immigration of cane cutters until two years after the end of the conflict was issued.29 Most of these workers, it was known, would come from neighboring Caribbean territories. In September, García Menocal and

24 25

26 27 28 29

Stephen Leech to Foreign Office, August 18, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Cecil Spring Rice to Robert Lansing, September 7, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. See also Cecil Spring Rice to US Secretary of State [September 15, 1917], NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917) [File 810]. Cecil Spring Rice to Stephen Leech (telegram), September 11, 1917 (also forwarded to the Foreign Office), NA, FO 372/2923. Stephen Leech to Foreign Office (telegram), September 13, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Cecil Spring Rice to US Department of State, September 15, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917), [810]. “Parte Oficial” [Immigration Law], Gaceta Oficial, 16: 30, Vol. II, August 4, 1917, 1941.

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Whigham were meeting to discuss “the question of highest efficiency of his railroad for the coming crop.”30 This suggests that the Cuban government was more concerned with sugar production than with justice for the migrant workers killed. But on the other hand, any fears that might have restrained migration from Jamaica and other islands during the revolt seemed to have vanished. Immigration numbers soared with various agencies engaged in labor transportation from Jamaica to Cuba. The British were unable to control the movement of their colonial subjects.31 Britain’s threat of discouraging immigration failed, not least because of the existing push and pull factors (difficulties for workers in the British Antilles and economic bonanza and openings for migrants in Cuba). But the diplomatic exchange continued, this time with a response from the Cuban government. According to their version of the Jobabo incident, explained to the US Department of State, “the British subjects had been mixed in the revolution.” This answer fit the logic of the foreign rebel accompanying long-held racial fears in Cuba. It was also an answer Leech had anticipated. Spring Rice clarified to the US authorities that such an assertion was wrong, and reported that the US Department of State would “speak strongly” to the Cuban minister in Washington, DC.32 The United States was seriously concerned about the need for labor for the next harvest, and warned Gonzales in Havana about the British authorities’ insistence on “full satisfaction for what they call the murder of these British subjects.” The official in the US Department of State wrote that in “view of the necessity in Cuba for labor from the British possessions,” it was hoped “that this matter may be brought to a satisfactory conclusion in the near future.”33 In Cuba, Gonzales’s loyalties became evident.34 He criticized the procedures followed by Leech, mentioning that he had been “under great

30

31

32 33 34

Mario García Menocal to William E. Gonzales, September 17, 1917, Gonzales Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia (hereafter SCL, USC), Box 3, Folder 1918. See, for example, “Best Way to Get to Cuba,” Jamaica Times, September 15, 1917, 1; “New Service to Cuba,” Jamaica Times, September 22, 1917, 4; “Samuels’ Service to Cuba,” Jamaica Times, October 20, 1917, 4. Cecil Spring Rice to Havana Legation and Foreign Office (telegram), September 18, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. [Frank Lyon Polk] to William E. Gonzales, September 28, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917) [no. 404 at 810]. Pérez has noted the close relation between García Menocal and Gonzales. See Pérez, Intervention, Revolution, and Politics, 82. Their closeness and friendship is also evident

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strain for a long time” and “in a very nervous state,” adding that his outspoken unfavorable opinion of the Cubans and their government was not “conducive to influence.” Gonzales further noted that Spring Rice’s argument on the “family connection” between García Menocal and Captain Cadenas was “construed by the Ambassador.” Based on a personal conversation he had with the president (shortly after García Menocal’s meeting with Leech), Gonzales mentioned that the Cuban president had “expressed doubts on the accuracy of Mr. Leech’s reports,” because Cadenas had “one of the best records in the Army and [was a] very ‘serious’ – or well-balanced – man.”35 By autumn, with the Jobabo situation unresolved, labor struggles in October and November of 1917 enhanced the need for foreign workers.36 There were concerns about the labor situation in various sugar mills, “fear of strikes,” and the planters took steps to bring migrant workers in.37 Despite concerns that these workers would instigate and direct the strikes, the government remained committed to bringing in migrants for the sugar season.38 On October 4, Leech met with García Menocal, warned him about “the importance of avoiding further delay,” and called “his attention to the necessity of British West Indian labour coming” to Cuba “both for Cuba and the Allies.” He insisted that until “I received full satisfaction, and was assured as to future treatment, I should not encourage this labour to come here, although the United States were anxious that I should do so.”39 Despite Leech’s insistence on his two bargaining tools (labor and the war effort), neither worked. Migration of workers from the British colonies was already taking place in great numbers, aided by the Cuban presidential decree. The war effort, instead of encouraging more diligence to solve the Jobabo killings, became a

35 36 37

38 39

in my own examination of correspondence in the William E. Gonzales Papers and the Gonzales Family Papers (SCL, USC). William Gonzales to the US Secretary of State, October 13, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917) [File 810]. Dumoulin, Azúcar y lucha de clases. See Eduardo Diez de Ulzurrun to Manuel Rionda, October 10, 1917; F. G. Smith to Higinio Fanjul, October 12, 1917, BBC, RG II, S. 1, Boxes 26 and 22 respectively; George Whigham to C. R. Hosmer, October 29, 1917, CCP, S. 1, Box 20 [File 41]. “Alien Strikers Will Be Expelled from Cuba,” Havana Post, October 24, 1917; “Decreto No. 1707” [Immigration of Workers], Gaceta Oficial, November 2, 1917, 7464–7465. Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, November 23, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923.

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reason for encouraging more migration of British Caribbean workers. After all, “Sugar, in fact, was Cuba’s ‘contribution’ to the cause of the allies.”40 In November, orders were finally issued for the arrest of the soldiers connected with the murders and the date of a court martial was set for December 3.41 But Leech’s hopes for a quick trial were soon dashed with the court martial changed to December 10 and later postponed indefinitely.42 Moreover, Cadenas was not arrested and appeared in Jobabo “trying his best to get certificates from residents as to the behaviour and character of the ill-fated Jamaicans.”43 Other people, including Cadenas’s colleagues and family members, were allegedly interfering in the process leading to the court martial.44 The rescheduling of the court martial was supposedly to admit over 100 witnesses, and General Martí had to commission a second report by a “reliable officer” to avoid a “whitewash,” after a first one had favored the army officers.45 Multiple arguments unfolded at that time. President García Menocal maintained that Cadenas was “incapable of such actions” as killing British Antilleans, but suggested that Jamaicans were among the “rebel troops of Gustavo Caballero” – most of whom were blacks and mulattoes.46

40 41 42 43 44

45

46

Meyer, “The United States and the Cuban Revolution of 1917,” 165. See also Chapman, A History of the Cuban Republic, 365–381; Jenks, Our Cuban Colony, 175–205. Stephen Leech to Foreign Office, November 17, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Stephen Leech to Foreign Office (telegram), November 30, 1917; Stephen Leech to Foreign Office (telegram), December 10, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, December 3, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. This includes Lieutenant Felipe E. Cadenas of the Cuban Army and Mr. Bernabe Sánchez, grandfather of Cadena’s wife. See O.H.B., second secretary of the US Legation, Havana, to Lieutenant Felipe E. Cadenas, November 19, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917) [File 800]; Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, December 3, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923. Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, December 3, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923; William E. Gonzales to US Secretary of State, December 10, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917) [File 800]. According to surrender records (presentaciones), many of the rebels under Caballero were either blacks or mulattoes. Assuming that blackness became the marker of those in rebellion for the authorities, and that it was also the factor equating the rebels and the black migrants, then one can make sense of the association of the Jamaicans with Caballero’s troops in terms of racial marking/stereotyping by the government troops. See the records of the surrenders in AHPC, JIC, leg. 376, no. 4708, leg. 476, no. 4709, leg. 376, no. 4706, and leg. 393, no. 4919.

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Leech responded that such claims “had nothing whatever to do with Jobabo.” He also warned General Martí of Parliamentary action in Britain and offered alternatives to handle the compensation (through the Cuban Workmen’s Compensation Act), while at the same time he expressed to Gonzales concerns about “fraudulent evidence” being used in the court martial. Gonzales did not engage with Leech’s arguments other than to stress that the killings took place during a revolt, which complicated any assessment of it and any role the United States could have had in the situation.47 By the time the court martial was finally scheduled to start on January 7, 1918, the participation of many witnesses was not guaranteed – including those who had submitted affidavits at the British Embassy.48 At this stage, and perhaps frustrated by what he termed “deliberate inaction” of the Cuban Secretary of State, Leech wrote to Rafael Montoro, secretary to the president. He stated that British Subjects had been murdered in cold blood and without trial or investigation. Even if it were said that they had looted or that they were rebels, neither of which I admitted, there was no excuse for their murder and someone was responsible, and an unsatisfactory verdict of the Court-martial would not settle the matter.

Again, Leech raised his threat of discouraging British colonial migration to Cuba until the question was satisfactorily settled.49 When the court martial against Cadenas and Cutilla began, the prosecutor asked for the death penalty for the soldiers, who were being defended by no less than Ricardo Dolz, president of the governing Conservative Party. He argued that even if the charges were true, Cadenas and Cutilla should not be condemned because they had acted out of “patriotism.” On February 11, 1918, one year after the beginning of the Liberal revolt, both military officials were declared not guilty and walked free

47

48

49

Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, November 23, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923; William E. Gonzales to US Secretary of State, December 10, 1917, NARA, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 096 (1917) [File 800]. Many witnesses (including Arthur Hall, acting administrator of the Jobabo sugar mill) were not living in the same places, and the subpoena notifications therefore did not have any effect. See Stephen Leech to A. J. Balfour, December 3, 1917, NA, FO 371/ 2923; Stephen Leech to Rafael Montoro, Cuban secretary to the presidency, January 4, 1918, ANC, SP, leg. 56, no. 31; “Contra Cadenas y Cutilla,” El Mundo, January 8, 1918, 6. Stephen Leech to Rafael Montoro, Cuban secretary to the presidency, January 4, 1918, ANC, SP, leg. 56, no. 31.

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from La Cabaña.50 “A travesty of justice” was the way the British authorities referred to the court martial years later.51 The result was a moral defeat for the British, and certainly for Leech. Now he was left only with trying to obtain some compensation for the families of the victims. Cuba Company officers were also insisting on their own compensation for material damages. In that context, in September 1918, the Cuban Consulate in London sent the Secretary of State in Cuba a press clipping from the British periodical The Economist about the “claims of British Subjects against the Government of Cuba for damages suffered in the last perturbation of the public order.” The article itself praised Cuba as “the world’s sugar-bowl” and touched upon British interests on the island (presumably Fleming), referring to the claims of some companies, but indicating that the sugar industry’s “prospects this year are so encouraging that there is little desire to press any immediate action.”52 Despite knowledge of the growing pressure in Britain, the Cuban government took its time to respond to any claims on material damages, and was dismissive and still slower on the humanitarian claims on behalf of the British subjects killed. The United States did not want an additional risk to ensure a stable labor force for the sugar industry at such an important time. Internal correspondence of Cuban government officials shows that on February 28, 1919, the US Legation suggested that an indemnity should be offered to the families of those who had died in Jobabo. The Cuban government replied that given their unity with Britain in the war and because Jamaican laborers were needed, they could agree to a rational indemnification. Under the scheme for accidents in the workplace, a credit not to exceed $100,000 would be made available for the necessary payments, with the

50

51 52

See Primelles y Xenes, Crónica cubana, 1915–1918, 229–230; “Cadenas y Cutillas resultaron absueltos,” Diario de Cuba, February 12, 1918, 3. In an exhaustive search I was unable to find any records either of the court martial or of the reports allegedly made by the Ministry of War at the time. Some of the military records in Cuba were still considered classified material on my last visit to the Cuban archives, and if there is some surviving material on the court martial, it seems it will not be available to historians. William Erskine to Earl Curzon, Foreign Office, February 11, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. “Latin-American Notes,” The Economist, 87: 3,913, August 24, 1918, 239. The article was enclosed in a letter to Guillermo Patterson, then Cuban Secretary of State, with a note that read, “makes reference to claims of British Subjects against the Government of Cuba for damages suffered in the last perturbation of the public order” – i.e., the Liberal Revolt. Letter to Guillermo Patterson, September 2, 1918, ANC, Fondo 304-Secretaria de Estado (hereafter SE), leg. 215, exp. 2909.

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assumption that the amount used would be less.53 Later, in September 1919, the British decided to push forward their claim once again. Reluctantly putting aside any demand for the punishment of Cuban army officers, they demanded compensation for the families. On February 26, 1920, the Cuban government notified the British of its decision that compensation would be provided under the Cuban Workmen’s Compensation Law of 1916, with $3,285 for each of the murdered men. Only eleven victims were eligible, and after bureaucratic delays, on May 12, 1921, with García Menocal out of the presidential office, a disbursement of $36,135 was announced in the Gaceta Oficial, not explicitly for $3,285 for each of the eleven eligible murdered victims of the Jobabo massacre, but for “unforeseen expenses” of the Office of the Secretary of State.54 The British diplomatic efforts had little effect on the Cuban government. The critical pressure came from the United States, not out of any concern for the victims, but out of their preoccupation with securing a stable labor supply for the sugar industry. The Cuban government never took responsibility for the killings, and when they paid compensation it was not out a sense of justice, but as an act of self-interest because of the need for foreign workers. Ironically, the payment was concealed as “unforeseen expenses” of the Secretary of State, the very office that stalled every British effort to unveil the truth.55 53 54

55

See Guillermo Patterson to Rafael Montoro, May 4, 1920, ANC, SP, leg. 56, exp. 31. “Annual Report for the Year 1920,” enclosed in William Erskine to Earl Curzon, February 11, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565; Primelles y Xenes, Crónica cubana, 1919–1922, 303. For the official government announcement of the compensation, see Decree no. 714 by Mario García Menocal and Pablo Desvernine, “Parte Oficial: Poder EjecutivoSecretaria de Estado,” Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, Year 20, no. 109, May 12, 1921, 8217. Other sources indicate that the Cuban compensation offer was on the table from November 13, 1917, and that it was not until February 26, 1920 – perhaps after the failure of the court martial – that the British Legation accepted the amount. However, available correspondence I have consulted does not reflect an explicit offer of compensation in 1917. See Godfrey Haggard to Earl Curzon, May 3, 1921, NA, FO 371/5563. The compensation, which in the end included only thirteen people, was reduced to eleven because two men could not be identified. Payment was then delayed because there was no quorum in Congress when the president petitioned the funds in May 6, 1920. When the money was made available, on May 12, 1921, General Carlos García Vélez (former Cuban consul in London during the war and friend of García Menocal) met with Godfrey Haggard, then British consul and chargé d’affaires in Havana, and handed him a cheque from the Cuban National Treasury for $36,135. Drafts for the corresponding amounts were then forwarded to the governors of Jamaica and the Bahamas. See Godfrey Haggard to Earl Curzon, May 3, 1921; Godfrey Haggard to Earl Curzon, May 17, 1921, NA, FO

110

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“     ” The exchanges between British, Cuban, and US government officials dealing with the political aftermath of the Jobabo incident were determined by their implications for the sugar industry in the context of World War I. The Cuban government, much against its wishes of “whitening” the nation, acquiesced to the imperative of sugar production for the war, and their own gain, accepting black migrant laborers as a necessary evil. For a short period, social animosity against them apparently receded. But when the war ended in 1918, its function and a moral imperative of Cuba’s contribution to the war, and its labor component, faded. Racial preoccupations surfaced again in public discussion. The discourses about the migrant that set the scene for violence in Jobabo continued to prevail in the host society where migrants worked and lived. Replicating the anti-immigrant discourse that had been used in the 1910s, newspapers expressed preference for European migrants and antagonism towards black Caribbean migration. In Guantánamo, a local newspaper article in 1918 titled “The Immigration Problem” was explicit about the preference of Spanish braceros. According to the article, “important sugar personalities” were interested in diverting the Spanish migration to “Argentina and other Republics” into Cuba.56 Aligned with the pro-European migration stance, a 1919 article in La Lucha argued that the “worse immigrant for Cuba was the black,” and condemned the recruitment of Jamaican and Haitian cane cutters as “unpatriotic,” even considering their usefulness during the war.57 The antiblack racism against Afro-Caribbean migrants during the late 1910s was disguised as a concern for health and sanitary conditions. But the central concern of Cuban elites and politicians was not easily hidden from contemporary observers. For example, US consul P. Merrill Griffith wrote in 1916 “that neither the health authorities here nor in Habana nor elsewhere in the Island entertain any serious apprehension with regard to the introduction of malaria, falaria or miasmatic germs.” This was a “voluntary deception,” he stated, to disguise an objection to the migrants

56 57

371/5563; Mario García Menocal and Pablo Desvernine, “Parte Oficial: Poder EjecutivoSecretaria de Estado; Decreto N. 714,” Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, Year 20, no. 109, May 12, 1921, 8217. “El problema inmigratorio,” La Voz del Pueblo, 22 de marzo de 1918, 2 “El jamaiquino y el haitiano,” La Lucha, October 19, 1919, 12. See Chomsky, “The Aftermath of Repression.”

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“on account of their color” because most of those arriving are “as black as coal.” Given “recent race riots and revolutions,” Merrill Griffith understood that the authorities viewed with “alarm” the “constant augmentation of the already high percentage of negroes in this vicinity.”58 Independently of the real reasons, the Cuban government took concrete actions against migrants under health and sanitary pretentions. Writing about malaria, historian Marc McLeod argues that “state officials singled out Afro-Caribbean immigrants as the leading cause behind the disease’s infiltration of the Cuban population.” He identifies pamphlets and notices in 1918 specifically targeting eastern provinces, and blaming foreigners for its spread.59 One year later, a cartoon in La política cómica dramatized the fear of disease in Cuba, representing smallpox as a “monster.” Although not explicit in its reference to migrants, the “monster” was a reptile coming from the water and crawling onto Cuban shores.60 The heightened concern with the diseases allegedly brought by black migrants coincided, not surprisingly, with the unprecedented levels of immigration. After World War I, regulation of sugar prices ended, and between 1919 and 1920 the price increased by 185 percent. This stimulated production and labor recruitment. Cuba was not the only place impacted by this changing economic environment. Worldwide sugar producers inundated the markets, and by the end of 1920 sugar prices had fallen as swiftly as they had gone up.61 With the sugar crisis of 1920–1921, and with workers becoming redundant, opposition to nonwhite working-class migrants was deployed, pressuring for their deportation. Early in 1921, El Camagüeyano reported on the “danger of Jamaican and Haitian immigrations” as an “urgent” one, referring to “recent sanitary reports” and advocating for “rigorous restrictions against these noxious immigrations.” Migrants from Caribbean neighboring islands, but also from Asia, were considered carriers of “small-pox” and “paludism.”62 The report from inspections in Camagüey and Oriente by the Secretary of Sanitation, Dr. Fernando de Plazaola, had less to say about diseases and health than about his personal impressions. An “enormous 58 59 60 61 62

P. Merrill Griffith to US Secretary of State, June 1, 1916, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.55/ 34 (M488, Roll 84). McLeod, “We Cubans Are Obligated Like Cats,” 63–64. “El monstruo de la viruela,” La política cómica, October 26, 1919. Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país, 55–57. “Editoriales: El problema inmigratorio,” El Camagüeyano, February 8, 1921, 2. “Paludism” is another word for malaria.

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mass of immigrants and Jamaicans, and above all Haitians,” were “making life as vagabonds, tending roosters.” While many in places like Guantánamo, Morón, and Ciego de Ávila were “living without working,” there was more “undesirable immigration” entering the country and becoming a “public burden.” In one Guantánamo neighborhood he found “horrible promiscuity,” with men, women, and children mixed up in one room; only there he found three cases of smallpox out of fifteen individuals.63 The city of Camagüey was said to be in a state of “putrefaction,” verging on catastrophe due to “contagious illnesses.” In what was labeled a “sanitary catastrophe,” the principal problem was a hospital “replete with Jamaicans and Haitians” being treated for smallpox and no space to serve the remaining poor population of Camagüey.64 Dr. Juan Guiteras, the Secretary of Health and Welfare, reacted to these conditions, including reports of a smallpox epidemic in Jamaica, and appealed to the president for the regulation of migration. A local newspaper in Guantánamo, La Voz del Pueblo, welcomed the government’s action and was easily convinced by the culprits of health and sanitary problems. Guiteras’s proposal was “the most practical measure” to “free the country of smallpox and paludism that was brought by the Haitian, Jamaican, and Chinese immigrants” who served as vectors of disease, “spreading death and desolation.”65 Cuban society was certainly experiencing public-health problems, particularly in the countryside, but this did not mean that immigrants were to blame for them.66 Yet the concerns with black migrants voiced in the press and evident in sanitary policy were also present for Cuban lawmakers. In this context, with police reports of thousands of Jamaicans and Haitians in Havana allegedly without places to eat or sleep and fearing they would become a “public burden,” on June 23, 1921, Senator Cosme de la Torriente pushed a bill to limit immigration. His aim was for Cuba to receive a “regular” inflow of “families from whichever of the two races peopling our land,” be that the “white race or the black race.” When he narrowed his guidelines, his preferences became evident: people “speaking our language,” with our “customs” and “conditions.” In what

63 64 65 66

“Hacinamiento de haitianos y jamaiquinos,” El Camagüeyano, February 8, 1921, 3. “Editoriales: La ciudad podrida,” El Camagüeyano, March 11, 1921, 2. “La viruela [en] Jamaica,” La Voz del Pueblo, April 13, 1921, 2; “Regulando la inmigración,” La Voz del Pueblo, June 11, 1921, 2. García González and Álvarez Peláez, En busca de la raza perfecta, 470.

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seems to be a statement to avoid accusations of discrimination, de la Torriente stated that he would opposed – in the same way I oppose the entrance of black Jamaicans and Haitians – the entrance here of Russian or Austrian workers, or from any other European country that is not of a race which speaks our same language, as it is spoken by Spaniards and Canary Islanders, the races that founded this country.67

Cosme de la Torriente was apparently inclusive by recognizing Cuba as a product of whites and blacks, but since most black migrants entering Cuba were Haitians and British Antilleans, his criteria of language revealed his inclination. He may have conflated race and ethnicity when referring to Spaniards and Canary Islanders, but the combined opposition to Jamaicans and Haitians and to non-Spanish-speakers revealed his color prejudice. Moreover, with language and culture as a measure for immigration policy, he supported the existing opposition to French-, English-, and Creole-speaking Antilleans. Moreover, given that Cuba only received 241 Austrians and 153 Russians, the irrelevance of his comment was only surpassed by the obviousness of his goal of keeping Cuba “white” and Hispanic. After all, he did not include Cuban blacks as “founders” of Cuba. De la Torriente had opposed the immigration decree of 1917, and the economic crisis of 1921 provided fertile terrain to replicate his antiimmigration discourse. On June 23, the Senate approved his bill to restrict immigration. Also, President Alfredo Zayas decreed that since the justification for labor immigration (the war) had disappeared, the government resolved to “[r]epatriate at the expense of the State the cane cutters that have come from Haiti, Jamaica, and the other Lesser Antilles hired under the Immigration Law of 3 August 1917.” They were, according to Zayas’s decree, “a public burden for the nation.” But even when other groups such as Spanish migrants were experiencing “indigence” due to the sugar crisis, the government’s repatriation targeted those migrants who, in de la Torriente’s terms, had a different language and customs from the Cubans: Haitians, Jamaicans, and other Antilleans. The Spaniards, de la Torriente’s founders of the nation, were left out of the official decree.68 67 68

De la Torriente, Cuarenta años de mi vida, 1898–1938, 114–115, 119. Alfredo Zayas, president of the Republic of Cuba, “Decreto No. 1414 (Secretaria de Agricultura, Comercio y Trabajo),” Gaceta Oficial, July 22, 1921, 1445–1446, ANC, SE, leg. 532, no. 12473. On the Spanish migrants, see “El problema inmigratorio,” El Cubano Libre, June 9, 1921, 2; “En pro de los españoles,” El Cubano Libre, June 11,

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While legislative debates and procedures were taking place in Havana in June and July, the situation for eastern Cuba demanded rapid action. The government of Santiago de Cuba received letters expressing concerns about the possibility that the nearly 8,000 Jamaicans and Haitians living in deplorable conditions would upset the public order. One request advocated the “forceful repatriation of these immigrants to their respective countries,” a demand that was rationalized by another writer who specified that the repatriation would “free us from these agents of disease” and that “the native would not have labor competition” in a context of crisis.69 The press reported that the province of Oriente faced a situation of some 5,000 Jamaican and Haitian immigrants “without work and in need,” and that the local government was taking measures to avoid the prospect of “these immigrants upsetting the public order.”70 Jamaicans, Haitians, and blacks in general were increasingly accused of causing public disorder. The mayor of the municipality of Niquero in eastern Cuba, Victor Labrade, stressed the need for repatriation to the governor of Santiago de Cuba, referring to robberies in the countryside and a woman allegedly raped by a Haitian. Labrade added that when foreigners “are out of work and in a state of vagrancy,” they “devote themselves to these matters.”71 The press reported on the accusations of the mayor, but instead of the alleged rape, referred to the failed assault on a child named Fermin Sanz. The article entitled “Jamaicans Accused” noted that a group of “Haitians or Jamaicans (it cannot be ascertained)” were the authors of the deed, and replicated the mayor’s logic: “Jamaicans appropriate what is not theirs because they lack a job and the means to acquire food.”72 The conflation of both migrant groups indicates that while ethnic lines were identified, in some instances skin color represented the principal target of the accusations, and it was also the main preoccupation for some Cubans.

69 70

71 72

1921, 1; “Distressing Conditions Prevail in the Interior of the Island,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, July 16, 1921, 40–41. Letter to Provincial Governor of Santiago de Cuba, June 29, 1921; Gilberto [Santos] to governor of Santiago de Cuba, June 29, 1921, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 786, no. 11. “5,000 inmigrantes sin trabajo y hambrientos hay en Oriente,” El Cubano Libre, July 9, 1921, 1; “En Oriente hay 5,000 jamaiquinos y haitianos,” La Voz del Pueblo, July 11, 1921, 2. Victor Labrade to Governor of Santiago de Cuba, August 17, 1921, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 786, no. 11. “Jamaiquinos acusados,” La Voz del Pueblo, August 18, 1921, 2.

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The concern with disorder was shared by the British authorities in Cuba; after all, British Antilleans were the ones being laid off in the crisis. Godfrey Haggard from the British Legation supported the repatriation because of the “danger of internal disturbance.”73 Haggard remarked to his superiors, “The Cuban Government fear, apparently with reason, that from begging these negroes [may] get to rioting.”74 The situation for the migrants was very serious indeed. The Jamaica Times reported that labor conditions in Cuba were “worse than the worst days in Jamaica,” with men seeking daily work every morning for their breakfast.75 Some of those who managed to return to Jamaica described the situation in Cuba as “desperate,” with “thousands being out of work, unable to pay their passages home, and actually starving.”76 J. W. Sheridan, the Jamaican repatriation commissioner, acknowledged the distress, but found the reports of Jamaicans being in “great want” and “starving” to be “exaggerated.”77 There was a local undercurrent to the fears about social disturbances and black migrants expressed by some Cubans. Racial propaganda was a part of the 1920 election campaign, like in the previous one, and US officials reported on the “importance of the negro vote,” the “revival” of Afro-Cuban cultural practices, and the living memory of 1912.78 Blacks were said to be favoring candidates of their own race and the racial propaganda was said to be a “disquieting feature” fomented largely by brujos and witches.79 Considering the usual association of the migrant outsider with any type of racial disorder, it is not strange that the Cuban authorities opted for repatriating the migrants. The sugar crisis revealed the enduring hostility against foreign blacks in Cuba. Once the island had felt the impact of the market crash, Afro-

73 74 75 76 77 78

79

Godfrey Haggard to Foreign Office, July 1, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. Godfrey Haggard to Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, July 5, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. “‘Worst than the Worst in Jamaica’: Bad Times in Cuba,” Jamaica Times, July 2, 1921, 14. “Hundreds Back from Cuba,” Jamaica Times, July 9, 1921, 2. J. W. Sheridan to Colonial Secretary, Kingston, November 17, 1921, ANC, SE, leg. 532, no. 12473. See also Colonial Office, Jamaica: Report for 1921, 7. See Boaz W. Long to US Secretary of State, October 20, 1920, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.00/1802 (M488, Roll #11), and Harold D. Clum to Boaz W. Long, October 21, 1920, RG 45, Navy Subject Files (hereafter RG 45, NSF), WA-7, Box 739, Folder 4. Harold D. Clum to Carlton B. Hurst, December 4, 1922, RG 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts, Consular Posts, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba (hereafter RFSP, CP-SC), Vol. 227, File 800.

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Caribbean migrants became racialized scapegoats, diseased aliens, and damaging to the nation. But many workers from the Caribbean were still hoping to make it to Cuba. In November 1920, people in St. Lucia were “heeding the call of Cuba” and leaving their island unaware that they would face the increased hostility that accompanied the economic crisis.80 In that year, Barbadian departures to Cuba were 19,455, while Jamaican immigration reached its highest point at 27,088. Through a different route, it was reported late in 1920 that “hundreds of British negroes” were leaving Panama searching for work in other localities, including Cuba.81 While the Cuban press was complicit in the campaign against migrants in 1920–1921, the local newspapers in the British Caribbean discouraged emigration. The Jamaica Times published “A Warning from the British Consul” in January 1921, and reported on dropping wages in February.82 The note on falling wages was reproduced by the Voice of Saint Lucia in the eastern Caribbean in March.83 Yet in April, the schooner Nellie Louise left St. Lucia “with 123 declared passengers for Cuba.” The report emphasized “declared ” because of a “rumour” that, once on its way, “the schooner was boarded by a good many who were made welcome.”84 The same month, the Barbadian press indicated that “crowds of laboring men were flocking the office of the Cuban recruiting agent daily.”85 That migrants in the eastern Caribbean insisted on traveling was possibly a response to the CASC recruitment strategy in that region. But as other evidence suggests, Chaparra and Delicias were not exempt from the crisis. In July 1921, one subscriber to the Jamaica Times wrote back to his island warning that “Jamaicans are not wanted in Cuba,” and wondered how the “Jamaican Government allows labourers to leave for Cuba.” But the writer detailed the situation in the CASC’s Chaparra Division, where the company had “brought in such a lot of contract men from the British Isles,” causing an “overcrowded” labor market. The Chaparra Division could not “find work for all her contract men,” let alone “the thousands 80 81 82

83 84 85

“Vital Statistics,” Voice of Saint Lucia, November 20, 1920, 4. “West Indians Are Leaving the Isthmus,” The Times (St. Vincent), December 23, 1920, 3. “Intending Emigrants to Cuba: A Warning from the British Consul,” Jamaica Times, January 15, 1921, 6; “Wages Dropped in Cuba: Warning to Labourers,” Jamaica Times, February 5, 1921, 2. “Wages Dropped in Cuba: Warning to Labourers,” Voice of Saint Lucia, March 16, 1921, 5. “Notes and Comments,” Voice of Saint Lucia, April 23, 1921, 5. Emphasis in original. “Barbados and Cuba,” Jamaica Times, April 30, 1921, 3.

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coming from other Estates.”86 That same month, due to the “great distress” among migrant workers in Cuba, the Jamaican government had commissioned J. W. Sheridan to “supervise the embarkation of natives of this Colony” and “assist as far as practicable” in collecting “payment promissory notes” of wages due to the returning men.87 Indeed, by then thousands of black migrants were either without pay, driven off the sugar plantations, or stranded in their efforts to return home. The international black press reported on the unemployment of Jamaicans, giving as a reason the unequal system of payment, with Cubans being paid in currency, and Jamaicans receiving “bits of paper” (vales) that had to be exchanged for food in the company shop.88 The acting British consul in Santiago de Cuba warned potential eastern Caribbean migrants in a local newspaper against the fate of being employed in the colonias (smaller sugar farms), which were managed “by small irresponsible men.” The colonos were accused of being prone to “escape the payment of a portion” of the wages of those employed, and of providing poor accommodation for workers and “no hospital accommodation” (which some company towns did have). Consequently, sick laborers were “place[d] on the train and sent to Santiago,” where the consul had to put them in the public hospital, despite his awareness that they had “a very fair chance of dying through neglect.”89 An article in the press also reported on the changing working conditions by 1921, including the dramatic difference in wages, from “as much as five dollars a day” for cutting canes to less than one dollar paid in a vale that the worker could not redeem immediately. The implications of the vale system were explained in the article, stressing that workers were unable to send remittances to their island of origin where their families were “suffering.” But “despite all the drawbacks,” during the summer of 1921, migrants were still “flocking to Cuba from different parts as it is certainly the largest field for labourers.”90 In 1921, Cuba endured a summer of discontent, with serious implications for migrants, albeit not equally for all of them. The ethnic and racial preferences hinted by Senator de la Torriente were present in the way 86 87 88 89 90

“Bad Labour Situation in Cuba: Jamaicans Workless and Half Naked,” Jamaica Times, July 23, 1921, 17. Colonial Office, Jamaica: Report for 1921, 7. [The Northern News], “Jamaica: Labor in Cuba,” Negro World, March 19, 1921, 7. “Labour Conditions in Cuba Bad,” Voice of Saint Lucia, June 4, 1921, 6. “West Indians in Island of Cuba: Many Experiencing Difficulty in Getting Pay,” Voice of Saint Lucia, June 22, 1921, 6.

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various groups experienced the crisis. The Spanish migrants also endured being seen as a problem for “public order,” and suffered the abuses of the vale system, but their situation at departure was lamented and seen as a “crime of humanity” and as an “absolute lack of feeling and commiseration.”91 While Spanish migrants were “desirable in all parts of the world,” Jamaicans and other nonwhites were “undesirable.”92 “Jamaicans [were] eating dead horses,” according to a report portraying the “national disaster” at the time, and were identified as negritos (“little blacks”) whose “continuous flow” was source of indignation.93 But despite their sufferings and their representation by the Cuban press as “indigent” and without resources, British Antilleans proactively took action in two directions to improve their situation during the crisis.

   - - While British Caribbean newspapers were disseminating the news about Cuba, and the Cuban press continued its anti-immigrant coverage, British Antilleans acted in two directions. First, they used their imperial allegiance to seek assistance from the British authorities, hoping that the empire would help its loyal subjects. Second, they relied on their Afrodiasporic networks through the black press (UNIA’s Negro World) to denounce their situation and combat the campaign in the Cuban press. In June 1921, some of the migrants had already organized to address not the British consuls or the island colonial governments, but the king himself. In a “Humble Petition of the British Subjects in Cuba to His Majesty the King,” John Hunt and other British Antilleans wrote to the monarch about their “sufferings” in Cuba. He referred specifically to those recruited by the CASC in Chaparra and Delicias from “Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts and all other British West Indies Islands.” He mentioned the promises made by the company upon recruitment, to then denounce that they were being “treated like animals of the lower class,” “suffering from hunger and nakedness and sickness,” and “dying by the hundreds.” Hunt’s letter highlighted the tensions between local and foreign workers in payment methods and recruitment; an otherwise preferred workforce

91 92 93

“La emigración española,” La política cómica, June 12, 1921, 14. “La ley de inmigración,” El Mundo, July 23, 1921, 1. “El desastre nacional,” La política cómica, July 10, 1921; “Negritos y chilampines,” La política cómica, July 31, 1921.

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was now rejected to favor the Cubans.94 Their letter to the king eventually led to British diplomats in Cuba being questioned by the Foreign Office. The response from the Havana British Legation was that Chaparra was “by general consent the best-managed” estate in Cuba and “one where the welfare and comfort of the labourers receives considerable attention.” But the preference for Cubans at that point was not denied.95 Hunt and his friends were not the only ones appealing to the highest imperial authority. From UFC’s Preston sugar mill, Samuel Augustus Richards also wrote to the king mentioning his military service in “the Great War as Negroes in the British Empire.” He wrote that “after leaving the Army” and facing the “meagre amount of employment” in Jamaica, he and his peers “had to leave our home” seeking opportunities. Those opportunities, he wrote, were no longer available in Cuba, where legislation protected the locals – hence the petition to “His Sovereign Lord the King for his kind consideration toward the English Speaking Negroes who are suffering for want of employment in Cuba.” Richards then proceeded to request that “His Majesty’s Government will see its way to give the English Speaking Negroes a portion of land of our own in Africa” to “be better off settled down and do well.”96 Whether the king read the letter is not known, but it circulated from the king’s desk to the Colonial Office, to the Foreign Office, where presumably a query was made to Cuba. The migrants’ strategy of writing to the imperial center had some degree of effectiveness. The pressure was certainly on the Foreign Office to take some action, not only because they were being forwarded the correspondence of the migrants, but also because other governmental departments were requesting it. Directed by Winston Churchill, then at the Colonial Office, G. E. A. Grindle, his assistant undersecretary, wrote to the Foreign Office asserting that some type of repatriation was needed, as long as the colonial governments – in this case, Jamaica – are “informed of the approximate number of persons who will be repatriated on any one occasion.” As for the “former residents in other Colonies,” Churchill thought that “if repatriated,” it had to be “to the Colony to which they belong.”97 This invalidated Richard’s petition to go to British 94 95 96 97

John Hunt and others to His Majesty the King, June 4, 1921, NA, FO 371/565. Godfrey Haggard to the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, August 29, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. Samuel Augustus Richards to the King, July 4, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. G. E. A. Grindle to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, July 21, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565.

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lands in Africa, however revealing it was about his Afro-diasporic desire, having left his Jamaican “home,” to serve the British Empire in the war. The situation in the early 1920s affected migrants from the different islands and intensified their hopes for support from the British Empire. Lionel Gardier from Dominica wrote to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies because he was not able to withdraw the money he had deposited in the Banco Español de Cuba and the Banco Nacional de Cuba.98 Samuel Ambrose from Antigua wrote to the Foreign Office complaining about his arrest, and being charged for a crime he did not commit that got him sentenced to three years imprisonment without evidence. He said that there were “lots of Britishers bearing the same pressure” and receiving bad treatment from the Cuban authorities due to the lack of knowledge of Spanish. Ambrose, like others, appealed to the Foreign Office because of the lack of action of the British consul.99 Besides written requests to imperial authorities, the agency of British Antilleans moved them in a second direction of self-reliance through their own Afro-diasporic networks. By 1921, many of the black migrants had established social networks and organizations, such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). A pan-African organization founded by Jamaican Marcus Garvey in 1918, the UNIA expanded globally with chapters and divisions across Latin America and the Caribbean. Marc C. McLeod has argued that the “efforts of the UNIA organisers to ameliorate the terrible conditions in 1921 won them the respect of numerous British West Indians in Cuba.”100 The presence of the organization, however, also represented the creation of a visible target for the discriminatory practices and repression in the different sugar mills. But this did not stop them from consistently using the organization’s newspaper, Negro World, to condemn the conditions in Cuba. In Preston, the place of the war veteran wanting to go to Africa, the UNIA experienced the actions of the local managers when members were “turned out of their jobs and houses” and “ill-treated.” Mr. Christian, the general secretary of the UNIA division, was himself a victim of the abuses when, on “September 3, 1921, he along with several others were called into the office of Mr. Howley to be questioned about the organization.”

98 99 100

Lionel Gardier to the Secretary of State [Colonial Office], British Empire, November 11, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. Samuel W. N. Ambrose to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, April 4, 1921, NA, FO 277/197. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba, 1920–1940,” 138.

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Mr. Christian “did not find it convenient to say, ‘yes sir’, to every question asked [of] him,” and “he was grossly assaulted and beated [sic] and afterwards imprisoned in the government’s ‘lock-up’ for several hours.”101 The immigrants had to face not only the campaign in the press and the shouts from Cubans, but also discriminatory practices by shopkeepers and sugar administrators, and material deprivation and physical hostility. In August 1921, the Negro World reported, Different prices and fares are paid for household commodities and on railway cars by Mikinas [jamaiquinos], Haytians [sic] and Spaniards. According to your color and nationality you pay . . . Entering any of the stores or business places, and from your appearance and lingo you are a Jamaican you pay half as much again for anything you may purchase. If you are a Haytian, which they know very well by their appearance, he pays two times as much again in many instances whether in stores, shops or railway cars.102

The UNIA’s mouthpiece served to expose and describe the attitudes, discriminations, and abuses against the migrants. “We are being mocked by the Cuban peasantry,” one Negro World article noted, adding that wherever migrants “turn the slang is ‘Mikinas bambose para Jamaica’.” The writer lamented that this was “very painful to the well-thinking Jamaicans who are peaceful and law abiding.”103 At the same time, the Negro World responded to a campaign against migrants in the Heraldo de Cuba that had caused migrants to be “constantly hailed by such names as cannibal, anthropophagus, etc.” (probably like the report cited above of Jamaicans eating horses). When these insults were rejected, “a copy of the paper,” which presumably had stories of the savage nature of the black outsiders, was “held up to your view to confirm the insults.” The writer specified that of the many aliens in Cuba, the editor of the Heraldo de Cuba had “picked out and named the Jamaicans because they are made up mostly of Negroes.”104

101 102

103

104

“Hard Treatment to the Preston Division in Cuba,” Negro World, October 8, 1921, 10. “Reports on the Conditions Existing in the Cuban Republic,” Negro World, August 27, 1921, 7. The term mikinas probably emerged from the English-speaking migrant’s understanding of jamaiquino, which was used and gained a derogatory connotation (as opposed to jamaicano). “Reports on the Conditions Existing in the Cuban Republic,” Negro World, August 27, 1921, 7. The expression “Mikinas bambose para Jamaica” is probably a translation from the Spanish made by the writer trying to say “Jamaiquino, vamose pa’ Jamaica” (“Jamaican, get going to Jamaica”). “Propaganda in Cuba to Divide Cuban and West Indian Negroes,” Negro World, August 20, 1921, 9.

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Despite some of his own evidence, historian Philip Howard has noted that “during the 1920s the socioeconomic circumstances of the braceros limited the effectiveness of the UNIA.”105 But other examinations of Garveyism during that decade, including my own, suggest otherwise. McLeod maintains that “UNIA leaders in Cuba took the lead in addressing the concerns of West Indian immigrants during the economic collapse of 1921,” assisting workers in need in Santiago de Cuba.106 Based on her case study of the Banes UNIA branch, Frances Sullivan countered that the “UNIA offered a clear avenue to project a strong image of black respectability” in the face of mounting opposition to black immigration in the 1920s.107 For Sullivan, the survival of the UNIA in Banes was based on a pragmatic approach to the UFC as an employer of Caribbean labor. This illustrates the malleability of the organization, which was also practiced in its accommodation to racial politics in Cuba, and through its (strategic) operational character as a mutual aid society and a religious movement.108 After the crisis of 1921, the movement created by Marcus Garvey remained an important part of black Caribbean migrant life in Cuba. It served as a springboard for the “self-reliance” advocated by Garvey himself, particularly when facing hardship and discrimination in the Cuban context.109

105 107 108 109

106 Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar, 186. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 140. Sullivan, “‘Forging Ahead’ in Banes, Cuba,” 246. Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’.” Martin, Race First, 22–40.

5 “Cuba Got Mash Up” British Antilleans between Cuba and the Empire, 1921–1925

The fall of sugar prices in 1921 is better explained by one of Erna Brodber’s informants, when he said that “Cuba got mash up”: “sugar was selling at 22 cents a lb., you see, and a slump came and the sugar started to sell at 5 cents a lb. 2 ½ cents.”1 Migrant workers, including British Antilleans, were caught in the middle of the crisis. Their mobile lives and options of movement were affected, even determined, by the circumstances. The presumptive stability that some British Caribbean migrants found in Cuban sugar communities as workers was also touched by the crisis, requiring appeals to, and interventions from, the British consuls and authorities. This chapter begins at that 1921 juncture, and moves between Cuba and the British Caribbean islands, examining the transnational experience of the migrants. Some of the situations endured by the migrants during the first half of the 1920s are examined as they escalated to yet another diplomatic clash in 1924.

     In July 1921 the Cuban government contracted Xavier Rumeau to implement a repatriation scheme for the “British West Indian Subjects” using ports in Guantánamo, Manzanillo, Antilla, Chaparra, Nuevitas, and Santiago de Cuba. The last of these was solely for the repatriations of

1

“Rev. John B.,” 75StTMa, 9, DDC, SALISER.

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Jamaicans.2 The British government, in turn, would allocate funds to repatriate some of the Jamaicans, with the local island government assisting with employment for returnees.3 The first contingent under Rumeau’s scheme was of over 200 repatriates and departed on August 5, 1921.4 Another departure on August 8 included 145 Jamaicans and 62 Haitians, 200 men from Niquero to Jamaica, 400 men from Chaparra to Barbados, and other 400 from Antilla to Haiti – the last two groups indicate the particular labor-recruiting patterns of the powerful CASC and UFC enclaves.5 The communication distributed by Rumeau in the eastern provinces of Cuba led many destitute and unemployed migrants to go to Santiago de Cuba. On their arrival, however, there was no boat for them. J. W. Sheridan, commissioned by Jamaica to assist with repatriation, reported his encounter with “a large number of British West Indian labourers . . . roaming about Santiago de Cuba begging.” The British consul had been providing food to some thirty workers among them, but in less than a week there were about a hundred migrants. It appears that Sheridan’s appointment as commissioner for Jamaica only led him to distinguish between the Jamaicans on the one hand, who were not starving, according to him, and other “British West Indians” (from the eastern Caribbean) who were “begging.” He wrote, “I am glad to be able to report that Jamaicans have not been subject to such great want and inconvenience[,] as were the other West Indian labourers.” In the port, Sheridan inquired as to why there were no ships available to undertake the repatriations, and told the contractor that it was a “risk that so many distressed persons [were] being kept without housing or food awaiting embarkation.” In his judgment the repatriation scheme was, “to say the least, primitive,” and the agents in charge “incompetent” and with no experience.6

2

3 4 5 6

Xavier Rumeau, “To British West Indian Subjects,” July 20, 1921, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 786, no. 11; “Repatriación de haitianos y jamaicanos,” El Cubano Libre, July 22, 1921, 1. “El gobierno inglés repatriará 10,000 jamaicanos,” El Cubano Libre, July 20, 1921, 1. “Repatriación de haitianos y jamaicanos: El primer contingente,” El Cubano Libre, August 5, 1921, 1. [Illegible], secretary, to Secretary of State, Havana City, August 10, 1921, ANC, SE, leg. 532, no. 12473. J. W. Sheridan to the Colonial Secretary, Kingston, November 17, 1921, ANC, SE, leg. 532, No. 12473.

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Without ships available, Sheridan and the British consul managed to get some of the immigrants into the infamous quarantine grounds for housing and feeding. But after three days the immigrants were out again looking to be repatriated. Rumeau had requested the support of the Rural Guard (not precisely a friend of black migrants) and “all the forces available” to “pick up these men and to convey them on foot or by cargo trains” to the ports.7 Presumably following this directive, the police brought nearly a hundred more Jamaicans to Santiago, “at the request of the Contractor’s Agent,” forcing them to leave their jobs and belongings. This new group was as stranded as the previous one, without maritime transportation available.8 Repatriations from Niquero were also problematic, with Cuban authorities forcing immigrants to abandon everything even when many did not want to leave.9 In Santiago, the situation did not improve and a warehouse was secured to house the immigrants. Meals were ordered and distributed daily for them at the expense of the government, a process that ended up in the hands of the local president of the UNIA. The latter, however, was accused of preference in the distribution of food and of profiting from it.10 William Walters, from the UNIA, would later seek reimbursement from the provincial government for the rations.11 Rumeau’s scheme proved to be a problem rather than a solution, because “the contractor, for selfish motives, has neglected his obligations under the contract.”12 Moreover, “rough water” and “damages” forced a ship taking 115 Barbadians to return to Santiago after some three weeks at sea and the passengers had to remain in the harbor with limited water and food.13 After an inquiry, the Cuban government decided to cancel the contract with Rumeau on September 2, and offer the task to the Compañía Naviera de Cuba.14 But the new repatriation scheme was unsuccessful. It only managed to send two ships, one for Jamaica on 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Cited in McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 139. For the details on this stage of the repatriation process, see J. W. Sheridan’s report to the Colonial Secretary in Kingston, November 17, 1921, ANC, SE, leg. 532, no. 12473. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 139. Harold D. Clum to John R. Putnam, US consul, Havana, September 23, 1921, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 138, File 843. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 140. Charles E. Hughes to British Embassy, Washington, DC, September 20, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 139. J. W. Sheridan to Colonial Secretary, Kingston, November 17, 1921, ANC, SE, leg. 532, no. 12473.

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September 12 and one for Barbados on October 1. At this time, the fate of British Antilleans was being decided in two camps, domestically in eastern Cuba and externally in their travels and reception in the British Caribbean colonies. All evidence indicates that the ship that left for Barbados was the Guantánamo with instructions to drop the 515 repatriates there. But it appears that eighty-eight stowaways where found on board during the trip. If the repatriates thought their departure from Cuban land was a relief, it was only the beginning of an ordeal. For all the Cuban fears about disease entering their territory, they were not that concerned with what was going out of it, and the ship left Cuba without a “clean bill.” With smallpox prevalent in Cuba, the returnees now had to undergo the same procedures against contagious disease in Barbados and be held in quarantine at Pelican Island. The discourse against disease was inverted to the migrants’ island of origin. It was stated that it would have been “criminal” to disembark the people because of the “risk of the introduction and spread of small pox.”15 Health was not the only concern for Barbadian authorities, but also the fact that of all the passengers, only 54 percent were actually Barbadians. The remaining group included migrants from virtually every British colony in the eastern Caribbean from Demerara in South America to little Saba in the Leeward Islands. The captain did not know from which islands the passengers were, which created “considerable difficulty in getting those belonging to Barbados.” Barbadian authorities could not allow the non-Barbadians to land and asked the captain to wait for seven days to make arrangements with colonial governments of the different islands. The Cuban consul was notified about this, and the next day he received instructions to send “the ship back to Cuba with those emigrants who had not been allowed to land.” The Guantánamo thus sailed with nearly half of its passengers back to Cuba.16 The Barbados Advocate reported on the lack of accommodation on Pelican Island, with “no room” for the “272 non-Barbadians” who were also “coming from an infected port” and thus endangering “the health of the whole community.” The newspaper blamed the captain for not waiting, and reported that the Barbadian government had “no fault” in “any suffering and anxiety the unfortunate 15 16

“The Emigrants of the S.S. Guantanamo,” Dominica Guardian, October 20, 1921, p. 3. The article is a reprint from the Barbados Advocate. “La situación de los no admitidos en Barbados,” Diario de la Marina, October 13, 1921, 4.

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repatriates” may have experienced.17 To make it worse, the conditions in Cuba at the time of the Guantánamo’s return were described as “awful,” and “more serious than can be imagined.”18 The ordeal for the non-Barbadians became known in the neighboring colonies. In St. Vincent, there was complaint that the government “has not been communicated with at all,” and therefore could not do anything about their “unfortunate young men.” They would now “face, a second time, starvation, homelessness, and possibly, the cruelty of the basser [sic] class of Cuban officials.”19 The administrator of the island of Dominica, R. Walter, communicated with colonial authorities and with consular officials in Cuba in order to ascertain what took place with the Dominicans on board the Guantánamo. Walter’s action had actually being triggered by the news report on the issue, but also by a petition of the migrants themselves. Eight individuals claimed to have been on board the ship when the British consul put them ashore, since when they had been “starving to death.” It is not clear whether this happened before the Guantánamo left Cuba, or when they were returned, but the date of the letter (October 10) suggests it was the former. Either way, their situation was not improved. The administrator did refer to “the balance of Leeward Islands men who were unable to land at Barbados” and thought that once in Cuba they would be “harrying the British Consuls to get them back to their own homes.” While he felt the “moral obligation to receive them,” the “prevalence of small pox in Cuba” made this “difficult, if not impossible.”20 In his correspondence, the Dominica administrator dreaded a situation such as the Guantánamo incident, with a ship full of repatriates arriving “without any notice.” But about a few months later, the government of Dominica had to deal with a slight repetition of the event. In late November 1921, and with “military guards” on board, the Martí left Cuba with “distressed natives” and specific instructions as to where to land regardless of the origin of the passengers on board. Authorized only to drop the Leeward Islands contingent in Dominica and to proceed to St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Barbados, the Martí would leave the Kittitian, 17 18 19 20

“The Emigrants of the S.S. Guantanamo,” Dominica Guardian, October 20, 1921, 3. “Conditions in Cuba,” The Times (St. Vincent), October 13, 1921, p. 3. “Distressed Vincentinians Return to Cuba to Face More Misery,” The Times (St. Vincent), October 20, 1921, 3. R. Walter to Acting Governor, Leeward Islands, Administrator’s Office, Dominica, November 23, 1921, despatches to the governor, #391/1841, p. 683, National Archives, Roseau, Dominica (hereafter NA-D).

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Monserratian, and Antiguan passengers as a burden to the Dominican authorities. The captain expressed that “he could not agree to proceed to Monstserrat, Antigua, and St. Kitts” without authorization and had “to leave for St. Lucia that day.” Knowing what had happened in Barbados, Walter decided not to wait a day for communications with the Cuban authorities and chartered a sloop to take the Leeward Islanders to their destinations.21 The trials and tribulations of British Antilleans in the eastern Caribbean seascape created by the Cuban deportations could only be compared with what was happening in Santiago de Cuba. Between the departure of the Guantánamo in October 1921, and the slightly better results of the Martí in December of the same year, British Caribbean islanders in Cuba seem to have increased their activism. McLeod’s account shows how, from food distribution, the UNIA members in Cuba “also helped to mobilise impoverished immigrants to demand proper representation from the British diplomatic corps.”22 In Santiago, the presence of Garveyites did not go unnoticed or without tensions. In mid-September, the US consul in Santiago, Harold D. Clum, reported that there were some “700 British negroes” from the Lesser Antilles who had been awaiting repatriation for a long time. Clum added that the UNIA was “doing its best to keep these people stirred up and to arouse the unruly spirit in them,” and accused the association of spreading false rumors “evidently with malicious intent.”23 These rumors included the end of repatriations by the Cuban government; that repatriated Jamaicans were being marched in Kingston as prisoners and that their property was used to pay for the repatriation; that repatriated Haitians had to fight the United States intervening forces there; that black workmen were being sold to sugar estates at forty-five dollars for the next crop; and that British consuls were colluding with the sugar estates, keeping repatriation funds and thus leaving cane cutters in Cuba for the next harvest. The rumor regarding the links between the British consul and the sugar estates was not far from reality. The acting consul in Santiago, Ernest 21

22 23

R. Walter to His Excellency the Governor, Leeward Islands, Antigua, December 12, 1921, administrator’s office, Dominica, despatches to the governor, #422/1841, p. 714; “Minutes: Executive Council, 9th December 1921,” in Executive Council Minutes, Dominica, 1918–1923 (Roseau, 1918–1923), 189–190, NA-D. “Reembarque de jamaiquinos,” El Mundo, November 25, 1921, 7. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 140. Harold D. Clum to John R. Putnam, US consul in charge, Consulate General, Havana, September 23, 1921, RG 84-RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 138, File 823.

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P. V. Brice, was later accused of trafficking workers with some eastern sugar mills.24 The possibility of ending the repatriations triggered a UNIA demonstration in front of the British Consulate and the police were used to disperse the protesters. US officials in Cuba argued that even without steamships, the UNIA were selling tickets for Haiti and Jamaica. It was reported that Garveyites “preach openly in the streets telling negroes that they should not buy their tickets from a white man but purchase them from the organization,” through an agent who allowed a three-dollar commission for each migrant destined for the UNIA.25 The association was also accused of harassing a white steamship agent from the United States named William Burger in their attempt “to stir up hatred among the negroes against the white race.” The US consul in Santiago thought that the UNIA “should be suppressed.” Surely thinking of the 1912 Morúa Law, he believed that such action could “be done without difficulty” because “the laws of this country do not permit such organizations.”26 The activism of the UNIA also caused concern for British consul Brice in Santiago who, McLeod notes, was “raising the specter of black rebellion” with reports that the “threatening demonstrations” of the organization were causing “great anxiety” and might end up with an “outbreak, which could cost possibly some lives.” Indeed, such a conclusion was plausible given that the actions of the UNIA were taking place in a fertile antiblack social landscape accompanied by an economic crisis and a failed repatriation process.27 The alarming perception of the UNIA was communicated to the Cuban authorities by the US Legation in Havana, but doubled when it was noted that “in the Province of Oriente there are two negro organizations reported as (one) the Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.) and (two) the African Colored League (A.C.L.)” and “the officers of these organizations are openly preaching racial war.”28 For unknown reasons, the US communication to Cuba divided one

24 25 26 27 28

See “Memorandum of ‘Blackbirding’,” by D. St. Clair Gainer (1923), enclosed in T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, March 19, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869. Harold D. Clum to John R. Putnam, US consul, Havana, September 23, 1921, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 138, File 843. Harold D. Clum to John R. Putnam, US consul, Havana, September 23, 1921, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 138, File 843. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 141. McLeod’s citation from Brice is from E. Brice to HM Minister, December 8, 1921, NA, 371/5562. Philander L. Cable to Dr. Guillermo Patterson, subsecretary of state, Havana, September 29, 1921, RG 84, RFSP, DP-C, Vol. 138, File 843.

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organization in two, increasing fears about their actions. It also enhanced their “racial” dimension by writing African Colored League, instead of the real name, African Communities League.29 In this instance, the Cuban press portrayed the UNIA in a more pacific role, stating that the Santiago division of the organization was simply helping those “waiting to be repatriated.”30 Indeed, the UNIA, together with the Salvation Army, were part of a network of self-reliance assisting distressed migrants with shelter and food.31 In contrast with the role of the British consuls and the Cuban authorities in 1921, the UNIA was steps ahead in their support for the British Caribbean community. This role, however, was fulfilled only at the grassroots level of the organization. Despite the correspondence to the Negro World, and the actions of Garveyites in Santiago de Cuba, the parent body of the organization in New York, its principal leaders, and even the editor of the Negro World seemed to be distant, unaware, or out of touch with what many black Antilleans – their main constituents – were experiencing in Cuba. The UNIA’s protest in Santiago de Cuba was not reported in the organization’s newspaper, and the ships of the Black Star Line were not provided – or even offered – to transport destitute migrants. What is more striking is that while many of the prominent leaders of the organization visited Cuba in 1921, there is no record of any statement regarding the problems of black migrants in Cuba.32 In 1921, UNIA leaders George Alexander McGuire, Henrietta Vinton Davis, J. S. de Bourgh, and Marcus Garvey himself visited Cuba. However, local events in Cuba – the forced repatriations, the racial and ethnic discrimination, and the abuses – seem to have been beyond their agenda, perhaps because of the mounting pressure on the organization of the increasing surveillance by the US Department of Justice and the Bureau of Investigation.33

29

30 31 32 33

My emphasis. This confusion of the UNIA from the US perspective was not unique at the time. Something similar took place in the Dominican Republic where US authorities confused the UNIA with the African Blood Brotherhood. García Muñiz and Giovannetti, “Garveyismo y racismo en el Caribe.” “En pro de los inmigrantes jamaicanos y haitianos,” El Cubano Libre, August 23, 1921, 1, 8. J. W. Sheridan to Colonial Secretary, Kinsgton, November 17, 1921, ANC, SE, leg. 532, no. 12473. This is based on my survey of the year 1921 in Negro World, as well as other newspapers and correspondence. Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’,” 9–18; Martin, Race First, 178–179.

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   ’  The beginning of sugar season late in 1921 put the repatriation saga on hold because some labor was needed. But the experience that summer had a lasting effect in both Cuba and the British Caribbean. For the migrants, it was “feared that many will never return” after the treatment they received.34 Assessing the situation in early 1922, Salvador Rionda “expected that there would not be sufficient cane cutters,” and reported that the “men are doing more work this year and most of them do not come in from the fields until after dark.” This is an “abandoned” practice, he wrote, and “up to now had never being [sic] acquired by the Haitians and Jamaicans.”35 Later that year, a confidential report from US officials in Cuba referring to the next harvest indicated that there was “likely to be a marked shortage of common labor.” According to information from the British consul, “people from the British islands have been leaving at an average rate of about thirty persons daily during the past year and coming in at a rate of about seven daily.” The enforced quarantine restrictions “aggravated” the provision of an adequate and timely supply of labor. The fall of sugar prices and the resulting crisis were blamed for the precarious labor market because “reports of the failure of many laborers to receive their pay for work in 1920–1921” were widespread in the region, creating “certain reluctance on the men to come to Cuba for work in the harvest.”36 The concerns of labor supply were accompanied by those of its desirability. By 1923 the Cuban press was debating the need for migrant workers. Responding to a newspaper report in El Sol of Cienfuegos that opposed Antillean migration as a “black danger,” El Pueblo in Banes – a UFC stronghold – stated that those with “proved lack of absolute knowledge of sugar operations” should be aware that 99 percent of the labor is performed only by Haitians and Jamaicans.37 In the British Caribbean, the impact of the crisis of 1920–1921 was perceived differently. While in Cuba the concern was with labor supply, in the British Antilles the preoccupation was with the treatment of workers. The news disseminated about Cuba went beyond the issue of

34 35 36 37

“Jamaican Laborers Being Returned to Their Homes,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, September 17, 1921, 184–185. Salvador Rionda to Manuel Rionda, January 21, 1922, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 88. Harold D. Clum to Carlton B. Hurst, US consul general, Havana, December 14, 1922, RG 84, RFSP, CP-SC, Vol. 228, File 812. “La inmigración de haitianos y jamaicanos,” El Pueblo, December 10, 1923, 1.

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unpaid wages. A March 1922 letter from Winston Churchill, who had followed the repatriation saga from the Colonial Office in 1921, indicates that he received reports from the Windward Islands of “dissatisfaction in the colony of St. Lucia regarding the treatment of labourers from the British West Indies at the hands of the British Consular authorities in Cuba.” Churchill thus moved to “correct any false impressions or statement,” and in April 1922 he forwarded a Foreign Office memorandum to the colonies. It admitted that “critical situations arose” in 1921 but highlighted the efforts of the colonial government in Barbados and consular official Brice in Cuba who provided food and medicines to some workers and found them work on “private roads.” The memorandum concluded that the “Universal Negro Improvement Association, or its local directors, were the cause of a great deal of the discontent among the men, and were probably responsible for many of them remaining in Santiago.” The organization had incited the British Antilleans to “make threatening demonstrations” at both the British Consulate and the provincial government. No mention was made of the UNIA’s efforts to feed the immigrants, or how the letters in the Negro World were ahead of consuls in condemning the conditions of British Antilleans in the early 1920s.38 This judgment about the UNIA on the part of the Colonial Office cannot be assessed in a vacuum. By 1922, when Churchill was writing, British officials at the Foreign and Colonial Offices had been monitoring the activities of the organization in the various eastern Caribbean colonies, assuming it would cause unrest, seeking ways to control it, and monitoring and even prohibiting the circulation of the Negro World.39 For example, late in 1921 and during his stint at the Colonial 38

39

Winston S. Churchill to officer administering the government of Jamaica, Barbados, Leewards, Trinidad, British Guiana, March 18, 1922 [Secret 7/1922 (1)b], National Archives, St. Vincent (hereafter NA, SV), 1922/71, ref. 91002 35/11; “British West Indians in Cuba,” memorandum enclosed in Winston S. Churchill to Sir G. B. HaddonSmith, the administrator of St. Vincent, April 18, 1922 [Secret 7/1922 (1) a; A 55C/161/ 14], NA, SV, 1922/71, Ref. 91002 35/11. See “Leopold S. Amery, Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, to Lieutenant-Colonel Charles O’Brien, Governor, Barbados, February 5, 1920”; “Enclosure: Gilbert E. A. Grindle, Assistant Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, to the Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, Februry 5, 1920”; “Viscount Milner, Secretary of State, Colonial Office, to Lieutenant-Colonel Charles O’Brien, Governor, Barbados, May 25, 1920”; “Executive Council Minutes, St. Vincent, June 12, 1920”; “Enclosure: St. Vincent Order in Council, June 12, 1920,” in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI, 533, 683, 723; “Herbert J. Read, Assistant Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, to the Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, August 19, 1920”; “Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, to the Under Secretary of State,

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Office, Churchill received letters from the UNIA about problems confronted by black British subjects in the Dominican Republic.40 Sugar interests were dominant, and with consular officials such as Brice being “servants of the very people they should move against,” British condemnation of Cuban policies and practices against migrants was restrained.41 But even when British officials disregarded the actions of the migrants, the grassroots activism of the UNIA indicates that British Antilleans were not passive actors. During and after the problems with the repatriations and in the context of an unsteady labor market, migrants used the resources they had – often pen and paper – to act against sugar entrepreneurs. Many migrants, entitled as British subjects, wrote letters to imperial authorities and representatives, or expressed their predicament as migrant workers writing to newspapers in their island of origin. The case of Musgrave E. Edwards is worth discussing in order to stress the agency of British Antilleans but also the resilience of Caribbean people living across regional borders. Starting around 1923, in the pages of the Dominica Guardian, Edwards took it as his task to condemn the actions of no other than the CASC, the large US sugar undertaking. The Dominica–CASC connection was not coincidental. As discussed earlier, the eastern Caribbean constituted a “special” source of labor for this company’s sugar mills, Chaparra and Delicias. Also, J. R. H. – Bridgewater was both linked with Dominica’s Legislative Council and allegedly serving as an emigration agent for Chaparra.42 Edwards described himself as one “who easily swallowed the Chaparra bait” only to find out that “the work they have to do is slavery compared with what labourers in the different islands are used to in these parts.”43 For “five months,” he claimed to have had “the opportunity of traveling considerably much over the Chaparra lands and some parts of Pranati [Manatí?], taking notes and investigating the conditions of labour in the different places among different classes, c[o]lours, and creeds of men.”

40 41 42

43

Colonial Office, October 1, 1920,” in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XII, 51, 103. García Muñiz and Giovannetti, “Garveyismo y racismo en el Caribe,” 162. “Wrongs of Jamaicans in Cuba,” The Times (St. Vincent), May 13, 1920, 3. See “194/1920. Emigration of Labourers to Cuba – Mr. [J]. R. H. Bridgwater’s action in connection with,” in “Minutes, Executive Council, 3rd February 1920,” in Executive Council Minutes, Dominica, 1918–1923 (Ruseau, 1918–1923), 65–67. Other sources link Bridgewater clearly to sugar interests in Dominica. “Sugar Growing in Dominica,” Dominica Guardian, March 20, 1924, 2. “Something about Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, July 19, 1923, 2.

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His findings were that since “Cuba fell from the pinnacle of her sugar glory” in 1921, British Antilleans were in “practical bondage and servitude.” The accounts, published in the Dominica Guardian, described the structure of the CASC operations, making reference to the colonia system, whereby independent or semi-independent farmers worked the cane for the larger sugar factory, either in their own lands or in company lands. Recounting the 1921 events, Edwards told stories of migrants being taken from the colonias and “put in a field fenced with barbed wire” in “Pazques” (probably Vázquez) for three months in a state of “inhuman treatment.” Clearly highlighting the controlling features of the company town regime in the Chaparra lands, he condemned how “the greatest cruelties and brutalities were exercised on destitute and defenceless men.” They were “virtually starved to death,” he wrote, and those sent to a nearby hospital in San Manuel would “die in the next 12 or 24 hours.” According to Edwards’s account, those conditions had claimed the lives of 40 percent of “that great army of over 2,000 men” brought to work. He also made specific accusations of acts against British Antilleans in Chaparra, naming guards in the company town and making them responsible for “two-thirds of the inhuman treatment” against those rounded with barbed-wire fences.44 Edwards’s accounts also identified the specific island origins of those hired in the CASC territory when he named abuses to a Grenadian, a Dominican (Warrington Francis), Joseph Charles and Joseph St. Pierre from St. Lucia, and “two Vincentinians” he left “innocently undergoing 3 years imprisonment in Holguín.” He summarized that for workers in Cuba “every year is made up of 365 days of absolute slavery,” where the “colour line is strictly drawn,” with “Cubans counting themselves as white and Negroes as slaves.” Highlighting both the racial divisions in Cuba and where British Antilleans fit within it, Edwards wrote that “the Negroes – especially the immigrant – can never attaint to sufficient distinction to be equal” with the Cubans. No one was spared from Edwards’s chastising articles, and in 1923 he directly accused “Mr. Brice, the British Consul at Santiago-de-Cuba,” who “gives absolutely no protection to British subjects in Cuba.”45 44

45

Musgrave M. Edwards, “The Treatment of B.W.I. Labourers in Cuba: Specially Written for the ‘Dominica Guardian’ and for the Information of the People and Governments of the British West Indies,” Dominica Guardian, November 15, 1923, 2. Musgrave M. Edwards, “The Treatment of B.W.I. Labourers in Cuba: Specially Written for the ‘Dominica Guardian’ and for the Information of the People and Governments of the British West Indies,” Dominica Guardian, November 15, 1923, 2.

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By 1924 and after the “mystery attached” to the closure of the British Consulate in Santiago, the link between Brice and sugar enterprises in Cuba became clearer.46 Edwards thus noted that “those who would think to look to Mr. Brice for any protection” would be in “great disappointment” because he was “too directly concern[ed] and interested in the emigration traffic to be of any valuable service to Negro labourers.”47 Edwards surely knew about Brice. He had traveled to Cuba in the Wanderer, one of the ships apparently operated by Brice in conjunction with Webster Line Agent in Barbados. This was in violation of Barbadian laws, according to a 1923 memorandum on “Blackbirding” circulated among British officials.48 Edwards was not the only one using the written word to condemn the situation experienced by migrants in Cuba. The Negro World reported internationally how planters in Cuba complained about the Caribbean laborers not working, ascribing the presumed low performance to their being paid with “bits of paper” (the vales). Defending Jamaicans and Haitians “as most satisfactory workers,” the newspaper challenged “the Cuban planter” to “pay the workers regularly and properly and again there will be heard not one word of complaint.”49 Along with news reports, migrants themselves used what was a frequent practice in previous Central American destinations: writing to consuls, newspapers in their islands of origin, and also higher imperial authorities in London.50 The case of John Hunt and fellow migrants discussed earlier was an example of the last of these, condemning the CASC and favoritism toward Cuban workers.51 The dilemmas for the migrants and tensions between local and foreign laborers in the CASC mills were highlighted in eastern Caribbean newspapers receiving the migrants’ correspondence. The Voice of Saint Lucia reported that migrants were “between the ‘devil and the deep sea’,” because while “native Cubans threatened them if they work,” the company “tortures them for not working.” Moreover, the 46 47 48

49 50 51

“The Situation in Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, May 8, 1924, 2. Musgrave M. Edwards, “Letter to the Editor: British West Indian Labourers faced with Native Uprising,” Dominica Guardian, May 22, 1924, 2. St. Clair Gainer to Haggard, “Memorandum of Blackbirding” (December 5, 1923), enclosed in T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, March 19, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869; Edwards’s travel in the Wanderer is documented in “Something about Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, July 19, 1923, 2. “Jamaica: Labor in Cuba,” Negro World, March 19, 1921, “The Northern News,” 7. On the actions in those previous migratory destinations, see Anderson, Imperial Ideology; Putnam, The Company They Kept, 40. John Hunt and others to His Majesty the King, June 5, 1921, NA, FO 371/565.

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salary offered to the migrants was one on “which the labourers cannot possibly exist,” and their treatment by Cuban authorities was said to be “worse than that which was meted out to slaves in those dark days of long ago.”52 The letters written by the migrants to the various British colonies and reaching the center of the empire in London had an effect in Cuba, one which brought the British and Cuban governments into a new diplomatic conflict.

  , – The epistolary activism of British Antilleans in Cuba writing to the colonies and the metropole put British consuls in the position of explaining to their superiors in London what was happening. In his correspondence with the Foreign Office, Godfrey Haggard from the British Legation in Havana defended the vice consul of Camagüey, Francis Matthews, for most of his work was related to “the British West Indians – their estates, their whereabouts and their trouble with the police.” He added that Matthews had “to answer enquiries about them to the West Indian Governments and also on occasions from Your Lordship.”53 This suggests that the correspondence of the migrants was having some effect. Haggard also had to explain to the Foreign Office about labor conditions, including the CASC sugar mills which were the subject of numerous denunciations by eastern Caribbean migrants.54 During the diplomatic aftermath of the Jobabo killings, the voice of the British Antilleans is available mainly through the testimonies at the British Legation. No evidence has been found of the migrants themselves writing to press the issue of compensation with the Cubans or the British. But in the 1920s the role of the migrants pushing for consular action on their behalf becomes salient. The early 1920s thus provides a window to examine the demands and perspectives of black British subjects in contrast to the actions taken by British consular officials; it allows us to measure whether British diplomatic support evolved or changed after the “Jobabo incident.”

52 53 54

“Stranded West Indians,” Voice of Saint Lucia, January 28, 1922, 4. Godfrey Haggard to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, May 25, 1922, NA, FO 369/1777. Godfrey Haggard to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, August 29, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565.

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The ambivalence of British officials in Cuba was evident. At times they defended the sugar corporations, but also had the responsibility of protecting black British subjects working in the plantations. In theory, consuls had to protect all British subjects independently of skin color, but in practice there was a racial understanding about who was a legitimate British subject. The contradictions can be identified in how consuls proceeded with different situations. While Stephen Leech kept pressing for answers during the Jobabo affair, other consuls ignored or diminished the claims of black British subjects. The migrants themselves denounced the British officials’ inaction in the press: “We have been to the English consul several times, asked him for help. He bluntly refused to help us in our need. He said that we are British objects, but not British subjects.”55 British Antilleans were caught between the discrimination and abuses of the Cubans and their unreliable protectors, the British consuls. This dilemma was captured in the Voice of Saint Lucia on March 1922 with the story that gave voice to a group of eastern Caribbean islanders. They “could not walk in the streets because they were being stabbed and shot by the Cubans in broad day light” in Havana. Nothing was done about that situation, the migrants argued, because “we have no one to represent us.” After telling the story of an immigrant flogged by a Cuban, the writer concluded, “Perhaps one question may be asked ‘Is there a British Consul?’ The answer to it is ‘Yes there is one, but how-often times we go to him and his answer is that he can’t do anything for us.”56 Despite complaints about lack of action by British representatives, some consuls moved on behalf of British colonial subjects, as in the case of Charles Sadler. On April 14, Sadler was killed by the Cuban police. Consul Haggard in Havana wrote to the Cuban government, siding with Sadler and demanding action from them. Sadler had been present during an entertainment practice (not clear in the sources) among workers when a guardia jurado ordered them to stop the game.57 The immigrant claimed that they were not gambling, and it is reported that the guard unexpectedly took out his revolver. Sadler reacted by taking the gun away, and rushing immediately to deliver the firearm to the terminal superintendent’s house, “preferring in his own defense not to return it direct to his aggressor.” On his way, Sadler encountered Enrique Céspedes, sergeant of the police, and “gave the revolver to him. There 55 56 57

“Stranded West Indians,” Voice of Saint Lucia, January 28, 1922, 4. “West Indians in Cuba,” Voice of Saint Lucia, March 4, 1922, 5. Guardia jurado, literally “sworn guard,” the private security of many sugar mills.

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were other policemen near and at Céspedes’ order they attacked Sadler with their machetes and threw him to the ground severely injured. As he was lying there Céspedes shot him twice and wounded him in the body.” Sadler died four days later and when the consul requested a full inquiry into the incident, he stated that he had “no reason to disbelieve” the circumstances of the event.58 The policeman accused of Sadler’s murder was acquitted in a trial marred by irregularities, including the language barrier between the English-speaking migrants declaring for Sadler and the Spanish-speaking witnesses on the police side. Also, according to Vice Consul Matthews in Camagüey, it appears that there was no witness who could declare what took place after Sadler ran away and surrendered the gun.59 It is difficult to accurately measure how proactive the consuls were in this case – or in others – but Haggard’s position indicates a degree of concern. He wrote with “regret” to the Foreign Office reporting the acquittal of the policeman and stating that the Nuevitas vice consul, Lloyd Patten, believed that material witnesses were bribed by relatives of Céspedes to either miss the trial or “give false evidence.”60 In this case, Vice Consul Matthews concluded that “it was impossible to expect a conviction, and consequently the abuse which we know these subjects are constantly receiving will continue.”61 Indeed, the abuses did continue. Migrants experienced terrible conditions from the moment of arrival. Cuban immigration policies tightened in 1922 through sanitary regulations and quarantine stations, giving credence to the fear of the diseased immigrant. Immigrants had to remain in a quarantine station at the port for fifteen days undergoing the scrutiny of medical officers before entering Cuba. A deposit was charged for this time, and if declared healthy and released in advance, they would receive the balance of the deposit. But what began as a policy to prevent diseases turned out to be quite the opposite. In December 1922, consular officials from Britain and the 58

59

60 61

Godfrey Haggard to Dr. Rafael Montoro, secretary of state, Havana, May 23, 1922, enclosed in Godfrey Haggard to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, May 25, 1922, NA, FO 369/1777. Francis Matthews to Godfrey Haggard, Havana, October 17, 1922, enclosed in Godfrey Haggard to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, May 25, 1922, NA, FO 369/1777. Godfrey Haggard to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, May 25, 1922, NA, FO 369/1777. Francis Matthews to Godfrey Haggard, Havana, October 17, 1922, enclosed in Godfrey Haggard to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, May 25, 1922, NA, FO 369/1777.

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United States visited the quarantine station. The US consul in Santiago, Harold Clum, reported to Havana that the station had only “40–50 beds” for 138 persons. He was told that in some instances “three or four persons [were] sleeping in one narrow bed” while others were sleeping on “old, ragged, and filthy mattresses.” The windows and doors of the structure had no screens, and since it was “on the edge of a mangrove swamp” it could be “infested with mosquitos at night.” Bathroom facilities were “out of order” and the supply of water was unavailable or limited for the many persons there. While there was a “separate sleeping quarters for the women,” Clum wrote, men “invade the women’s quarters” claiming “to have wives there.” The cure seems to have been worse than the disease, as the conditions described by Clum were a potential setting for the very diseases that Cubans were trying to avoid. According to the report from the quarantine officer to the consular visitors, 40 percent of the persons examined in the station had hookworm, but there were no cases of malaria. Clum warned, “if there is one case of malaria at this station conditions are ideal for its spread to everyone there. Hookworm also might easily be spread there, owing to the complete lack of sanitation. In short, the place is everything that a quarantine station should not be.” He also referred to the potential for the spread of yellow fever and the disadvantages of small children and ill persons in the station. Food was limited and its quality “disgusting,” according to the US official. Clum also suggested that the chief immigration officer, Mr. Alberni, was earning some money out of the situation.62 In effect, the problems in the quarantine station came to the surface in 1923, and British consuls clashed again with Cuban authorities. On July 17, Alberni wrote to the British consul in Santiago notifying him that a group of migrants had mistakenly left the quarantine station and requested that he send them back if they presented themselves to the consulate.63 That same day, however, the migrants reached Consul Brice 62

63

Harold D. Clum to Carlton B. Hurst, US consul general, Havana, December 14, 1922, RG 84, RFSP, CP-SC, Vol. 228, File 812. In his account of early twentieth-century Cuba, Charles Chapman notes the predominance of graft practices, particularly in the importation of Haitian and Jamaican workers. Chapman, A History of the Cuban Republic, 481, 498. On the experience of Caribbean migrants in the quarantine station, see McLeod, “We Cubans Are Obligated Like Cats,” 57–81. José Alberni to E. Brice, British consul, Santiago de Cuba, July 17, 1923, in Further Correspondence. The Cuban version of the correspondence is available in Spanish at the José Martí National Library in Havana. See Cuba, Secretaria de Estado, Copia de la correspondencia cambiada, Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, Havana, Cuba (hereafter BNJM), P.G. 327.72910942, Cub, C.

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with a different version. Rather than a mistake, they claimed that they had been certified healthy by the station’s doctor before the fifteen-day limit. Although they were entitled to the balance of their deposit, they were “all refused the refund by said immigration officer.” The Jamaicans argued further that, to get their refund, they had to present themselves to the quarantine station, taking a one-way boat trip for fifty cents and then the different amount of two dollars to return. Since only some boatmen were allowed to reach the quarantine station, that was their only option. In their complaint, the migrants maintained that they were placed in a “very awful position and quite likely to lose all that we ought to get.” As “British subjects of Jamaica,” they requested the consul to “write or to telephone the emigration [sic] agent and advise him to pay us at his office at the Customs.” Consul Brice wrote to Alberni with an option: In view of their declaration, and knowing that it was impossible that you would retain the money, I recommend them to make a fresh application, as there is no doubt that it is a fresh mistake made by one of your employees, which has already on many occasions caused me to trouble you that it may be corrected.

This is one case in which migrants’ claims to local consuls generated at least a supportive action by them without calling upon superior authorities.64 It appears that the claim by the Jamaicans in July 1923 was not an isolated incident, but part of an organized scheme. One month later, in August, the acting British consul in Santiago, G. L. McCormack, reported to Havana that officers in the quarantine station threatened immigrants who claimed their deposit balance. Migrants were apparently kept in the station for the full fifteen days even when discharged by the doctor, as a way to retain the deposit. This practice was covered up by forcing the immigrants to sign a receipt made out in Spanish, which most of them did not understand. Because of “their eagerness to get out of the quarantine station” most migrants signed the document. McCormack complained that, under such conditions, he was “powerless to take any action in the matter.” He recommended that “a very strong report” should be made on the subject of these irregularities because the issue will “continue to be a

64

Benjamin Stewart and others to British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, July 17, 1923; and E. Brice to José Alberni, chief of quarantine station, Cayo Duan, July 17, 1923, in Further Correspondence.

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source of trouble to this consulate, and the means for fleecing the poor Jamaicans of their money.”65 The Havana Consulate had already warned colonial governors in February 1923 that the situation in Cuba was “extremely unsatisfactory and persons contemplating proceeding to Cuba are strongly advise[d] not to do so.”66 But with the sugar industry recovered, the British Caribbean influx continued. Jamaican migration increased in 1923 and 1924 and recruitment of workers in the eastern Caribbean by the CASC remained steady. Also, the Manatí Sugar Company, after being authorized to import 3,000 workers, recruited 2,000 in the Dutch Antilles and considered going “elsewhere for laborers,” probably Haiti or the British Antilles.67 Although immigration was less than in the 1910s, a conservative estimate from the available figures would be of an average of approximately 3,000 immigrants per year in the eight years that followed the 1921 crisis. Haitian migration during the same period surpassed that of the British colonies with an average of some 8,500 per year (a total of 85,869). The outcome of this recovery was a significant presence of black migrants – from the British and the Dutch Caribbean and from Haiti – that would inevitably generate a reaction in Cuban society. In 1924, the Cuban government estimated that 65,000 Jamaicans were living in the country.68 Cubans reacted in the press but also in the voices of intellectuals such as Jorge Le-Roy y Cassá and Carlos M. Trelles. Black migrants were the subject of discussion in a 1923 meeting of the Havana Academy of Sciences, with arguments about their harmful and dangerous character.69 Health and civilization discourses labeled the migrants carriers of disease and “uncultured,” “inferior races,” “illiterate,” and of “rudimentary civilization.”70 In this context, British Caribbean migrants – and blacks in general – continued to be the targets of prejudice. The Negro World reported on a case where a black Jamaican by the name of John Sawyers 65 66 67 68 69 70

G. L. McCormack to S. Clair Gainer, Havana, August 31, 1923, in Further Correspondence. “Warning against Emigration to Cuba,” Saint Lucia Gazette, February 3, 1923, 31. Emphasis in original. Manuel Rionda to Manatí Sugar Company, January 14, 1923, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 69. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to St. Clair Gainer, British Legation, Havana, July 4, 1924, in Further Correspondence. McLeod, “We Cubans Are Obligated like Cats,” 64. Trelles, El progreso (1902–1905) y el retroceso (1906–1922); and Le-Roy y Cassá, Inmigración anti-sanitaria.

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was abused by the Cuban police, highlighting the racial side of the incident. In a park in Remedios, a white man and his family ordered Sawyers “to leave the bench.” As he was moving, a group of policemen appeared and, “after giving him brutal blows, took him to jail.” Sawyers was later released, but with “his arm useless and with cuts on his right arm.” He sought medical attention, but finding that “the young man was not Cuban and, worst of all, that he was a Negro” he was refused treatment. Highlighting the way migrants thought about consular support for them, the article noted Sawyers’ skepticism: “Despite the advice of his friend, Sawyers has resolved to be content with his lot, for he considers it a waste of time and money to write the British Consul about the matter.” According to the report, “many other similar incidents show the sort of treatment given to the Negro in this country.”71 There were other incidents. On September 9, 1922, Jamaican Aurelio Fickson was violently attacked by guardia jurado of Central Miranda, enduring “twenty blows” that left him in a “pitiful state.”72 Egbert Archer “was arrested on a charge of robbery in October 1922, and was detained in prison for a year before his trial took place.” In May 1923, Oscar Taylor was shot dead by three Cuban guards without any attempt to arrest him. In April of that same year, Locksley Roye was beaten by a marine guard and shot dead because he refused a second dose of medicine while staying at the quarantine station. In May, an unarmed immigrant, Moses Buchanan, was accused of stealing and was killed by a guard at Tacajó sugar mill. Other cases include the actions taken against immigrant workers demanding decent salaries and a raid on a Jamaican Lodge in Ciego de Ávila where property was stolen and members were arrested without explanation.73 The Dominica Guardian, considered a “colored” newspaper, became the space for Musgrave Edwards, who, after his time in Cuba, remained the key person with some political status in Dominica able to advocate for the migrants abroad. His 1923 writings described indiscriminate beatings and shootings by the CASC guards and equated the situation of immigrants with slavery.74 A “coloured British subject” from Jamaica 71 72 73 74

“A Jamaican Negro Beaten by Three Policemen,” Negro World, January 20, 1923, 10. “Castigo cruelmente a un jamaiquino,” El Mundo, September 10, 1922, 2. Godfrey Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, January 3, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government. Musgrave Edward, “The Treatment of B.W.I. Labourers in Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, November 15, 1923, 2. On the limited information on Edwards see Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI, 525–526,

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named A. Llewelyn Porter refused to accept a lower salary for his work and left the barracón, only to face the Rural Guard – sent by his employer, a colono named Alfredo Bernal. The guard not only “thrashed Llewelyn Porter with his machete” but also “attacked various coloured workmen for refusing to work.” Later, Porter “was again struck by the Guard, and cut twice in the jaw with a machete” when he was leaving the colonia. In February 1924, a group of “coloured labourers” in Algodones sugar mill were victims of “wilful ill-treatment” by Rural Guards during a fire in the cane fields. “Wilfred Bennet, Charles Bennet, and a man called FitzGerarld,” all British subjects, “were cut about the head with machetes, and subsequently, on the usual charge of ‘resisting the authorities’ were flung to jail.”75 There is also the attack on Randolph Smith by a Cuban guard in Cascorro, and the flogging, imprisonment, and robbery of Joshua Bartlay, “a Jamaican Negro” accused of taking workers from one sugar mill to a colonia on February 26, 1924. Two immigrants who were crossing from one colonia to another were shot by the local overseer, and were “thrown in jail on the accusation of their aggressor.” David C. Patterson, a Jamaican with a “good record of service during the great war and a good local reputation was beaten with a sword by the rural guard at Guaro, Oriente” in February 1924. And then, adding to these grievances, the illegal system of payment with vales continued.76 The increasing number of abuses against British Antilleans and their denunciation between 1921 and 1924 forced British officials to take action, starting what would become another diplomatic standoff with the Cuban government. After verbal communications between British consul Haggard and the Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the former wrote an official communication in January 1924 stating that “His Majesty’s Government has learnt with grave concern of the treatment to which British West Indian labourers continue to be subject in Cuba.” After listing some of the incidents, Haggard condemned the

75 76

footnote 1. It also seems that Edwards either was linked to, or sympathized with, the UNIA, and as late as the 1950s he was politically active in Roseau, Dominica’s capital. See “The Roseau Town Council: Minutes of Proceedings,” Dominica Official Gazette, 75: 44, August 18, 1952, 258–262; “Roseau Town Council Election” Dominica Official Gazette, 76: 4, January 12, 1953, 11. Godfrey Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, January 20, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government. Godfrey Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, March 8, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government.

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conditions at the quarantine station at Santiago de Cuba; the use of fire-arms, too often with fatal results, by Cuban guards against unarmed West Indians; the apparent lack of interest in arresting and prosecuting men guilty of such acts; and the unsatisfactory termination of such trials as have taken place; together with the maltreatment of the estates of these British subjects.

The consul’s defense of the migrants concluded by stressing “the benefit which the sugar plantations derive from their labor” as reason for their receiving “every protection and consideration from the Cuban authorities.”77 Diplomatic relations were again in crisis. A courtesy visit by Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour and the Royal British Fleet was canceled. De Céspedes acknowledged the communications and called for an inquiry, hoping for a peaceful settlement of the issue.78 As in the 1910s, the British used their colonial labor as a bargaining tool, telling the Cubans that they were exploring “the possibility of restriction, if not prohibition, of the emigration to Cuba of the referred coloured workers” employed in the sugar harvests.79 De Céspedes acted swiftly, gathering the necessary information for a response on January 24. He acknowledged the poor conditions in the quarantine station, but assured Haggard that there were improvements, including separation by sex in the sanitary installations and new beds. De Céspedes guaranteed that the deposits given by immigrants upon arrival would be returned to them in cash. In those cases of migrants killed or abused (Egbert Archer, Moses Buchanan, Locksley Roye, Oscar Taylor), the Secretary of State only expressed that some of the cases were still postponed but were subject to due process with “equal rights in Cuba for the national [as well] as the foreigner.” De Céspedes also acknowledged that the practice of discharging laborers without pay had been used before, but for both local and foreign workers. He noted, however, that the migrants “seemed to be content and satisfied with the treatment offered to them, because, notwithstanding the dark picture provided” about conditions in Cuba, the migrants continued to arrive “in ever increasing numbers.” This migration trend,

77 78 79

See Godfrey Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, January 3, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to Godfrey Haggard, January 23, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to Godfrey Haggard, January 24, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government.

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de Céspedes told Haggard, “would not happen if the current situation was like the one exposed in your note.”80 At some level, government actions seemed to acknowledge the illtreatment of migrants. On January 23, the Secretary of War and Marine notified de Céspedes that the “rural guard have special instruction[s] to treat aliens with the utmost correctness and courtesy.” These instructions were given to the guards “with special regard to their relations with the Jamaicans and the Haitians,” reminding the officers that “they should refrain from every action which might give rise to friction and to wellfounded complaints.”81 De Céspedes also contacted sugar entrepreneur Aurelio Portuondo in a “precipitous way” to discuss the issue of Antillean migration and to show him what Portuondo described as an “extensive note, expressed in harsh terms, aggressive almost, by the British Legation, in which somewhat unfair charges are formulated for grievances against the Jamaicans residing in Cuba.” Portuondo understood the “alarm” of de Céspedes in view of the “fatal consequences” that a restriction or prohibition of immigration would have for planters in eastern Cuba. He then offered his assistance to de Céspedes to “prepare a reasoned response that would be presented to the British Minister.”82 Portuondo wrote a memorandum to assist the Cuban government, expressing that the voucher system was something of the past and that while it lasted “the Antilleans as well as the Spaniards and Americans and foreign nationals” were all exposed to it. It was surprising, Portuondo noted, that “Antilleans, especially Jamaicans, whose culture is superior to that of the Haitians, could be so naïve or ignorant as to accept the payment of their job with paper.” It was unreasonable and absurd, in his understanding, that planters and colonos who needed the Antillean labor force would ill-treat them, since eventually they will have to bring “other workers of analogous origin.” In Portuondo’s view, distressing situations were not exclusively experienced by the Antilleans, but also by Spaniards and Cubans.83 Even Manuel Rionda himself intervened, giving Portuondo more arguments for the Cuban response to the British. Rionda’s comment on the memorandum mentioned that it would “be good to add something in relation to the fact that England needs from 80 81 82 83

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to Godfrey Haggard, January 24, 1924, in Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government. A. Montes to Cuban Secretary of State, January 23, 1924, in Further Correspondence. Aurelio Portuondo to Manuel Rionda, January 25, 1924, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 58. “Memorandum for the Secretary of State,” January 25, 1924, enclosed in Aurelio Portuondo to Manuel Rionda, January 25, 1924, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 58.

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4/500,000 tons of Cuban sugar, and if the whole crop is not done due to the lack of cane cutters, the price of sugar will increase – something that will result in disadvantage for the English.”84 British officials in Cuba were not convinced by the Cuban response. Haggard answered in March 1924, insisting on the cases of ill-treatment and adding that despite the illegality of the vales since the 1919 Arteaga Law, he had evidence of vales issued as late as 1923. It also turned out that despite the directives given to the Rural Guard, the abuses continued. On March 2, Albert Barnett made a complaint to a Rural Guard who, in turn, “attacked and drew his revolver on him.” Barnett was “arrested and bound” and then “shot from behind.” He “remained for twenty-three days undergoing a cure” for his wound while in custody.85 Other cases included that of Joseph Holness and Eustace Winter, who were “immediately assaulted” during their trip from Siboney to Jatibonico on March 31, 1924. The train was crowded and they sat on seats reserved for Government Guards, and at their destination “they were struck by the guards with the butt of their rifles, were arrested on some charge unknown and taken to the gaol in Majagua and thence to Ciego de Avila,” where they remained in prison. On March 24, Edward Robinson and Barnard Hall were arrested on the “charge of stealing a Cuban child, which was afterwards found to be asleep” in the house of the parents. The immigrants, nonetheless, “were bound with ropes and ill-treated by the police” and put in prison to await trial. Another five immigrant workers who had performed a job worth $1,184.95 did not receive payment, and when they demanded it “soldiers were sent for, the men were arrested and locked up in the guard-house.” They were “brutally beaten” for refusing to work the next morning, then “taken to Ciego de Avila, where they were tried on some count or other and discharged.”86 On April 18, a Jamaican named Frank Ellis working in Camagüey was rounded up by two Rural Guards and a civilian in front of the local shop of a colonia, and assaulted. The next day he went to complain and seek medical attention in the town and was arrested by the same guards who had

84 85 86

Manuel Rionda to Aurelio Portuondo, Havana, January 28, 1924, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 58. D. St. Clair Gainer to Cuban Secretary of State, April 17, 1924, enclosed in St. Clair Gainer to Mr. McDonald, Foreign Office, April 19, 1924, in Further Correspondence. “West Indian Labourers in Cuba,” memorandum, pp. 4–5, enclosed in D. St. Clair Gainer to Mr. MacDonald, April 23, 1924, in Further Correspondence.

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abused him. He was locked up for four days together with a witness who went with him to make the complaint.87 In April and May 1924, the Cuban government responded to some of the complaints, siding with everyone but the migrants – and therefore the British consuls. Alfred Barnett was accused of “brawling and drunkenness” and A. Llewellyn Porter’s case was “completely groundless.” No evidence was found in favor of those attacked in the colonia of Central Algodones.88 In the case of Laban Morgan and Wilfred Dixon, they had been attacked because they “trespassed on the property of the plantation ‘El Progreso’,” and in that of David Patterson (the Great War veteran) he was beaten and accused for “refusal to aid” during a cane fire.89 These and other cases turned the spring of 1924 into a battle between the Cuban and the British versions of events. On June 10, 1924, Havana’s British consul, D. St. Clair Gainer, reported to the Foreign Office that “complaints of assault, ill-treatment, and refusal to pay wages” continued to reach his office “from all quarters” and “general conditions affecting British West Indians in Cuba appear in no way to have improved since serious representations were made in January last.”90 On June 25, the consul wrote again to the Cuban Department of State, referring to more abuses and stating that “no marked diminution in the number of complaints of ill-treatment has been observed, in spite of the orders stated to have been given to this end by the various departments concerned.” Failure to “comply with the conditions contained in Mr. Haggard’s note of the 3rd January” led the Foreign Office to present the issue of ill-treatment against British subjects before the British Parliament. “I am to state clearly,” the consul added, “that there is a definite prospect of the restriction or prohibition of immigration from the British West Indies to Cuba at an early date.”91 This final warning to the Cubans was presented in a visit to the Secretary of State in which Aurelio Portuondo engaged in what the consul described as a 87 88

89 90 91

D. St. Clair Gainer to Cuban Secretary of State, May 3, 1924, enclosed in St. Clair Gainer to MacDonald, June 25, 1924, in Further Correspondence. Report of Sánchez Clavel, first lieutenant, enclosed in Guillermo Patterson, Cuban undersecretary of state, to D. St. Clair Gainer, May 6, 1924, enclosed in D. St. Clair Gainer to Mr. MacDonald, May 14, 1924; G. Patterson to D. St. Clair Gainer, April 26, 1924, enclosed in D. St. Clair Gainer to Mr. MacDonald, May 8, 1924, in Further Correspondence. D. St. Clair Gainer to MacDonald, May 8, 1924, in Further Correspondence. D. St. Clair Gainer to MacDonald, June 10, 1924, in Further Correspondence. D. St. Clair Gainer to Cuban Secretary of State, June 25, 1924, in Further Correspondence.

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“long harangue explaining how beatific was the state of Jamaicans” in his companies.92 De Céspedes mentioned that there were “obedient” Jamaicans, but called on the British authorities to “recognise that a minority, luckily small, exists, which, on the other hand, is turbulent in the extreme . . . and at times violent and criminal.” This “small” group was making “very difficult the duties of the authorities” when intervening with them. For him, it was unfair to accuse the authorities of ill-treatment continually without considering their position when facing Caribbean migrants who committed “acts of disrespect” and “misdemeanours.”93 The British remained firm in their position, and the correspondence regarding the ill-treatment of British Antilleans in Cuba was presented to Parliament and subsequently published as a White Paper. The Cubans responded by also publishing the diplomatic exchange, and de Céspedes warned St. Clair Gainer “that bad feeling would be created and that Cubans would unite against” the actions of the British.94 Once the conflict was public, the British press, much against the wishes of the Cuban diplomats in Britain, published sensationalist articles on the topic comparing the situation of the British Caribbean immigrants to those in H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dickens’s American Notes.95 Details of the cases were also published in newspapers of the different Caribbean colonies, and possibly had an effect on emigration to Cuba.96 But on the Cuban side, as the country prepared for the coming zafra, other sources suggest that the migration of thousands of Caribbean workers continued.97 The publication of the White Papers on the ill-treatment of the British Caribbean migrants marked an “end” to a second diplomatic saga between the British and the Cuban governments. British consuls certainly 92 93 94 95

96

97

St. Clair Gainer to MacDonald, June 25, 1924, in Further Correspondence. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to St. Clair Gainer, July 4, 1924, in Further Correspondence. D. St. Clair Gainer to MacDonald, July 14, 1924, in Further Correspondence. See “Official Tales of Cuban Cruelty: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a White Paper.’ ‘Red Sugar’,” Daily Chronicle, July 15, 1924; Rafael Rodríguez Altunaga to editor, Daily Chronicle, July 16, 1924; “Cuba Reply of Tales of Cruelty: ‘Hideous Deeds’ Not Denied: Alleged Offenders on Trial,” Daily Chronicle, July 18, 1924, ANC, SE, leg. 457, no. 10149. See the government notices in Saint Lucia Gazette, July 15, 1924; October 11, 1924; January 12, 1925; “Sugar and the Cuban Atrocities,” Dominica Guardian, September 4, 1924, 1. The gradual decrease of migration after 1924–25 is mentioned chapter 2 above. Chaparra and Delicias (of the CASC) were authorized to bring thousands of Caribbean workers. “3,000 antillanos emigrarán a Cuba,” El Mundo, November 22, 1924, 1. The press also reported on the arrival of 2,500 Antilleans for the Tánamo sugar mill in Oriente Province. “Inmigrantes antillanos,” El Mundo, November 13, 1924, 5.

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fulfilled their duty to represent their colonial subjects. But in the 1920s, such representation also took place, yet again, under the shadow of the international political economy of sugar production, namely the role of the British Caribbean labor force in sugar production and the British markets for Cuban sugar. The British position as consumers, second to that of the United States, was nonetheless considered “a valuable asset” in British economic and commercial circles. As the diplomatic conflict between the British and the Cubans ensued in 1924, The Economist reported from the British side, “No effort should be spared, therefore, to maintain our position, secondary as it may now have become.”98 What becomes evident explicitly and implicitly in the discussions between the British and the Cubans is how the ultimate fate of British Caribbean migrants was intertwined with the global sugar trade and the related labor politics. While the British and Cuban governments debated matters of life and death for the British Antilleans (threats, abuses, discrimination, etc.) their discussion was ultimately marked by, first, the Cuban need for cheap labor from the British colonies, and second, Britain’s position in the Cuban sugar trade. The appeals for justice that the British consuls exposed always reverted to the value of their colonial labor and threats to limit the mobility of the colonial workforce that the Cuban sugar industry needed. This subtext is present in the correspondence exchanged by government officials on both sides, and with the Foreign and Colonial Office, in debates in the British Parliament and in reports about the matter in places like The Economist. In the end, British Antilleans remained not that much as “subjects” of the empire, but as “objects” in the game of labor needs of the international sugar economy. On the Cuban side of the discussions, the politics of sugar were also present. This was clear in their diplomatic maneuvers when discussing the cases of migrants with the British, recognizing some things and disputing others. But it was also obvious in such instances as Manuel Rionda’s help to the Cubans in their response to the British stressing Britain’s need of Cuban sugar. As for the question of what was the role of British consuls on behalf of British Antilleans, and its impact, two things are revealed. First, consular support was not automatic due to the altruism of British officials in Cuba. The migrants themselves were agents in accomplishing this through their own written requests from “all quarters” to consular offices, their islands

98

“Conditions in Cuba,” The Economist, April 19, 1924, 827.

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of origin, the press, and London. Second, neither in the Jobabo case, nor in the exchanges of the early 1920s, did the Cubans seem to be compelled to improve the conditions of migrant workers in a meaningful way beyond lip service to the British. In the end, the Cuban government rarely admitted any wrongdoing against the migrants, and the British seemed to be satisfied with the publication of the White Papers. The questions that remain are, what was the nature of consular support? And what did it really mean for the British Antilleans?

6 The Racial Politics of Migrant Labor Company Town Control, and Repatriations, 1925–1931

After the publication of the White Paper, in 1925 the Cuban press reported on the good treatment received by Jamaicans in Cuba. El Camagüeyano cited a speech in the House of Commons by Sir Donald McNeill from the Foreign Office. He said that the “treatment currently received in Cuba by workers, British Subjects of the West Indies, has improved much since the English Government dealt with it with the Cuban government some months ago.”1 The statement gave credit to the actions of British diplomats and consuls which resulted in the publication of the White Paper. But the migrants’ written activism that was behind the British officials’ actions was silenced. Ironically, McNeill was replicating the Cuban government’s position outlined by de Céspedes: that compared to 1921, the conditions for British Antilleans had improved. That was contrary to the appreciation of British Caribbean migrants, at least according to a leading advocate, Musgrave Edwards. In a letter to the Dominica Guardian in August 1924, Edwards expressed disagreement with the idea that three years after the crisis of 1921 things were any different. “I fear,” he wrote, “that there is very little hope to the Negro labourer of a more human treatment by the Cuban employers and rural guards,” who “seem to be temperamentally incapable of treating the Negro with any amount of kindness and consideration.”2 Edwards 1

2

“Los jamaiquinos están recibiendo ahora un buen trato en Cuba,” El Camagüeyano, June 11, 1925, 1, 2. Note that the reference to “English Government” is a direct translation from the article in Spanish, which refers to “Gobierno inglés,” inglés being the general term to refer to someone from Britain. Musgrave M. Edwards, “Letters to the Editor: The Situation in Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, August 21, 1924, 2.

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contrasted the alleged improvements in the conditions of migrant labor and his experience in the “Chaparra Company” (CASC), where, he argued, “the work they have to do is slavery.” Addressing the issues in the White Paper, he also distinguished sugar companies in Oriente which, unlike Chaparra, “do not immigrate labourers” and could not “be held responsible for the personal safety of immigrants.”3 The difference in assessment between Westminster and British Caribbean migrants must not be a surprise; those were, precisely, the differences in the British Empire. This chapter covers the period roughly between 1925 and 1931 to discuss the situation of British Antilleans after the publication of the White Paper in 1924. Examining the public debates about British Caribbean labor and zooming in on their experiences as workers in specific instances and localities, I chart the persistence of British Antilleans as the Other and their subaltern position as workers in the Cuban plantation regimes. The chapter brings to the surface the continuing prejudices against the migrants, the power of the company town plantation, and the problems with British representation that manifested the inequalities within the British Empire. The chapter also considers the wider social, political, and economic changes in Cuba in the late 1920s under the presidency of Gerardo Machado, including issues of labor supply, antiblack discrimination, and the impact of a new economic crisis in 1929 on the lives of black British subjects.

     Gerardo Machado’s time in office (1925–1933) was one of economic and political unsteadiness. The sugar industry, the main source of employment for most Caribbean migrants, was changing. There was a reconfiguration of the dynamics between the different interest groups within and behind the plantations (finance sector, planters, colonos, workers, etc.) and there were changes in the government’s policies around sugar production.4 Simultaneously, the 1920s witnessed an effervescent nationalism, and marginalized sectors such as Afro-Cubans and

3

4

“Something about Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, July 19, 1923, 2; Musgrave M. Edwards, “Letters to the Editor: The Situation in Cuba,” Dominica Guardian, August 21, 1924, 2. Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país, 51–203.

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the working-class began to have a stronger presence in the country’s politics, culture, and society.5 For the sugar industry, the second half of the 1920s started with the “Ley Verdeja” in 1926 setting limits to sugar zafra to avoid overproduction. The legislation was accompanied by the establishment of January 1, 1927 as the official starting date for the sugar crop. This shortened the length of the harvest season and essentially limited the working days – and incomes – of employees. Production quotas were established for sugar mills and further restrictions of the crop followed in 1928 as Cuba’s position in the world sugar market evolved. For British Caribbean migrant workers, the restriction on the sugar crop meant that “a larger number than usual [were] unemployed.”6 Those examining the period have noted that, behind the seemingly recovered sugar economy, the “reality” of the sugar industry of the late 1920s and early 1930s was depression; the sugar industry was undergoing a “structural crisis” and living in a “precarious balance” that would end in disaster.7 Notwithstanding the problems of the sugar industry, Caribbean migrants remained a part of the rural landscape. By 1925, estimates of black British migrants in the province of Camagüey ranged from 15,000 to 40,000. Even with declining arrivals, the estimate of British Antilleans in the country for 1930 was some 43,000.8 Because of the limits to sugar production, planters were more inclined to use cheaper migrant labor to maximize profits. But concerns about the availability of field workers increased when President Machado announced in 1926 that “he will not authorize the entry of more Jamaicans and Haitians for cane work during the coming crops” due to its “evil consequences.”9 Machado’s public-works initiatives during the late 1920s affected the availability of labor, and increased the need to import cane cutters.10 Sugar colonos, many of them Cubans, advocated the entrance of 5 6 7 8

9 10

Moore, Nationalizing Blackness; Shaffer, Anarchism and Countercultural Politics. Parliamentary Debates (1929), 2625. Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país, 87–102; Aguilar, Cuba, 1933, 95. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, “Inspection of Camagüey Vice Consulate,” March 30, 1925; Mr. Kelham to Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, November 2, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869; F. O’Meara, “Memorandum,” enclosed in J. J. Broderick to Marquess of Reading, November 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/1869. “Ba[n]s Entry of Further Supply of Jamaican and Haitian Labor,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, June 5, 1926, 452. “Importation of Labor Asked to Offset Shortage Caused by Public Works Program,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, September 25, 1926, 253.

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Antillean labor. Unlike large sugar enterprises such as the UFC and CASC (to which they were sometimes subordinated), the colonos had more difficulty in securing workers.11 But also, Cuban colonos held national and racial concerns regarding immigration that large North American sugar entrepreneurs did not have. The Louisiana Planter & Sugar Manufacturer reported on the position of organized colonos, stating that while Antillean labor was “socially undesirable” due to “contagious diseases,” it was also “absolutely necessary to the economic welfare of the country.” The view of Antilleans as a necessary evil (discussed earlier) transpired when it was argued that their absence “will mean a loss of approximately $9,000,000 to the colonos of Camagüey and Oriente.” They would be needed “until a substitute more favorable and at the same time as cheap can be found, or until the prices of sugar are such that they will enable the cane growers to pay more for their cane cutting and field work.”12 The government denied that its public-works initiatives had an effect on labor supply, and authorized the importation of labor only when repatriation was guaranteed. Between 1926 and 1927, writers such as Ramiro Guerra and Luis Araquistáin published their thoughts on the long- and short-term social impact of Antillean migration.13 But neither the government’s view nor that of intellectuals solved the practical problems faced by the planters. Foreseeing shortage of labor for the 1927 sugar crop, Salvador Rionda of the Manatí sugar mill established that due to the “great competition” for workers in eastern provinces, they would “try to bring immigrants instead of trying to take the labor away from other mills.” Given Manuel Rionda’s dislike of Jamaican workers, the option was to join the CASC to bring labor “from the British West Indies, outside of Jamaica.”14 Mutual trust among planters was not widespread, and Manuel Rionda advised caution with the CASC neighbors Chaparra and Delicias “because, as far 11

12 13

14

For the complex politics between large sugar corporations, colonos, and workers during this period, and changing patters at different stages and in different regions and plantations, see McGillivray, Blazing Cane, 188–204. “Refusal to Admit Laborers Will Mean Financial Loss to Two Provinces,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, October 23, 1926, 333. “Government Unable to Grant Request Concerning Antillian [sic] Labor,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, November 6, 1926, 273–274; Guerra, Azúcar y población; Araquistáin, La agonía antillana, 193. Salvador Rionda to Manatí Sugar Company, NY, November 22, 1926, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 70. Manuel Rionda’s preference for labor supply may have been influenced by the past diplomatic exchanges in which he and Aurelio Portuondo, his close friend and colleague, participated, assisting the Cuban government.

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as I know, the outcome has never been good for us when we have tried to bring people in combination with those sugar mills. They always keep many cane cutters and give very little.”15 Before the 1927 crop began, labor conditions were reported to be “everything to be desired,” but subsequent crops were plagued with complications of labor supply.16 In 1928, the Haitian government decided to restrict emigration to Cuba due to the treatment that workers were receiving. This threatened the preferred labor supply of sugar mills such as Boston and Preston (UFC) and Tánamo (AFSC). Reports from R. B. Wood, of the CASC, with their preferred labor arrangement in the eastern Caribbean, indicate the labor situation in 1928: “Our own immigration business seems to be progressing satisfactorily, but the other Oriente mills are, apparently, having much trouble.”17 He expressed concerns about keeping the company’s eastern Caribbean labor supply when he reported to his superiors that “both the United Fruit Company and Cayo Mambi [sic] are sending agents throughout the British West Indies, to Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, Barbados and Dominica,” their “special preserve [sic] for labor recruiting.” The CASC had agents “on the scene” who were “very expert in such operations” and had “a fortnight start over the other Companies.”18 The precarious labor market led companies like the AFSC to express to President Machado their opposition to immigration restrictions, stressing the need for migrant laborers.19 The strategy apparently worked. This company alone brought some 12,566 immigrants, mostly Haitians, from 1927 to 1930, through their own port in Sagua de Tánamo.20 While the Riondas at Manatí managed to get some 550 men from the eastern British Caribbean to be sent to the colonias, Salvador Rionda reported that “Chaparra and Delicias have been very short of labor” and had hopes that the “Cuban Government will change its attitude toward the importing of negro labor, for otherwise

15 16 17 18 19 20

Manuel Rionda to Salvador Rionda, Manatí Sugar Company, November 30, 1926, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 70. “Labor Conditions Good,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, December 25, 1926, 512. R. B. Wood to Walter S. Bartlett, vice president, CASC, November 24, 1928, AHPT, CASMC, leg. 37, exp. 444, no. 188. R. B. Wood to Walter S. Bartlett, vice president, CASC, November 15, 1928, AHPT, CASMC, leg. 37, exp. 444, no. 201. González Suárez, “La inmigración antillana en Cuba,” 55. See the reports of immigration and movement of passengers for the years mentioned. República de Cuba, Inmigración y movimiento de pasajeros.

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the cost of producing sugar is going to go up.”21 Manuel Rionda shared his nephew’s concerns, but had learned of authorizations for importation of labor in Chaparra, Delicias, and Tánamo. Knowing the distance between the Cuban government’s rhetoric and their actions, he wrote just, “I think you must take care of this.”22 The issue of migrant labor was also discussed among different social sectors in Cuba. The spectacle of stranded and wandering black migrant workers seeking jobs or food in 1921 increased the social visibility of Antilleans. It also raised questions in the sociopolitical landscape regarding the ethno-racial and hygienic desirability of Caribbean migrants and their seemingly inexorable tie to the Cuban sugar plantation. Was the route of the large foreign-owned sugar plantation worked by alien black workers desirable for Cuba? This discussion crystalized in the late 1920s. Historian Ramiro Guerra entered the public debate with his Azúcar y población en las Antillas, published in 1927. The proposal of “no further importation of foreign laborers” was “not new in the history of Cuba.” He claimed that the “fundamental question was not one of race or climate, but simply of economics.” The “illiterate” migrants who entered Cuba from 1921 to 1925 had “depressed the wages of native Cuban workers.” Guerra’s nationalist program against latifundia and their foreign labor maintained that neither was beneficial for Cuba or Cuban workers. Small farmers and colonos, Guerra claimed, did not need the “cheap labor from the Antilles or elsewhere”; it was only larger colonos in the east that were subordinated to the big sugar companies and thus had to rely on Antillean labor.23 Another commentator, Luis Araquistáin, was a Spaniard who had traveled the Hispanic Caribbean between 1926 and 1927. In his La agonía antillana, published in 1928, he concurred with Guerra in that lowering wages “to a level that can only be accepted by blacks from Jamaica and Haiti” affected Cubans and, of course, Spaniards. In his exposition, Araquistáin quoted Guerra and aligned with him in rejecting the idea that racial animosity was behind their judgment; he was not racist but maintained the backwardness of blacks. He lamented the “grave, numerous, and well-known

21 22 23

Salvador Rionda to Manuel Rionda, NY, January 24, 1928; Salvador Rionda to Manuel Rionda, August 17, 1928; BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 70. Manuel Rionda to Salvador Rionda, October 3, 1928, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 70. Guerra y Sánchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean, 141, 143, 145–148. The citations are from the translation into English and emphasis is in the original.

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inconveniences” that Jamaican and Haitians caused in the eastern provinces. Oriente was being “Haitianized,” in Araquistáin’s view, and foreign migrants “had always been a danger” leading to the “dissolution of nationalities,” a problem that was heightened by “mutual prejudices of race, notable differences in the cultural level, and for speaking a language different from Spanish.”24 For an alleged and self-proclaimed non-racist, Araquistáin’s elaborations clearly explain the fears and the valuation of differences that usually accompany and define racist discourse.25 In light of the authorizations to import labor granted to companies such as the AFSC and the UFC, the pages of Carteles – a weekly magazine of wide circulation – became another outlet for the discontent with both foreign Antilleans and the failure of governmental decrees on migrant labor. One columnist claimed that the “dreadful policy of human importation” of “elements proceeding from countries less civilized than ours” would “profoundly alter” Cuba’s “social status” and also harm the economy. The sugar mills that were in need of foreign labor were named in the article, stating that it was well known that there was no repatriation after the harvest and most imported workers stayed.26 Directed by Alfredo Quilez and Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, the campaign in Carteles was more explicit (or honest) about race than were Guerra and Araquistáin. Moreover, it was in dialogue with these authors that Roig de Leuchsenring asked whether Cuba was being “Africanized” by a Caribbean migrant labor force that was “less civilized, weaker, and easily exploitable by foreign capitalism.” The historian’s depiction of Caribbean labor migration made parallels with the “slave trade,” which “instead of being with Africa, was being made with Jamaica and Haiti.” Simultaneously, he lamented the displacement of native workers and “good migrants,” by which he meant Spaniards.27 Despite his more explicitly racialized rhetoric, Roig de Leuchsenring wanted to avoid being labeled racist by noting that the migration was “undesirable,” “not for being Jamaican, or Haitian,” or “for being of the black race,” but for a “lower civilization and inadaptability” that could not assimilate either with the “native and foreign white” or with the “black Cuban.”28 He brought

24 26 27 28

25 Araquistain, La agonía antillana, 186, 192–194. Memmi, Racism, 95–100. “La importación de antillanos,” Carteles: El semanario nacional, 10: 45, November 6, 1927, 9, italics in original. Roig de Leuchsenring, “¿Se está Cuba africanizando?” 18, 27–28. Roig de Leuchsenring, “El problema gravísimo para Cuba,” 27.

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 . Cuban “disguised” as Jamaican. Source: Carteles: El semanario nacional, November 6, 1927, 9. Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Florida, USA.

others into the debate by quoting at length from a letter that alluded to the history of black Caribbean migration, mentioned the Jobabo incident, insisted that Antilleans were undesirable, and condemned the big sugar interests.29 The graphic art in Carteles also served to communicate the national concern with both black foreign laborers and foreign sugar interests. Often located in the top heading of the magazine’s pages, the cartoons effectively communicated national concerns regarding the immigrant’s effect of excluding Cubans from the labor market and sugar latifundia, or regarding external control of Cuban lands. On November 6, 1927, one illustration included two black Cubans having a conversation, with one asking the other, “Why do you use that large smoking pipe?” The other one replied, “It so happens that in order to work I have to pass as Jamaican” (Figure 6.1).30 Another cartoon on November 27, 1927, depicted two peasants in a rural landscape with a large sugar mill in the background. One of them tells the other that without moving from Cuba, “we are stepping into foreign land,” clearly pointing to the 29 30

Roig de Leuchsenring, “Cuba, esclava de la industria azucarera,” 18, 27. Cartoon in Carteles: El semanario nacional, 10: 45, November 6, 1927, 9. In Spanish the text of the cartoon is written with elements of the presumed way of speaking of the Cuban peasant, particularly without pronouncing the final consonant in some words, and including accents to emphasize their pronunciation: “E[s] que pa[ra] podé[r] trabajá[r] tengo que pasar por jamaiquino.”

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 . Cubans blame US sugar company control for turning their country into “foreign land.” Source: Carteles: El semanario nacional, November 27, 1927, 9. Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Florida, USA.

territorial dominance of foreign sugar interests (Figure 6.2).31 Later, in January 1928, a full-page cartoon depicted foreign migrants as a stampede of animals going after two Cuban workers (male and female) who would fall off a cliff. The image not only appealed to the native laborer, but dehumanized foreign migrants, with the Haitian depicted as what appears to be a black bear and the Jamaican as a large elephant (Figure 6.3).32 Dehumanization is a common practice by nations in situations of conflict, one that facilitates the lack of empathy with the other and the perpetration of violence.33 The frame of the discussion portrayed foreign migrants as cheap labor whose surreptitious entrance through the “sub-ports” of company towns was inconvenient for Cuban national interests. This linked the fear of the racialized other (the black migrant) and “colonial exploitation” (mostly US sugar companies) in one and the same discourse against latifundia.34 In that discussion, the colonos mentioned by Ramiro Guerra were also exposing their views on Antillean migration in the national and regional

31 32 33 34

Cartoon in Carteles: El semanario nacional, 10: 48, November 27, 1927, 9. “Al borde del abismo,” Carteles: El semanario nacional, 13: 3, January 20, 1929, 10. Bandura, “Moral Disengagement,” 200. “Proyecto agrícola,” Carteles: El semanario nacional, 13: 20, May 19, 1929, 9; “Entre dos fuegos,” Carteles: El semanario nacional, 13: 22, June 2, 1929, 9; “Explotación colonial,” Carteles: El semanario nacional, 13: 26, June 30, 1929, 9.

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 . “At the edge of an abyss.” Migrants, including Haitians and Jamaicans, dehumanized as an animal stampede chases Cubans to an abyss. Source: Carteles: El semanario nacional, January 20, 1929, p. 10. Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

press. Although in favor of the repatriation of Caribbean workers, they were concerned about its effect on the labor market. The president of the Colonos de Oriente, Dr. Tomás Puyans, manifested that repatriation had to be “gradual and progressive” to guarantee the replacement of the

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Antillean by the local worker.35 Another writer, Congressman Carlos Manuel Cruz, advocated fighting the “immigration of elements of the race of color” for “the future of Cuba,” yet acknowledged that “the existence of the sugar industry was due, in great part, to the Antillean migration; the only one that can live and work in our cane colonias.” Cruz highlighted that foreign sugar corporations were solely concerned with production costs and not with the racial future of Cuba. For him, “an industry whose existence depends on the indispensable employment of manual labor of an inferior race, which has to be imported, is not a healthy industry.” He appealed to the government to solve the tensions over labor and the sugar industry in a way adequate to “the present economic needs, the interests of an industry, mostly foreign, and the racial and cultural future of our country.”36 While local planters were caught between admitting the need for foreign labor and decrying its evils – or both at the same time – at the other side of the socioeconomic spectrum (i.e., Afro-Cubans and the Cuban working class) one can also identify ambivalence regarding Caribbean migrants. During the first decades of the twentieth century, AfroCubans entered migration debates spearheaded by Cuban white elites. While black Cubans recognized the threat that foreign workers represented for the Cuban working class, they did not fully embrace the racial nature of anti-immigration discourse in the 1910s.37 The program of the PIC, for example, advocated for “free immigration of all races, as long as they contribute to the advancement and development of public wealth.”38 In 1928, a certain “Dr. Alfa” challenged leading Afro-Cuban Gustavo Urrutia to protest against Antillean migration. According to “Dr. Alfa,” if the “Haitians and Jamaicans, without moral or culture,” were lowering that of the Cuban blacks to a “disgraceful” level, why had the latter not made any protest? Urrutia, who authored a regular column in Diario de la Marina, was aware of the challenges of being an Afro-Cuban public voice, and his position was that it was useless to express an opinion that would be ignored. Nonetheless, he referred to Ramiro Guerra as someone who 35

36 37 38

“Sufrirá serios quebrantos la Zafra por la forma en que repatrian a Antillanos,” El Mundo, June 22, 1927, enclosed in H. Freeman Matthews to US Secretary of State, June 22, 19[2]7, NARA, College Park, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State–Decimal Files (hereafter GRDS-DF), 1930–1939, Box 5946, File 837.504/775. Cruz, “Editoriales: Ecos,” 2. Cruz’s position was reproduced in other Cuban newspapers as part of an ongoing debate. On that debate see Chomsky, “Barbados or Canada?,” 415–462. Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 66.

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had exhausted the theme of Caribbean migrants. Urrutia agreed with Guerra’s view relating immigration to big American sugar interests, putting the weight of responsibility on “those terrible Americans” importing foreign labor. Since Cuban blacks were not importing immigrants, Urrutia believed that expressing any opinion would be like bringing “lightning down on our heads” given the racism of US sugar planters. Urrutia’s unwillingness to state his thoughts on Antillean migration – which he surely had – illustrates the delicate position of Cuban blacks within the debate on foreign labor, and their marginalized position within Cuban society.39 His response, however, was also smart. He put the blame on US sugar planters for both the importation of migrant labor and any retaliation against him for speaking up, which saved him from direct confrontation with the white Cuban elites. For the Cuban working class, immigrants were perceived as an obstacle to labor activism and a reason behind the troubles of Cuban nationals. As the labor movement was consolidating itself by 1924 with a nationwide strike in the sugar industry, one of its demands was the end of the “traffic” in Antillean workers. One year later, the Cubans were achieving their aim of a unifying working class at a national level through the organization of the Second National Labor Congress (Segundo Congreso Obrero Nacional, or SCON) held in Cienfuegos in February 1925.40 At this venue, a statement was made avoiding an explicit position about “the restriction of the entrance of fellow immigrants.” It was understood, however, that migrants were “misled” and “ignorant” regarding the situation in Cuba and there was recognition that their presence affected those “workers waging for our subsistence” in Cuba. The SCON thus agreed to “address their peers abroad advising them not to come.”41 While the intention was not to antagonize, the workers’ congress clearly preferred foreign laborers to stay away from Cuba and leave the space to local workers. The ambivalence of some representatives of both Afro-Cubans and Cuban workers may illustrate the complexities and cautions of racial and labor activism during Machado’s presidency, but should not be generalized. Also in 1925, the Federation of Workers of Havana demonstrated against the government’s attempt to divide local and foreign 39 40 41

Urrutia, “Ideales de una raza: haitianos y jamaiquinos,” 8. Instituto de Historia del Movimiento Comunista, Historia del movimiento obrero cubano, vol. I, 218–225. Tellería Toca, Congresos obreros en Cuba, 137–138.

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workers and blamed the latter for labor conflicts. “Among workers there is no distinction,” it was declared, a position that challenged the idea of the “imported evil” that had to be “eliminated through the deportation of foreign activists.”42 And there was also the participation of Jamaican Henry Shackleton in labor congresses during that year, one that historians often cite as an example of British Antillean involvement in the Cuban labor movement.43 In terms of racial politics and interethnic solidarity, black Cubans embraced aspects of Garveyism, a movement dominated by British Caribbean islanders. McLeod has noted that Cubans participated in the meetings and listened to Marcus Garvey when he visited Cuba in 1921.44 Despite the existing language barrier, evidence indicates cross-ethnic efforts such as Cubans delivering speeches at UNIA gatherings in 1921 and the regular Spanish-language coverage in the organization’s newspaper Negro World. Cuban Garveyites such as Cayetano Monies and Felix Machado from the Cuban Chapter 71, Spanish Speaking Division, of Santiago de Cuba used the Spanish section of Negro World to praise the newspaper and express their loyalty to the movement, and Cuban participation was also registered when UNIA leader Henrietta Vinton Davis visited Cuba in 1927.45 Cubans had reservations about some ideological aspects of the Garvey movement, but historians have indicated general Afro-Cuban involvement with the Garvey movement and available testimonies of black Cuban women show their activism in the UNIA.46

42 43 44

45

46

De la Fuente, “Two Dangers, One Solution,” 43. Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation,” 96; de la Fuente, “Two Dangers, One Solution,” 43; McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 611–612; Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar, 164–165. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 143; “Marcus Garvey and Miss H. V. Davis Tell Thrilling Story of Trip to West Indies and Central America,” Negro World, July 30, 1921, 3–4. An example of the translation into Spanish of the UNIA’s declaration is found in “Declaración de derechos de los pueblos nuevos del universo,” Negro World, August 7, 1926, 9. The letter from Monies and Machado was published in “Correspondencia,” Negro World, July 24, 1926, 8. Cuban participation is documented in various articles in the UNIA’s mouthpiece. See Negro World, March 19, 1921, 8; Negro World, March 26, 1921, 8–9; Negro World, April 16, 1921, 7; Negro World, June 25, 1921, 9; Negro World, August 27, 1921, 10; Negro World, August 27, 1921, 11. The reference to Vinton Davis is from McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 144. See Guridy, “Enemies of the White Race,” 107–137; Marc C. McLeod, “Sin dejar de ser cubanos,” Rodríguez, “Marcus Garvey en Cuba,” 279–301; and Fernández Robaina, “Marcus Garvey in Cuba.” On testimonies see Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 22–26; and my account of another Cuban Garveyite women in Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’,” 11–12.

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     It only took an economic crisis and sociopolitical shake-up to solve the precarious balance of opinion and the tenuous alliances that had prevailed over the issue of Caribbean labor during the late 1920s. The changes in Machado’s rule had fomented social opposition to the migrants, and the market collapse of 1929 and subsequent depression affected their labor options. In 1929 Machado appeared to be more vocal against black migrants, favoring the “white” immigration of Spaniards, because “Cuba’s negro population was already quite as large as was desirable.”47 His racial hostility was also evident when he banned Garvey from entering Cuba in 1930, a decision that raised discussions on the political role of blacks on the island.48 The already decreasing and unstable prices of sugar during the late 1920s took a dramatic fall with the average New York price reaching 1.471 cents in 1930 and later 0.59 cents in May 1932.49 As with all socioeconomic crises, existing fissures and latent antagonisms deepened, and black foreign migrants were affected. Early in 1931 the Cuban government ordered the repatriation of Antilleans unemployed or in a destitute condition.50 Reports from Palma Soriano condemned its failed implementation because “the fields continue to be invaded by Haitians and Jamaicans,” who were a “ruinous competition” for Cuban workers. Whatever work was available in the coffee fields “should be for the Cuban and Spanish workers, who have their family and interests in Cuba.”51 The CASC’s continuous recruitment of Caribbean migrants was criticized in August 1931 by the Civic Committee of Local Defense of Puerto Padre because it took “from the native, and from others more desirable, the means of living.”52 The tone of these and other expressions regarding the repatriations was one of national

47

48 49 50 51 52

These are statements by Machado as reported by the British Embassy in Cuba in Noble Brandon Judah to US Secretary of State, May 31, 1929, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.5552/orig (M488, Roll #48). Seigle, “La esclavitud del negro.” Swerling, International Control of Sugar, 1918–41, 29. “Los obreros antillanos sin trabajo,” La Voz del Pueblo, March 31, 1931, 1. “Permanecen en Palma los inmigrantes antillanos,” Diario de Cuba, July 11, 1931, 10. “Manifiesto al País: Comité Cívico de Defensa Local, Puerto Padre, Oriente,” El Colono: Revista de agricultura y de información general, 16: 8, August 1931, 6.

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protectionism for Cubans, which was summarized in a letter to the Negro World: “Cuba is crying: ‘Cuba for the Cubans’.”53 In this new context, black Caribbean migrants had to leave. From Chapter 2 we know that there was a gradual pattern of departure for Jamaicans, one which increased after 1930. McLeod maintains that “more than 12,000 Jamaicans sought and received repatriation through the Emigrants Protection program” between 1930 and 1937.54 For those years, a total of 22,429 laborers returned from Cuba, suggesting more Jamaicans returning, independently or without British colonial assistance.55 The impact of repatriation for Jamaicans is also clear. But what happened to other British Antilleans? Following the discussion in Chapter 2, the focus below is on the experience of British Leeward and Windward Islanders. Shifting the discussion from the Jamaican–Haitian or British West Indian–Haitian comparisons, this section examines differences among British Caribbean islanders. Attention to unexplored differences within the group generalized as “British West Indians” provides a more nuanced understanding and analysis of the overall experience of Caribbean migrants in Cuba. If, as has been argued, British Caribbean migrants were in a better position than Haitians for purposes of repatriation, the question here is whether all the British Antilleans were in the same position. The lower position of Haitians in the social stratification of Republican Cuba is recognized, but the consideration of British Antilleans as a homogeneous group – with a homogeneous experience – silences fundamental differences within the black British Caribbean group. This focus will also illustrate the agency of the eastern Caribbean migrants pressing for their rights and shows that consular support was not present at all moments and for all British Antilleans in the same way. The concentration of eastern Caribbean workers in Chaparra and Delicias provides a case study for my chosen emphasis, but also permits exploration of the organization of company town plantations of the CASC and their labor management policies. These CASC plantations, and others like Tánamo and Baraguá sugar mills, followed the pattern of hegemony and control of company towns, agro-industrial complexes where “virtually everything associated with

53 54 55

“Wanted, a Government,” Negro World, May 30, 1931, 4. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 612. Proudfoot, Population Movements in the Caribbean, table 18, 77–78.

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the settlement, including the houses, store, school, and even the chapel,” is “subordinated to the business enterprise.”56 The CASC in particular was described in 1931 precisely as having “absolute control over everything,” including “free commerce of men, monopolizing trade, services of electric lighting, railroads, wharf and maritime warehouses, bakeries, ice factories, cattle raising and carwashes, telephone and sawmills.” Their territory covered “almost all the municipality of Puerto Padre, and part of Holguín, Tunas, and Gibara.”57 In the company town, the “social order derived from labor routine, isolation, and companyimposed rules and policies,” which was possible through well-organized labor recruitment and management with exclusive maritime access, combined with plantation security by government Rural Guard and private guardias jurados – mainly white in complexion.58 The CASC plantations thus could recruit and police migrants with methods similar to those of first-generation guestworker programs in other world regions.59 According to a publication promoting the company in the 1920s, the labor force of the CASC was of all nationalities, but “preferably Antillean Blacks who are not from Jamaica, but from the islands of Barbados, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Grenada, etc.”60 Other sources do not make explicit the reason for the company’s preference, but the use of Leeward and Windward Islanders may be linked to one of the features of the company town: labor control. The main implication of company town control in the CASC was that very few Leeward and Windward Islanders traveled to Cuba without a prearranged contract with a sugar mill. This was not the case for many of the Jamaicans and Haitians arriving independently through Santiago (though many Haitians had labor contracts with the UFC and the AFSC). With limited transportation to their islands other than that provided by their employer, recruited workers from the eastern Caribbean were bound to the company, and indeed subject to its control. This was a particularly sensitive position to be in as a laborer, especially during the crisis of the early 1930s. In that context, the migrants again used their practice of writing in order to call attention to their plight and seek support. From an obvious position of power, the company rejected

56 57 58 59

Davis, “Company Towns,” 119. “Manifiesto al País: Comité Cívico de Defensa Local, Puerto Padre, Oriente,” El Colono: Revista de agricultura y de información general, 16: 8, August 1931, 6. Garner, “Introduction,” 4. For the security forces, see Agricultura y zootecnia, 88–89. 60 Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land, 18. Agricultura y zootecnia, 77.

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 . Rural Guards in the lands of Chaparra sugar mill. The company also had their own private security (guardias jurados) inside the company town. Source: Album de vistas del gran central Chaparra (1910), 49.

accusations against them, avoided responsibility for any wrongdoing, and repressed protesters on their properties. These processes, illustrated below, exemplified the control and impunity of the regime of the company town. In the summer of 1930, the eastern Caribbean press reported on a group of Dominicans stranded in Cuba. Both the Dominica Chronicle and the Voice of Saint Lucia published a letter written from Chaparra in which the Dominicans requested assistance from their island government. They had tried to leave with a group who were going to Barbados, but “were rejected.” The letter commented on their experience after the end of the sugar crop, when they were informed that the company was “not going to send home anyone.” Unable to “make up a passage money” to return, they emphasized the seasonal nature of their work, which “means that after crop time starvation stares us in the face.” To further illustrate their suffering, they wrote that migrants “are worse than animals in the pasture; for they have master to call them in the night, whilst we have no one to call for us.” “A prisoner,” the letter continued, “is better of [sic] than we; for when his time has expired, he is

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let off free; but we; no, no!” The letter concluded pleading, “So, please, do help us out of this awful land of Cuba.”61 The strategy of writing seemed to have an effect, as the situation of the 300–350 stranded Dominicans was discussed in a meeting of the Legislative Council where T. E. P. Baynes, the acting administrator of Dominica, expressed that he was in touch with the British minister in Havana.62 As a result, R. B. Wood, Chaparra’s general manager, had to reply to the inquiries of the acting British consul in Santiago de Cuba regarding the Dominicans. Wood’s version of the situation in Chaparra obviously differed from that of the workers. He maintained that “at the time of sailing of our last ship for the repatriation” they “used due diligence and all the methods in [their] power” to embark “every British subject who was entitled to repatriation.” A “free kitchen” in the port was used “to lure all interested parties and assure their presence” for departure. Still, they “were obliged to round up” migrants with the guardias jurados, and some of them did not want to leave.63 In the letter, Wood claimed to be unable to enforce workers’ repatriation, while showing his power and the available resources (the guardias jurados) to guarantee their return to their islands of origin. Wood’s response apparently stopped further enquiries by British diplomats, revealing CASC’s influence. The following year, the situation was similar: laborers complained and Wood rejected the accusations. In February 1931, a collective letter by a group of “British Leeward and Windward West Indian subjects” from Chaparra was written to the British Legation in Havana. The group of 515 men and women, headed by a Dominican named Melville A. Jacobs, argued that even during the crop, they had “very little scope of maintenance” and “little or nothing to do during the dull season,” a time in which they had to “beg our daily bread.” The migrants were “suffering in this island” and had “no 61

62

63

The letter was originally published in the Dominica Chronicle, and reprinted as “British West Indians in Cuba: When Will Our People Learn?” Voice of Saint Lucia, July 26, 1930, 4. “Minutes, Legislative Council, 3rd July 1930,” Minutes of the Legislative Council of Dominica for the Year Ended 31st December, 1930 (1931), 23–24. The number of 300 Dominicans is mentioned in Voice of Saint Lucia, July 26, 1930, 4, correcting a published letter which referred to 3,000 Dominicans. The latter figure was probably for all British Caribbean islanders, not only Dominicans. It could also be a strategy of the author of the letter to call more the attention to the issue. The Minutes of the Legislative Council speak of 350 Dominicans. R. B. Wood to L. Haydock-Wilson, acting British consul, Santiago de Cuba, August 6, 1930, NA, FO 369/2191.

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possibility of obtaining passage money to leave,” which led them to appeal for the “kind consideration” of the British authorities.64 The Chaparra manager was again forced to answer the inquiries of the British Legation in early March 1931, arguing that 50 percent of the signatories in Jacobs’s letter were fictitious. Many of those in the letter, Wood argued, were not registered on the estate, and the fact that some of them were women supported his argument because of their policy of not bringing female workers (see Chapter 2). While Wood claimed that Chaparra never brought women, surviving repatriation records for the mid-1920s include British Caribbean women, and in limited cases some of them even traveled with children.65 This suggests that there were fractures in CASC’s territorial control allowing some women to come in. But if we take Wood’s 1931 words at face value, either the company fixed the situation and reaffirmed their exclusive recruitment of men or he was lying to the authorities. As in the previous year, the manager stated to the British consul that the company had to “forcibly compel the men to be repat[r]iated to take passage, using for that purpose the Rural Guards and our own private police,” illustrating the repressive apparatus of the company town. To strengthen his point, Wood’s response enclosed letters from some of the migrants who were in Jacobs’s letter, which he said were “self-explanatory.” He noted that “every British subject whom I have interviewed, desires to remain on the estate,” and added that there was “very little distress among the British workmen.” Wood directly condemned Jacobs, suggesting that he was “taking more interests in the matter” because he had been discharged from his job at Chaparra’s offices.66 But Jacobs was not alone in his denunciation. Beyond those signing his letter, it turns out that a woman, Margarite Lochart, was also writing on behalf of British Antilleans from Chaparra. On March 30, Lochart wrote to the Legislative Council of Dominica with a dramatic appeal, noting 64

65

66

M. A. Jacobs, and others, to British Legation, Havana, February 5, 1931, NA, FO 369/ 2191. The letter was also published later in “British West Indian Emigrants in Distress,” Dominica Tribune, May 21, 1931, 9. Various records for 1924 included names that could be for either men or women, but some of the cases are Sarah Lindo, Felicia Jones, Frances Quailey and two children, Jane Rebecca Francis, Alice Maud Joseph, and Martha Brick and two grandchildren, all traveling in the schooner Nueva Altagracia; and Geraldine Mills and Vivian Williams, traveling in the steamship Vedette. ANC, Fondo 302-SACT, leg. 4, exp. 45. R. B. Wood to Mr. C. N. Ezard, British Legation, Havana, March 12, 1931, NA, FO 369/ 2191. Unfortunately, the letters enclosed by Wood did not survive in the archival sources consulted.

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that starvation “has taken place, and it means death, for a thorough famine is very near at hand.” She asked a member of the Legislative Council to write to the Colonial Secretary in London “on behalf of we the Leeward and Windward West Indian subjects,” claiming that “no result seemed to [be] coming out” of the “petition to the British Consul in Havanna [sic].” “The company,” she noted, “does not want to send us home” and was keeping them in the plantation “as slaves” and enduring “great calamities.”67 Lochart was aiming her plea at London, in light of what was perceived as a lack of action from the British Consulate. Jacobs himself also moved his complaint to the center of the empire, manifesting his disagreement with Wood’s position. In a letter to the Foreign Office, he accused Wood of influencing the British consul with “false reports.” According to Jacobs, Wood had “all the British Subjects bound in misery, calamities and with starvation,” which explained those signing the document against his petition. Wood’s falsehoods, he argued, “compelled the Consul to dropped [sic] the matter.” Jacobs was questioning the consular officials in Cuba and challenging Wood’s authority. He declared that the company did not want to return the migrants, which may have well been the case in 1931 given the scarcity of labor due to the forced repatriations in other parts of the island.68 Jacobs also wrote to the Colonial Office and His Majesty the King, in petitions that were forwarded by C. E. A. Rawle, a barrister-at-law in Dominica. Rawle wrote to the island’s colonial government, referring to the “acute distress” of the migrants in Cuba, and suggested that “action should be taken by the West Indian Governments concerned to repatriate them without delay.”69 On May 15, 1931, T. R. St. Johnston, governor of the Leeward Islands, forwarded the correspondence from Jacobs and Rawle to Lord Passfield at the Colonial Office. St. Johnston agreed with Rawle on the need for some action, yet lamented that “it would be quite impossible to repatriate all these people” due to “the present state of finances of the Colony.”70 In Cuba, Wood had already identified Jacobs in his letter to the British Legation in Havana, but by 67 68 69 70

Margarite Lochart to Hon. Randolph Lockhart, March 30, 1931, in “British West Indian Emigrants in Distress,” Dominica Tribune, May 21, 1931, 9. M. A. Jacobs to Honorable Representatives [Foreign Office], May 5, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. Cecil E. A. Rawle to Governor Johnston, Government House, Dominica, May 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. T. R. St. Johnston to Lord Passfield, Colonial Office, London, May 15, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191.

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late May and early June, Jacobs’s actions seem to have gone too far for the Chaparra administrator. On the afternoon of June 12, 1931, three men showed up at Jacobs’s house telling him they had a job for him in the Hotel América in Vázquez. Jacobs said that he could not go at that moment because he did not have a trusted person with whom he could leave his son. Then one of the persons in the group known to him walked off, but “the other strange fellows” told him that he was under arrest. When he complained and asked what he had done to be arrested, they said, “‘hush up’, you have nothing to ask, for we are men sent by the authority to do so.” Jacobs asked for some proof of that authority and they showed him some badges and “their guns,” and proceeded to “arrest” him, leaving all his belongings. He was driven with his son off the Chaparra sugar mill to Sabanaso. In a letter to the Colonial Office dated June 16, 1931, Jacobs narrated these events, told how he was left “with the little infant” late at night, “knowing nobody in the place, having not a nickel in my pocket and absolutely destitute.” He declared that the men were instructed to “take me off the Chaparra’s boundary.” Apparently, the child’s presence spared him from the worst, and he was “put off the gasoline truck” and warned “not to go back to Chaparra again” because his life would be “in danger” and he would “shortly get killed.” According to Jacobs, he learned that “it was only a plot by the General Manager of the Chaparra Sugar Company,” R. B. Wood.71 The Dominica Tribune reported the news that he had “been kidnapped, and taken, by force armed estate guards [sic] from Chaparra to an unknown destination, accompanied by a motherless baby, and without clothing or money.” “This act of terrorization,” the article noted, “was undoubtedly intended to cow other British West Indian emigrants and to stifle the demand for an investigation of conditions at Chaparra.”72 The experience of repression and suffering in the CASC lands was not limited to those who wrote about it seeking assistance. With the economic crisis and the associated difficulties of the labor market, it was reported that workers from the Windward and Leeward Islands were “been victimized by the Latin policy of ‘Natives First’,” which obviously gave preference to Cubans in the distribution of jobs.73 In June 1931, Edward B. Chandler, a Barbadian who has “been accostumed [sic] to 71 72 73

Melville A. Jacobs to the Right Honorable Secretary of the Colonies, London, England, June 16, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. “The Cuban Collapse,” Dominica Tribune, July 16, 1931, 6. “Deserving Assistance,” Dominica Tribune, May 21, 1931, 9.

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handle labourers from the Islands for Chaparra Estates Co.,” was asked by some migrants to write a letter to the government of Barbados to tell about the “destitute conditions they are now in.” Chandler described how some of the workers were “naked, barefooted, and starving.”74 Early in July, about 500 British Caribbean migrants from Chaparra were transported to the Sabanaso Railroad Station (property of Chaparra Railroad Company) following an announcement of repatriation of Haitians and Jamaicans. The group, mostly Barbadians, was said to be in “a condition of complete destitution” and “entirely without means.” Neil Hone, a British subject who owned a sugar colonia in Sabanaso and was linked to the British consular service in Cuba, was called on July 8 to provide food to a group of destitute immigrants who were in the charge of the Guards. When Hone investigated the situation on July 9, he found that thirty Haitians had been taken by Captain Emilio Jomarrón, the district military chief, to be repatriated while the Windward and Leeward Islanders were left because they were neither Haitians nor Jamaicans. The advertisement said that there was going to be free transportation from Sabanaso to Santiago for repatriations of jamaiquinos and Haitians only. However, the fact that all British Caribbean migrants in Cuba were generally referred to as jamaiquinos caused confusion and the Chaparra migrants were also taken to Sabanaso. This resulted in hundreds of British Leeward and Windward Islanders stranded at the railway station.75 This outcome illustrates how the exclusive way in which eastern Caribbean migrants had been brought to the CASC sugar enclave limited their options to leave Cuba. Hone was aware that the migrants “had been badly treated and deceived” and, considering the “excited state of mind” and the possibility of “bloodshed,” he tried to convince them to return to the plantations, or what he called “the lesser of evils.” In Hone’s opinion, the military authorities in charge of the process of repatriation “acted with undue precipitation” and without having made sufficient provisions for transporting the migrants. The authorities, on the other hand, blamed the migrants themselves because the advertisement only called for Jamaicans and Haitians. However, when Hone asked what would have been the case 74 75

Edward B. Chandler to Colonial Secretary, Barbados, June 29, 1931, NA, FO 369/2248. Neil Hone (provincial administrator vice consul for Oriente), “Detailed Account of the Happenings from 8th to 13th July [1931] with Reference to the Dumping of Some 500 Men in Sabana[s]o from Chaparra” (1931), NA, FO 1001/1. The outcome is not surprising if we consider Captain Jomarrón’s previous history supporting CASC and acting against foreign workers. McGillivray, Blazing Cane, 177–178.

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if the “people happened to be Jamaicans only vague answers were returned.” He concluded that even if they had been Jamaicans they “would have been stranded.” Despite his efforts, Hone was unable to convince some of the British Antilleans to go back to Chaparra, and a group of over a hundred “declared they prefered [sic] to try and walk to Santiago rather than return.” This group managed to arrive at Santiago and were temporarily located in an immigration camp. The Cuban authorities wanted the British Consulate to accept the subsistence costs of the immigrants. The British understood that the Sabanaso incident was caused by the “carelessness, to say the least, of the Cuban authorities,” and rejected that proposal.76 The newly appointed British consul, J. J. Broderick, communicated to the Cuban Ministry of Finance that “unless this situation was handled promptly and satisfactorily we might be compelled to reconsider the whole question of Jamaican repatriation.” With this strategy, Broderick was able to obtain means to feed the migrants in Santiago, but more definite action had to be taken to deal with the migrants, later referred to by Broderick as a “group of malcontents.”77 They were obviously willing to get back to their islands of origin, but due to shortage of funds in the smaller eastern Caribbean colonies, the British position was that “there is, for the present at all events, no case for any extravagant scheme of repatriation.”78 According to the British consul the best option for the migrants was to return to Chaparra, which had “agreed to receive these men and to provide them with employment.” The company, nonetheless, admitted to the consul that their decision was because “they were anxious to please the Island Governments so that no obstacle may be placed in the way of their drawing labor from the British West Indies in future years.” Here again, the fate of the migrants was tied to their role as a transnational workforce, and they were doomed to return to the “lesser of evils,” but an evil nonetheless.79 76 77 78

79

J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Arthur Henderson, Foreign Office, July 28, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. J. J. Broderick to Most Honourable Marquess of Reading, Foreign Office, November 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/2190. The reference to lack of funds in the smaller islands is in HM Minister [J. J. Broderick] to Neil Hone, July 16, 1931, NA, FO 1001/1. Chapter 7 discusses the different policies for repatriation between the eastern Caribbean and Jamaica. The citation is from J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Arthur Henderson [Foreign Office], July 28, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. For the Sabanaso incident see Neil Hone, “Detailed Account of the Happenings from 8th to 13th July [1931] with Reference to the Dumping of Some 500 men in Sabanzo from Chaparra,” NA, FO 1001/1; and J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Arthur Henderson [Foreign Office], July 28, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191.

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 As the leading recruiter of British Leeward and Windward Islanders in Cuba, the CASC sugar complex of Chaparra and Delicias exemplifies the power of the company town. The constant description of work under the authority of Chaparra as “slavery” by the migrants themselves was no hyperbole. They were in many ways unfree laborers, people who could not “quite work when they like, do not enjoy customary civil rights and cannot appeal to justice when their rights as workers or human beings are violated.”80 The CASC exercised control over their eastern Caribbean labor force, and eventually their fate vis-à-vis other migrants. When the crisis of the depression unfolded in 1930–1931, the destiny of the Leeward and Windward Islanders brought exclusively through the ports of the CASC was tied to the company, and different from that of many Jamaicans working in other localities and under different conditions. The terrible experiences portrayed by eastern Caribbean migrants in Chaparra and Delicias during the late 1920s also shows that the 1924 White Paper did not have any immediate meaningful effect in the lives of migrants, who continued to face discrimination and abuse. The abuse illustrates that the antagonism and hostility against black Caribbean migrants persisted during the machadato in the late 1920s, and was informed by Cuban nationalist discourse exposed by intellectuals such as Guerra and Roig de Leuchsenring, but also by local labor politics of “Cuba for the Cubans.” Migrants’ agency was evident in how they faced challenges on many fronts through their own resources, writing to the consuls, their colonial governments, newspapers in their islands of origin, or British authorities at higher levels. These multiple targets entailed an explicit and implicit denunciation of the British consular service in Cuba, which was either satisfied by the explanations of Cuban managers such as Wood of the CASC, or quite simply did not care enough about the fate of “British objects.” The following chapter examines precisely the changes and conflicts within the consular service in Cuba during the same period (1925–1933) and the impact they had on the experiences of Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders.

80

Baud, “Sugar and Unfree Labour,” 304.

7 Transactions in Colonial Caribbean Governments and Consular Policy, 1925–1933

Another factor drawing a line between the experiences of British Leeward and Windward Islanders and those of Jamaicans were the changes in British colonial and consular policies during the late 1920s. First, colonial island administrations in the Caribbean took decisions that affected migrants. In light of previous experiences with those who went to Cuba, the British Colonial Office and the island governments took measures to control emigration from their islands. This was, simultaneously, an attempt to keep a labor force in the colony. Second, there was a reorganization of British consular establishments and changes in consular policy in Cuba. Three factors triggered the Foreign Office’s rethinking of the consular service: the diminishing levels of migration to Cuba, the overwhelming amount of work related to British Antilleans, and the need to liberate the staff for other duties and broader responsibilities. This chapter examines these processes and their effect on British Antilleans, especially on eastern Caribbean migrants.

    Knowing about the 1924 White Paper and the ordeal of British representatives in Cuba regarding British Antilleans, the colonial island governments took their own measures. The Legislative Council of St. Vincent considered that if diplomatic representations failed “to produce the desired result” on behalf of migrants, they must “take power to restrict 175

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or prohibit the emigration of labourers.”1 Actions in this direction, they argued, were to be “taken by all West Indian Colonies so that the result would be a boycott of Cuba.”2 But a bill on the matter was not passed by the council until 1927. However, the measure was opposed by the colonial administrator, CMG Robert Walter, understanding that the government “had no desire to prevent the labourers from selling his labor in the best market.” Walter had been colonial administrator in Dominica during the 1921 crisis and was familiar with the regional movement of labor to Hispanic territories.3 In his opinion, however, if workers were leaving, the government “should not have to pay the cost of the repatriation of any of these emigrants who might fall into distress in foreign countries.” The colonial administrator resented that “people who worked in Cuba cutting canes were too big to do similar work here” in St. Vincent. He explained that the movement to “Cuba was a craze; the men were seized by the desire to see these places and away they went.” Walter thought that the government should not “interfere with the liberty of the subject,” but measures had to be taken for their repatriation and the maintenance of dependents. Another council member interpreted the emigration in similar terms as those used by Walter (“desire,” “craze”) when he expressed that workers leaving for Cuba “possessed the roaming spirit and the desire to pick up a few words of Spanish with which they endeavored to impress their friends and relatives on their return home.” Somehow dismissing the larger economic reasons for emigration, the council member emphasized the migrant’s aim of bringing “new caps and brightly coloured shirts and handkerchief” from their trip. He maintained that “beyond such gaudy articles of apparel they brought back

1

2 3

“The Emigrants Protection Ordinance, 1924,” in Minutes of the Legislative Council of St. Vincent (Adjourned Second Meeting), Friday 18th January, 1924, at 2 p.m., Minutes of the Legislative Council of the Half Year Ended, 30th June 1924 (1924), OPI/6, National Archives, Kingstown, St. Vincent (hereafter NA-StV). C. M. G. Robert Walter, administrator, “Executive Council [Minutes], Saturday, 19th January 1924,” in Executive Council, 1924 (1924), NA-StV, OP7/28 (91002–11/4). “Minutes of the Legislative Council of St. Vincent, Thursday, 17th November 1927, at 11 a.m.,” in Minutes of the Legislative Council, 1927 (1927), 5–6, NA-StV, OPI/6. Walter had also served as colonial secretary in British Honduras, where he was vigilant regarding the activism of the Garvey movement and the dissemination of Negro World. See Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI, 152–154, 257–258; Vol. XII, 52, 66.

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nothing with them.” In fact, they “had returned home stricken with fever and without a cent in their pockets.”4 Similar debates had been taking place in the Leeward Islands. The Emigrant Labourers Protection Act of 1924 established that colonial governors could prohibit emigration to a country once established that conditions there “would be detrimental to the labourers . . . by reason of their ill[-]treatment or otherwise.”5 But neither prohibitions nor emigration through “licensed persons” for recruiting labor were stopping emigration trends in islands such as Antigua, where departures for Cuba and the Dominican Republic were frequent. In 1927, the authorities complained that it had “become a common practice for labourers to leave (say) Antigua nominally for St Kitts” and then they would “slip away” to other destinations. It was “almost impossible to control their movements after they have left the Colony,” colonial officials argued.6 In 1927, the government in Antigua considered the “treatment of the labourers in foreign countries,” their “transport to and from” these places, and the “maintenance of their dependants who remain in this Colony” to be “problems” of “greatest importance.” The governor had received reports from the British consul general in Havana “that at least one large estate is willing to co-operate with this Government [of Antigua] in regard to the treatment, etc., of labourers.” A proposal was made to send the Attorney General of Antigua, H. H. Trusted, as representative of that island to inquire into the conditions of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.7 Edward Baynes, the Colonial Secretary for the Leeward Islands, endorsed the idea of the mission to Cuba and other islands, adding that it “would be infinitely better if Mr. Trusted could represent all the West Indian Colonies interested, instead of the Leeward Islands only.” A “closer federation or at any rate closer association among the West Indian Colonies” was desirable to deal with the matter.8 A concerted action was unfeasible because of the realities and interests of the various 4 5

6

7 8

“Minutes of the Legislative Council of St. Vincent, Thursday, 17th November 1927, at 11 a.m.,” in Minutes of the Legislative Council, 1927 (1927), 5–6, NA-StV, OPI/6. General Legislative Council, Leeward Islands, The Emigrant Labourers Protection Act, 1924: Leeward Islands No. 9 of 1924, Leeward Islands Acts, 1924, British Library (hereafter BL), C.S.F. 200/3 (2) H. H. Trusted, Attorney General, Antigua, “Emigration of Labourers [Memorandum to Eustace Fiennes]” (April 13, 1927), NA, Colonial Office Papers (hereafter CO), 318/ 390/4. Gov. Eustace Fiennes to Right Hon. Secretary of State for the Colonies, May 10, 1927, NA, CO 318/390/4. Edw. Baynes to My Dear Darnley, June 12, 1927, NA, CO 318/390/4.

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islands. For example, while the government of Trinidad and Tobago emphasized that their workers were going to Venezuela, the colonial administrators in Grenada were unwilling to “interfere with the liberty of the subject,” had dismissed a contentious bill imposing fees on labor contractors, and were satisfied with the available emigration ordinances.9 Despite the discussions among colonial officials in the British Caribbean, migration to Cuba continued, and black British subjects remained a critical labor supply for the Cuban sugar industry. In January 1927, authorities in the eastern Caribbean communicated regarding an agent recruiting for Cuba who “collected about 40 labourers for last year’s crop in Antigua without any agreement, or other formality.”10 In February, the La Belle Sauvage left Dominica with workers to Cuba, and other workers were leaving the island for the Dominican Republic.11 Reports in Dominica maintained that the island was “very thinly populated” and that there was a need for “labour coming in instead of going out.”12 In 1928, the Dominica Tribune reported on “1,000 men and boys” leaving for Cuba and lamented, “we are unable to hold our labouring population.”13 Although immigration had certainly diminished in the 1920s, the number of British Antilleans living in Cuba during and after those years was significant. A May 1926 letter from the British Consulate in Santiago de Cuba to the Colonial Secretary in Jamaica estimated the number of British Antilleans as 90,000 in total divided between 75,000 Jamaicans, 8,000 Barbadians, 2,000 Grenadians, 1,500 Trinidadians, 1,500 from St. Vincent, 1,000 from St. Lucia and Martinique, and 500 from St. Kitts. Confirming the increasing migration trend of Haitians for that decade (Chapter 2), the report also noted that there were some 100,000 Haitians with “no less than 3 unofficial representatives.”14 In any case, the issue is that there were foreign inhabitants from the British Caribbean who could

9

10

11 12 13 14

W. E. Jackson, acting governor, Trinidad and Tobago, to Right Hon. Lieutenant Colonel L. S. Amery, MP, September 22, 1927, NA, CO 318/390/4; “Grenada and Emigration,” Dominica Tribune, October 1, 1927, 14; F. S. James, governor, Government House, Grenada, to Right Hon. L. S. Amery, MP, October 29, 1927, NA, CO 318/390/4. E. C. Eliot, acting administrator, Dominica, to the governor of the Leeward Islands, Antigua, January 29, 1927, Administrator’s Office, Dominica, despatches to the governor, #26/1483/26, p. 994, NAD. “De Omnibus Rebus,” Dominica Tribune, February 5, 1927, 11; “Emigration,” Dominica Tribune, February 5, 1927, 13–14. “De Omnibus Rebus,” Dominica Tribune, February 5, 1927, 11. “Cuba Emigration,” Dominica Tribune, January 14, 1927, 8. British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, to A. S. Jelf, colonial secretary, Jamaica, May 19, 1926, JARD, 1B/5/77/150 [1926].

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potentially leave at any point or who were – as discussed in Chapter 2 – gradually leaving Cuba. Colonial authorities in Jamaica effectively noticed the departure pattern, which led to the appointment of W. U. G. S. Ewen as their secretary of immigration. Attached to the British Legation, Ewen’s assignment was to look after the interests of Jamaicans and their complaints. No one could do the same for the eastern Caribbean islands because the 1927 proposal to send Mr. Trusted had been deemed “unnecessary.”15 Since no one could deal with migrants from the eastern Caribbean, and given that Mr. Ewen had “also to deal with a large number of British subjects from the other West Indian Islands,” there was an attempt after 1928 to make him into a “West Indian Secretary for Emigration in Cuba,” rather than exclusively Jamaican.16 In 1929, the Jamaican governor, R. E. Stubbs, inquired into the move to expand Ewen’s role, but the eastern Caribbean islands decided, in “united action,” not to accept the proposal. That was in line with the previous decision regarding Mr. Trusted in 1927. But in addition to the different island realities discussed on that occasion, it was also claimed that the number of migrants from those islands was “small” or “negligible.”17 For some eastern Caribbean colonial governments and administrators, “the number of natives of the Windward Islands who are still in Cuba is probably very small indeed.”18 That premise was accompanied by another: that the various ordinances regarding emigration were working, stopping or reducing the flow to Cuba. Both premises were not necessarily true. It is not clear how the “small” number of migrants was determined in 1929, but the years immediately before that assessment witnessed frequent emigration from the Windward Islands. Official colonial reports indicated that for 1927 a “fair number of St. Lucia labourers [were] 15 16 17

18

F. S. James, governor, Government House, Grenada, to Right Hon. L. S. Amery, MP, October 29, 1927, NA, CO 318/390/4. L. S. Amery to Governor Eustace Fiennes, Antigua, Leeward Islands, March 14, 1928, NA, CO 318/390/4. Acting Governor, Windward Islands, Grenada [Ferguson] to Governor of Jamaica, August 19, 1929; Acting Governor, Trinidad, to Governor of Jamaica, August 22, 1929; Administrator of the government, Bahamas, to Governor of Jamaica, August 29, 1929; Lieutenant General, Governor and Commander in Chief, Bermuda, to Governor of Jamaica, September 6, 1929, JARD, IB/5/77/140 [1928]. Acting Governor, Windward Islands, Grenada [Ferguson] to Governor of Jamaica, August 19, 1929; JARD, IB/5/77/140 [1928]; R. E. Stubbs, governor of Jamaica, to Right Hon. Lord Passfield, secretary of state for the colonies, London, March 13, 1930, NA, CO 318/398/8.

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recruited periodically for work in Cuba and Santo Domingo,” and the St. Vincent report similarly noted that “a considerable amount of emigration takes place annually” to the same two destinations.19 Equally, for 1928, St. Vincent reported that “emigration is on the increase” with “[l]arge numbers” going to Cuba and other destinations. High wages in Cuba and Santo Domingo were attractive for agricultural workers of the island.20 Barbados also indicated emigration to Cuba in its 1928–1929 colonial report.21 Dominica had its share in 1930 with 350 laborers in Cuba in “distress” troubling the Legislative Council. The Dominica Tribune reported more generally on a total of “75,000 British West Indians temporarily resident in Cuba,” of whom 35,000 were employed in the sugar industry.22 The combined policy of eastern Caribbean colonial governments would seal the fate of those allegedly “small” migration flows to Cuba, but also of thousands of non-Jamaican British Antilleans who were still in Cuba.23

   Parallel to the developments in the British colonial Caribbean regarding emigration and their migrants, there were changes in the British consular service in Cuba. The protagonists of the diplomatic saga that led to the White Paper were no longer serving in Cuba. Inspections were made of the different vice consulates around the island in 1925 and T. J. Morris was appointed new consul in Havana. He engineered the post of “secretary of immigration” to assist in “smoothing out the difficulties caused to the legation and the Cuban authorities by the numerous complaints from British West Indians working on the Cuban plantations.” Morris seemed aware of the difficulties that “at one time threatened to cause an interruption of the good diplomatic relations” between Britain and Cuba.24 19 20 22

23

24

St. Vincent: Report for 1927, 14. BL; St. Lucia: Report for 1927, 17, BL. 21 St. Vincent: Report for 1928, 13, BL. Barbados: Report for 1928–29, 36, BL. “Minutes, Legislative Council, 3rd July 1930,” Minutes of the Legislative Council of Dominica for the Year Ended 31st December, 1930 (1931), 23–24, NA-D; “35,000 West Indians on Less than $7 Per Week in Cuba: Total Number Resident in Island 75,000,” Dominica Tribune, May 25, 1929, 6. Only for 1929 and 1930 did the Colonial Reports indicated “no immigration labour,” and St. Vincent declared “large numbers” returning from Cuba and elsewhere only in 1930. See Leeward Islands: Report for 1929–30, 9, BL; St. Vincent: Report for 1930, 15, BL. J. R. Murray to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, June 5, 1930, NA, FO 362/2130.

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Financed by the government of Jamaica, the secretary of immigration served to alleviate the consuls working directly under the Foreign Office. Right from the start of his appointment, Consul Morris began what was labeled a “new policy of conciliation” that “will eventually reduce the volume of complaints from Jamaicans, and enable the Consul-General to devote at least half of his time to consular work.”25 In 1930, after some time in his post, Morris himself summarized the situation of British Antilleans in Cuba, noting that, after the problems of 1924, “A modus vivendi has now been established, and worked successfully with a minimum of trouble, for five years.”26 It is evident from what was discussed in the previous chapter that there was another side to the alleged “modus vivendi.” Even with McNeill’s exposition in the British Parliament about improved conditions, the correspondence of the migrants themselves tells a different story.27 Officials in the Leeward Islands continued to be concerned with Caribbean migratory crossings in “dangerously overcrowded” ships that were deemed to be incurring “criminal action.” A ship going to Barbados with passengers is said to have arrived to its destination “only [through] the mercy of the high powers.”28 Mr. Trusted in Antigua understood that there were “no means of preventing overcrowding of ships bringing labourers back.” The government in Barbados is alleged to have tackled the issue through Act Number 5 of 1927 and stated that other islands should enact similar legislation to put an end to passenger overcrowding.29 On land, the precarious position of British Antilleans in the labor market continued throughout the late 1920s, reaching even the British Parliament.30 25 26 27

28 29

30

T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, May 4, 1925, NA, FO 369/ 1869. Mr. Morris to Foreign Office, January [6], 1930, NA, FO 369/2129. McNeill’s report is reported in “Los jamaiquinos están recibiendo ahora un buen trato en Cuba,” El Camagüeyano, June 11, 1925, 1, 2. The administrator of Dominica reported in 1924 that returning workers from Cuba “spoke of fair treatment” on their arrival. E. C. Eliot, administrator, Dominica, to Acting Governor, Leeward Islands, Antigua, September 8, 1924, Administrator’s Office, Dominica, despatches to governor, #320/1408, p. 1803, NA-D. A. H. Johnson, agent, harbour and shipping master, to Acting Colonial Secretary, July 7, 1926, JARD, 1B/5/77/17 [1926]. H. H. Trusted, Attorney General, Antigua, “Emigration of Labourers [Memorandum to Eustace Fiennes],” April 13, 1927, underlining in original; W. C. F. Robertson, governor of Barbados, to Right Hon. L.C.M.S. Amery, MP, December 20, 1927, NA CO 318/390/4. On the labor conditions of British Antilleans, see, for example, “No Employment in Cuba for West Indians,” Dominica Tribune, January 14, 1928, 9; Parliamentary Debates,

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For the migrants arriving or living in Cuba, the intertwined antiblack and anti-immigrant discourses of people like Araquistáin, Guerra, and Roig de Leuchsenring had their ugly equivalence in the ground. In 1927, Barbadian Evans Pile, a war veteran of the British West Indies Regiment who had been hired to work in Chaparra, was allegedly abused by Cuban police who told him, “All Barbadians are Bad men and Bad people,” and put him into jail for a crime he did not commit. He was executed in Santiago the next year.31 In 1928, Marcus Garvey was not allowed to enter Cuba because his presence was considered “prejudicial.” Information on Garvey’s imprisonment and recent release in the United States was provided by the Cuban consul in Jamaica, influencing the ban on the panAfrican leader.32 But beyond the UNIA leader, Cuban politicians were concerned about the organization’s followers. In 1929, President Machado was inquiring into the closing of UNIA branches in Cuba, affecting an important social space for British Antilleans.33 With failed repatriations and incidents like that of Sabanaso, by 1930 it was reported that conditions in the country had gone “from bad to worse,” with Jamaicans “who had settled in Cuba” becoming “destitute” and seeking repatriation. A total of 2,049 were repatriated in 1930 alone, according to official records.34 It was in this context, as Cuba was undergoing an economic debacle and migrants were suffering from it, that the British consular service in Cuba was restructured. The British consul, J. J. Broderick, understood that after the Sabanaso incident, the situation in the province of Oriente regarding repatriation was “for the time being liquidated,” or solved. He took the opportunity to make an assessment of the distribution of consular establishments in Cuba. The newly appointed consul of Santiago, Francis O’Meara,

31

32

33 34

House of Commons Official Report (Monday 26 November to Thursday 20 December 1928), 2625–2626. On this case, see Evans Pile, Santiago de Cuba Prison, to War Office, London, March 30, 1928; Evans Pile, Santiago de Cuba Prison, to War Office, June 1, 1928; W. C. F. Robertson, governor, Barbados, to L. C. M. S. Amery, Colonial Office, June 27, 1928; Mr. Ezard, British Legation, Havana, to Acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, August 21, 1928; Charles Burt and others to the British War Office, November 24, 1928, NA, FO 369/2022. Armando de León, Cuban consul in Kingston, Jamaica, to Rafael Martínez Ortiz, Secretary of State, Havana, Cuba, January 26, 1928, ANC, SE, leg. 215, no. 2921. See also provincial government of Oriente to Secretary of Government, March 20, 1928, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 377, no. 17. McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 154; Guridy, “Enemies of the White Race,” 110–132. Jamaica: Report for 1930, 7. BL.

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concluded that there was “no justification whatever for a career post at Santiago” and his advice was to reduce the post to an unsalaried one (i.e., vice consulate). For him, the correspondence was “of the petty miscellaneous type,” dealing “mainly with the troubles of non-Jamaican West Indians.” O’Meara expressed disregard for the writings of “these people” on “incredibly trifling matters”: family quarrels, living costs, and Cuban culture. Besides the “miscellaneous,” the decision was also based on the fact that the Jamaican secretary of immigration relieved the “Santiago Consul of nearly all the work of any complexity connected with West Indians.”35 Writing to the Foreign Office, Broderick agreed with O’Meara’s conclusions, adding that “a large body of British West Indian Negro labourers” in Cuba had an “inveterate tendency to get into trouble,” “quarrel with their employers,” and “fall foul of the Cuban Rural Guard.” The task of dealing with them required a “tactful energy” to safeguard “the interest of the West Indians” while keeping relations with the Cubans “on a friendly footing.” Broderick thought that “unsalaried consular officers” were sufficient to deal with ordinary complaints, but there were situations of “unusual difficulty” like that of Sabanaso, for which none of the officials had the “kind of ability that is required.” Other problems “constantly occurring amongst the West Indian immigrants” included that they were “cheated and defrauded, maltreated, and thrown into gaol and sometimes murdered.” He considered British Antilleans to be “turbulent and vain” people who “resort to acts of fraud, provocation and violence,” to then “demand protection of the nearest consul.” The consul put the weight of the blame on the migrants themselves.36 Broderick’s strategy was to follow the recommendations of O’Meara’s memorandum and use the budget in Santiago to have “a good man” in Havana who could be deployed “to the critical spot at the critical moment.” The proposed changes were “justified by the serious difficulties, controversies and bad blood” as the British Legation strived “to protect the lives and interests of British West Indians against wanton attacks” or obtain compensation for lost lives and other abuses. “My own aim,” he remarked, “has been to bring about a change in the attitude

35 36

Francis O’Meara, “Memorandum,” November 4, 1931, enclosed in J. J. Broderick to Marquess of Reading [Foreign Office], November 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/2190. British consular perceptions of migrants as “prone to lawlessness” and their tendency to appeal to the consuls appeared in the Jamaican archival sources consulted by Knight, “Jamaican Migrants,” 105.

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of the Cuban police and judges and other provincial officials towards British West Indians.”37 Broderick’s policies appear to have been well received by his superiors and 1932 started with the downgrading of the consular post in Santiago, but also with the closure of vice consulates in eastern Cuba. After a “careful” review, Consul Broderick recommended that the Foreign Office abolish the unsalaried consular posts at Nuevitas, Antilla, and Camagüey, all localities with significant presence of British Caribbean migrants. The Nuevitas vice consulate had been established “to take care of the needs of the British Negro subjects” working in the nearby estates, but since the “importation of British West Indian labour ceased” the post had no justification. The post in Antilla was not considered “essential” because British Antilleans were “drifting away” from the locality. About Mr. M. F. E. Kezar, the vice consul at Camagüey, Broderick believed he was “very active in the interests of the West Indians” but only due to “a personal urge to rid himself of superfluous energy, or a personal desire” for self-promotion in the position. Since Kezar did not bring cases to “any useful conclusion” and they were forwarded to Havana, there was no need to have a vice consul “merely to look for difficulties to pass on to higher authority.”38 At Havana, Broderick ended up having two vice consuls, and a proconsul to support his work. Much like some colonial governments taking decisions based on diminishing emigration, the decisions by Foreign Office personnel in Cuba were taken based on the cessation of immigration and the existence of the secretary of immigration for Jamaica. Again, these premises did not recognize that, first, irrespective of immigration figures there were communities of British Antilleans making a life in Cuba, and second, some of these communities were non-Jamaicans. The consul’s understanding was that “[g]enuine cases would, in any event, gravitate” to Havana “sooner or later.” Replying to concerns from the Foreign Office with regard to the disadvantages of abolishing the Camagüey post, Broderick argued that there were “very few white British subjects” there and “no one who would be willing” to take the position. He recognized the “large number of Jamaicans in the outlying districts”

37 38

J. J. Broderick to Marquess of Reading [Foreign Office], November 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/ 2190. J. J. Broderick to the Right Hon. Sir John Simon [F.O.], February 3, 1932, NA, FO 369/ 2247. Vice Consul Kezar was Canadian, married to a Cuban woman, and served as president and manager of a US land company, the Trust and Guarantee Company.

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of Camagüey but maintained that they were served by the consular agent in Santiago de Cuba.39 Thus British Antilleans needing access to a consular official would have to go to Santiago de Cuba, at a time when their numbers in Camagüey Province were still estimated in the thousands. In 1933, a year after the abolition of consular posts, the numbers ranged from “20 to 30 thousand British West Indians of non-Jamaican origin.”40 A report around the same time roughly agrees with those numbers (including the 10,000 difference), estimating that “there were still from 40/50,000 British West Indians” in Cuba; roughly half were Jamaicans (20,000) and the others were Barbadians (15,000) and from the “various other islands” (5,000, or more if we consider the larger figure). The report maintained that the “Cuban authorities clearly want to be rid” of the migrants, and that only the Jamaicans had been repatriated.41 Here again, eastern Caribbean islanders would be at a disadvantage in the context of rising hostility and the economic crisis of the early 1930s. With different policies in each island colony, and with the ongoing transactions in the consular service, the division between Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders became more salient. In June 1932, Barbadian Edward B. Chandler wrote to the Colonial Office as well as to Barbados, on behalf of his fellow British Antilleans, warning about “hazardous” conditions for migrants leading to the repatriation of “other Nationalities, every one of them,” except “our people.”42 Consul Broderick’s own report to the Foreign Office reflects the activism of British Antilleans in the face of their conditions, and against the closing of consular posts. He reported to the Foreign Office that once “it became known that the vice-consulate at Camagüey was about to be abolished, a few groups of British West Indian Negroes” began writing to him. The migrants voiced their “fear that the closing of the post would leave them without protection or assistance in their difficulties,” which they also expressed in letters to the Foreign Office and the island governments. Broderick’s account puts in evidence the persistent strategy of British Antilleans, directing their concerns to different offices and individuals to secure attention. 39 40 41 42

J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], NA, FO 369/2247. Denis Capel Dunn to Foreign Office, “Memorandum,” May 28, 1933, NA, FO 369/ 2307. H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. John Simon [Foreign Office], July 31, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307. Edward B. Chandler to Secretary of State of the Colonies, London, England, June 11, 1932, NA, FO 369/2248.

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Vice Consul C. E. Gedge received “deputations of Negro labourers from Jamaica” expressing their “misgivings” about the closure of the Camagüey post.43 Upon visiting the location, Gedge had some 200 British Caribbean migrants waiting for him, and it was only through Vice Consul Kezar that a smaller delegation was interviewed. A group of twelve Jamaicans expressed their “regret at the closing of the Vice-Consulate, and a warm appreciation of Mr. Kezar’s work in protecting the interests of the British Caribbean community in Camagüey Province.” Since the men were Jamaicans, Gedge pointed out that they had “the Secretary of Immigration, an officer of their own Government, to look after their interests.”44 A Grenadian by the name of Alexander Henry, said to be “already known by correspondence to the Legation and Consulate-General,” also presented his concerns to Gedge. Henry spoke on behalf of the “nonJamaican British West Indians,” which he estimated at 5,500, and expressed that the elimination of the vice consulate at Camagüey would leave them without protection in that vicinity.45 Henry also asked about repatriation for this particular group. Gedge was only able to tell Henry that the issue had been raised with the governments of the islands but “that only [in] a few instances had small sums [of money] been placed at our disposal for repatriation purposes.” Gedge reported that Henry “proposed to write a protest to the Legation, to the Governments of all the British West Indian Islands except Jamaica, and to the Foreign Office and war Office [sic] in London.” According to Gedge, two other Jamaicans who also criticized the elimination of the vice consulate had made “a special point of the fact that a great deal of animosity existed on the part of the Cubans against the British West Indians in Camagüey Province.” He attributed these feelings and the preference given to Cuban nationals to the “severe economic depression.” When Gedge confronted them 43 44

45

J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/ 2247. Extracts from the memorandum submitted to HM Minister by Mr. Vice Consul Gedge, May 10, 1932, enclosed in J. J. Broderick to John Simon, FO, June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247. Vice Consul Gedge considered Henry’s figure of 5,500 non-Jamaicans as an overestimation for Camagüey only. Vice Consul Kezar agreed, but said that the figures “might be more nearly correct for the Provinces of Camagüey and Oriente together.” Later reports of nearly 20,000 non-Jamaican British Antilleans in the 1940s prove Henry’s estimates to have been more accurate. See Annex No. 3: “Estimated Number of British West Indians Desiring Repatriation (excluding Havana),” in M. E. Vibert to HM Principal, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, May 25, 1946, NA, FO 1001/1.

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saying that perhaps the animosity was “directed against all foreigners irrespective of nationality,” one of them, T. A. Moody, “still insisted that it was directed mainly against British West Indians.” The other Jamaican, J. P. Baxter, from Ciego de Ávila, “insisted that they were regarded with more antipathy than other foreigners by the Cubans” because “they would not tolerate such treatment as was, for example, meted out to the Haitians.” After those interviews, the British official concluded in his memorandum that “the fears expressed by the British West Indians of the local Cuban authorities are not altogether without foundation.” In reference to the comments of A. W. L. White, the spokesperson of the first delegation of migrants, and based on his experience in Cuba, Gedge wrote, “I do not suppose that his accounts of cases of harsh and brutal treatment by the Rural Guard and corruption in the local courts were much exaggerated.” But prejudice transpired in Gedge’s preconceptions concerning black migrants, through his amazement at White’s delegation: “These twelve men, and their spokesman in particular, seemed quite intelligent, and capable of discussing their problems reasonably.” About the spokesperson, he added that he “was somewhat impressed by the moderate and rational way in which the Jamaican A. W. L. White, put forward the view of the deputation which he headed.”46 But while Gedge gave some credit to the migrants, Consul Broderick looked at them with reservations. He thought that the “danger of maltreatment of coloured West Indian subjects by the Cuban police and rural guards” had been “somewhat overstated” in the Camagüey consular post and also in the memorandum submitted by Gedge. For Broderick, “the West Indian Negro . . . scarcely ever loses an opportunity of bringing his grievances, actual or anticipated or imaginary,” to British officials. He believed that the “writings of protests and the receipts of letters in reply” fed the migrant’s “sense of self-importance.” It was even suggested that the retiring Camagüey vice consul, Mr. Kezar, “would not discourage the West Indians in the vicinity from pressing for his reinstatement.” In a long letter that Broderick had to write to justify his closure policies, he acknowledged the problems faced by migrant workers but argued that some of the larger estates allowed the migrants to remain in the plantations. He singled out Chaparra, where, even with the exodus of 46

Extracts from the memorandum submitted to HM Minister, J. J. Broderick, by Vice Consul Gedge, May 10, 1932, enclosed in J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247.

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workers in 1931, “the conditions of the West Indian labourers could not be said to be desperate.” The consul acknowledged challenges during the “slack season” and a “hunger problem” among the Caribbean migrants. Based on the Jamaican repatriation scheme, he thought that a solution was for colonial governments to allocate funds for repatriation.47 But as was presented before, colonial governments were neither prepared to provide funds for such an enterprise, nor willing to upgrade the Jamaican secretary of immigration. As part of Broderick’s policies, he pressed the Cuban government to improve the treatment of the migrants by the Rural Guards and the army. In 1932, the military General Staff called on the members of the different branches of the armed forces to “remember that they must only make use of their arms when there is reasonable need to do so” and that “persuasion should be used as far as possible.”48 Broderick thought that the “complete absence of serious complaints during the past four or five months” was due to that directive. His language, and his perception of the immigrants, implied that many of their grievances were not genuine and that they might even be “imaginary.” In his view, instances of “serious maltreatment” would arrive “sooner or later” at the legation.49 As a matter of fact, in the crisis of the early 1930s, the complaints of the British Antilleans did reach Havana. In September 1932, Broderick reported to the colonial government of the British Leeward Islands, Every day destitutes [sic] natives of the British West Indies colonies come to His Majesty’s Consulate-General in Havana and to the consulate in the provinces begging to be sent home and have, unhappily, to be told that no funds exist for the repatriation or even for the temporary relief of any but Jamaicans.50

Since 1931 the British officials in Cuba had inquired into the possibility of repatriating Leeward and Windward Islanders, but plans remained “purely tentative.” C. N. Ezard from the Havana British Legation made an assessment of the impact of repatriating non-Jamaican British Antilleans, and lamented their situation, in contrast to the “smooth operation 47 48

49 50

J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247. A. Herrera and E. F. Torres, Circular No. 7, of the Military General Staff, Republic of Cuba, March 11, 1932, enclosed in J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247. J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247. J. J. Broderick to Hon. Edward Baynes, acting governor of the Leeward Islands, BWI, September 6, 1932, NA, FO 369/2248.

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 . “Writings of protest.” Extract of handwritten letter from migrant denouncing abuses and lack of consular support: “. . . in 1941 between my Self and a Cuban Coffee proprietor by the name of Francisco Maturell [sic] on the 26 of August in the Said year that I was badly treated by Both him and his son wounding me materially and Broked [sic] one of my hand[s.] Then I had to appeal then to the Counsel [sic] who took little or no interests in the Cause of a British West Indian in this Country. I have actually [been] thrown in the Streets of the Town Hospital . . .” Source: James Sylvester to Foreign Office, December 17, 1944, NA, FO 371/44438.

of the Jamaican scheme.”51 But by 1932 it was the British authorities in London that were more concerned, certainly because of official reports from consuls, but possibly because of the letters that the migrants themselves were writing to the center of the empire. However, Broderick warned about the “heavy costs of repatriating individuals and families to the more distant islands.” He suggested allocating some funds for “relief of the worst cases of distress.”52 When the Colonial Office in London considered the allocation of funds, S. McNeill Campbell thought that more information about Broderick’s plan was needed. McNeill also

51 52

Mr. C. N. Ezard to Right Hon. Arthur Henderson [Foreign Office], June 10, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247.

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asked the Foreign Office whether there was a “legal instrument binding the Cuban Government in any way to provide for destitute resident aliens.”53 The response from the Foreign Office was not encouraging. Estimates of population were inaccurate “and subject to wide seasonal fluctuations” and “economic conditions,” plus there was no law that would force the Cubans to assist in the relief of British Caribbean islanders.54 While Jamaicans were lucky enough to have at least some repatriation strategy that appeared to work, migrants from the eastern Caribbean were left to their own resources.

 Interrogating British migration policies in the Caribbean colonies and the consular transactions in Cuba exposes the different experiences of Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders. What surfaced during the crisis of 1921 was obvious in the 1930s, with social actors themselves making the distinctions in their proposed policies or their “writings of protest.” Budgetary considerations influenced the policies of eastern Caribbean governments. The notion that diminishing migration numbers erased the needs of migrants, or their existence in their chosen destination, was also behind both the decisions in the islands and the downgrading and restructuring of consular posts. In both contexts, in Cuba and in the islands, British authorities failed to assess the situation of the migrants, relying more on migration data for their policies, rather than on what their own head count showed about British Antillean’s significant presence in Cuba. Broderick’s consular policies in Cuba also reveal some of the underlying prejudices impacting diplomatic representation: the holder of a consular post had to be a white British subject and black British subjects’ complaints were bogus or did not merit attention. Paradoxically, one subtext about the consul’s argumentation on the character of the “West Indian Negro” is their agency, as they mobilized against the closure of consular establishments. By complaining about the migrants’ “writings of protests” and their practice of sending letters to “every official whose name and address [they] can secure,” Broderick identified precisely one of the most important survival strategies of British Antilleans in the Cuban

53 54

S. McNeill Campbell to D. V. Kelly [Foreign Office], June 8, 1932, NA, FO 369/2248. R. Craige to S. McNeill Campbell, July 26, 1932, NA, FO 369/2248.

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environment.55 Their letters were an important tool in seeking assistance and were certainly “writings of protest” against the consuls in Cuba for not providing the support they believed they were entitled to. Writing to the center of authority in London (Foreign or Colonial Office) elevated the protest of the migrants over the level of consuls or colonial administrators, prompting some kind of action. Migrants such as Melville Jacobs had epistolary journeys to virtually every bureaucratic corner of the British Empire, writing to every place he could, and calling attention to his case – and to the abuses of the CASC. It is not surprising that Jacobs identified his actions as “struggles,” showing awareness of the intentions behind his writing.56 Jacobs’s actions were replicated by many migrants who, after exhausting the possibilities at the consular level, or considering it useless, moved their “protest” to the Foreign, Colonial, and War Offices, and to the British monarchy itself. The strategy of writing to British authorities also made explicit the different experiences of Jamaicans vis-à-vis the other islanders. Grenadian Alexander Henry wrote on behalf of “non-Jamaican British West Indians” and Melville Jacobs did so in the name of “British Leeward and Windward West Indian subjects.” The differential experience of eastern Caribbean migrants in places like the CASC plantations, along with their awareness of the situation of Jamaicans, prompted the more explicit self-identification of eastern Caribbean British subjects. Antiguan George J. Carlisle, who gathered three dozen signatories to his letter, made it very explicit. He stressed that his group comprised “westernian [sic] in this Island of Cuba such as Leeward Island,” referred to the assistance granted to Jamaicans, and signed off “I am a native of Antigua, am awaiting your answer.” Moreover, indicating his awareness of the potential effects of his writing, he added, “please give this to the publisher.”57 The individual and collective letters of the migrants were complemented by other types of activism on the ground, from churches and lodges to associations based on their imperial affiliation, and organizations like the UNIA stressing their Afro-diasporic allegiance. According to McLeod, the UNIA in particular, with over fifty divisions in Cuba, 55 56 57

J. J. Broderick to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 22, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247. Melville Jacobs to the Right Hon. Secretary of the Colonies, London, England, June 16, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. George J. Carlisle, to His Excellency Governor of [Leeward Islands], April 30, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191.

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operated as “an immigrant protection society,” but there was also its role as a “civil religion” uniting the migrants and establishing links with others, including the Cubans.58 The UNIA in Cuba followed McLeod’s understanding of the movement as one that “adopted different forms in different countries,” having ties with churches, the labor movement, and even the British diplomatic authorities.59 In particular, the UNIA was central in “fostering an organization tradition, by spearheading the formation of other clubs or organizations,” a tradition that would be important for decades.60 As the British Antilleans remaining in Cuba endured the nationalism and political climate of the 1930s, and faced the local and regional implications of their lives as migrants in a foreign country, their individual and collective agency would prove to be an asset.

58 59 60

McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba,” 134; Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’,” 14. McLeod, “Garveysim in Cuba,” 135; Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’,” 14, 17–18, 23. Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’,” 23.

8 The Nationalization of Labor and Caribbean Workers, 1933–1938

By the early 1930s, British authorities in Cuba were conscious of differences between Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean islanders in Cuba, from labor recruitment processes to their options for repatriation. The end of each zafra made migrants more visible, vulnerable, and disposable, and these differences became more relevant. In January 1933, Neil Hone wrote to the Colonial Office about “destitute men, claiming to be British Subjects” in “abject misery” and singled out Barbadians, the expensive trips to Dominica, and the fact that there were “men from every island in the Caribbean.”1 Jamaicans, on the other hand, were experiencing a more stable situation, according to the Jamaica Times in May 1933. There was a seemingly effective repatriation process going on, aided by the fact that a “steady homeward flow” had been taking place.2 In contrast, that same month, a memorandum from the British Legation in Havana made reference to the bleak prospects for “20 to 30 thousand British West Indians of non-Jamaican origin.”3 While the secretary of immigration for Jamaica was arranging repatriations, islanders from Dominica had to find $100 to return to their island,

1 2 3

Neil Hone to Hon. Secretary of State for the Colonies, January 30, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307. “Colonial Migration,” Jamaica Times, May 13, 1933, 14. Denis Capel Dunn, “Memorandum,” to Foreign Office, May 28, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307. This memo was later forwarded to the Colonial Office by November 1933 and was shared with the government of British Guiana for consideration. H. Beckett to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, November 29, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307.

193

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an amount “utterly impossible for any agricultural labourer here to find.”4 By mid-year, there seemed to be a pattern whereby Jamaicans had been gradually drifting away, while other islanders remained stranded in Cuba. Dunn’s 1933 memorandum pointed to the concrete difficulties that the “colonial governments – with the exception of Jamaica, have never seen their way to meeting the cost of repatriating their nationals.” He argued that even though British Antilleans “have nobody but themselves to blame for their plight,” their situation was becoming more “distressing” and in need of a “reasonable solution.”5 While a scheme to transport destitute workers to British Guiana was considered for Jamaican returnees, nothing was being done for eastern Caribbean islanders.6 As if things needed to be even for all British Antilleans, in May 1933 the Jamaican government notified the British minister in Havana that the office of the secretary of immigration would be abolished in late June.7 The vice consul in Havana, Hugh Border, expressed his regret with the Jamaican government because the estimates of those who would eventually apply for repatriation were between 6,000 and 8,000. He wrote to the Foreign Office stating that “Jamaican subjects, in common with other British West Indians in Cuba, are suffering severely from economic depression.”8 British Antilleans were not passive about their precarious labor situation in the eastern sugar plantations and made their own move, literally, migrating west to Havana. The new British consul in Havana, H. A. Grant-Watson, indicated that they would “seek employment as mechanics, servants, porters, etc.” Grant-Watson reported that migrants were receiving assistance from various sources (Salvation Army, the Episcopal Church, and North American mill managers) and also that the Victoria Fund for relief was established, providing forty dollars per month to British Antilleans. The Victoria Fund stopped in July 1933, and the “Anglo-American Community Chest” provided $2,268 to assist

4 5 6 7 8

Neil Hone to Hon. Secretary of State for the Colonies, January 30, 1933, NA, FO 369/ 2307. Denis Capel-Dunn, “Memorandum,” to Foreign Office, May 28, 1933, NA, FO 369/ 2307. Denis Capel-Dunn, “Memorandum,” to Foreign Office, May 28, 1933, NA, FO 369/ 2307; “Colonial Migration,” Jamaica Times, May 13, 1933, 14–15. A. R. Slater to HBM, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Havana, Cuba, May 5, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307. Hugh W. Border to A. R. Slater, governor, Jamaica, May 25, 1933; Hugh W. Border to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], June 14, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307.

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“English speaking negroes (95% are British) for the period from July, 1933–1st July, 1934.” This fund, however, had only been able to give relief to 257 out of 800 applications – the latter figure indicates the extent to which the migrants sought assistance. Grant-Watson’s conclusion was that “the relief of genuine cases of distress among the British West Indians is inadequate and that the small amount of relief which is being accomplished is a strain on the resources of British residents in Cuba, with help of American residents.”9 These relief initiatives suggest that British Antilleans received support from sources other than their consular representatives. As British Antilleans were striving to survive, the sociopolitical climate in Cuba reached boiling point. Strikes erupted in different areas throughout the spring and summer of 1933, and opposition to Machado’s dictatorship increased. The situation of the island had been under US scrutiny since April, with Sumner Welles as ambassador to Cuba hoping to mediate between Machado and opposition groups.10 In August 1933, amidst Machado’s stubborn attempts to remain in power, US diplomatic mediation, popular manifestations, and a military coup forced him out of office. A political crisis involving the military and the de facto lack of government created a fertile ground for the protest of long-disaffected workers. In September, workers – including foreigners – seized sugar mills and virtually turned the power relations of the industry upside down.11 Salvador Rionda, of the Manatí Sugar Company, wrote that in more than two decades working in Cuban plantations, he had “never seen anything like these strikes,” displaying an overall level of co-ordinated planning on different sites.12 The nature and organization of the strikes were indeed like nothing Cuba had ever experienced, encompassing mobilizations across the country.13 The end of the machadato was followed by further political instability in the short-lived presidency of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes which collapsed in September with a revolt within the army ranks led by Sergeant Fulgencio Batista. The “Sergeant’s Revolt” was 9 10 11 12 13

H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. Sir John Simon [Foreign Office], July 31, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307. Aguilar, Cuba, 1933, chapter 10. Braga, “To Relieve the Misery,” 27–28; Carr, “Mill Occupations and Soviets,” 137–158; Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba, 101–121. Salvador Rionda to Irving Trust Company, receiver of Manatí Sugar Company, NY, September 25, 1933, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 69. On the labor mobilizations of 1933, see, among others, Braga, “To Relieve the Misery,” Carr, “Mill Occupations,” and Whitney, State and Revolution, 101–121.

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joined by members of the opposition to Machado – the Student Directory – forming a junta revolucionaria (Revolutionary Board) that took control of the country. The junta appointed Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín as president and placed former leaders of the student opposition in key governmental positions. New government meant new rules. A decree on October 18, 1933 ordered the repatriation of unemployed foreign workers, and on November 8, the Nationalization of Labor Law (also known as the Ley del 50%) established that fifty percent of the employees of industry, commerce, and agriculture had to be Cuban – a nationalist coup de grâce for migrant workers.14 On previous occasions, the repatriation of workers resulted from their own demand to return home in dire times, or from sugar companies and the government getting rid of surplus labor. With the Ley del 50%, migrant workers had few options; it represented the state’s authority to guarantee work for Cuban nationals and deport undesirables on a legal basis. It was also in tune with both the xenophobic feelings and antiblack racism often expressed by the Cuban elites. The revolution of 1933 changed the country’s politics and the faces heading the government, but ideas concerning black immigration remained more or less the same. Machado had openly and privately expressed his concern about the impact of black workers on the racial composition of Cuba, and the policies of Grau San Martín gave a solution to his predecessor’s concerns, the “Africanization” of Cuba.15 A former professor of medicine at the University of Havana, Grau San Martín was exposed to “sanitary” ideas against black migrants, and was actually present in LeRoy y Cassa’s speech on insanitary immigration in 1923.16 Paradoxically, at the time the British government was searching for a “legal instrument” whereby destitute migrants would be assisted by the Cuban government, the latter created a law to get rid of them.17 14

15

16 17

For the Nationalization of Labor Law (Decree 2583), as well as for the earlier Decree 2232 of October 18, 1933, for the repatriation of foreigners without employment and resources, see Pichardo, Documentos para la historia de Cuba, vol. 4, 80–82, 98–100. See “Ba[n]s Entry of Further Supply of Jamaican and Haitian Labor,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, June 5, 1926, 452; and also Machado’s more private exchanges with US diplomats and entrepreneurs. Noble Brandon Judah to US Secretary of State, May 31, 1929, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.5552/orig (M488, Roll #48); Leland H. Jenks, interview with William Shuyler, general manager, United Fruit Company, June 16, 1934; Leland H. Jenks, “Notes on Santiago and United Fruit Company at Preston,” June 28, 1934, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5. Le-Roy y Cassá, Inmigración anti-sanitaria, 35. S. McNeill Campbell to D. V. Kelly [FO], June 8, 1932, NA, FO 369/2248.

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To be sure, the nationalism embodied in the 1933 legislation targeted all foreign workers, including the otherwise desired Spaniards, now seen as “bad weed” (yerba mala) and “archaic” people sending their money abroad.18 But the historically less-desired black Caribbean migrants would feel the measure with more force. There is general agreement among scholars about the hierarchical impact of the Ley del 50%, stressing that at the bottom level, British Antilleans, as a general group, had the assistance of the British government, and Haitians were the most affected.19 But the evidence of distinctions within the British Antillean group presented here allows for a more complex and nuanced analysis than has hitherto been offered. This discussion of the Ley del 50% thus focuses on the comparative impact of the legislation on Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders. Also, in light of the downsizing of consular establishments and the agency of British Antilleans, questions can be raised about exactly what kind of diplomatic support or access was really available for the migrants and how important it was. Based on a critical assessment of the forces and reasons behind consular support, this chapter looks at the conflicting interests that ensued between sugar planters and the Cuban government regarding the implementation of the Ley del 50%.

 %  Early assessments of the impact of the Ley del 50% provide an indication of the differential treatment of workers. Days after its approval, a memorandum from the US military attaché, Thomas Gimperling, explained that its implementation was affecting “mostly Haitians and Jamaicans.” Regarding the Haitians, he remarked on the “arbitrary and hasty procedures adopted” and the fact that many of them “were taken by force from their families and without being given the opportunity to settle their 18

19

Manuel Mora to Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, president of Cuba, January 14, 1934, ANC, Fondo 73-Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico)-Ramón Grau San Martín, leg. 21, exp. 696; Jordi Maluquer de Motes’s work mentions the discriminatory laws against Spanish migrants and repressive actions and popular protests against them. But his sources are not very explicit about, nor do they elaborate on, which kind of discrimination was experienced. Maluquer de Motes, Nación e inmigración, 103; Maluquer de Motes, “La inmigración española a Cuba,” 141–142. Correspondence in the 1940s referring to the 1933 Ley del 50% named Spaniards as the original target of the law. See Sir G. Ogilvie-Forbes, telegram to Foreign Office, June 1, 1943, NA, FO 361/33832. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 607–613; Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation,” 93.

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affairs.” Gimperling wrote that “in view of the treatment accorded to the Haitians in Santiago de Cuba, the British representative there has taken charge of the repatriation of the Jamaicans.”20 Although referring specifically to events in Santiago, the military attaché’s statement highlights the general disadvantages of the Haitians in comparison with their British Caribbean counterparts. Early in 1934, Consul Grant-Watson commented that the law “has only been applied so far to unemployed Haitians, of whom some five to six thousand have been repatriated by boat from Santiago de Cuba to Haiti,” adding that “no British West Indians have been repatriated by the Cuban authorities.”21 The migration data presented in Chapter 2 provide the background information for the analysis here. Haitian presence in Cuba in the 1930s was larger than that of any other Caribbean group, which resulted in a more noticeable impact during the deportations (inferred from departure figures). Indeed, reports in 1934 by the Cuban and US governments, along with the work of several historians, also highlight that the Nationalization of Labor law resulted not only in more deportation of Haitians, but also in more arbitrary and discriminatory implementation against this group.22 The problems endured by Haitians during the Ley del 50% are credited to their lack of adequate diplomatic representation, or, as it has generally been put, to the other groups (namely British Antilleans) having such diplomatic support.23 Indeed, Gimperling’s memorandum in particular points to the role of the British government in repatriating the Jamaicans, thus supporting the argument that British consular support was available. However, the downsizing of consular establishments in key localities calls for a revisiting of general statements about diplomatic 20 21 22

23

Lieut. Col. Thomas N. Gimperling, “Cuba (Social), Subject: Immigration and Emigration,” November 25, 1933, NARA, RG 165, MID, 2655-Q-94 (M 1507, Roll #5). H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. John Simon, February 21, 1934, NA, FO 277/228. See Rogelio Pina y Estrada, “Informe Rendido por el Dr. Rogelio Pina y Estrada al Honorable Sr. Presidente de la República y al Consejo de Secretarios sobre la inmigración haitiana y jamaicana,” Havana, 1934, ANC, SP, leg. 121, no. 84. Pina’s report is also available in Diario de la Marina, July 8, 1934. C. R. Cameron, “Trends of Migratory Movement in Cuba,” January 18, 1935, RG 165, MID 2655-Q-99 (M 1507, Roll #5). This US report is also available in RG 59, GRDS-DF, Box 5968, File 837.55/142. Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana,” 27. According to some sources, Haitians in the late 1920s only had three “unofficial” representatives. See British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, to A. S. Jelf, colonial secretary, Jamaica, May 19, 1926, JARD, 1B/ 5/77/150 [1926]. Perhaps this reference was to the courtiers – individuals who “posed as consuls” and cheated workers – examined by Casey. He also provides the fullest account of Haitian consular (problematic) support to date. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 215–221.

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support to (all) British Antilleans. Beyond a blind reference to the consuls, other factors can be considered in the comparative examination of the experience of various Caribbean groups in Cuba during the 1930s as they faced nationalism and economic adversity. One aspect to consider is that British Antilleans may have had more room for maneuver in the labor market due to their skills and literacy. While Casey has shown that Haitians diversified their work possibilities more than has been thought, the majority were field laborers in sugar (and coffee).24 British Caribbean islanders had more options beyond the agricultural phase of sugar production, and indeed beyond the sugar industry itself, with the English language serving as an important asset. Also, at the moment of forced repatriations, settlement patterns of British Antilleans were different from those of the Haitians. By 1931, British Caribbean islanders were “scattered in remote parts of the island,” and the difficult economic situation triggered a westward move, which saved them from forced deportations in the 1930s.25 For instance, in 1925 Cienfuegos had a “floating population” of British Antilleans estimated at 100, but ten years later, by 1935, the “coloured British subjects in that part of the island” were estimated at between 1,000 and 2,000.26 Havana also illustrates the westward movement; in 1933 between 1,500 and 2,000 were said to be seeking jobs as mechanics, servants, and porters, but by 1935 British officials estimated that “8,000 to 10,000 colored resided in Havana and the immediate neighbourhood.”27 The internal migration of British Antilleans to the west did not mean total escape from the Ley del 50%, but it did mean that many were not in the eastern regions where the law was forcefully implemented.28 Beyond internal mobility, a fresh assessment of the effects of the 1933 labor legislation needs to qualify the explanation of diplomatic 24 25 26

27

28

Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 110–114. C. N. Ezard to Right Hon. Arthur Henderson [Foreign Office], June 10, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, “Inspection of Cienfuegos Vice Consulate,” March 27, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869; H. Hall Hall to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, April 17, 1935, NA, FO 369/2394. H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. John Simon, Foreign Office, July 31, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307; H. Hall Hall, “Inspection of the Havana Consulate-General,” to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, May 7, 1935, NA, FO 369/2394. In Cienfuegos, for instance, the increased population of British Caribbean migrants meant “numerous complaints” related to the “recent legislation regarding employment of foreigners.” H. Hall Hall to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, April 17, 1935, NA, FO 369/2394.

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support for British Antilleans. Indeed, the long history of British–Cuban diplomatic travails (from the Jobabo incident to the White Paper in 1924) influenced how Cuban authorities dealt with migrants from British Caribbean colonies in the 1930s. The cumulative effect of that history is quite different from actual British consuls helping migrants on the ground, which is questionable given the downsizing of consular establishments and the constant skepticism concerning the migrants’ complaints on the part of consular officials. Also, the focus on eastern Caribbean migrants shows that not all the British Antilleans were (literally) in the same boat. For example, Grant-Watson’s assessment of the impact of the various decrees on repatriation expressed that British Antilleans were not being repatriated by the Cubans and that “the greater cost of repatriation to the British Islands has probably deterred the authorities.”29 Although he did not explicitly state it, Grant-Watson was possibly referring to Leeward and Windward Islanders. In prior correspondence, in January 1934, he had pointed to the higher costs of repatriating eastern Caribbean islanders. Islands such as Trinidad, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Barbados only provided eighty pounds for the assistance and repatriation of thousands of migrants.30 The average price of one passage to one of the Leeward or Windward Islands, according to British officials, was between thirteen and sixteen pounds. Thus the eighty pounds (approximately $403 at the time) would have allowed for the transportation of about half a dozen islanders.31 For Jamaicans the situation was somehow different, but not necessarily more encouraging. The Jamaican secretary of immigration – not the British consular service – had managed to repatriate over 10,000 Jamaican migrants before the Ley del 50% was implemented in 1933. However, many Jamaicans had remained in Cuba even after the decrees for deportation. By the 1930s, many migrants had families in Cuba and were established in the country; others changed their names to Spanish ones, or used a Spanish nickname, seeking protection from nationalist policies. In a survey of the migrant settlements in the province of Camagüey in late 1932, a British official reported about the 2,500 British Antilleans in that 29 30 31

H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. John Simon, Foreign Office, February 21, 1934, NA, FO 277/228 H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. John Simon, Foreign Office, January 2, 1934, NA, FO 369/2351. The exchange rate in 1934 was US$5.041 per £1 sterling. See figures in “Financial Institutions, 22 – Foreign Exchange Rates, 1609–1980,” in Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 703.

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region (including 1,700 Jamaicans): “All those I met are unwilling to go home.”32 Later estimates in 1934 by Grant-Watson were of 40,000 British Antilleans, including some 25,000–30,000 Jamaicans.33 With no secretary of immigration, the consular establishment in Santiago de Cuba reduced to the rank of vice consulate, and other posts abolished, the choices left for British Antilleans in Cuba during the 1930s were not many. The reduction in consular establishments limited their access and proximity to consular representatives, but did not stop their demands to British authorities. An official inspection of the consulate general in Havana in 1935 estimated that 80 percent of the miscellaneous correspondence was related to British Antilleans, mostly Jamaicans, and that the work related to them was “large in volume and seems to be duly attended to.” The inspector also referred to the amount of work related to British Antilleans in the vice consulate in Cienfuegos, where, as was noted before, the migrant population had increased.34 We know now that diplomatic support to British Antilleans emerged in great part out of migrants’ efforts, and their demands of British government officials in Cuba, the Caribbean, and London. This agency transpired during previous episodes of difficulty for them and was no less visible in the immediate aftermath of the Ley del 50%. For example, in January 1934, J. Johnson wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Jamaica protesting the effect of the 50% Law on “Jamaicans and other West Indians” and the way it had been executed on the ground. “Cubans on the whole,” he noted, “got wild over the matter, and began to illtreat, molest, taunt, and abuse all West Indians, and Haitians,” “claiming 80 and 90 per cent” of the jobs.35 Someone named “Ramon Juan,” said to be “Cuban by nationality,” wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Kingston to defend the “English subjects and other foreigners.” In a letter written in English, he indicated that President Grau San Martín “planted a bad seed among nationality,” a “bad seed” which caused problems within a labor union in Puerto Tarafa, where union members wanted to “turn out the strangers,” accusing them of “different crimes,” of being “communists” 32 33 34

35

W. H. Bunbury to Mr. Aitken [December 2, 1932 – date of receipt in the Colonial Secretary’s Office, Jamaica], JARD, IB/5/77/111 [1932]. H. A. Grant-Watson to Right Hon. John Simon, February 21, 1934, NA, FO 277/228. H. Hall Hall to Secretary of Foreign Affairs [Foreign Office], April 17, 1935; H. Hall Hall, “Inspection of the Havana Consulate-General,” to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [Foreign Office], May 7, 1935, NA, FO 369/2394. J. Johnson to Colonial Secretary, Jamaica, January 1, 1934, NA, FO 277/228.

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and “strike breakers.” He also condemned how “Jamaicans are here in Cuba without any protection.” The “British Minister in Havana,” he argued, “would not heed their cry.” Ramon did not provide his surname because he “would not last as long as a snow ball in hell.” He defended the “poor Jamaicans . . . in Nuevitas” as “the most decent and most law abiding” people, and urged the authorities to “act at once.”36 One can speculate as to whether Ramon was indeed Cuban, or a disguised Jamaican, but his letter (as well as others) indicates both the lack of attention of the British minister and the undercurrent of activity that fueled official representation. British Antilleans also resorted to other means to safeguard their interests, through churches and social organizations that had existed before 1933, and new ones founded after. In August 1935, a group of British Caribbean islanders met in the UNIA locale in Havana to “organize an Association for the defence and protection of their common interests and social benefits, as well as for the prosperity of their members and a greater harmony between the British Antilleans resident in Cuba.” The group, registered under the Spanish name of Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos de los Antillanos Británicos (British West Indian Mutual Association), intended to maintain its members in “amicable contact with the Government of the Metropolis, protecting the cause of every British Subject, as far as this cause is officially reported and just.” The association was thus encouraging the continuing “writings of protests” to the British authorities, and was explicit in its incorporation documents about the pressure on official representatives. They would channel “unjust acts” to the British consul and also engage in investigating the cases brought to them with their own lawyer. But they added a stipulation: “In the improbable case that the Consul refuses to act or assist us in obtaining justice, we will be able to act under our own criteria.” This statement did several things at the same time. It affirmed confidence in the British representatives (maybe deliberately putting them on the spot) while acknowledging the possibility that claims to British authorities might fall on deaf ears. Simultaneously, it indicated the organization’s determination to act autonomously to defend their rights. In a statement of pan-Caribbean cross-ethnic solidarity, the association was also open to provide support to Antilleans of the French Caribbean, Haiti, or any

36

Ramon Juan, Cuban by nationality, Nuevitas, to Colonial Secretary, Kingston, Jamaica, April 10, 1934, NA, FO 277/228.

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other foreign nationality, that “as member will obtain the same benefits received by British Antilleans.”37 A branch of the British West Indian Mutual Association was founded also in 1935 in the city of Nuevitas in Camagüey, the region from which the “Cuban by nationality” had written in request of support, and a city and province that had consular establishments.38 Other associations that were active during the mid- and late 1930s included the Grenadian Club in Baraguá, which had ties to other associations, and later became the Unity Club to reflect the variety of islanders composing the community.39 In the summer of 1937, David S. Nathan, Eduard J. Henry, Daniel E. Nathan, and U. Noel organized the Asociación de la Repatriación de Antillanos Ingleses (Association for the Repatriation of English Antilleans) in Camagüey. The organization intended to (1) make the repatriations economical and effective, (2) “persuade” its members of the advantages of repatriation “according to the requirements of the Cuban authorities,” (3) try to provide opportunities in the British territories for those repatriated, (4) assist persons who cannot be repatriated by their own means, and (5) protect the rights of those who underwent repatriation.40 These grassroots organizational initiatives by the migrants responded to the particular problems that they continued to experience after the early years of the depression and the Ley del 50%.

     %  Less than a year after the enactment of the Ley del 50%, the government commissioned Rogelio Pina to travel to the “regions where nuclei of 37

38

39 40

Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos de los Antillanos Británicos, “Reglamentos” [Negociado de Asociaciones], November 5, 1935, ANC, Fondo 54-Registro de Asociaciones (hereafter RA), leg. 334, no. 9902. The translated name comes from the association’s own letterhead paper. Leonardo G. Reid, Joseph T. Griffith, and H. A. Caines, “Asociación de Socorros Mutuos de Antillanos Británicos [British West Indian Mutual Association] – Fundado en Agosto 1935,” Division 1, Branch 4, City of Nuevitas, Province of Camagüey, August 2, 1943, AHPC, Fondo-Registro de Asociaciones (hereafter RA-C), leg. 128, no. 5. See Teófilo Gay Watkins, “Actividades (Creación de Sociedades),” MS, 4, private papers, Teófilo Gay Watkins, Baraguá, Ciego de Ávila, Cuba. See D. S. Nathan and D. E. Nathan, “Acta-Asociación de la Repatriación de Antillanos Ingleses”; and David S. Nathan, Eduard J. Henry, Daniel E. Nathan, and U. Noel, “Reglamento-Asociación de la Repatriación de los Antillanos Ingleses,” July 8, 1937, AHPC, RA-C, leg. 180, no. 11. The association was dissolved in 1941, but as we know from the introduction, one of the Nathans remained active among the Antilleans after that year.

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Haitians and Jamaicans exist” and report on the “legal situation” of these migrants and the “measures that should be adopted to proceed with their re-embarkation.” His report, submitted in June 1934, attempted a balance between the “contradictory” views of different sectors, the working class and peasants who “unanimously” wanted migrants repatriated, and the great planters and colonos who, despite reservations about foreigners, affirmed that Antillean workers were “indispensable” (especially the Haitian cane cutters). Without them, the planters maintained, the “next crop would be impossible.” Seeking “conciliation of the moral and ethnic interests with the material and economic” considerations, Pina recommended a gradual repatriation over a five-year period, but “suspending for the moment the capture and detention of Haitians until an advisable plan is put into practice.”41 Such recommendation, Juan Pérez de la Riva argued, contributed to stopping the “waves of expulsions” of migrants and the postponement of the “Haitian problem” during the mid-1930s.42 After 1933, the Cuban sugar industry entered a post-depression recovery period, with increases in both sugar production and the value of the sugar crop between 1935 and 1938. From a total production of 1,994,000 tons in the critical year of 1933, production grew to 2,538,000 tons in 1935 and then to 2,976,000 in 1938.43 One representative of the colonos, Gabriel Mouriño, had written to Pina expressing his view that Oriente and Camagüey would be “bankrupt” if repatriations were executed carelessly. An executive member of the Asociación de Colonos de Cuba, Mouriño recognized the importance of migrant workers to the sugar industry and advocated for a “careful, proportionate, and progressive” repatriation.44 Interviews by Leland Jenks in 1934 indicate the significant presence of both Spaniards and Haitians still as a central part of the sugar industry in specific plantations (owned by North Americans). Almost coinciding with the ideas exposed in Pina’s report, interviewees included a Cuban politician who was convinced that the 50% Law represented a “serious injury” to the sugar companies and sugar managers, who considered Haitian labor

41

42 43 44

Rogelio Pina y Estrada, “Informe rendido por el Dr. Rogelio Pina y Estrada al Honorable Sr. Presidente de la República y al Consejo de Secretarios sobre la inmigración haitiana y jamaicana,” Havana, 1934, 1, 2, 16, ANC, SP, leg. 121, no. 84. Pérez de la Riva, “Cuba y la migración antillana,” 72–73. Schroeder, Cuba, 261–262. “Reembarque de Antillanos,” Cuba agrícola: La revista rural (La Habana), 1: 3, July 1934, 12–13.

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“indispensable, but regrettable.”45 Jenks’s 1934 visits to plantations throughout the eastern provinces confirmed the “indispensable” character of Haitian field workers active in the UFC plantations, Tánamo sugar mill, Palma sugar mill in Palma Soriano in San Germán, and in sugar mills in Guantánamo. Jenks’s research in 1934, virtually as Pina was submitting his report, also pictures the ethnic contours of the sugar regions. His interviews and field notes illustrate the position of Haitians at the bottom of the labor social hierarchy, which guaranteed their role in the sugar industry, but also the antagonism against them. After all, they were performing duties that other ethnic groups were unwilling to do. Revisiting the report in light of some of the research materials left by Jenks sheds light on the ethnic division of labor at the time, but also evidences the racial and ethnic tendencies in Cuban nationalism. The counterpoint of Pina’s report and Jenks’s findings, despite their top-down character, also provides a window onto the complex ethnic landscape and labor order threatened by the Ley del 50%, and how British Antilleans fit into it. This provides more insight into the differential impact of labor legislation in the 1930s. While Pina’s report coupled Jamaicans and Haitians, he established some distinctions, with the former being “a demographic element [that was] more cultured than the Haitian.”46 The Haitian was almost exclusively a field worker, and Jamaicans performed “different manual arts, with their women serving as domestic workers, and some even working as teachers.” This diversification, according to Pina, meant that Jamaicans were competing in a difficult labor market with the “Cuban and the Spaniard and Canary Islanders.” The last two groups, although foreigners, seem to fall into a different category for the purposes of labor competition, despite the Ley del 50%. And given the white racial preferences in Pina’s report, and the ethno-racial distinctions in some sugar mills, the favoritism toward Spaniards must not surprise. When Jenks visited the Soledad sugar mill, for example, he reported that there were “[n]o negroes” in the batey or “mill,” and that the “[c]olor line is drawn in the social club run by Cuban and 45

46

Leland H. Jenks, “Interview with Carlos Hevia,” June 12, 1934; Leland H. Jenks, “Trip to San Germán; Interview with V. J. Gianelloni, Manager,” June 27, 1934, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5: Interview and Trip Notes, 1934 June. Rogelio Pina y Estrada, “Informe rendido por el Dr. Rogelio Pina y Estrada al Honorable Sr. Presidente de la República y al Consejo de Secretarios sobre la inmigración haitiana y jamaicana,” Havana, 1934, 7, ANC, SP, leg. 121, no. 84.

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Spanish workers” as whites.47 The white (Spanish and Cuban) social club can be contrasted with the previously mentioned British West Indian Mutual Association, which fomented cross-ethnic alliances on the other (blacker) side of the color line. In the east, Spaniards also held their preferred place in the wider structure of the sugar plantation economy, working as administrators of almost all of the fifteen independent stores in the town of Guaro, near the UFC enclaves. At the other end of the ethno-racial spectrum were the black migrants, already separated by Pina, with Jamaicans in a more privileged position in the labor market (thus representing a threat to Cubans and Spaniards, according to him), and Haitians at the bottom of the social and labor stratification (which was a sensitive position, but a vital role in the agricultural industry). The distinction between the Jamaicans and Haitians was established in Jenks’s interviewees where the Haitians emerged as more racially stigmatized. Narciso Fernández, “a sort of operation manager” in the Guantanamo Sugar Company, “considered the Jamaican as the best – not as workers – but as intelligent persons in a community” and “Haitians the worst.” The latter had been attracted by “primitive dances and rituals” performed by “Cuban negroes.”48 This supports McLeod’s argument of Haitians inheriting “a legacy of racial intolerance” that existed against Afro-Cuban religion, and distinguishes them from other migrants such as British Antilleans, who practiced established religions.49 Fernández’s statement, however prejudiced, also points to the religious syncretism that took place between Haitians and Afro-Cubans.50 The racial and ethnic division of labor is evident in Jenks’s notes about the recruitment of field workers, with “agents who would offer [a] negro as much as $10 to leave his job and go to another central.”51 The link between blackness and agricultural field labor was also palpable when it was stated that the UFC, in curtailing the “monopoly of Haitian labor,” had “demonstrated that Cubans will cut cane, and that it is white men’s work.”52 Such marked divisions were part of a more complex rural 47 48 49 51 52

Leland H. Jenks, “Trip to Central Soledad,” June 24, 1934, 2, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5: interview and trip notes, June 1934. Leland H. Jenks, “Trip to Guantanamo,” June 28, 1934, 6, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5. 50 McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 611. Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, chapter 5. Leland H. Jenks, “Notes on Santiago de Cuba and United Fruit Company at Preston,” June 28, 1934, 4, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5. Leland H. Jenks, “Notes on Santiago de Cuba and United Fruit Company at Preston,” June 28, 1934, 6–7, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5.

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diversity, as Jenks wrote about his visit to Palma Soriano, stating that “at Palma and other company mills [labor] is Cuban and Haitian. Cuban and Spanish are employed largely in the mill; Spanish on the railway; Chinese at the centrifugals,” but the fieldwork was “largely in the hands of Haitians.” The diversity was evident in coffee colonias in Manzanillo under the supervision of a US entrepreneur named Sheffield, who is said to have had “about 10 colonos, 4 Jamaicans, 1 Haitian, 1 Mexican, [and] 5 Cubans.”53 While the report by Pina highlighted the work diversification among the Jamaicans, the Haitians had their own way to maneuver the job market. According to the field visits made by Jenks, Haitians operated as “floating laborers” who “work[ed] part of the year on mill colonias and part of the year in coffee” in Palma Soriano and other areas of Oriente Province.54 What Pina’s report does not mention is that Cubans were not ready to “displace the black Antillean” – as he put it – in the labor arena, particularly in cane cutting. This dilemma, however, was captured by Jenks’s research in his visit to Palma Soriano, stating that “Cubans in Oriente will not cut cane” and that they were “accustomed to farm supervision rather than farm labor.”55 His observation emerged from his interactions with US planters, one Mr. Crenshaw of the UFC claiming that “Cubans will simply refuse to cut cane,” and John Randolph in Guantánamo expressing that he had “no love for Cubans” who “will not cut cane continuously during the crop.” Randolph in particular, who was “very bitter about the 50% law,” said that it would be “the best thing for the island if all of [the Cubans] were banished, leaving the Spaniards and the Haitians.”56 That was the ethnic picture of sugar and coffee in 1934, in the immediate aftermath of the Ley del 50% – one that would remain contentious with increased nationalist measures by the Cuban government.

53 54

55 56

Leland H. Jenks, “Notes on Santiago de Cuba and United Fruit Company at Preston,” June 28, 1934, 10, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5. Leland H. Jenks, “Trip to Central Palma, Palma Soriano,” June 24, 1934, 3; Leland H. Jenks, “Notes on Santiago de Cuba and United Fruit Company at Preston,” June 28, 1934, 4, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5. Leland H. Jenks, “Trip to Central Palma, Palma Soriano,” June 24, 1934, 3, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5: interview and trip notes, June 1934. Leland H. Jenks, “Notes on Santiago and United Fruit Company at Preston,” June 28, 1934, 6–7, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 5; Leland H. Jenks, “Interview with John Randolph,” July 14, 1934, 1,2, LHJP, Box 1, Folder 6.

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    The contention between sugar production, the need of foreign labor, and national interests against them intensified after 1936. That year, a bill was passed in the Lower House of the Cuban Congress requiring the companies operating in Cuba to pay 80 percent of their total payrolls to Cubans. The US military attaché reported this measure and commented that the large companies employed Cubans as common laborers only because “they were forced to do so by law.” “In the sugar mill,” he noted, “the Haitian and Jamaican negroes are considered much more satisfactory that [sic] native Cubans.”57 The tension between those who would perform the work (Haitians and Jamaicans) and those who would not (Cubans) persisted. By the second half of the 1930s, many Caribbean workers were still in Cuba. This led to an intensification of the measures to deport alien workers in 1937 and 1938. The new Secretary of Labor, Juan Portuondo, met with sugar hacendados to “ask for their concrete suggestions as to a solution for the large problem created by the presence in Cuba of large numbers of Haitian and Jamaican Negro canefield laborers.” According to a report from the US Embassy on January 6, 1937, he “indicated that he was not considering any drastic action to prevent the employment of non-Cuban canefield laborers during the coming ‘zafra’,” but hoped that it would be “possible during the next few years to repatriate a substantial proportion of them.”58 Subsequent reports from the US Embassy on January 30 indicated that the move against foreign workers was “proving popular with Cuban labor organizations.”59 This time the measure actively targeted Haitians, with thousands of deportations starting in February 1937.60 By March it was reported that a “total number of up to 3,267” Haitians had been deported and “that in spite of the grinding season in Cuba, further deportations of as many, if not

57 58 59 60

Col. Thomas N. Gimperling, “G-2 Report,” December 16, 1936, RG 165, MID, 1917–1941, Box 1806, File 2736-Q-19. H. Freeman Matthews to Hon. Secretary of State, US, January 6, 1937, RG 59, GRDSDF, Box 5946, File 837.504/705. H. Freeman Matthews to Hon. Secretary of State, US, January 30, 1937, RG 59, GRDSDF, 1930–1939, Box 5946, File 837.504/714. H. Freeman Matthews to Hon. Secretary of State, US, March 5, 1937, RG 59, GRDS-DF, 1930–1939, Box 5946, File 837.504/724.

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considerably more, Haitians are in prospect for the immediate future.”61 While in 1934 negotiations between sugar planters in need of workers and the Cuban Secretary of Labor helped “suspend deportation proceedings against the Haitians,” in 1937 representatives of the sugar industry believed that there “will be no acute labor problem[,] nor any real shortage of cane field labor.”62 If there was a time when Haitians were the main victims of the Cuban deportation policies it was not in 1933, but later, in 1937 and 1938. The departure figures for Haitians and Jamaicans at that time were highly disparate, with a sugar company reporting that between January and June 1937, a total 15,563 Haitians were deported, and only 253 Jamaicans.63 The official departure figures for Haitians also indicate a dramatic increase, from 1,652 in 1936 to 19,561 in 1937. But in November 1937, US officials referred to an even greater number of Haitians being repatriated that month: “approximately 35,000.”64 By 1938, the extent of the repatriations and their impact came to the attention of both sugar entrepreneurs and the British authorities. The former were concerned with the availability of workers for the 1938 crop, even when the previous year the belief had been that the repatriations would not create a shortage of labor. The British authorities surely knew that Haitians were being targeted, but previous experiences (1920–1921, 1930–1934) where arbitrary procedures affected British Caribbean workers must have been a concern. Perhaps more importantly, it was not in the best interests of the British Caribbean colonies to receive repatriates when they were themselves experiencing critical economic conditions and prospects of labor unrest.65 In March 1938, the US military attaché reported on the repatriations of Antilleans, mentioning that Cuban and American mill owners believed that “if carried out as planned, [it] will seriously cripple the sugar 61 62

63 64 65

George A. Gordon to Hon. Secretary of State, US, March 11, 1937, RG 59, GRDS-DF, 1930–1939, Box 5946, File 837.504/729. For 1934, see Leland Jenks, “Interview with John Randolph,” 1934, in LHJP, Box 1, Folder 6, interview and trip notes, July 1934. For 1937, see H. Freeman Matthews to Hon. Secretary of State, US, March 5, 1937, RG 59, GRDS-DF, Box 5946, File 837.504/ 724; and Major W. Timberlake, G-2 Report, April 26, 1937, RG 165, MID, 1911–1941, Box 1806, File 2736-Q-19. The report was referred to in H. Matthews Freeman to Hon. Secretary of State, US, August 18, 1937, RG 59, GRDS-DF, Box 5946, File 837.504/781. Major E. W. Timberlake, G-2 Report, November 19, 1937, RG 165, MID, 1911–1941, Box 1806, File 2736-Q-19. Bolland, The Politics of Labour; Hart, Rise and Organise.

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industry.” The argument of the inadequacy of native labor continued in the report, emphasizing that “the Cuban canefield laborer does not compare with the Haitian and the Jamaican.”66 Later, in November, sugar interests in Guantánamo had also expressed their concerns regarding repatriations. A representative from Esperanza sugar mill wrote to the president of the Provincial Assembly of Colonos that whilst he agreed with the repatriation, the next season’s crop was in jeopardy. A gradual retrieval of foreign laborers was proposed, whereby government decrees for the shipment of immigrants would be implemented by removing small groups of Haitians from each farm, “and not all of them by sweeping everyone there.” A more balanced process was advocated, because in some areas no workers were taken, while in those where the “Haitianpicking soldiers go, the organizations of colonos and coffee growers are unsettled.”67 In other municipalities such as Yateras and Jamaica, also in Guantánamo, there were protests because repatriations were executed in the middle of the coffee crop. Coffee growers demanded that if the repatriations were to take place, the government should assure them that a native Cuban would substitute each Antillean worker. The president of the Cuban Institute of Coffee, however, did not oppose the repatriation of the Antilleans, arguing that such repatriation does not damage us in terms of the work of the coffee harvest . . . we are Cubans and we want that the little or the much that we can provide for the earnings of the peasant workers, Cubans be the ones who should earn it. We want to cubanize Cuba.68

Yet again, the country’s economic and nationalist interests collided. The British also reacted to the repatriation and its impact on the thousands of British colonial subjects living in Cuba in the late 1930s. On June 1, 1938, the issue was raised in the House of Commons in London. Mr. Macquisten asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether any action was being taken regarding the repatriation of British Caribbean workers in Cuba. He suggested using the “large volume of Cuban sugar” imported by Great Britain as leverage, adding that Cuba

66 67 68

Major E. W. Timberlake, G-2 Report, March 23, 1938, RG 165, MID, 1911–1941, Box 1806, File 2736-Q-19. Antonio Pérez Calviño to Enrique Díaz Ulloa, president, Provincial Assembly of Colonos, Santiago de Cuba, November 18, 1938, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 313, no. 27. See Álvarez Estévez, Azúcar e inmigración, 249–251. The citation from the president of the Cuban Institute of Coffee is on page 251. My translation from Álvarez Estévez’s citation comes from ANC, Donativos y Remisiones, leg. 702, no. 21.

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was benefiting from sacrifices of British colonial sugar producers under the international sugar agreement. Mr. MacDonald answered that representations regarding the repatriations had already been made and that there was no need of further action at that time. Macquisten replied, “Cannot we refuse the Cuban sugar? Would not that prevent dumping labour on our labour market, thus perpetuating labour evils in the West Indies?”69 It is very probable that Macquisten was aware of the current condition of the sugar market, but also concerned with the labor unrest that had exploded across the British Caribbean.70 Subsequent debates in the House of Commons, in July 1938, raised again the issue of British consumption of Cuban sugar. The Secretary of State for the Colonies was questioned about how the British seemed more commercially engaged with Cuba than with the colonies, both importing her sugar and exporting goods to Cuba. With about 600,000 tons per year coming from Cuba, which equaled the amount coming to Britain from her sugar-producing colonies, the Secretary was asked, “what steps were possible under the International Sugar Agreement to reduce their imports of Cuban sugar and to increase their imports of Colonial sugar[?]”71 After the April 1937 International Sugar Conference in London, and while some colonial exports were reduced, Cuban sugar remained safe in the British market.72 After Java, Cuba enjoyed second place in British import quotas of non-colonial sugars, with a total of 940,000 metric tons. Later, the dislocations in the sugar market during the early years of the World War II would be covered by Cuba.73 In short, Cuba and Britain remained strongly tied by sugar commerce. The Cubans were surely aware of the importance of the sugar trade with Britain at the time. Once the issue of sugar was raised in the House of Commons in relation to the discussion on repatriations, the Cuban ambassador in Britain immediately wrote to Havana, sending transcripts of the debates. The ambassador, Guillermo de Blanck y Menocal, understood the concerns of the British about the repatriations, which were 69

70 71 72 73

Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons Official Report (Monday 16 May to Friday 3 June 1938), 2031–2032. Also published in “Repatriations from Cuba,” Voice of Saint Lucia, July 15, 1938, 3. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings; Bolland, On the March; Bolland, The Politics of Labour; and Hart, Rise and Organise. “Cuban and Colonial Sugar Imports,” Voice of Saint Lucia, July 26, 1938, 4. Swerling, International Control of Sugar, 58. See Swerling, International Control of Sugar, 56–64.

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obviously in conflict with the Cuban desire to eliminate as many migrants as possible from the country. However, it seems that the discussion at Westminster had some influence without any representation by the British. The ambassador’s opinion suggests interest in reaching a compromise. The repatriation of Jamaicans, in the ambassador’s judgment, “must be made at a sure pace but without urgency, reconciling in this way our interests with the considerations that could be held for that nation [Britain].”74 Later in that year, de Blanck y Menocal continued to report on the debates in Britain about the repatriation of migrants, disturbances in Jamaica and other islands, and the creation of the Moyne Commission to inquire into the situation of the British colonies. He acknowledged the impact of the repatriations in the disturbances in Jamaica and realized that this would be an issue investigated by the West India Royal Commission. The ambassador believed that Cuba should “not be concerned with the conclusions of such a commission” but “with the need of keeping its right to repatriate the Jamaicans.” Yet he suggested an apparently balanced approach with “repatriation measures” that would “alleviate the job market of the national labor force without at the same time – due to its application – either causing serious disturbance in the social and economic life of Jamaica or worrying the government of that island and that of Britain.” The repatriations had to be implemented before the arrival of the commission, periodically and “without urgency, thus conciliating our interests and not giving motives for the complaints” of Britain.75 After many years of diplomatic tension between the two nations over the British Antilleans, at least the Cuban side seems to have been sufficiently concerned to try to avoid further protests from the British. Ultimately, it seems that global British authority, its imperial aura, and its leading position in an international sugar market had more impact on the fate of British Antilleans than any consular action. The political economy of sugar that had impacted the outcome of diplomacy after Jobabo was at work also in the 1930s, as both governments dealt with the repatriation of workers. Time did not change the way sugar

74 75

Guillermo de Blanck y Menocal to Dr. Juan J. Ramos, secretary of state, Havana, June 3, 1938, ANC, SE, leg. 220, no. 3055. Guillermo de Blanck y Menocal to Dr. Juan J. Ramos, secretary of state, Havana, August 5, 1938, ANC, SE, leg. 220, no. 3055.

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production and migrant labor were intertwined, or, for that matter, the way migrant labor and Cuban racism were tied. In his August 1938 letter, de Blanck y Menocal referred to the “undesirable Jamaicans” and “other components of the black foreign race” that constituted an inconvenience within the “national territory.”76

76

Guillermo de Blanck y Menocal to Dr. Juan J. Ramos, secretary of state, Havana, August 4, 1938, ANC, SE, leg. 220, no. 3055.

9 “The Best and Most Permanent Solution”? Repatriation or Assimilation, 1938–1948

The 1930s in Cuba revealed the conflicting interests around the permanence or expulsion of foreign Caribbean migrants. While nationalist sectors were seeking their expulsion, the sugar industry needed their labor. Therein was the compromise, Cindy Hahamovitch asserts, that temporary labor immigration schemes (or early guestworker programs) in other world regions had been trying to settle.1 In the British Caribbean, the late 1930s revealed a different set of dilemmas. On one hand, colonial governments were preoccupied with the impact of receiving yet more destitute repatriates in the aftermath of unprecedented labor disturbances. On the other, Foreign Office personnel in Cuba were looking for what to do with destitute colonial subjects in a foreign country. These were the issues faced by two branches of the British government, as Cuba underwent political transition and constitutional change on the eve of World War II. This chapter extends beyond the 1930s, the common closing point of most histories of Caribbean migration to Cuba. It examines how the British Foreign and Colonial Offices clashed over the best solution for British Antilleans in terms of their responsibilities to the British Empire. There were thousands of British Antilleans still living in Cuba after 1940. There was continuous migrant activism in the UNIA during the late 1930s, but also in other organizations, from social clubs that suggest communal stability to associations seeking repatriation. One of these societies, the Asociación de Repatriación de los Antillanos Ingleses, which emphasized repatriation in its name, was dissolved, indicating perhaps

1

Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land, 14.

214

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fewer people wanting to leave.2 Migrants were also using the institutional route of British consulates. In 1939, the inspector of British consular establishments reported that “repatriation work is heavy and is the principal reason for the existence of the post” in Santiago de Cuba. “The correspondence is unusually heavy for a subordinate post,” he added, “being in fact of greater volume that at Havana itself.” Most of this correspondence was from “British West Indian negroes.”3 While Foreign Office representatives in Cuba were consumed with “British West Indian work,” their counterparts in the Colonial Office were busy with the aftermath of social unrest in the colonies. The convergence of both departments was evident in the 1939 report by Granville St. John Orde-Browne about labor conditions in the British Caribbean, outlining the problems for the colonies of return migration. It was an “adverse factor,” it noted, that the benefits of “good wages overseas” had ended with the consequence that repatriated workers “swelled the numbers of the unemployed at home” and remittances were no longer a reliable source of income in the colonies.4 For Jamaica in particular, the absence of an estimated £125,000 average value of total annual remittances affected the recipients of the money, who were “now in most cases forced to compete for employment.”5 In tune with the Orde-Browne report was that of the Moyne Commission on the British Caribbean colonies in 1938–1939 signaling the overpopulation problems due to the closure of “emigration outlets in other parts of the Caribbean area.”6 Conditions in Barbados, supplier of the second-largest group of British Antilleans in Cuba, were described as “uncomfortable” due to repatriates who had “contributed even more than the process of natural increase” to the “pressure of population.”7 The dissonance between the situation in the colonies and that of stranded colonial subjects in Cuba (and other Caribbean localities) would become more salient throughout the 1940s. The British must have been relieved when it was reported in 1938 that limited funds would stop any “large undertaking” to repatriate “40,000 2

3 4 6 7

Social organizations are registered as active in different regions, including the UNIA. See Oliver S. Nelson to Provincial Governor, December 20, 1939, AHPC, RA-C, leg. 33, no. 21; “The Black Man Fund,” The Black Man: A Monthly Magazine of Negro Thought and Opinion, 3: 10, 1938, 19; Eduard Henry to provincial government of Camagüey, September 5, 1938, AHPC, RA-C, leg. 180, no. 11. Mr. McLean to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, August 15, 1939, NA, FO 369/2520. 5 Orde-Browne, Labour Conditions, 13. Orde-Browne, Labour Conditions, 78. Moyne et al. West India Royal Commission, 10. Moyne et al. West India Royal Commission, 195, 243.

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Jamaicans” still in Cuba.8 Moreover, the proposal of gradual repatriation advanced by some planters was apparently accepted. Sources indicate that once the 1939 sugar crop started, “the deportation of West Indians had been suspended.”9 But by then many British Antilleans wanted to leave and the Santiago vice consulate was overwhelmed with “miscellaneous letters, mainly from British West Indian negroes in connection with repatriation.” Repatriation to Jamaica was being “efficiently performed,” but only a “maximum of 20 repatriates” were allowed on the ships. The inspector of consular establishments, Mr. McLean, reported that the process was “a very difficult task,” involving “a long waiting list, and the planning of each shipload, complicated by railway transport for outlying parts of the district, and above all by the native dilatoriness and verbosity of the West Indian.” According to him, the Jamaican government continued to pay clerical staff in Santiago de Cuba for purposes of repatriation, which shows again the relative advantages of Jamaicans over eastern Caribbean islanders when it came to reaching their home islands.10 Different legal provisions imposed by each British colony on their emigrants, constitutional changes in Cuba, and the effects of the war would add to the dissimilar experiences of both groups in the 1940s.

      Cuba entered the 1940s with a new Constitution. Its labor-rights provisions benefited Cubans and to some extent workers of other nationalities. Stipulations about labor hours per day and per week, discrimination in the workplace, and the prohibition of payment with vales or tokens touched upon the realities of Caribbean workers. Laborers had the right to organize strikes and the state would encourage affordable housing for workers.11 In theory, the Constitution provided other measures that could favor those British Antilleans already settled in Cuba or undecided 8 9

10 11

“Repatriations of Jamaicans from Cuba,” Voice of Saint Lucia, October 7, 1938, 4. Edward P. Lawton to US Secretary of State, January 26, 1939, RG 59, GRDS-DF, 1930–1939, Box 5942, File 837.504/850. The views regarding labor and the sugar industry are noted in Antonio Calviño Pérez to Enrique Díaz Ulloa, president of the Provincial Assembly of Colonos, Santiago de Cuba, November 18, 1938, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 313, no. 27, and E. W. Timberlake, G-2 Report, March 23, 1938, RG 165, MID Correspondence, 1911–1941, Box 1806, File 2736-Q-19. McLean to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, August 15, 1939, NA, FO 369/2520. República de Cuba, Constitución de la República de Cuba, 20–23.

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about their next move. This included some general rights; the safeguarding of property; and the general stipulations of nondiscrimination by race, sex, color, and class that could – depending on the interpretation – protect the migrants.12 Moreover, the combination of several dispositions gave Caribbean migrants the possibility to become naturalized Cubans, either because of residence of five consecutive years (which some had by 1940) or by marrying a Cuban citizen, as long as they resigned their previous nationality. Not all British Antilleans were willing to give up their British nationality, particularly if they wanted repatriation. But the alternative was there for those who had decided (or were in the process of deciding) to stay in Cuba. Also, the Cuban-born offspring of Caribbean migrants were constitutionally Cubans according to Article 11 on nationality, a factor that was relevant to the children, but also to the parent who could apply for naturalization based on the Cuban child.13 Population figures in the British colonies suggest that the number of Cuban-born British Antilleans was not small, with a total of 6,713 Cuban-born Jamaicans in 1943, and an estimate of 6,000 Cuban-born British Antilleans still in Cuba by 1944.14 Despite what was possible constitutionally, the British minister in Havana, George Ogilvie-Forbes, presented a different side. It may be a “comforting thought,” he argued, to believe that “the West Indian problem will in time settle” once citizenship is granted to those born in Cuba. But he characterized that notion as a “rather pusillanimous” one that “assumes that British West Indians will renounce their British citizenship and it also ignores the growing movement in this country to deny certain rights either to naturalised Cubans or to Cubans of foreign parentage.”15 Indeed, while giving with one hand, the Constitution took with the other, guaranteeing in Article 73 that Cubans by birth would have “predominant participation” as workers over naturalized Cubans and foreigners – a sort of constitutional 50-percent law. Section B of Article 19 secured the state’s prerogative to expel foreigners from Cuba by legal means (that were already in place), and Article 76 prohibited the introduction of hired cane cutters or any other migration affecting the labor market.16 In many ways, therefore, Caribbean workers continued to be in a delicate position, 12 13 14 15 16

See Articles 19 and 20, República de Cuba, Constitución de la República de Cuba, 8–9. República de Cuba, Constitución de la República de Cuba, 7. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, 235; Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, April 4, 1944, 1, NA, FO 371/38074, no. A1569. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, February 16, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461, no. A2669. República de Cuba, Constitución de la República de Cuba, 22–23.

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even if naturalized. To be sure, Article 76 was really symbolic because despite the presence of many migrants in Cuba, immigration itself had virtually ended.17 However, it possibly reassured a strengthened working class. “Labor is, truly, the most Cuban thing that is left to us,” declared Cuban writer and politician Juan Marinello in 1940, commenting on the importance of the Cuban working class for the national future.18 He added that for the benefit of the “Cuban masses” and given the “miserable salaries” and “increasing unemployment,” the “criteria for migration must be restrictive,” despite the “most authentic feeling of human fraternity” with workers of all walks of life.19 Thus, while British Antilleans could have recourse to the Constitution when demanding their rights as part of the working class, in Marinello’s view, labor remained a Cuban sphere to which migrants had “restricted” access. In short, for foreign Caribbean workers, the Constitution was a mixed blessing. But as will be examined below, once established, the constitutional provisions on citizenship would be used by the British government to advance their own policies regarding British subjects in Cuba.

        World War II had direct and indirect effects on the situation and the prospects of British Antilleans. Transportation within the Caribbean was limited, with dislocating effects on trade, let alone a large repatriation scheme.20 Simultaneously, the construction and expansion of US military installations in the Caribbean (including the Guantánamo naval base) opened employment alternatives, especially for English-speaking workers.21 The sugar industry gained from the crisis of sugar production

17

18 20

21

In 1943 Cuba received 183 immigrants only, including six North Americans, one Dutch, four English, five Mexicans, one Polish, thirty of undetermined origin, and a majority of 136 Spaniards. República de Cuba, Informe general del censo de 1943, 352; Schroeder, Cuba, 111. 19 Marinello, La cuestión racial, 9. Marinello, La cuestión racial, 13–14. US Department of State, The Caribbean Islands at War, 54. Specifically on the effects of the repatriation of British Antilleans, see J. T. Weir, “Report on the Conditions of British West Indians in Cuba” (1942), 5, enclosed in Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, February 16, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461, no. A2669 (hereafter Weir, “Report on the Conditions”); Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions.” Stockdale, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1940–1942, 43–44; Lipman, Guantánamo, 44–53.

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in Asia and Europe (cane and beet respectively), and sugar workers, including the British Antilleans in Cuba, benefited from it.22 The effects of these changes were uneven by region and employment sector. While sugar gained from the war, tourism declined, and a diminishing international trade affected other agricultural products (tobacco, fruits, and vegetables), creating unemployment in rural areas and among dockworkers.23 Census data for 1943 indicate that 52.73 percent of foreigners of color were employed, with 21.78 percent unemployed, and no information on the remaining 25.47 percent.24 In the early 1940s the alternatives for foreign Caribbean workers depended on their agency, their ability to operate in precarious changing times. But in many cases, they were subject to forces beyond their control: Cubans legislating on foreign labor, sugar industry employers following (or evading) such legislation, British imperial authorities deciding on repatriation, and administrators in the British colonies preoccupied with returnees. The life of the British Antilleans continued to be negotiated with the Cuban nation (and nationalism), the British Empire (and imperialism), Cuban labor politics, the international political economy of sugar, and US regional hegemony. As the war unraveled in Europe in the 1940s, Britain was also seeking stability in its Caribbean colonies. As part of the Moyne Commission’s recommendations, in September 1940 Sir Frank Stockdale was appointed to design programs for development and welfare in the colonies under the Colonial Office.25 However, Sir Ogilvie-Forbes, British minister in Havana and a Foreign Office appointee, requested that Stockdale visit Cuba to assess the situation of British Antilleans. Stockdale projected a visit in the autumn of 1942 and requested a report that was prepared by Vice Consul J. T. Weir and sent to the Foreign Office in February 1942. Ogilvie-Forbes sent the report and expressed concerns at the fact that the Colonial Office did “not wish to press” Stockdale to visit Cuba because “it would interfere with his duties in the British West Indies.”26 The alleged Colonial Office resistance to the Cuba visit was shortsighted, given the potential impact that thousands of British subjects abroad would have in the colonies if they were to return to Jamaica with its “endemic” unemployment problem or Barbados with “heavy and 22 24 25

26

23 Pérez, Cuba, 215, 217. Pérez, Cuba, 215–216. República de Cuba, Informe general del censo de 1943, 1133. Stockdale’s post was comptroller of development and welfare in the West Indies. He was a veteran agriculturalist, and was already familiar with British colonial domains in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Jeffries, rev. Elizabeth Baigeut, “Stockdale, Sir Frank,” 823. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, February 16, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461, no. A2669.

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increasing pressure of population.”27 The Colonial Office was basically ignoring and actively rejecting the existence of an emigrant community wanting to return, and Ogilvie-Forbes was actively trying to find a solution to his problem. Ogilvie-Forbes advocated for Stockdale’s visit to Cuba, stating that “in view of the fact that so many of these Colonies make difficulties about receiving back their own people,” it should be considered that British Antilleans abroad unable to return “have just as much right to consideration as their fellow citizens in their home Islands.” He further argued that “it is the duty of each Colony to provide for its own destitute,” and that the “present attitude of helplessness is not only damaging to our prestige but a strain on the loyalty of the British West Indians in the present difficult times which show no sign of improvement.”28 If, as Richard Hart noted, the Colonial Office was “responsible for ensuring the loyalty of colonials to the Empire,” then Ogilvie-Forbes was simply asking them to fulfill their responsibility.29 This responsibility was, according to Weir’s report, a “rough estimate” of between 30,000 and 40,000 British Antilleans in Cuba mostly in the provinces of Oriente, Camagüey, and Santa Clara, with a total of 17,000 in Oriente alone. Census figures for 1943 do indicate a total of 60,107 foreigners of color, a group that must include also Haitians (the largest migration group from the Caribbean for the 1920s).30 Weir’s report noted that “roughly 50% are calculated to be of Jamaican origin, 40% from Barbados and the remainder from the Leeward and Windward Islands.” The proportions of the different islanders had shifted, invalidating assumptions about the composition of the British Antillean population that rely on larger Jamaican immigration in comparison with other colonies.31 The balance of those remaining on the island only confirms the difference between the Jamaicans and other islanders regarding repatriation. Indeed, as Weir noted in the report: “Many Jamaicans have already been repatriated under the provisions of the Jamaican Emigrants’ Protection Law. Other West Indian Governments, however, have in the past limited repatriation of their subjects to 27

28 29 30 31

The “endemic” problem of Jamaica was referred to by Stockdale himself in his report, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1940–1942, 45. Barbados’s overpopulation was highlighted in Moyne et al., West India Royal Commission, 396. George Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, February 16, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461, no. A2669. Hart, Towards Decolonisation, 140. República de Cuba, Informe del censo de 1943, 736. See, for instance, Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar.

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individual cases of dire distress and usually the cost has been met by relatives of the persons concerned.”32 The report sent to Stockdale also pointed to the “devastating” effects of the Ley del 50% and the “strong anti-foreign feeling that has been asserted since the revolution in 1933,” of which British Antilleans were the “worst sufferers.” Weir’s report also elaborated on another labor regulation – the Aliens Registration Law – establishing that foreign workers had to obtain and renew an identification carnet. From its enactment in 1933–1943, the cost of this carnet more than doubled (from $1.45 to $3.74), and failure to comply with the regulation meant fines, charges for previously unpaid years, imprisonment, and deportation. But the deportation, Weir noted, was “never carried out, much as it would be welcome by most British West Indians who find themselves in this predicament.”33 The Antilleans were also victims of problems “inherent to the country itself” suffered by the rest of the population, including “mal-administration of justice, police and military oppression, [and] the cruelty and unscrupulousness of many Cuban employers.”34 Weir pointed also to discrimination in the provision of health services, and indicated that despite some assistance by the Anglo-American Association, the situation of the migrants was “deplorable.” According to the vice consul, the CASC and the UFC “do what they can do to better the lot of the British West Indians,” and a “minority” seemed to benefit, ironically, from being in the company town with some private medical facilities.35 Despite highlighting the problems, Weir’s report also mentioned that with World War II a “more pro-democratic and therefore more proBritish” feeling was emerging. This, he concluded optimistically, would help diminish the “existing animosity towards British West Indians, which had been increasing in recent years.”36 Ogilvie-Forbes was less optimistic, writing that the pro-democratic “sentiment is not carried to the extent of doing justice to the British West Indians, still less, giving a fair chance to earn their living.”37 The war increased the cost of living, but also created more employment in the sugar industry, with migrants enjoying “a limited share of this prosperity.” A “small number,” mostly “carpenters and mechanics,” also found employment in the US military 32 34 36 37

33 Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 5. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 1–2. 35 Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 2–3. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 3. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 3. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, February 16, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461, no. A2669.

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installation in Guantánamo, and “a very few British West Indians were taken” to work in other military bases in Bermuda, Jamaica, and Trinidad.38 The war also brought “the almost complete disappearance of suitable steamship facilities between Cuba and the West Indies,” including even Jamaica, where “travel opportunities [were] very limited.”39 Weir’s report mentioned the resentment of British Antilleans against their governments doing “so little in the way of repatriation,” in spite of their “loyalty” in times of war.40 Ogilvie-Forbes seemed to concur, writing that he was “ashamed of how little has been done” for the migrants, affecting “their loyalty and devotion to the Crown.”41 The British authorities in Cuba were trying to find an immediate solution to their problem, but the war limited their options. Their “chief weapon in normal times” to negotiate against the labor legislation was “economic pressure” as “Cuba’s second best customer,” but such strategy was “out of the question” in the current context. While the “most logical” solution was “repatriation in wholesale numbers,” the war made this “practically impossible.” Moreover, any large repatriation scheme would be too costly for local colonial governments and, given their economic situations, such a scheme would transfer the problem from Cuba to the colonies. With hopes that the “repatriation in wholesale numbers could be revived later,” the British Legation was left with the option of making a “strong appeal” to colonial governments for “a substantial annual contribution towards the welfare of their subjects who have the misfortune to be stranded in Cuba.”42 The problem with such a “strong appeal” was that it would be made to the same colonial authorities that had not provided support for their emigrants the decade before. In the early 1940s, the interest of colonial island governments was to secure a stable socioeconomic situation, something that clashed with the British Foreign Office personnel in Havana trying to solve their own problem. The clash between the Colonial and Foreign Offices was taking place also at the center of empire in London. Upon receipt of Weir’s report at the Foreign Office, Neville Butler expressed “growing concerns,” and added that he was also “having a 38

39 41 42

Cuban labor policy was, nonetheless, affecting the contracts for Guantánamo, and labor hired for other Caribbean military locations was mostly Cuban either because of US stipulations or because of the policies of the contracting firms. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 6–7. 40 Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 3. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 4. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, February 16, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 5–6.

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highly unsatisfactory correspondence with the Colonial Office” and their “discouragingly helpless attitude in the matter.”43 Clearly, the Colonial Office considered that Cuba was something outside Stockdale’s jurisdiction, but Ogilvie-Forbes saw the “British subjects” as the responsibility of the government, even if they were outside the imperial domain. Stockdale possibly could perceive the connections and understand how thousands of British Antilleans abroad were relevant to the welfare of the colonies – even as potential disruptors of it. Stockdale’s responsibilities increased in 1942 when he was named co-chair of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC), but Ogilvie-Forbes continued to pressure for his visit.44 For the Havana minister, Stockdale was some kind of solution, and he planned for him “not merely one or two days in the capital,” but a full program of visits to “centres of the West Indians in the provinces.” In pressing his case, Ogilvie-Forbes was clear in a telegram in April 1943, that a “visit of only one week would be quite inadequate.”45 Indeed, Stockdale’s visit would allow him to witness the problems of British officers there. But after more than two years dealing with the colonies, and a regional view through the AACC, he was also aware of the wider regional and sociopolitical context of any solution to the “British West Indian work” in Cuba.

    “Situation impossible to describe in diplomatic language and difficult to phrase temperately.” Such were the words cabled by Stockdale with an “IMMEDIATE” and “SECRET” character after he finally visited Cuba in May 1943 and met with British Antilleans to assess their situation. His telegram of May 31 called for “action now (repeat now) on behalf of British subjects whose loyalty to the Crown despite untold sufferings is unwavering.” Their “general outlook [was] towards British way of life and all which that means in regard to respect of law, justice and fair 43 44

45

Neville Butler to Ogilvie-Forbes, April 23, 1942, NA, FO 371/30461. When the visit was postponed, Ogilvie-Forbes wrote to Butler in London asking him to keep Stockdale “up to the mark” and telling that the visit “is not merely one or two days in the capital.” In a January letter, he mentioned “a programme for him [Stockdale] to visit centres of the West Indians in the provinces.” George Ogilvie-Forbes to Neville M. Butler, North American Department, FO, London, January 7, 1943, NA, FO 371/ 33832, no. A 850. Ogilvie-Forbes to Neville Butler, January 7, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832; Ogilvie-Forbes, telegram to Frank Stockdale, April 20, 1943, NA, CO 318/453/14.

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play.” Yet he described their position as “the most pathetic of anything I have ever seen.” The telegram even detailed the budgetary action, calling for £20,000 annually for the Havana Legation, and adding that it “matters not from what source they come whether direct from the British race under Colonial Development and Welfare act or from West Indian Governments.” The money would be administered from Havana and used in “country centres for provision of work,” housing improvements, the “establishment of gardens,” allotments for British subjects in the cities, “doles to unemployed” migrants, school equipment, medicines, and administrative expenses. The idea was to enable the British minister in Havana to “do more until such time as final decisions can be reach[ed] regarding a more permanent solution of the problem.” Repatriation was not mentioned.46 A full twenty-one-page report from Stockdale followed on July 21, 1943, from his headquarters in Barbados. The “Report on the Present Conditions of the British West Indian Community in Cuba” was essentially in line with the previous telegram, or indeed with Vice Consul Weir’s previous appraisal. It was, nonetheless, a more thorough document, including details of visits to Havana, Ciego de Ávila, Baraguá, Camagüey, Nuevitas, Santiago de Cuba, Guantánamo, Holguín, Banes, and Puerto Padre. In order to have “first hand information,” Stockdale interviewed “not less than 3,000 West Indians” and received “deputations which represented no less than half the total number of British West Indians in Cuba.”47 Stockdale’s report specified the difficulties in particular communities, at the same time as it outlined the general problems. In particular, regarding the 50% Law, he wrote, “Not only is the law enforced harshly and sometimes improperly by minor officials but it is also enforced illegally against Cuban-born children of West Indian parents.”48 Whatever cross-ethnic solidarity may have existed during the 1933 strikes, it faded away with members of Cuban labor unions actively ensuring the enforcement of the 50% Law.49 British Antilleans in almost all the localities visited by Stockdale complained about the “Carnet Law” and its costs, and the “impossibility” of meeting them “by reason of under-employment.”50 The particularities of precarious 46 47 48 49 50

Stockdale’s message is in Ogilvie-Forbes telegram to Foreign Office, May 31, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 1. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 4. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 4, 11. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 8, 10, 11, 14.

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living in each British Antillean community went from “difficulty in securing clothing” in Baraguá to “low rates of pay – often amounting to little more than free food” in Camagüey. In Nuevitas, Stockdale described conditions as “very bad indeed” and in Santiago as “very poor,” with migrants only able to afford “rooms in the slums” of the city.51 In Chaparra and Delicias, the report concluded that “the limits of endurance [were] being reached.”52 Stockdale’s tour through various localities provided an opportunity for British Antilleans to express their grievances. The report suggests that the delegations and representatives interviewed by Stockdale pressed him on the issue of better consular representation and treatment by the British authorities. Reverting from the downsizing of consular establishments, the report noted that there was “a good case for the re-establishment of the post of British Vice-Consul at Camaguey [sic],” and that the “need for a consular or sub-agent in Guantanamo [sic] was urged” by the migrants.53 In Santiago de Cuba, British Antilleans complained directly to Stockdale, telling him to discuss with the minister in Havana “as to how the affairs could be more sympathetically and more expeditiously dealt with at the Vice-Consulate.” Stockdale discretely reported that the “matter was discussed with the Minister and it is unnecessary for me to go into this matter further here.”54 The issue of repatriation emerged with requests by interviewees and delegations in Camagüey and was “desired by some Jamaicans” in Santiago. In Guantánamo, the issue “figured prominently amongst the comments made by those emigrants from Barbados and the Leeward Islands.”55 In Chaparra, Delicias, Puerto Padre, and San Manuel, practically “all who were interviewed asked that they should be repatriated.”56 British Antilleans had clearly mobilized for Stockdale’s visit to make their demands, including repatriation. In Camagüey, “five Lodges or Friendly Societies” made delegations to meet him, and in Chaparra and Delicias, two branches of the British West Indian Progressive Association were founded on the occasion of the visit.57 Paradoxically, while the migrants 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 9–11. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 16. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 10, 12. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 11. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 12. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions, 15. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 10; The British West Indian Progressive Association of Central Delicias, Municipio de Puerto Padre; Constitution and Laws of

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were trying to get out of Cuba, Stockdale’s recommendations were in the opposite direction, trying to keep them there to avoid further problems in the colonies. Despite Stockdale’s belief that repatriation was the “best and most permanent solution,” the option was off the table due to the regional effects of the war and the “existing population problems in the majority” of the British colonies.58 Accordingly, the recommendations and allocations of funds were geared toward keeping the migrants in Cuba, seeking exemptions from existing labor regulations, and engaging in “determined effort” to “secure the sympathy of the Cuban Government” to “obtain the concessions” desired. The funding provided would be “for the development of farming and co-operative farms,” annual stipends for “allotments” and “doles to the unemployed in the towns and cities,” relief money for the “destitute and chronic sick,” medicines, and the support of educational efforts of British Antilleans.59 By helping British Antilleans in Cuba, partially answering some of their grievances and solving some of their needs, Stockdale sought to balance the regional concerns of the Colonial Office with the Cuban ones of the Foreign Office. The Stockdale report made evident the distinctions between Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders. Repatriation attempts for the latter group in the 1930s had been a “fiasco,” and now, in the context of the war, distance was an obstacle for a repatriation effort to the eastern Caribbean.60 Yet it was the people from “Barbados and the Leeward Islands” in Guantánamo who pressed for repatriation, along with the predominantly eastern Caribbean communities in the CASC plantations. For migrants in Chaparra the “hardships” were described as “very real,” with “inadequate” conditions and a latent “resentment against authority and against the Cubans.”61 Despite this diagnosis, Stockdale also found that “West Indians decline to leave the townships because they feel that they have better protection there against the hands of junior Cuban officials” and could also “obtain occasional casual employment.” Their “definite reluctance” to leave the territory of the company town suggests

58

59 60 61

the British West Indian Progressive Association of Central Chaparra, Pueblo Viejo, Oriente. I am grateful to Clara Goodridge in Delicias for access to these materials. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 21. Repatriation would be an option only for those aged and chronically sick, and even for them it would be a matter of waiting until the end of the war. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 10, 19, 21. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 9, 19–20. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions” 15. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 15–17.

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what was being experienced by other migrants in more open rural fields.62 The contradiction between wanting repatriation and preferring to stay in CASC lands shows that migrants in Chaparra were caught between two evils. The irony was that the otherwise oppressive structure of the company town was perceived by the migrants as a source of protection against the arbitrary treatment and uncertainty outside the domain of the CASC. Previous experiences were probably in their memory. Ultimately, even when Stockdale resolved not to engage in “wholesale repatriation,” the situation in Chaparra led him to conclude that “the movement of people and possibly repatriation would be inevitable from this centre,” and that “some repatriation for certain areas (Chaparra) will have to be undertaken.”63 How to deal with the Leeward and Windward Islanders (such as those in the CASC lands) would be a tormenting issue for British officials throughout the 1940s.

   Just after Stockdale signed his report, Ogilvie-Forbes was facing the very problems raised by it and dealing again with cases of ill-treatment of British Antilleans in two of the places assessed by the British envoy (Guantánamo and San Germán). In Guantánamo, where living conditions for migrants had been deemed “indescribable,” Ogilvie-Forbes reported “further cases of arrests of British West Indians.”64 A migrant from the British West Indian Democratic Association, J. Petinaud, wrote about the incidents to the Consul General with a “true and correct statement of what really happened, and is still in progress.” In June 1943, in the area of Caimanera, British Antilleans who were recruited to work along with Cuban workers unloading a ship were singled out and intimidated by Cuban Marines. One of the officials wanted to take the migrants into custody and targeted them for intense scrutiny, requesting two identification documents (the infamous carnet and the passport). They were asked to pay a “Bail Bond ranging from $5.00, $10.00 up to $25.00.” When the migrants requested a receipt, the “Marines threatened to flog them and send them to a big jail in Guantánamo,” where they were “locked up for some three days.” Petinaud wrote that there was “a lot of fear amongst 62 63 64

Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 15. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 17, 19. Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 12; Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, FO, July 27, 1943, NA, FO 371/33830.

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the people” who refrain from denouncing the abuses because of “having no one to protect them.” The situation, according to Petinaud, turned the 50% Law into a 75 per cent law when the Cuban official told the migrants that for every “40 men to work on the U.S. Naval Station 30 must be native born Cubans and 10 Jamaicans.” In all, fifteen persons were arrested, one of them – Darius James – had been “tied, wet with water and beaten” during a previous incident. The next month, in the Boquerón area of Guantánamo, Edward Moses (who had been arrested in Caimanera) and Amos Robinson were detained in jail even though they had paid their carnets and had receipts. Petinaud referred to the murder of another migrant at the hands of a Cuban Marine and expressed his fear of reprisals against his organization if the “Cuban hostile people” learned that their “cruel actions” were being investigated by his association.65 The problems in San Germán illustrated the “mal-administration of justice, police and military oppression” previously highlighted in Weir’s report.66 Bruce Francis declared in a statement from the hospital in Holguín that in late July he “was awaken [sic] by two military guards and a national policeman and two coloured civilians who were breaking into [his] shack” in “San German Company’s property.” He was beaten with “wooden sticks over the head and body” and received “many body wounds, principally in the abdomen and shoulders.” Francis was then “handcuffed” and taken “to the military post in San German,” hardly able to walk and accompanied by Rural Guards. He declared that he only received medical attention when “a doctor friend of mine, a Cuban, came to attend to my wounds.” In an instance of interethnic solidarity, Cubans provided information about the incident to Jamaican Teresa Dixon and Grenadian James Patrice, who then testified on behalf of Francis. In her testimony Dixon highlighted the brutal treatment received by Francis while Patrice used information provided “by a Cuban friend” to identify the names of the Rural Guards involved.67 While British Antilleans continued to encounter trouble in Cuba, these two cases illustrate moments in which the migrants and the Cubans went to work together (as in Caimanera), collaborated with each other (providing information), and established friendship. To this, one can add that 65 66 67

J. Petinaud to Consul-General, Havana, n.d., enclosed in Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, Foreign Office, London, July 27, 1943, NA, FO 371/33830. Weir, “Report on the Conditions,” 2–3. Bruce Francis, Teresa Dixon, and James Patrice, “Statement of British West Indians: Bruce Francis, Teresa Dixon, and James Patrice on the Assault of Bruce Francis, July 27, 1943,” 1943, in NA, FO 371/33830.

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in the aftermath of Stockdale’s report, there was a disposition on the part of consular representatives to act on behalf of the migrants. In the case of Guantánamo in particular, British authorities understood that the “trouble [was] undoubtedly caused by the Cubans resenting the British West Indians obtaining employment in the Base.” Ogilvie-Forbes would follow diplomatic channels with the Secretary of State, but pondered the idea of sending a former consular official in Santiago, Haydock-Wilson, to “see whether anything can be done to put things straight.”68 This time around, British representatives in Cuba understood that “increased Consular representation” for British Antilleans – as had been recommended – was “urgently required” to deal properly with the complexities of the cases of ill-treatment, having the “right type of man” on the spot. Consul Broderick’s idea in the 1930s (when consular establishments were closed) that “genuine” complaints would gravitate to Havana was not an option. Action from Havana, through either the Secretary of State or the chief of the police, would do nothing. According to OgilvieForbes, the former had no influence over the military or the police who were, in any case, “indifferent to the behaviours of rank and file in remote country districts towards unwanted British West Indian aliens.”69 The latter was “a well-known gangster . . . puffed up with the quite unnecessary flattery he has received from the U.S. Ambassador.” Even when he wanted to accomplish something and had pressed the authorities with “strong language,” Ogilvie-Forbes was concerned that the “Cuban Government might consider we were ‘framing’ a case against them over the British West Indians.” He was therefore cautious not to antagonize, but also aware of the British position in the matter, and considering a longterm strategy for the situation at hand. In a letter to Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office, the minister wrote that their “means of reprisal were practically Nil” and that “previous experience” showed that they could not count on US support. Ogilvie-Forbes was “therefore reluctant to provoke a show-down on these B.W.I. cases” because of the “considerable delicacy” that would involve the implementation of Stockdale’s plan.70 The route followed was that of increasing and reorganizing consular representation, appointing Neil Hone (from the Sabanaso incident) to the vice consulate in Oriente, and reopening the vice consulate in

68 69 70

Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, July 27, 1943, NA, FO 371/33830. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, August 28, 1943, NA, FO 371/33830. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, August 28, 1943, NA, FO 371/33830.

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Camagüey with M. T. Depree in charge. Both Hone and Depree held titles as “relief officers,” which indicates the nature of their role.71 While solutions were being sought in Cuba, in London the Colonial and Foreign Offices were mending their differences over the issue of British Antilleans. In August 9, 1943, before the arrival of Stockdale’s report, British government officials discussed the issue of repatriation.72 Foreign Office and the Treasury officials thought that given the challenges of exerting “any effective pressure” on the Cubans conducive “to mitigate present conditions” of migrants or to “refrain from interference with any welfare schemes” by the British, “repatriation of the West Indians to the British Colonies of origin was the best long-term solution.” Thomas I. K. Lloyd of the Colonial Office opposed this and considered repatriation “impossible” due to transport, housing, and labor difficulties in the colonies. Even from a “long term point of view, repatriation would also offer very grave difficulties in that no West Indian Colony was in the position to accept any considerable number of immigrants” and that “most of them were considerably over-populated.”73 Lloyd, who had worked for the Royal Commission on the West Indies, was more concerned about the welfare of the colonies than about the troubles of his Foreign Office colleagues.74 So strong was his position that he even turned around the humanitarian argument for repatriation to his advantage, stating that “there would be a humanitarian objection to any forced repatriation, in that the children of British West Indians had, he understood, acquired Cuban . . . nationality . . . by virtue of their birth,” and had presumably acquired ties there that might make them reluctant to leave” and “return with their parents to the British Colonies.”75 71

72

73

74 75

Telegram from Havana to Foreign Office, September 23, 1943, NA, FO 369/2777; Ogilvie-Forbes to Frank Stockdale, December 14, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832. See enclosure in Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, April 4, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074, for the “Relief Officer” titles. Mr. Emmens to A. S. Paterson, September [22], 1943, NA, FO 371/33832. A handwritten note in an August 9, 1943, telegram sent by Stockdale referring to his report says “Not Yet Received,” which seems to confirm the delay in the report’s delivery to the Colonial Office, or at least to the people who should have received it. See Stockdale, telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, August 9, 1943, NA, CO 318/453/14. Minutes, “Meeting Held in the Conference Room at the Colonial Office, Palace Chambers, on Monday 9th August 1943,” enclosed in P. Rogers to A. S. Patterson, Foreign Office, August 17, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832, no. A 7266. See Poynton, “Lloyd, Sir. Thomas Ingram Kynaston (1896–1968),” 166–167. Minutes, “Meeting Held in Conference Room at the Colonial Office, Palace Chambers, on Monday 9th August, 1943,” enclosed in P. Rogers to A. S. Paterson, FO, August 17, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832.

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In other words, Cuban-born British Antilleans, and possibly their parents, should stay in Cuba. London’s view of the British Antilleans as “Cubans” had resonance in the way Neil Hone would implement relief in Oriente as the new vice consul. There was not “any advantage,” he thought, for the British “to subsidise schools” in Cuba “to help turn out Cuban citizens.” Because of their birth and their acquisition of labor and electoral certificates, these “B.W.I. children” were “Cubans and not British,” Hone proclaimed.76 For him, education assistance for British Antilleans was “a very moot point” and it was his “strong recommendation” to prioritize medical relief efforts.77 In his memorandum, Hone boasted of his “long experience” dealing with British Antilleans and expressed that medical relief was “immediately effective,” as opposed to “long term matters” such as housing, co-operatives, and gardens, which Stockdale had recommended. He also differed with Stockdale’s approach on having any hope of negotiation with the Cubans regarding labor legislation. “I am very much afraid,” he wrote, “that if anyone thinks that the labour laws will be ever altered here to allow foreigners to get more employment . . . they are living in an ivory castle.”78 Hone also was strong in his position and emphasized that British Antilleans were in Cuba of “their own free will and accord.” He believed that Jamaicans “could have returned home at any time” because of the deposit in the Jamaican Treasury, and that eastern Caribbean islanders were “illegally” in Cuba because they had not left when “rounded up to be taken back.” In his assessment, independently of the economic conditions and labor laws, British Antilleans were in Cuba “due to their own will.” While Hone had “very great sympathy with our British Coloured subjects,” their predicament was “due to themselves principally as they could have gone home before the war.” He considered that the burden of

76

77 78

Neil Hone to Consul General, Havana, “Tentative ante-investigation memorandum,” November 15, 1943, 3, enclosed in Ogilvie-Forbes to Stockdale, December 14, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832 (hereafter Hone, “Tentative.”). Hone, “Tentative,” 3, 6; Ogilvie-Forbes to Stockdale, December 14, 1943, NA, FO 371/ 33832. Ogilvie-Forbes to Stockdale, December 14, 1943, NA, FO 371/33832; Hone, “Tentative,” 2, 6. Hone put his credentials “on record,” including “24 years of experience,” and also “at times” as a “large employer of British West Indian labour.” Hone, “Tentative,” 1.

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the whole situation should not be on British taxpayers, who should not pull “their chestnuts out of the fire.”79 Other differences of opinion emerged as Stockdale’s recommendations began to be implemented. Stockdale had been attracted by the cooperative farming option because of its implementation in Baraguá, but probably replicating practices in the Caribbean colonies where – under the Moyne recommendations – farming was seen as the “key to the economic and social problems.”80 But he believed “that long-term expenditure and co-operative farming will promote assimilation with the Cuban population,” thus diminishing (and avoiding) the possibility of repatriation. A farming experiment was started in Guantánamo, but Hone was “sceptical of its success.”81 On the support for education, about which Hone was unconvinced, Ogilvie-Forbes thought that “differences would merely be accentuated” by education in English among British Antilleans.82 On repatriation, the consensus was deferment until after the war, but the Colonial Office had twisted the humanitarian rationale for it. Also, the colonies were facing unemployment and were sending their contract labor elsewhere to Panama and the United States, which made the return of destitute workers from Cuba unlikely.83

79 80 81 82 83

Hone, “Tentative,” 1–2. Stockdale, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1943–44, 26; Stockdale, “Report on Present Conditions,” 9, 19. Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, April 4, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074. Ogilvie-Forbes, telegram to Foreign Office, February 26, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074. Hart, Towards Decolonisation, 232. In 1940, some work was available in Panama due to an “extensive construction program” and the government of the Canal Zone requested the recruitment of Jamaicans. William Dawson, US ambassador to Panama, to Dr. Narciso Garay, secretary of foreign relations, Panama, January 3, 1940, George W. Westerman Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter SCRBC, NYPL), Box 49, Folder 7. The option of contract labor in the United States solved two problems in the context of war for the United States and the Caribbean, harmonizing the interests of the Development and Welfare Organization and the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (representing the interests of the United Kingdom, but mostly of the United States). It provided an outlet for the working population in the Caribbean colonies, and it solved the (mostly male) labor shortage that the war had caused in agricultural and industrial enterprises in the United States. The British Legation in Havana communicated with the British Embassy in Washington, DC expressing that “British West Indians here are aware that labour has been recruited in the various colonies” and they were “pressing” the legation to “open up this field of employment for them.” The problem with this option was that once done working in the United States, workers could not return to Cuba and would have to go to the colonies, which was not desired. Chancery, letter to Chancery, British Embassy, Washington, DC, March 30, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074.

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Despite existing differences, relief operations took place between 1944 and 1945 and population data on British Antilleans were collected. Estimates by 1944 were of 26,800 in Oriente, “including 6,000 Cuban born,” and 15,000 in Camagüey, with the general figure of 40,000 being considered an “under estimate.” In Oriente, most migrants were in Guantánamo (7,000) and in company town regions of the UFC (3,500) and the CASC (4,000), and more than 8,000 were in other areas around the province.84 Census figures for 1943 cannot corroborate British Antillean estimates properly, but do point to a significant foreign-born population of color in Cuba, with 43,256 black and mixed-race foreign-born individuals (22,001 in Oriente and 17,537 in Camagüey). Census charts for “people in different industries” by race, sex, and citizenship report 59,628 foreigners of color aged over thirteen, and 45,791 with occupation (whether employed or not), with 14,881 in Camagüey and 18,501 in Oriente.85 Any estimate becomes more difficult because the category “foreign people of color” includes also Haitians, Chinese, and other foreigners.86 The assessment of British operations in Cuba regarding the Antilleans by 1944 indicates that “Jamaicans were better off than the other islanders and less of them wanted to return home.” “Most of those desiring repatriation were ‘Small Islanders’,” a term used for those from the eastern Caribbean.87 The funding of medical assistance that was reported included expenses for “many cases needing extensive operations and, after care, artificial limbs,” and also there “were a considerable number of blind and near-blind, paralytics, cripples and people too old to work.”88 84

85

86

87 88

This includes Manatí (1,200); Cayo Mambi mill with Sagua de Tánamo and nearby areas (1,200); Jobabo, Río Cauto, Oriente, and América Mills and Bayamo (1,500); Manzanillo (1,000); towns on the railway from Omaja to Cacocum (1,000); San Germán, Miranda, Mangos de Baraguá, Alto Cedro, Bayate, and other localities (2,400). See “Relief of Distressed British West Indians in Cuba” (Minutes of meeting at British Consulate General, Havana, March 28, 1944), enclosed in Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, FO, April 4, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074. These figures roughly approximate the estimate by the British authorities for Camagüey, but not for Oriente (of 26,800) unless one estimates the number of children under the age thirteen. República de Cuba, Informe general del censo de 1943, 1042–1043, 1070–1071, 1080–1083. República de Cuba, Informe general del censo de 1943, 888–889, 916–917, 920–921. The difference in the figures and with the problematic ethnic/racial classifications do not facilitate much precision, but they are provided in order to at least frame a rough estimate that can serve as a point of reference. “Relief of Distressed British West Indians in Cuba,” 2. “Relief of Distressed British West Indians in Cuba,” 2–3.

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At the meeting held in the British Consulate General in Havana to assess the relief efforts, the issue of support for schools for British Antilleans emerged again. This time, the directives from London were that “assimilation of the British West Indians with the local Cuban population was now the decided policy of the Colonial Office.” Therefore, “the encouragement of British West Indian schools with their necessary emphasis on English language and history ran directly counter to that directive.”89 Only “a small per capita quarterly allowance” would be provided to “existing deserving schools subject to constant revision and strict supervision,” but it was sustained that “no assistance should be granted to establish new schools.”90 The new “directive” would guide the actions taken and their assessment. Thus, while the actions of the “Relief Officers” had a “chastening effect” at the local level and the authorities were dealing “less arbitrarily with British West Indians,” the protective action “accentuated the ‘separatism’ of the British West Indian themselves,” something that was against the “directive for assimilation.” The investment of funds in people who were constitutionally Cubans, or would become so, was seen as “largely unproductive,” and it was thought that money should be spent in “the sterling area (i.e., in the British West Indies).” After years of evaluations, reports, and recommendations, the road had reach a dead end, or rather an intersection; if the intention was that British Antilleans were going to assimilate, support funding would not help; if British money was going to be spent on Cuban soil, they might as well go for “the only solution of the problem,” that of repatriation “of those who so desire or are elegible.”91 While deliberations took place in Havana, officers of the Colonial and Foreign Offices, including Stockdale, met in London on July 15, 1944, and discussed “what is the best method of securing the loosening of the tie which binds those British West Indians who are already Cuban citizens with the Colonies from which their parents originally came.” Stockdale “stated that Sir Ogilvie-Forbes had originally been in favour of the existence of a separate West Indian community in Cuba and he . . . had been of the opinion that the best method was to get the people on the land” through the co-operative farm scheme. But with that route canceled, the prevailing opinion would be that of the Colonial Office, stated by Lloyd, who “was against a long term separate self-contained 89 90 91

“Relief of Distressed British West Indians in Cuba,” 3. “Relief of Distressed British West Indians in Cuba,” 3–4. “Relief of Distressed British West Indians in Cuba,” 5, underlining in original.

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community looking ultimately to the British Government for support.” That is, the British could not afford to maintain a colony of subjects in a foreign land. Black British subjects would have to assimilate in Cuba, and the more so if they were already Cuban citizens.92 The paradox of the British policy in Cuba in the 1940s is that while the authorities wanted to promote assimilation among British Antilleans and weaken their imperial affiliation, the migrants were aiming in the opposite direction. During Stockdale’s visit in 1943, the migrants impressed the officials with their imperial loyalty. This was evident in the continued organizational efforts of the migrants, creating societies, clubs, and associations clearly exposing their allegiance. That was the case of the Association of British Subjects of Morón, created in May 1943, for the “representation and protection” of “British subjects and their offspring that live in this Republic [of Cuba],” to “safeguard the defence of any member that could be incarcerated or maltreated in his body or reputation.” Aware of the dilemmas of citizenship and national definition at play in the 1940s, the association’s rules emphasized the education of the offspring and indicated that it would accept all British subjects born in Cuba or any other country “taking for granted that they are of British origin and ensuring in all the cases that the applicant speaks the English language.” Birthplace was therefore, in the eyes of British migrants, not an obstacle, and as far as people had a “British origin” and spoke English, they could claim their membership of a wider British Empire, without regard to birthplace.93 The similar emphasis in the British allegiance is evident in the Cultural Association of the British Antilleans of Cuba, using capital letters in its rulings indicating that members would be from the “‘BRITISH’ Antilles or any of its dependencies.” It further clarified that “British Antilleans” meant “British subjects from the following colonies and their dependencies: The Bahamas, Barbados, British Guiana, British Honduras, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, and the Windward Islands.”94 The Nuevitas branch of the British West Indian Mutual Association, founded early in 92

93 94

“Note of a Meeting Held at Palace Chambers at 11 a.m. on Saturday the 15th July, 1944,” enclosed in Whitehorn to H. A. H. Hohler, FO, July 17, 1944, NA, FO 371/ 38075. Kenneth L. A. Mayne and Austin Hines, “Proyecto de Reglamento de la Asociación de Súbditos Británicos de Morón,” May 27, 1943, AHPC, RA-C, leg. 125, no. 9. C. C. Richardson and Aden N. Sandiford, “Reglamento de la Sociedad Cultural Denominada ‘Asociacion Cultural de las Antillas Británicas de Cuba’,” July 13, 1943 (approved August 9, 1943), AHPC, RA-C, leg. 305, no. 2.

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1943, stated that its aims were, among others, “keeping relations with the Governments of every unit of the British Antilles, as well [with] the diplomatic representatives of His British Majesty in the city of Havana.” They also defined the Caribbean British imperial domain, and emphasized education and the admission not only of people from the British Antilles, but also of their descendants, as long as they had the “indispensable requisite” of documentary proof of their identity.95 There were also individual manifestations of that allegiance to the British Empire, such as that of Josiah Lawrence in July 1944. Evading the Colonial and Foreign Office, Lawrence wrote to Winston S. Churchill, then prime minister, emphasizing both his national affiliation as British and the way British Antilleans have been left “as sheep without a shepherd.” He wrote, “As a humble Servant and Subject Hon Sir We are pleased to report to you we are British Subjects we have respect our Laws and we have such respect for all Laws of any country or government. We have Redeemed a British Passport to Identified Our Nationality [sic].”96 Clearly, there was no intention to lose their tie with the empire; on the contrary, the migrants in Cuba were asserting it.

  ? By the late 1940s, significant funds were being used in relief efforts in Havana, Camagüey and Oriente ($24,921.74) from contributions made by various colonies. Jamaica provided a total of 62.42 percent of the budget, more than all the other colonies together. Relief of poor and sick British Antilleans was the priority of the funding, with only small amounts for education ($482.00), thus following the Colonial Office assimilation directive. Only $972.22 was allocated for repatriation by the Jamaican government, and no funds from the Leeward and Windward Islands were destined for repatriation. Overall, in the three provinces, only 1.93 percent of the budget was for education, 3.90 percent for repatriation of Jamaicans, and 86.06 percent for relief of the poor and sick.97

95

96 97

Leonardo G. Reid, Joseph T. Griffith, and H. A. Caines, “Asociación de Socorros Mutuos de Antillanos Británicos [British West Indian Mutual Association] – Fundado en Agosto 1935,” August 2, 1943, AHPC, RA-C, leg. 125, no. 13 (second piece). Josiah Lawrence to Winston S. Churchill, London, July 18, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074. The remaining 8 percent was for administrative expenses, 79.35 per cent of which was used by Vice Consul Hone in Oriente.

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Clearly, the British did not want the colonial subjects back, nor did they want them educated as a separate community from Cubans.98 But by 1948, the Colonial Office declared a reduction in the “amenities” for British Antilleans in other countries. They were considered a “liability” and it was “agreed that future policy should aim at the winding up of relief financed” by the British, and “the encouragement of the West Indians concerned to assimilate themselves with the local population.”99 This policy was communicated to ministers in Cuba (and other Hispanic Caribbean former destinations) by M. E. Vibert of the Foreign Office, explicitly ruling out repatriation due to overpopulation in the colonies. If any migrant were to return, it had to be “ensuring the best ultimate economy, coupled with due regard to humanitarian factors” for “those more or less permanently in need of aid” or “not encumbered with large families.” Vibert’s disdain for Caribbean migrants was noticeable through his lack of recognition for their autonomous relief and community efforts and his racial prejudices. He argued that since “voluntary aid societies do not already exist” a “small subsidy” exclusively for “essential relief” may be given to newly created organizations “if they were under non-coloured control.”100 The situation in Cuba seemed to be particularly tense, and what to do about repatriation continued to be an issue of friction between the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Vibert wrote to the ministers in Havana as he appeared to look for ways to solve the problems faced by Foreign Office personnel in Cuba.101 In March, the Colonial Office was ambivalent, writing to Vibert that while “continued relief would be preferable,” a “substantial measure of repatriation must be faced.”102 But as the moves for that “substantial measure of repatriation” were taking place, the prosperity of war-related sugar production apparently alleviated the conditions of British Antilleans.103 The British Legation in

98

99 100

101 102 103

The relief funding figures are available in [J. T. Weir] to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, December 22, 1947, NA, FO 369/3962, no. K238. W. D. Sweaney to C. D. Jennery, January 22, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962. M. E. Vibert to H. Dodds, Havana, Cuba, R. D. MacRae, Ciudad Trujillo, Santo Domingo, and A. C. Trouth, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 23, 1948, NA, FO 369/ 3962. M. E. Vibert to H. Dodds, January 24, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962. W. D. Sweaney to M. E. Vibert, March 2, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962. Sugar production increased by nearly 40 percent between 1944 and 1948 and sugar exports increased. Pérez, Cuba, 217.

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Havana then wrote to the Foreign Office in April 1948 stating that “it would be advisable to abandon the idea of organized repatriation for the present at all events.” From their point of view, “until the sugar industry in Cuba ceases to be prosperous the labour problem among the British West Indians will not be acute.”104 The postponement of repatriation moved the Colonial Office back to their complete opposition to repatriation, supported by colonial governments in Jamaica and Barbados. W. D. Sweaney from the Colonial Office wrote to Vibert immediately (and presumably with relief ) agreeing to the postponement of repatriation: the return of sick and aged migrants was seen as a “big problem” and arranging for shipping would be “very difficult.”105 By late 1948 the British authorities in Havana discarded any “large scale repatriation” and moved to a small-scale scheme targeting those migrants receiving relief and thus alleviating their own financial burden. Here again, Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean islanders were in different positions. H. Dodds from the Havana Legation stressed the “high cost of repatriating British West Indians to more distant islands” in contrast to the “readiness of the Jamaican Government to refund the amount of the deposit made by Jamaican emigrants to Cuba.” In conclusion, it was better “to repatriate Jamaicans rather than grant them relief, and to grant relief to British West Indians from the other islands rather than repatriate them.”106 The options for the migrants that would stay in Cuba were limited, because support for mutual relief societies was seen as “a means of affording easy living to their officers” and the existing farming cooperatives rested on circumstances “not likely to be repeated.” The British authorities feared that further cuts in relief funds would increase demands for repatriation, and while some “small islanders” were being sent back, it was likely that “the means for financing increased repatriation will not be availabl[e].” With colonial governments in the eastern Caribbean penny-pinching on the cost of “repatriating their own distressed emigrants,” the British representatives in Cuba were “faced with the choice of depriving necessitous cases of relief or reducing the repatriation of ‘small islanders’ to very small proportions.” At this point, they apparently accepted the inevitable, and wrote to London conveying the grim prospects for the British Antilleans (and specifically, eastern Caribbean 104 105 106

British Legation, Havana, to consular department, Foreign Office, April 5, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962. W. D. Sweaney to M. E. Vibert, May 5, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962. H. Dodds to H. McNeill, UK, November 30, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962.

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ones): “an aging group of British West Indians will have to fend for itself in a country which will do little or nothing to relieve or repatriate them.”107 In 1948, when Vibert assessed the situation of British Antilleans in foreign countries, he thought it was time to “settle this question definitely.” His recommendations included selected repatriation, relief “to a small number of unrepatriables,” the “encouragement of voluntary aid and welfare societies,” and “assimilation.” Relief would be only for those too old to return and those who “no longer have any ties in their native islands.” About the societies, Vibert completely ignored decades of organizational history and self-reliance of the British Antilleans, and argued that it was “almost impossible to get coloured people amongst themselves to do anything for mutual aid and when it comes to money they are far too suspicious of each other.”108 His distrust of British Antilleans led him to believe that if money was going to be given to encourage societies, “Control of the funds must be in the hands of Europeans.” Even abroad, black colonial subjects did not escape the prejudiced eyes of British colonialism. Vibert’s contempt for British Antilleans was more evident as he rationalized the assimilation policy, writing that “a lot of these people” should simply merge “with the people of the country.” There should not be concerns “about losing these people as British subjects,” he thought, because “their loyalty to us is mainly sentimental.” Moreover, for him, the way British Antilleans proclaimed “their British allegiance” was “offensive to the people of the country whom they despise.”109 After more than four decades of diplomatic representation, contentions, and struggle with regard to British Antilleans in Cuba, and with the British Empire crumbling into pieces, by the 1940s, there was nothing to hide. Vibert’s words encapsulated the paternalistic and patronizing view that had ruled most of the diplomatic actions, the acknowledgment of US control over the Caribbean, and the way they regarded people of African descent (British Antilleans and the Cuban rural population), whether they had a British or Spanish colonial background.

107 108 109

H. Dodds to H. McNeill, UK, November 30, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962. On the organizational tradition of the migrants, see Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’.” M. E. Vibert, “Minutes: British West Indian Relief in Cuba, S. Domingo and Haiti,” 1948, NA, FO 369/3962.

10 Race, Nation, and Empire

Between 1933 and 1948, the British and Cuban governments were, from different positions, seeking colonial and national solutions to one problem: black British subjects in Cuba. Their respective solutions were, of course, contradictory, with the Cubans wanting the migrants out of their national territory, and the British hoping that they would “assimilate themselves with the local population” in Cuba away from the British Caribbean.1 Both solutions were also predicated on and implemented under the rationale of the otherness and inferiority of the British Antilleans. For all their diplomatic quarrels, the Cuban and British governments shared a common disregard for the black Caribbean migrant and a national utopia of whiteness with no space for British Antilleans. This final chapter attempts to disentangle the ideas of race, ethnicity, and nation as they emerge in the history of black British subjects in Cuba.

        Cuban opposition to the black Caribbean migrant was anchored in two complementary ideas from the nineteenth century: the long-held black fear and the utopia of Cuban whiteness. The visibility of black migrants in the early twentieth century triggered hostility, but also elite and intellectual articulations of the (white) nation which illustrated the limits (and problematic nature) of black inclusiveness in Cuban national discourse.

1

W. D. Sweaney to C. D. Jennery, January 22, 1948, NA, FO 369/3962.

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As early as 1900, Cuban opposition to black Caribbean workers forced railroad entrepreneur Van Horne to deny allegations of recruitment of Jamaican labor and declare that he would “bring nobody who is not likely to become a good citizen, and nobody who could be objectionable in any community.”2 In harmony with anti-Jamaican feelings, but also with US immigration laws applicable in Cuba, Van Horne declared that his agents had particular instructions to recruit men “who are in every way suitable to become, further on, good Cuban citizens.”3 The racial implications of the preferences to which Van Horne yielded were obvious, even if not explicit: prospective good Cuban citizens were those from countries regarded as white or “whiter,” and not from “blacker” Caribbean islands. Antiblack feelings were present when Fernando Ortiz outlined his criminological take on immigration in 1906. Blacks were a “backward” race who were more prone to crime than whites in a similar position. Nonwhites had a “primitive” and “barbarian” psyche, as well as other “social defects,” that distinguished them from whites. Even mestizos – because of their middle ground between “pure races”– shared the criminological predicament of blacks. Essentially, Ortiz argued that black migrants were inferior and damaging to the nation in order to advocate for his preference for white migrants. The immigrant, he argued, had to be “dispersed through our depopulated countryside, avoiding the formation of nuclei of foreigners of the same race, especially those who speak nonSpanish languages.” To “avoid collective crimes and the rooting of secret societies” (both features of nonwhite migrants, in Ortiz’s view), the “immigrant had to be absorbed, assimilated; we should make him ours,” Ortiz concluded.4 His ideas were replicated in Cuban immigration policies, and popular conceptions of black migrants echoed his assessment. In northeastern plantations the link between immigration and criminality was sustained when British Caribbean migrants were accused of stealing with no evidence and Cubans were spared from police actions or accusations.5 Paradoxically, while British Antilleans were being 2 3 4 5

William Van Horne to José Miguel Gómez, November 3, 1900, CCP, S. 1, Box A (1900–1905). “Our Labourers Not Wanted,” Jamaica Times, September 7, 1901, 1. Ortiz, “La inmigración,” 55–61. Harold Harty to William Mason, British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, February 19, 1910, manager’s letter books, 1909–1911, UFCP, p. 226. See also, for another case of a Jamaican accused of stealing, Harold Harty to William Mason, British Consulate, Santiago de Cuba, August 1, 1907, manager’s letter books, 1907–1908, UFCP, p. 466.

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racially profiled as criminals, they were themselves also the victims of injustice because of their skin color. In 1909, Jamaican John A. McKenzie denounced that “British subjects in Cuba, especially colored are suffering terrible [sic] from the aggressions of the Cubans.” He was facing eviction by the government and used his denunciation to the British authorities to communicate the general antagonism against “blacks” in the Cuban context.6 Black migrants became also associated with sociopolitical unrest. The 1912 PIC revolt did not escape this connection. It did not help that the PIC’s platform advocated for an open and non-racist immigration policy, which indicates that a sector of Cuban blacks and mulattoes did not share the prevalent views on black migration.7 Nonetheless, its leadership was linked to Jamaica and Haiti and black migrants from these islands were said to be taking part in the uprising.8 Curiously, Ortiz’s essay, “Las rebeliones de los negros en Cuba,” was reproduced twice during the PIC revolt and its aftermath, associating black revolt with the “preaching of foreigners.”9 In that context, an article in the El Camaüeyano newspaper set the origins of Caribbean racial conflicts in Haitian independence in 1804, as it denied any white hate for blacks and proclaimed that 88 percent of Cubans “are not blacks!”10 A group of “Ladies” in Santiago de Cuba referred to the insurgents as cafres Africanos, a label that placed Cuban rebels or black Cubans outside the nation, in a very specific continent that opened a charged racial imagery.11 Other Cuban 6 7 8

9

10 11

John A. McKenzie to Sir Edward Grey [MP, Foreign Office, London], September 1, 1909, NA, FO 369/207. Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 66. A. M. Beaupré to US Secretary of State, June 2, 1912, NARA, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.00/657 (M488, Roll #6); “Cuba to Invoke Martial Law,” Tobacco, 53: 7, June 6, 1912, 1, 19. Governor, Oriente Province, to Secretary of Government, May 27, 1912, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 1790, no. 6; “Cuban Revolt,” Daily Gleaner, June 12, 1912, 1; “The Revolution Grows in Cuba,” Daily Gleaner, June 11, 1912, 1; John de Pools, “Cuba’s Present Rebellion: Its Sources and Dangers,” Jamaica Times, July 6, 1912, 5, 8; “Cuban Revolt: The Destruction of an American Sugar Estate, Burning Houses,” Daily Gleaner, June 5, 1912, 1. See also Helg, Our Rightful Share, 197, 209–210, 217; and Fermoselle, Política y color en Cuba, 94, 144–145. Ortiz, “Las rebeliones de los negros en Cuba,” 8. The essay was initially published in the Revista de Administración, 2: 9 (May 1–15, 1912): 157–164. Fernando Coronil refers to Maria Poumier, with no printed reference, to indicate that Ortiz remained silent in the events of 1912. Yet the timing of his publications was in itself telling. Coronil, “Transculturation and the Politics of Theory,” xlix, note 11. “Racismo, si racismo,” El Camagüeyano, 8 June 1912, 2. “Hablan las mujeres cubanas” [Imprenta de J. Borron, periódico “Cuba”], June 18, 1912, ANC, SP, leg. 110, no. 2 [Segunda pieza].

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newspapers constantly reported on “Haytian [sic] and Jamaican negroes” being led by Estenoz, and correlated the center of the revolt in the east with the location of large concentrations of black migrants.12 The overall view was that racial problems in Cuba were not endogenous and always had roots in “outside” influences.13 The involvement of black migrants in the revolt was always denied, and indeed there is little evidence about it, but in 1912 and after, their portrayal as disturbing elements continued and gained impetus. With the increase of black migration in the 1910s, the imagery of the black revolt led by Jamaicans and Haitians increased. In February 1913, Carlos de Velasco opposed the authorization granted to the Nipe Bay Company to import Caribbean workers, arguing that from “Jamaica and Haiti came a part, not insignificant, of the contingent that followed Estenoz and Ivonet in the racist rebellion.” Their similar “ethnic origin” and “instincts” led him to warn the country to be “on guard against the grave conflict” that becomes one of “not far-off probabilities” due to the “arrival of these contract ‘Antillean’ workers.”14 That same month, the Rural Guard reported on the arrival of “individuals of the race of color” from Haiti and Jamaica. Its acting chief reminded the government that “experience” (presumably the PIC) showed that these migrants were a “pernicious element” that would “disturb” the “cordial relations” among Cubans.15 Haitian military personalities visiting Cuba between 1914 and 1915, such as Edmond Defly and Rosalvo Bobo, raised concerns and attention among Cuban authorities and the press.16 The dramatic increase of British Caribbean immigration between 1915 and 1916 (from 1,640 to 6,005) generated strong opposition among various sectors of the population. In 1915, the eastern regional press

12

13 14 15 16

“The Revolution Grows in Cuba,” Daily Gleaner, June 11, 1912, 1, reviewed an unidentified article from La Prensa of Cuba. See also “Haitianos y jamaiquinos,” El Mundo, May 25, 1912, 5; “Baturillo,” Diario de la Marina, June 4, 1912, 4; A similar argument can be found in Chomsky, “The Aftermath of Repression,” 7. De Velasco, “El problema negro,” 75–76. Enclosed in Luis [Carmona] to Provincial Governor of Oriente, February 10, 1913, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 786, no. 1. On Defly’s alleged actions according to the Cuban authorities, see “Constituion of a black republic in Oriente,” Sub-secretary of State, Cuba, to Provincial Governor of Oriente, October 8, 1914; chief, government police, to provincial governor of Oriente, October 15, 1914; Chief, government police, to Provincial Governor of Oriente, October 17, 1914, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 1709, no. 9; Chomsky, “The Aftermath of Repression,” 10–12. Rosalvo Bobo (1873–1929) had written a history of Haiti entitled Pour l’histoire de la revolution haïtienne. On Bobo, see Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers, 222–227.

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warned that among the Jamaican and Haitian migrants there were “vagabonds,” “adventurers,” the “perverted,” and people of “delinquent” life “capable of everything that is not permitted by law.” In response to the “Jamaican danger,” El Pueblo of Banes emphasized that cheap Antillean labor contributed to the profits of the sugar industry.17 In a 1916 article in La Reforma Social, Luis Marino Pérez recognized the advantages of Jamaican migrants as field workers, but identified them as a “social problem” because they were “all of color.” However convenient it was for economic reasons, he maintained that black migration would turn Cuba’s eastern half into a “predominantly black region,” and “weaken Cuban nationality.” Marino Pérez’s explicitly racist argument was complex as he maneuvered the contours of Cuban national identity in contrast with the segregated United States, declaring that “we made all Cubans citizens of the Republic, without regard to their color, and blacks are as respected as whites. Before their skin color,” he continued, “we place their condition as Cubans, because above ethnic aspects comes nationality, the common origins and the history of common struggles and sacrifices that have had the virtue of melting into one single nation, whites and blacks – a unique historical example.” By including blacks in the nation, Marino Pérez was forced to elaborate his argument beyond skin color, stating that “black foreigners, with their traditions and ideas, their civilization and language different from ours, cannot be assimilated with the black Cubans, much less with the whites.” Ethnicity and culture came to the forefront as markers of difference (although he seemed to equate “skin color” and “ethnic aspects”), allowing him the national inclusion of black Cubans, but not “black foreigners.” Unlike Ortiz’s 1906 argument for dispersion of the immigrant for their future absorption, the increase in the black population in the east led Marino Pérez to assert the “little assimilative power of Cuban society.” By 1916, the nation could “not absorb, nor assimilate with easiness those foreign elements living in its territory.”18 Some dissident views on black migration found a space in public debate. One article by José de Gabriel Palacios supports Aviva Chomsky’s argument that debates on black Caribbean migration were an implicit dialogue on the position of Cuban blacks in the national polity.19 Writing from Santiago de Cuba in 1916, Palacios condemned 17 18 19

“La inmigración en Oriente,” El Eco de Tunas, April 27, 1915, 2; “Inmigración perniciosa,” El Pueblo, November 15, 1915, 1. Marino Pérez, “La inmigración jamaiquina,” 392–393; Ortiz, “La inmigración,” 55–61. Chomsky, “Barbados or Canada?,” 424.

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the “unjustified campaign” against migrants which – he believed – was grounded in Cuba’s own racial problems (cuestión de razas). He attested to “fraternal relations” existing between migrant workers of “different countries and different races,” with Haitians “united in leisure and entertainment with Spaniards, Jamaicans, and Puerto Ricans.”20 Mulatto writers and commentators such as Ramón Vasconcelos and Lino D’ou also intervened in the discussions of 1916 with positions that maneuvered the tenuous politics of race and nation in Cuba. Under the pseudonym “Tristán,” Vasconcelos advanced a counterargument of pan-Caribbean solidarity, reminding readers that during Cuba’s independence struggles, Haiti and Jamaica were shelters for Cuban insurgents. He avoided the issue of race, or dissolved it into one of ethnic difference, arguing that Jamaicans and Haitians were as foreign to Cuba as the Turks and Chinese, but ended up supporting “closing the door of the black seasonal migrant from neighboring Antilles.”21 For his part, D’ou’s convoluted response to writings on immigration appeared in Gráfico. He rejected the idea that opposition to Caribbean migration was because they were “black”; rather the main concern was that those arriving in Cuba were the “brushwood” of their respective islands and that affected “fusion” with the Cubans.22 “Tristán” engaged with other writers in late April 2016, still avoiding an explicit racial opposition to Caribbean migrants, but questioning what “convulsive Haitians” and the “illiterate Jamaican” could contribute to Cuba. This characterization shared some of the prevalent ideas about black Caribbean outsiders.23 In 1917, the Chambelona put Marino Pérez’s domestic “social harmony” to the test. Racial tensions among Cubans converged with opposition to foreign blacks. The familiar accusations against black migrants were reproduced before, during, and after the revolt. Black migrants were accused of transmitting malaria, and in Jobabo Jamaicans became “hordes of savages” attacking white women.24 While one editorial in La Lucha linked Jamaicans to the 1912 revolt again, another in Diario de la Marina described them as a “plague” bringing “prejudices” and “dangers” to Cuba: “What the country needs are men of order, not those 20 22 23 24

21 Palacios, “¡Tengo la palabra!” 4. Tristán, “Calamar en tinta,” 4. D’ou, “Suaviter in modo,” 5. The argument that there was no space for Jamaicans and Haitians in the Cuban ajiaco was also expressed later by Fernando Ortiz. [Tristán], “Sin vuelta de hoja,” 4. “Los haitianos y jamaicanos son los principales transmisores del paludismo,” El Cubano Libre, February 12, 1917, 1; “El relato de las atrocidades cometidas por los alzados en Jobabo causa verdadera indignación,” La Lucha, March 26, 1917, 4.

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who are uncontrollable, quarrelsome, and disturbing, like the Jamaican immigrants.”25 The editorial in Diario de la Marina referred to the need for migrants with “ethnic affinities” such as language, character, and habits, and blending potential. “These colored immigrants,” it was argued, were only “agents of discord and perturbation” with no possible affinity to Cuba’s history or “her national and patriotic interests,” and would “take every occasion to promote racist conflicts.” “The Jamaican immigrant,” it was concluded, “will bring with them neither a healthy and robust sap of labor and wealth, nor a source of strength and homogeneous cohesion, but a virus of vices, vagrancy and disruption.”26 Even sugar planters and entrepreneurs took into account Cuban racial concerns in 1917. In June, the people of the Rionda sugar enterprises considered the option of bringing Chinese workers and migrants from Puerto Rico, even when the latter did “not work much.” But it was “better for them not to be black,” they argued, perhaps aware of the persecution that blacks experienced during the Chambelona.27 The labor strikes in the fall of 1917 provided another justification for opposition to black migration, preparing the setting for a plea to encourage white European migration.28 But despite attempts to foment Spanish migration,29 black Antilleans were the ones coming in unprecedented numbers to Cuban plantations. Unwelcome British Antilleans faced a violent reception. In 1919, the police reported several attacks on Jamaicans and Haitians to the government of Oriente Province.30 Three Haitians were found hanged between Marcane and Preston.31 Also in 1919, in the town of Regla, near Havana, a Jamaican was accused of attempting to kidnap a child for witchcraft 25 26 27 28

29 30

31

“Editorial: Las fechorias de los sediciosos,” La Lucha, March 27, 1917, 2; “La plaga de jamaiquinos” (editorial), Diario de la Marina, April 5, 1917, 3. “La plaga de jamaiquinos” (editorial), Diario de la Marina, April 5, 1917, 3. See Eduardo Diez de Ulzurrun to Manuel Rionda, NY, June 22, 1917; Victor Zevallos to Manuel Rionda, NY, June 22, 1917, BBC, RG II, S. 1, Boxes 26 and 29 respectively. “La inmigración,” El Pueblo, October 5, 1917, 1; “la inmigración conveniente,” El Camagüeyano, October 25, 1917, 1; “Los colonos y la inmigración,” El Camagüeyano, October 26, 1917, 1; “Editorial: El fomento de la inmigración,” El Camagüeyano, October 31, 1917, 1. “El problema inmigratorio,” La Voz del Pueblo, March 22, 1918, 2; “El ‘Barcelona’ trae 1,006 Pasajeros de España y Canarias,” La Prensa, January 17, 1917, 2. See correspondence between the Chief, special police, to Provincial Governor of Oriente, April 14, 1919; and two letters for May 2, 1919, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 1836, no. 22; “Ocurrencias del interior,” El Mundo, December 27, 1919, 11. Chief, special police, to Provincial Governor of Oriente, May 2, 1919, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 1836, no. 22.

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(brujería), taken to jail, ill-treated, and shot, and then the corpse was tied to a horse and pulled through the local streets.32 Despite the violence during and after the Liberal revolt and events such as those in Regla, a newspaper editorial argued that the economic benefits of the booming sugar industry justified some tolerance of black migration, as a necessary evil.33 This tolerance, if it ever existed, definitely ended with the collapse of the sugar industry that brought economic distress and hostility against Cuba’s black significant other. In the 1920s, the accusations against black migrants persisted, identifying them as carriers of disease, and as elements that would “upset” and “disturb the order.”34 The crisis of 1921 added to the perception of the migrant as a social burden, and increased tensions between locals and foreigners competing in the jobs market.35 St. Lucians were shot in broad daylight, some Jamaicans were taunted, and it was reported that they were “all termed dogs” in Cuba.36 Jamaicans continued to be accused of criminal activities, from stealing lottery tickets to the accusations of pickpocketing by a “native of the English Antilles” known as “The Brilliant Negro.”37 In Niquero, the mayor reported that a group of “Haitians or Jamaicans (he could not say which)” attempted to assault and rob a boy.38 This latter case highlights how ethnic distinctions between both migrant groups were blurred and skin color became the principal marker of “otherness.” In 1921, the government opted to repatriate “cane-cutters coming from Haiti, Jamaica, and other Lesser Antilles.”39 While many British Antilleans left and migration diminished, black foreigners remained a 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39

Duque, La historia de Regla, 129; Bronfman, Measures of Equality, 100; McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens,” 601. “Editoriales: El problema inmigratorio,” El Camagüeyano, February 8, 1921, 2. “En Oriente hay 5,000 jamaiquinos y haitianos,” La Voz del Pueblo, July 11, 1921, 2. Gilberto [Santos] to Provincial Governor, Santiago de Cuba, June 29, 1921, AHPSC, GPO, leg. 786, exp. 11; “Repatriación de haitianos y jamaicanos,” El Cubano Libre, July 22, 1921, 1. “Reports on the Conditions Existing in the Cuban Republic,” Negro World, August 27, 1921, 7; “West Indians in Cuba,” Voice of Saint Lucia, March 4, 1922, 5; “Jamaican Shoots White in Self-Defence,” Negro World, December 16, 1922, 9. “Hacinamiento de haitianos y jamaiquinos,” El Camagüeyano, February 8, 1921, 3; “Noticias de Oriente,” Diario de la Marina, second section, March 16, 1921, [11]; “‘El brillante negro’, hábil carterista detenido anoche,” Diario de la Marina, March 29, 1921, 1. “Jamaiquinos acusados,” La Voz del Pueblo, August 18, 1921, 2. Alfredo Zayas, “Decreto No. 1404 (Secretaria de Agricultura, Comercio, y Trabajo),” Gaceta Oficial, July 22, 1921, 1445–1446.

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concern for Cuban elites, with Jorge Le-Roy y Cassá’s 1923 speech invoking José Antonio Saco and marking Jamaicans and Haitians as “undesirable” for the nation and prone to criminality, “blood crimes,” and drug usage.40 Along with him, Carlos Trelles also delivered a conference in 1923 condemning García Menocal for allowing the entrance of “156,000 uncultured men of rudimentary civilization” of “inferior, illiterate races.” Referring also to Saco, Trelles’s racial preferences became more explicit, arguing that Cuba had become “perfectly habitable for the white race” once yellow fever was eliminated, and migration policies should favor “what we could call Caucasian; but never the African or the Asiatic.”41 These statements exemplified the eugenic ideas that circulated among Cuba’s intellectual elites.42 The racialized nationalist concerns gained more impetus in the late 1920s in the weekly newspaper Carteles, where Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring joined the likes of Araquistáin, Marino Pérez, Ramiro Guerra, and Fernando Ortiz on the issue of black migration and the sugar industry. Like others, Roig de Leuchsenring contrasted Cuba during the republic and Spanish colonial times, mentioning the “good” and “laborious” Spaniards, the Chinese workers, and the absence of black slavery, but the continuation of an “African slave trade,” “with the only difference being that now, instead of being with Africa, it is made with Jamaica and Haiti.”43 For Roig de Leuchsenring, and for others, the association of black migrants with Africa and the general criticism of Haitians and Jamaicans were often accompanied by favoritism for Spaniards, lamenting their departure due to competition from cheap Caribbean labor.44 While he rejected skin color as the basis of his argument, opposition against Chinese, Jamaicans, and Haitians was expressed in terms of “scarce morality, civilization, culture, education, and sanitation.” The racial contours of Roig de Leuchsenring’s positions were linked to a national project that echoed Ortiz’s idea of dispersing migrants. The encouragement of “adequately selected” immigrants had to consider those who were “good, physically and morally,” and could be 40 41 42 43 44

The speech was published later in 1929. Le-Roy y Cassá, Inmigración anti-santiaria, 9, 11, 24, 32–33. Trelles, El progreso (1902–1905) y el retroceso (1906–1922), 14–15. García González and Álvarez Peláez, En busca de la raza perfecta. Roig de Leuchsenring, “¿Se está Cuba africanizando?,” 28. See “La importación de antillanos,” Carteles: El semanario nacional 10: 45, November 6, 1927, 9; and the various articles by Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring “¿Se está Cuba africanizando?,” 27; “El problema gravísimo para Cuba,” 27; “Lo más negro,” 22.

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“assimilated” and “absorb[ed]” by Cuba, contributing their “vigorous and healthy sap.” They would have to be “dispersed and diluted across diverse zones of the Republic, not constituting isolated colonies.” The “nuclei of foreigners” were perceived as an “extraordinary danger for the strengthening and cohesion of nationality,” as well as a “constant threat of dangerous international conflicts.”45 In all its complexity, Roig de Leuchsenring’s nationalist project was not only about racial preferences for the nation (as much as he disguised them), but also against the foreign sugar corporations that were occupying the Cuban land and recruiting the Caribbean workers. It also paid lip service to the Cuban working class, because it was the Cuban workers (and the Spaniards) who were being displaced by the hired Caribbean workers. During the 1920s, the racist views published by intellectuals in various periodicals were being challenged on a different level, with Afro-Cubans on the ground having a visible presence in the activities of Garvey’s UNIA during that decade.46 Many of those activities actually took place in rural Cuba and the sugar mills where UNIA branches were located, and where the Cuban national anthem was sung at times.47 Cuban participation in an organization that was dominated by British Caribbean migrants is, in fact, indicative of the “fraternal relations” mentioned by Palacios years earlier. At the same time, during the 1920s, Afro-Cubans eluded debating migration, as presented in Chapter 6, with Gustavo Urrutia’s silence for fear of reprisals given the dominant antagonism against black migrants – which in itself suggests disagreement with the dominant discourse.48 The feelings against black migrants in Cuba did not remain limited to government circles and intellectual elites. These discourses against the migrants as criminal, unhealthy, uncivilized, and generally bad for the nation were replicated in newspapers across the island in editorials and other writings. The reports of actual incidents reflected these ingrained ideas about black migrants in other social layers of Cuban society. For example, “An event of blood” in Guantánamo – reminiscent of Le-Roy y Cassa’s “blood crimes”– took place when a Jamaican went mad and shot passengers in a train, while an incident between a white woman

45 46

47 48

Roig de Leuchsenring, “Lo más negro,” 22. On Afro-Cuban participation in the organization, see McLeod, “Sin dejar de ser cubanos,” 75–104; Guridy, “Enemies of the White Race,” 116–130. See also reports such as “Correspondencia,” Negro World, July 24, 1926, 8. “Nuevitas, Cam., Cuba,” Negro World, August 7, 1926, 8. Urrutia, “Ideales de una raza: haitianos y jamaiquinos,” 8.

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“defending her honor” and a black Jamaican also led to shootings in Florida.49 One newspaper article declared it unfortunate that Cuba had become a favorite destination for “undesirable elements, who damage, rather than benefit, Cuba.”50 Pro-white leanings like those of Havana intellectuals appeared in the regional press, when in April 1928 El Noticiero of Puerto Padre noted that the improvement of the Cuban population would be achieved by “absolutely attacking the immigration of the colored race” and “allowing and favoring the arrival and settlement in the country of elements of the same race, proceeding from countries with good civil development.” Implicit in the contrast of such preference was the notion that “colored” was not the “same race” as Cubans, and the “same race” would be white, or at the least a non-colored balanced mixture. The yearly entrance of “30 to 40 healthy and strong men in full vitality, of the black race,” was problematic for the “racial and cultural future” of Cuba.51 The nationalist discourse framing black migrants as ethnic and cultural “others” became present during the repatriations of 1931. The Department of Immigration pleaded guilty to past failures to safeguard Cuba’s future by allowing the entry “of elements that cause variations in the [Cuban] ethnic and moral physiognomy, with serious detriment to our country.”52 The Diario de Cuba criticized the fact that Antillean workers escaping repatriation were working in coffee plantations in Palma Soriano. In the middle of the economic crisis, the available work had to be for “Cuban and Spaniard” workers who have “family and interests in Cuba.”53 Unlike the Antilleans, the Spaniards were not detrimental to the nation, and were seen as an acceptable “other” – if at times subject to prejudices different from those experienced by black Caribbean workers. While the latter were always represented as everything Cuba was not, the

49

50

51

52 53

“Escena de sangre en un tren al volverse loco un jamaiquino,” El Camagüeyano, March 5, 1925, 1, 5; “Una cubana y un jamaiquino se entraron a tiros: Se atribuye el hecho a que ella defendía su honor,” El Camagüeyano, June 16, 1925, 1. “Inmigración deseable y no deseable,” Neptuno, July 20, 1926, reproduced in Carlton Bailey Hurst to US Secretary of State, September 8, 1926, NARA, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.55/79 (M488, Roll #84). Cruz, “Editoriales: Ecos,” 2. The article was reproduced in the national press, in El Diario de Cuba (April 21, 1928), according to US consular dispatches. Edward I. Nathan, consul, Santiago de Cuba, “Cuba’s Population Problems,” April 24, 1928, NARA, RG 59, GRDS-IAC, File 837.55/83 (M488, Roll #84). Departamento de Inmigración, “Proclama,” enclosed in A. J. Molina to Immigration Commissioner, La Habana, October 2, 1931, ANC, SP, leg. 121, no. 68. “Permanecen en Palma los inmigrantes antillanos,” Diario de Cuba, July 11, 1931, 10.

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Spaniard (often coupled with the Cuban) was seen as having an “easy adaptation” to Cuba, with similar “manners and customs” and an “affinity of race.”54 Aurelio Portundo’s 1924 memorandum helping the Cuban government’s diplomatic efforts stipulated that the Spanish migrant had the “same ethnic condition and origin as the majority of our [Cuban] native population.”55 A US official reported in 1929 that President Machado intimated to him that the black population in the country was quite large and that he wanted to encourage white immigration from Spain.56 The depression and the 1933 labor legislation undeniably affected Spanish migrants, but there is no question that its selective application was tougher on black migrants. Already in 1934, Rogelio Pina’s report was grouping Cubans, Spaniards, and Canary Islanders as those being affected by Jamaican labor diversification beyond the cane fields.57 Moreover, almost a century after Saco’s publication, the report reproduced the “ideal of the great Cubans,” favoring the “encouragement of white immigration” once Cuba recovered from the economic crisis. Pina denounced the “circumstantial legislation” that brought black labor, creating “difficulties for the arrival of white Europeans and Canarians and from other countries of that race.” Cuba’s alleged “evolutionary cycle” toward whiteness from 41 percent in 1841 to 71 percent in 1919 needed to be re-established, according to the report.58 Anchored, as it was, in Cuba’s nineteenth-century history, Pina’s report also embodied the “black fear,” citing Saco and the Count of Pozos Dulces and advocating for “ethnic improvement.” “I do not hesitate to affirm,” he wrote, “that in less than two centuries our population will be completely white, the black race having been extinguished by absorption.” While admitting Cuba’s racial mixture, or “biological–social instinct,” Pina’s view of “absorption” was biased, closing Cuba’s doors “tightly to the Negro and Chinese immigration,” in order to “be completely white.”59

54 55 56 57 59

“Problemas obreros: Inmigración,” El Pueblo, June 4, 1915, 1. Aurelio Portuondo, “Memorandum,” enclosed in Aurelio Portuondo to Manuel Rionda, January 25, 1924, BBC, RG II, S. 10a–c, Box 58. Noble Brandon Judah to US Secretary of State, 31 May 1929, NARA, RG 59, GRDSIAC, File 837.5552/orig (M488, Roll #84). 58 Pina y Estrada, “Informe Rendido,” 7–8. Pina y Estrada, “Informe Rendido,” 8. Pina y Estrada, “Informe rendido,” 10. Translation from the version of the document in English in Rogelio Pina to President of the Cuban Republic, June 1934, NA, FO 277/228.

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In 1939, Alberto Arredondo argued that “foreign blacks” should not be taken into account to “present a thesis of ‘national integration’.”60 And even under the new 1940 Constitution, which was explicitly against racial discrimination, no other than Fernando Ortiz in his Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar still identified black migrants as upsetting factors in Cuba’s national racial balance.61 Absorption, fusion, or indeed transculturation, and arrival at a certain national ideal, were processes with their own racial scale, delayed by “blackness” and improved by “whiteness.”

      Blackness and whiteness were marked in another facet of the British Antillean experience: their relationship with the representatives of the British Empire. While the migrants’ imperial allegiance served them as one instrument to face Cuba’s hostile environment, their appeal to the British authorities was in itself a struggle within and against the power hierarchy of the empire. This encounter between colonial subjects and the British government was one where issues of race, identity, Britishness, and empire were in contention. Appealing to imperial authority was, in a way, something to be expected given the British social and cultural policies in their Caribbean colonies after slave emancipation. A “Cult of Monarchy and Empire” had influenced former slaves, free coloreds, and peasants during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.62 That “cult” had been manifested in numerous instances, including the events that led to the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion in 1865.63 Not surprisingly, British Antilleans’ recourse to British imperial representatives became evident in some of the early Hispanic destinations of intra-Caribbean migration, such as Costa Rica and Panama.64 The practice of appealing to the empire continued when British colonial subjects moved to Cuba. Evidence of appeals to imperial authority exists even before the massive arrivals in Cuba in the 1910s. In 1906, Samuel Archer, from St. Kitts, accused of rape, unsuccessfully claimed innocence to consuls in Cuba and 60 62 63 64

61 Arredondo, El negro en Cuba, 90. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 53. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 204–244, 271–310. Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica, 83–85, 111–115; Heuman, “The Killing Time.” Anderson, Imperial Ideology.

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the Foreign Office in London.65 The 1909 letter from Jamaican John McKenzie mentioned above was respectfully addressed to Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office in London. He stated the racial rationale of what he considered “ill, wrong abuses” from the Cubans directly to the center of the empire in London, criticizing also the racism of consular officials. He wrote that “Mr. Brooks the British Counsel [sic] don[’]t look after no colored man, he won[’]t hear any complain[t],” and was taking sides “with the Cubans.” He then mentioned a case of abuse by the Rural Guard in Guantánamo and the inaction of the Jamaican government, to conclude with a bold accusation of racism: “So we are beaten like dogs and robbed ill[-]treated no one look after our rights, so long as we are black.” McKenzie’s letter illustrated both the “aggressions of the Cubans” targeting “colored” people and the racial discrimination of the British authorities.66 Rather ironically, the reaction of the British consul in Cuba to McKenzie’s complaint illustrated the biases among consular officials. When asked by the Foreign Office to report on the situation, Consul Leech responded on October 12, 1909, that McKenzie’s complaint was “entirely without foundation.” The Havana consul praised both consular officials in Oriente (Brooks and Mason) for their handling of the situation. Brooks was a “conscientious consular official” and Mason “one of the kindest of men . . . always doing his best to assist people.” Finally, there was Leech’s prejudiced commentary: The Jamaican negro causes a great deal of trouble to everyone in Cuba, and especially at Santiago . . . He is saucy and quarrelsome by nature and constantly getting into trouble. When in difficulties he appears to think that the British Consul must fight his case in Court and act as a lawyer.

In a statement that confirmed both the migrants’ practice of seeking assistance from consular officials and the official attitude, Leech wrote that he had refrained from troubling your Department [Foreign Office] with the details of the innumerable cases of Jamaican negroes in difficulties which are constantly occurring in Cuba, but I can assure you that every consideration is shown them both at

65 66

Samuel Archer to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, October 15, 1906, NA, FO 369/13. John A. McKenzie to Sir Edward Grey [MP, Foreign Office], September 1, 1909, NA, FO 369/207.

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this Legation and by the Consular Representatives in this Island, and that they receive the same treatment as any other British subject.67

This meant that local representatives in Cuba preferred to stop the migrants’ complaints at their level, even when (or perhaps because) they were constantly accused of indifference and lack of action. The subtext in Leech’s assurance that the migrants were treated “as any other British subject” became evident in a handwritten letter two days later to his friend Louis Mallet, at the Foreign Office. To be sure that he was understood in London, Leech’s note was explicit that while the “Cuban Negro is the most well-trained and orderly person” with “good qualities” and “manners,” the Jamaican “seems to lack all of these, and hardly a day seems to pass without a grievance of some sort. He is incessantly getting into [illegible] and troubles.” He attributed that difference to the variants of British and Spanish colonialism and methods of abolishing slavery, and added that “although few of our Jamaican negroes can write, they generally find some one in prison who can and they have no hesitation in [firing] off long[-winded] stories of their imaginary grievances in all directions.” Leech noted the habit of “complaining to the FO,” and stressed “the object” of his letter as being to confirm that in his judgment “the Jamaican negro obtains fair and equitable treatment both from the Cuban judicial authorities and from our Consular offices.” Leech was thus addressing directly the two versions of racism expressed by McKenzie: Cuban and British. His final line confirmed the latter: “Roughly speaking a negro with a grievance must [be] looked upon as a child, and a Jamaican negro generally as a naughty one.”68 In a 1910 report on the Guantánamo consular establishment, Leech noted that there were “many British West Indians resident in the district and their troubles and quarrels give plenty of occupation to the Vice Consul” there.69 In Ciego de Ávila, in 1911, Edward C. Moloney, a medical doctor, wrote to the Foreign Office asking to be appointed to an official position, justified by the “numerous British Subjects mostly Jamaicans employed in the vincinity [sic] at the three different Sugar Mills located within a radious [sic] of twenty five miles of this place.” As “the only British Subject in this town of any prominence,” Moloney was

67 68 69

Stephen Leech to Rt. Hon. Sir E. Grey, FO, October 12, 1909, NA, FO 369/207. Stephen Leech to [Louis] Mallet, [assistant and superintendent undersecretary, FO], October 14, 1909, NA, FO 369/207. Stephen Leech to Sir E. Grey, FO, July 21, 1910, NA, FO 369/288.

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“frequently asked for advice” because “Jamaicans do not understand Spanish.”70 These examples indicate British Antillean activism seeking assistance and their use of imperial allegiance, but also the marking of difference in the reluctance to accept the migrants’ claim to British subjecthood. Leech said that “Jamaican negroes” were receiving the same treatment afforded to “any other British subject,” which does not necessarily mean that they were regarded as such. Moloney did refer to the migrants as British subjects, but qualified that by saying they were “mostly Jamaicans” and specifying levels of subjecthood, as he was “the only British subject” of “prominence.” While in theory every subject of the empire was equal, in practice, Kathleen Paul argues, British subjecthood was compromised by many factors, from skin color to gender and class.71 Distinctions of this kind would become more salient as more migrants arrived in Cuba, insisting in their allegiance to the empire and their claims on the British authorities. By the 1910s, when many British Antilleans started to arrive in Cuba from Central American labor sites, some of them replicated the practices of appealing to the empire that had been “an important means of survival and integrity in an ideologically hostile situation.”72 Further on, many of those who migrated to Cuba were veterans of the British West Indies Regiment active in World War I, which reinforced the importance of imperial ideology. Laura Tabili writes that “the war simultaneously strengthened troops’ reciprocal bond with the monarch and conferred a sense of entitlement that was ultimately subversive of the imperial order.” She argued further that “the war experience was at once conservative in strengthening Black working men’s claims on the British state, and radicalizing, in provoking a sense of betrayal – expressed not through the separatist impulse of nationalist elites, but through militant demands to redeem their rights as imperial subjects.”73 If one considers that over 6,000 British Antilleans went directly from Central America to Cuba in the 1910s and that returning veterans of the war also moved there (an estimated 4,000 out of 7,000 returning Jamaicans, for example), the strong imperial allegiance in Cuba must come as no surprise.74 70 71 72 74

Edward C. Moloney, MD, to Right Hon. Secretary of State, Foreign Affairs, FO, July 18, 1911, NA, FO 369/367. Paul, “‘British Subjects’ and ‘British Stock’,” 233–276. 73 Anderson, Imperial Ideology, 57. Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice,” 18–19, 29. For the involvement of Jamaicans in the war and subsequent move to Cuba, see Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War, 154–156. Returning veterans to Barbados also went to Cuba. See Maughan, “Some Aspects of Barbadian Emigration,” 241. It is

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A letter by a Cayman Islander on June 8, 1913, exemplifies the steps followed by most migrants when protesting the British authorities as well as their awareness of the layers of imperial inequality. Written respectfully to King George in London, Donald Chisholm started by asserting his status as “British Subjects” from Grand Cayman, requesting protection from “His Royal Majesty.” He mentioned that he had “already applied to the Honorable English Minister” and the “Honorable General Consul” who were “sent by Great Britain, to this Country of Cuba to look after their Subjects.” Chisholm wrote that England had “lots of Small and Large Countries,” with some of them experiencing poverty that forced people “to go around” to other countries to earn a living “so that we can return to our native homes and build it up.” He then described how, whenever they appealed to the British minister or consul, the response was that they were not sent “to look after poor Subjects.” Following references to the distinctions and the disregard of local authorities, Chisholm described that British Antilleans would proceed to write to “Sir E. Grey Secretary of State Forigen [sic] Office” seeking some protection, but this letter ended up in the hands of the minister and consul again, who would tell the Foreign Office “whatever they thinks [sic] like and please.” Aware of how they were being ignored by local officials, Chisholm wrote that “we made up our mind to write to you this letter asking of His Majesty King George” to “make a good investigation on our behalf” because the minister and the consul were “only selling us British Subject[s] to the Cuban Government.” The letter was also signed by Jamaican James Samuel, Barbadian Joseph Hall, and another James Samuel from St. Kitts, as “Obedient Children,” adding, “We are all British Subjects” who could “prove we are English and nothing else.” They further stated that they were the only ones remaining in the prison and that others had died without the help of the British consuls.75 Chisholm’s letter to the king was not acknowledged by Buckingham Palace and appears to have been forwarded to the Foreign Office. From there, Andrew Bonar Law wrote to Chisholm on July 9, 1913, telling him that if he could “furnish particulars as to any specific instances in which protection has been refused when it should have been properly given, the

75

very telling about the move of veterans to Cuba that interviews for Helena Appio’s film on the British West Indies Regiment, Mutiny, took place in Cuba. Donald Chisholm and others to His Royal Majesty King George, June 8, 1913, NA, FO 369/566.

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matter will be investigated.”76 More than a month later, and more than two months after the original complaint, the Foreign Office requested information on the case from Consul Leech in Havana. In contradiction with the claims of the British Caribbean prisoners, the British Legation argued that they had supported the application for pardon made by some of the Antilleans and had visited them in prison. Leech stated that Joseph Hall’s claim that no one “came to see if I was white or black” was “inexact” and Chisholm’s statement that “no one visited him, though unimportant,” was “untrue.” The Foreign Office had told Leech to “suggest” to the Cuban government the provision of interpreters in hearings involving British subjects with no knowledge of Spanish, but Leech took no action because he thought language was not a “great disadvantage” for the prisoners.77 The correspondence between Britain’s colonial subjects and the government representatives reveals two facts. First, as Moji Anderson argued for British Antilleans in Central America, there was “a fervent belief in the efficacy and superiority of Empire” among the migrants in Cuba.78 Even when the migrants were aware that imperial officials would fail, their escalated writing indicates some hope that their letters would have an effect on their plight, even if only to show the Cuban authorities that they had higher authority to appeal to. Second, the letters of the migrants had a degree of effectiveness in triggering the actions of British officialdom, at least from London, even if such action was ultimately ineffective at the local level. If there was negligence by the consuls in Cuba, at least the officials in London seem to have assumed their paternalistic imperial responsibility toward the subjects of the empire. The conflicting versions of the consuls and the migrants interacted with those of the sugar planters and government officials in Cuba. When Robert Brown, “an English subject[,] a Jamaican,” wrote to the War Office in London on September 14, 1914, seeking “the welfare of my right,” he accused Rural Guards in the Manatí Sugar Company of assaulting a group of Jamaicans who were “playing.” Brown received lashes on his back that impaired him from any activity.79 Because Brown’s letter went to London, the British consul was compelled to report

76 77 78 79

A. Law to Donald Chisholm, July 9, 1913, NA, FO 369/566. A. Law to Stephen Leech, August 25, 1913; Stephen Leech to Sir E. Grey, Foreign Office, November 3, 1913, NA, FO 369/566. Anderson, Imperial Ideology, 3. Robert Brown to [W.O.D., England], September 13, 1914, NA, FO 369/690.

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on the matter to the Foreign Office, but only knowing the version of the sugar company manager. According to that version, Brown had been “fighting with another Jamaican,” and the Rural Guard only separated them. Brown ran away in fear of punishment. The manager gave assurance that on the “estate it is strictly forbidden to ill-treat workmen,” and when Brown returned to work he was advised by Consul Mason in Santiago to “avoid getting into trouble in the future.”80 Dismissing the migrants’ version of events was in tune with the prevalent views among British representatives that they tended to “get into trouble” and had “imaginary grievances.”81 Failure to act by local British representatives did not stop British Antillean practice of making claims, and the increase in migration in the 1910s only intensified their demands. Disregard by British consuls in Cuba, on the other hand, reinforced the Antilleans’ practice of writing to London. A Jamaican worker, James Lowe, wrote to the Colonial Office on April 22, 1916, notifying that he had been attacked and beaten by a guard in a sugar colonia. Lowe mentioned that on the evening when he was attacked “there were much comments made by the Guards to the effect that ‘England cannot defend her subjects now’,” which suggests one of two things. Either the Guards had knowledge of consular indifference and felt unthreatened by it, or Lowe believed that citing that statement would compel the British authorities to act. In any case, Lowe’s letter explicitly mentioned his complaint to the local British representative who, according to him, replied “that he can do nothing concerning the matter.” Thus, “As a British Subject,” he appealed “to the Supreme Authority.”82 But while consuls in Cuba did not act, acted slowly, or achieved no results for the migrants, they were aware of, and acknowledged, the disadvantageous situation of the British Antilleans. In September 1916, Consul Leech reported that the “politicians and press are very much opposed to the British West Indian, and it is to be feared that they are often unfairly treated by the police, rural guard, and the courts.”83 However, once those

80 81

82 83

Stephen Leech to Sir E. Grey, Foreign Office, November 3, 1914, NA, FO 369/690. Stephen Leech to [Louis] Mallet, [assistant and superintendent undersecretary, FO], October 14, 1909, NA, FO 369/207; J. J. Broderick to the Marquess of Reading, November 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/2190. James D. Lowe to Right Hon. Bonar Law, [secretary of state for the colonies], April 22, 1916, NA, FO 369/867. “Memorandum in Regard to the Conditions of West Indian Labour in Cuba,” enclosed in Stephen Leech to Rt. Hon. Viscount Grey, Foreign Office, September 8, 1916, NA, FO 277/190.

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in power (the Cuban government and sugar planters) had stated their position, it was unlikely that the British Antillean’s version of events would be accepted, and the British consuls took no further action. The proactive British consul during the “Jobabo incident” is an exception to the rule, and even there the compensation materialized only after four years of persistent moves by British officials, and those accused of the massacre were acquitted. The “Jobabo incident” and its long aftermath were perhaps unique, but they would represent a point of reference for future dealings between the British and Cuban governments regarding black British subjects. After such a long diplomatic ordeal, British diplomatic action seems to have become more active and diligent. One indication of this was the publication of two White Papers in 1924 after failing to get the Cubans to take measures to improve the situation of the migrants. But the power relations and social and racial understandings in the interactions between British officials and colonial subjects remained unchanged. The repatriation crisis of 1921 was yet another instance which exposed the common prejudices and racial fears of Cuban and British government officials. Fearing the “danger of internal disturbance” due to the “distress and unemployment amongst coloured British subjects,” the Cubans offered to repatriate the migrants. After consulting with the Jamaican government, Consul Haggard in Havana accepted the proposal.84 Sharing the Cuban fears, he wrote to London that his office was “being besieged by destitute negroes,” adding that the “Cuban Government fear, apparently with reason, that from begging these negroes ma[y] get to rioting.”85 But even then, the complaints of the migrants continued to take second place to the explanations given by sugar managers. When Leeward and Windward Islanders protested their situation in Chaparra, Haggard’s report to the Foreign Office was skeptical about the accusations of negative treatment of workers there and basically praised the company’s management.86 Attitudes such as that of Haggard were what led the migrants to write to the center of empire, protesting both their general situation in Cuba and the indifference of the British consuls. From prison, Antiguan Samuel

84 85 86

Godfrey Haggard, telegram to Foreign Office, London, July 1, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. Godfrey Haggard to Rt. Hon. Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, London, July 5, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. Godfrey Haggard to the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, August 29, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565.

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Ambrose, who had been accused of forgery, wrote to the Foreign Office condemning the lack of evidence against him and the irregularities in the judicial proceedings. “Through the none [sic] assistance of the Consuls,” he wrote, “I am compelled to forward my grievances to you as Secretary in Charge of our Affairs.”87 On June 5, 1921, a group of British Caribbean islanders from Chaparra headed by John E. Hunt submitted a petition to “His Majesty the King.” Asserting their allegiance to the British Empire and their identity as British subjects, they criticized the conditions of work in Chaparra and Delicias. In a skillful appeal deploying respect for imperial authority, the letter referred to the tensions left by the war in Europe and to their Britishness. The letter stated that the engineers who recruited them were Germans “trying in every possible way to suffer we the British subjects.” These Germans were asking the British Antilleans if they were British, and once they answered positively, the jobs went to the Cubans. Thus they made a “humble petition to his Royal Majesty the King to deliver us out of our greivous [sic] distress as we have no one to represent us.”88 Hunt’s statement that they had “no one to represent” them directly attacked the lack of action of the consuls. That was also the case of George Smith, who wrote to the Home Office in London asserting that the consul “would not help us.” Smith strengthened his case with his imperial credentials: “the Majority of us are Ex. Soldiers who have been in the Consul with our papers Etc. He disacknowl[ed]ge us as British subjects.”89 In 1922, a letter from Santiago by 105 St. Lucians, cited before, included thirty-eight veterans of the British West Indies Regiment, and denounced the refusal of assistance by the consul, who responded that they were “British objects, but not British subjects.”90 While some evidence indicates that some British representatives were particularly invested in defending British Antilleans (e.g., Jobabo and the 1924 White Paper), what transpires in most cases is either indifference by the consuls or some diplomatic action only after the protest of the migrants themselves. The claim of British subjecthood and the prestige of empire generated an ambivalence among British diplomats, which was 87 88

89 90

Samuel W. Ambrose to Secretary of State, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, April 4, 1921, NA, FO 277/197. John E. Hunt and others to His Majesty the King, June 5, 1921, NA, FO 371/565. The letter was forwarded to the Foreign Office. From there, the consuls in Cuba were asked to provide reports. George Smith to Home Office, December 7, 1921, NA, FO 371/5565. “Stranded West Indians,” Voice of Saint Lucia, January 28, 1922, 4.

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mixed with their other responsibilities in Cuba (commercial or economic), their personal interests, and racial and class prejudices. Indeed, British imperial ideology was the source of the racism against colonial subjects perceived as inferior, but at the same time it was an ideology embedded in a paternalism that guaranteed diplomatic representation for every British subject.91 The theory and practice of imperial subjecthood were at play. Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders were aware of that long historical tradition and imperial legislation that entitled them to a claim to British subjecthood and used it as a resource.92 As has become clear from their letters, they were aware also of the racial prejudices among British consuls specifically, and within the imperial structure as a whole. The first awareness was strategically convenient for them, but it also allowed them the position to act with regard to the racism they had discovered, and challenge British imperial whiteness. The practice of writing to imperial authorities that continued in the late 1920s and the 1930s illustrated the contradictions and the political struggles within the (power and racial) structures of the empire, but also the agency of the migrants. A Barbadian by the name of Evans Pile, who had been sentenced to death, was one of those seeking assistance. After being unsuccessful with local consuls, Pile wrote to the colonial government of Barbados in January 1928. Empowered by his military service in “the front fighting for my King & Country,” Pile explicitly denounced the racial bias of the British consul in Havana for not representing “Black people in Cuba.”93 His case was supported from Barbados by Governor W. C. F. Robertson, who wrote to the Colonial Office stating that the evidence against Pile did “not seem convincing” and “the prolonged imprisonment prior to trial may be reasonable ground for diplomatic action.”94 By the time Robertson contacted London, Pile himself had written to the War Office, in March 1928, describing his case as a setup by Cuban officials. He concluded his letter, “I am one of those Brave Boys who fought in the last

91 92 93 94

These contradictions are outlined by Anderson for the case of British Antilleans in Central America. Anderson, Imperial Ideology, 2. Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others, 22–23; Platt, The Cinderella Service, 18. Evans Pile to [Colonial] Secretary of Barbados, BWI, January 27, 1928, enclosed in W. C. F. Robertson to L. C. M. S. Amery, Colonial Office, June 27, 1928, NA, FO 369/2022. W. C. F. Robertson to L. C. M. S. Amery, Colonial Office, June 27, 1928, NA, FO 369/2022.

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Worlds [sic] War for my Brave Good King and my Brave Good flage [sic], and Country and my number is 15.152.P.T.”95 Unfortunately, Pile was executed in November 1928, triggering the concerted action of his co-veterans of the British West Indies Regiment. A letter by Charles Burt, and signed by members of the 8079th Regiment, E. H. Walters, A. S. Wilson, James Brown, Dr. S. A. Holly, and E. A. Reid, stated that “as fair thinking Loyal subjects of His Majesty the King” they believed Pile’s case merited a “proper investigation.” British Antilleans were “not protected in this Country,” they denounced, adding that they “would be very grateful if our Mother Country could take some more interests [sic] in us in this country as Britishers.” The signatories believed that abuses and murder by an “inferior nation of any kind” would “only show the world that we as British subjects are not protected abroad.”96 The rhetoric of loyal subjects was commonly used by the migrants, which suggests their belief that stressing their allegiance to the empire improved their possibilities of obtaining protection or succeeding in their complaints. Such was the case of Melville Jacobs in 1931, the Dominican employed by the Chaparra sugar mill, who wrote respectfully to the empire (e.g., “Honorable Representatives”) using submissive allegiance (signing “Subordinately Yours, British West Indian Subject, M. A. Jacobs”). His communication led to some action on his behalf by British representatives, but also to his expulsion from the premises of the sugar mill, and death threats.97 Antiguan George J. Carlisle also used the relation of mutual dependence of subject and empire through previous (and possibly future) war efforts in his letter of April 1931: “we will have to look for our people so we can provide and care them for our next war . . . a lot of our men here have Been [sic] in the world war and we may need them again.”98 As in other migrant destinations in the Americas, the evidence indicates that British migrants either believed in the imperial power or learned to use it as a strategic tool. The Cuban Secretary of State, Carlos Manuel de 95 96 97

98

Evans Pile to War Office, UK, March 30, 1928, NA, FO 369/2022. Charles Burt and others to British War Office, UK, November 24, 1928, NA, FO 369/2022. M. A. Jacobs and others to British Legation, Havana, February 5, 1931, NA, FO 369/ 2191; R. B. Wood to Mr. C. N. Ezard, British Legation, Havana, March 12, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191. George J. Carlisle to His Excellency the Governor [of the Leeward Islands], April 30, 1931, NA, FO 369/2191.

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Céspedes, had made reference to the migrants’ strategic practice when defending the actions of Cuban government officials against giving any “credit to the information supplied by those persons who, after committing acts of disrespect, misdemeanours and breaches of the law, seek impunity in the diplomatic protection of the British Empire of which they form part.”99 The use of the authority of the empire by British Antilleans in Cuba may be considered what Richard D. E. Burton described as a practice of “opposition,” one that “simultaneously challenges and confirms the dominant order by turning the latter’s resources against it in a complex double game of double oppositionality.”100 Not surprisingly, the migrants’ actions compare to those of black workers in interwar Britain which “appropriated and refashioned imperialist arguments in defense of their rights as they defined them.”101 The agency of individual migrants seeking assistance for them, and representing others, functioned like James C. Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance,” individual acts that pressured – or forced – British authority to act on their behalf, but that avoided a “confrontation with authority.”102 This lack of confrontation did not necessarily mean an absence of challenge. By emphasizing their identity as British subjects, reasserting their role in the British West Indies Regiment and the Great War, and praising the monarchy, the migrants appropriated the language of the empire in an action that – to paraphrase William Roseberry – recognized authority and addressed power while protesting it.103 Such practice of opposition and protest also altered notions of race and identity among British officialdom in Cuba, the colonies, and London. In the process, British (racial) understandings and notions of empire were challenged at the margins and at its very center. British Antilleans’ encounter with imperial officials was a face-to-face meeting with the “other” within, outside the empire but inside the structures of imperial power. In that encounter, the incompatibility of Britishness with blackness, and the unspoken assumption of a white nation and British subjecthood, were revealed. The theoretical all-embracing British subjecthood was really a fragmented one. British Antillean awareness of

99 100 102 103

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to St. Clair Gainer, British Legation, Havana, July 4, 1924, in Further Correspondence. 101 Burton, Afro-Creole, 8. Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice,” 5. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvi. Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” 364.

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this was evident in John McKenzie’s 1909 letter, and also in Barbadian Joseph Hall’s statement in 1913 that nobody “came to see if I was white or black.”104 On the side of the British consuls, they showed reluctance to talk about the migrants as British subjects without ethnic or racial qualifications. The consuls referred to the British Antilleans usually by their island of origin, as British West Indians, Jamaican negroes, Jamaican subjects, blacks, or black British subjects. The notion of British subject (unqualified) was reserved for white British residents in Cuba, including the consuls themselves.105 For example, when reporting about British people living in the Nipe Bay area of Cuba to the Foreign Office in 1913, Consul Leech reported that there were “nearly four thousand black and one hundred fifty white British subjects.” Leech may have wanted to distinguish between blacks, on one hand, and white British subjects, on the other, or simply between British subjects in two categories, black and white, but either way the racial distinction was stated.106 In 1933, Neil Hone, himself one of the “few British” in his region, manifested concerns about British prestige being affected by “hundreds and thousands” of British Caribbean migrants “claiming to be British subjects” in a state of misery and destitution. The hundreds and thousands of migrants were, in his view, not part of the “few British” but only had a “claim” to British subjecthood.107 Homi Bhabha argued that the “construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference.”108 For British officials, such difference was articulated racially and ethnically by qualifying the migrants’ imperial allegiance. Consul Leech bracketed the allegiance by referring to “British subjects (Jamaicans),” and when dealing with the alleged involvement of black migrants in the 1917 revolt, the British ambassador in Washington, Spring Rice, referred to the migrants as “British subjects” but also as “our negroes.”109 Others, such as Vice 104 105 106 107 108 109

John McKenzie to Sir Edward Grey [MP, Foreign Office], September 1, 1909, NA, FO 369/207; Stephen Leech to Sir Edward Grey, November 3, 1913, NA, FO 369/566. Platt, The Cinderella Service, 72. Stephen Leech to Sir E. Grey, Foreign Office, October 17, 1913, NA, FO 369/565. My emphasis. Neil Hone to Secretary of State for the Colonies, January 30, 1933, NA, FO 369/2307. My emphasis. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 67. Stephen Leech, telegram to Foreign Office, April 28, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923; Sir Cecil Spring Rice, telegram to British Legation, Havana, and Foreign Office, UK, September 18, 1917, NA, FO 371/2923.

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Consul Dennys Cowan, simply referred to British Antilleans as “West Indian negroes” and “Jamaicans,” and in a 1920 report by the British Legation to London he wrote that the British subjects registered in Santiago de Cuba were thirty-five in 1914, 515 in 1917, and 1,506 in 1919, while simultaneously stating that there was “no doubt that the major portion of this Consulate’s duties concerns the approximately 12,000 Jamaicans in the two Eastern provinces.”110 During the crisis of 1924, two of the consuls involved also classified the migrants in different ways that, while not mutually exclusive, are evidence of the dilemmas faced by British officials in their construction of the colonial other. When outlining some of the cases of ill-treatment, Haggard mentioned Randolph Smith, “a British subject”; Joshua Bartlay, a “Jamaican negro”; and David C. Patterson, “a Jamaican.”111 St. Clair Gainer, for his part, in separate correspondence, identified migrants Frank Ellis, Henry Haiden, and C. N. Davis individually as “British subject . . . native of Jamaica.”112 British officials in London had similar need to identify the subjects. In a query from the Foreign Office on the case of Albert Barnett, who was assaulted and shot by a Cuban Rural Guard, J. Ramsay MacDonald asked, “I should be glad to learn whether the British subject in question is a West Indian or not.”113 The reports on consular establishments in Cuba in the 1920s also marked the socio-racial differences. Inspector T. D. Dunlop’s report on the Vice Consulate of Antilla mentions that the “British colony numbers half a dozen whites and about 350 West Indians.”114 For Santiago de Cuba, where thousands of black migrants were living during that decade, he indicated that there were “only about 40 British subjects” – clearly indicating who was a British subject.115 Dunlop went beyond his 110

111 112

113 114 115

Dennys Cowan, “Memorandum,” enclosed in Stephen Leech to Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, Foreign Office, June 21, 1917, NA, FO 277/191; William Erskine to Rt. Hon. Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Office, UK, April 14, 1920, NA, FO 369/1398. Godfrey Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, March 8, 1924, in Correspondence. D. St. Clair Gainer to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, May 3, 1924; D. St. Clair Gainer to Cuban Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, June 13, 1924, enclosed in D. St. Clair Gainer to Mr. MacDonald, June 25, 1924; and D. St. Clair Gainer to Cuban Secretary of State, July 3, 1924, in Further Correspondence. Ramsay MacDonald to D. St. Clair Gainer, British Legation, Havana, May 14, 1924, in Further Correspondence. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, March 15, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, March 19, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869.

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judgment on the migrants to label others located – to use Ann Stoler’s phrase – in “contradictory colonial locations.”116 Such were the cases of the Jamaican Secretary of Immigration Mr. H. J. Dignum, the pro-consul, Mr. MacCormack, and other candidates to fill consular positions, who were “white Jamaican[s]” in the inspector’s eyes. Their appointment to a consular position, as well as that of Mr. L. Brooks (“more Cuban than British,” according to Dunlop) “would be a risky and undignified expedient.” He added that “Jamaicans, white or black, are not liked or trusted in Santiago,” and it was “essential that the new Consul should not be Jamaican.” About Mr. Dignum in particular, Dunlop had thought that he “might serve as Consul, although a Jamaican,” but then backtracked after a “few days spent with him in Santiago.” Dignum, he said, was “quite unsuitable” and had “no standing in the white British colony,” and his “liaison with a young married woman,” and “impending divorce suit in New Orleans,” would “further discredit him.”117 Dunlop’s inspections made the racial distinctions within the empire blatantly clear. His Cienfuegos report stated, “Besides the 12 white British subjects in Cienfuegos, there is a floating population of about 100 coloured Jamaicans.”118 In Camagüey, the “British colony” was of “twenty whites and a floating population of blacks,” estimating “perhaps 15,000 Jamaicans.”119 About Nuevitas, he wrote that there was “only one British subject besides Mr. Patten,” the vice consul, and there was the “usual large colony of Jamaicans in the vicinity.”120 For Havana, Dunlop’s report stated that the “British colony numbers about 500 whites and about 60,000 blacks in all Cuba.” He reported about difficulties in “persuading white British subjects to register” at the consulate and that the “registration of West Indians of colour has not been attempted.”121 That policy continued in the 1930s when another inspector of consular establishments, J. R. Murray, wrote to the acting British consul in Santiago that in “endeavouring to promote the registration of British subjects 116 117 118 119 120 121

Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories,” 154. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, March 19, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, March 27, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, March 30, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, March 28, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869. T. D. Dunlop to Undersecretary of State, Foreign Office, May 4, 1925, NA, FO 369/1869.

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resident in the Santiago consular district you will do well to remember that His Majesty’s Government is not anxious to encourage the registration of British West Indian negroes of the labouring class.”122 Murray’s reports were no different from Dunlop’s, making explicit the racial distinctions (“Jamaican negroes”) and reporting that the number of “British subjects resident in Camagüey is 60 white and 900 blacks.”123 Accordingly, consular inspector H. Hall Hall in 1935 established that in Cuba there were “2,000 white British subjects” and “possibly 60,000 coloured British West Indians, mostly Jamaicans.”124 For Cienfuegos, his assessment was that there were “about 25 white British subjects in the town” and “possibly one to two thousand coloured British subjects.”125 In the early 1930s, color and class were central to Consul J. J. Broderick’s identification of the migrants as “British negro subjects,” “West Indian labour,” or “British negro residents.”126 Racial markings by British officials were accompanied by prejudice by stating either that Jamaicans were “not always to be relied on for truthfulness” and were “apt to exaggerate,” or that British Caribbean workers had an “inveterate tendency to get into trouble.”127 What was at play through decades of marking and grading differences was a struggle about who belonged to the British body politic and how Britishness was to be defined. The encounter of British officials with the colonial “other” prompted the racial definition of Britishness. Several scholars have stressed how such encounters with the “other” are central for processes of self-definition,128 and Catherine Hall in particular has argued that the colonies “provided the benchmarks which allowed the

122

123 124 125 126 127

128

J. R. Murray to L. Haydock-Wilson, acting British consul, Santiago de Cuba, June 5, 1930, NA, FO 369/2130. Perhaps the fact that white British subjects had to be persuaded to register indicates that they did not feel the need to assert their Britishness institutionally, and that their whiteness and social position were sufficient as an indicator of their status. J. R. Murray, “Report of Consular Posts,” June 19, 1930, NA, FO 369/2130. The whites were Canadians working in sugar and fruit plantations. H. Hall Hall to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, May 7, 1935, NA, FO 369/2394. H. Hall Hall to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, April 17, 1935, NA, FO 369/2394. J. J. Broderick to the Right Hon. Sir John Simon, Foreign Office, February 3, 1932, NA, FO 369/2247. Stephen Leech to Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, Foreign Office, November 15, 1918, NA, FO 369/985; J. J. Broderick to the Most Honorable Marquess of Reading, November 4, 1931, NA, FO 369/2190. Colley, “Britishness and Otherness,” 311; Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 33; Triandafyllidou, “National Identity and the ‘other’,” 594.

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English to determine what they were.”129 Here, colonial subjects provided that benchmark, with British officials being forced to define what they were (white British subjects), or make detailed qualifications (as the case of “white Jamaicans”). Being English was no longer “outside of ethnicity,” as Catherine Hall put it, and the colonial encounter forced British officials to make their whiteness explicit, and in the process reveal the racial understandings of British nationality. The “other” was no longer the only one who was “visibly ethnic” and those usually doing the racial or ethnic marking could no longer take the features of their nation for granted.130 An otherwise explicitly un-racialized identity such as that of the British subject became racially charged, not only for the black British subject, but also for the white British subject. Whiteness was therefore a common racial identity for the British and the Cubans in their encounter with Jamaicans, Barbadians, and other British Caribbean islanders in early twentieth-century Cuba.

129 130

Hall, “Histories, Empires and the Post-colonial Moment,” 71. Hall, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” 215.

Epilogue

In closing, I return to the question raised in the Introduction out of David Nathan’s flysheet. How did Cuba become the place from where a panCaribbean independence from Britain came to be declared, in Spanish? One can at least venture into a conjectural answer. The thousands of men and women of African descent who moved throughout the Caribbean between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave substance to the word “diaspora.” They were literally dispersed, from Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama to the Dominican Republic and Cuba. In their specific destinations they then clashed with another predicament of diaspora, manifested through decades of antiblack racism and discrimination in host societies like Cuba. After realizing that they were also being rejected by the British Empire they valued, and in some cases by home islands that did not want them back, it is perhaps understandable that British Antilleans – however small the Camagüey group was – opted to reject imperial rule. Moreover, it seems reasonable that such a move for independence would be achieved through pan-Caribbean unity with people from different islands and through cross-cultural alliances with Cuban workers. At the center of Nathan’s bold move is British Antillean agency in Cuba, the capacity to challenge and survive racism, hostility, and discrimination on three fronts. First, British Caribbean workers endured the sugar plantation as a race-making institution, with its segregated spaces and ethnic division of labor, and challenged its power and hegemony. Second, Jamaicans and Leeward and Windward Islanders faced the dominant racism in Cuban society, deeply anchored in long-held racial fears and anxieties, especially among the elites who also aspired to a whitened Cuba. Third, as black British subjects they denounced the hypocrisy of empire, trespassed 269

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layers of imperial authority, and forced British representatives to provide support and reveal the racial understandings of Britishness. By all accounts, British Antilleans were empowered individuals. During their time in Cuba, British Caribbean workers had to survive the plantation regime in all its features, from economic exploitation and the vale system to the surveillance of white security guards. Nathan’s “Inter-Caribbean Labour Party” in the 1940s was not the first instance in which British Antilleans organized as workers. Earlier actions documented in previous chapters illustrate confrontations with authority in and around the plantation, from US sugar managers to the Cuban Rural Guards. People like Melville Jacobs and Musgrave Edwards, for instance, challenged the power structure of one of the largest sugar mills in the Caribbean. Other examples include two Jamaicans who acted against the Guantanamo Sugar Company in 1925. According to an accusation that reached the company’s headquarters in New York, a “Jamaican black named Fritz Van Bacle” and a fellow islander surnamed Bolt were involved in a scheme to tamper with the weights of cane supply to benefit a particular colono.1 As foreign labor, British Antilleans were often at odds with Cuban workers and there were incidents of interethnic violence such as the 1921 strike in the Havana Iron Works in Regla, in which four Jamaicans were injured.2 In February 1922, the directives of the Federación Obrera de Bahía (Workers Federation of the Bay) protested the recruitment of Jamaicans that affected locals. Foreign workers were seen as “passing birds” who only “save” money and send remittances without “throwing roots in Cuba.”3 In December 1923, Cuban organized labor condemned “undesirable migrations” arriving as “contraband from Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas, and other smaller islands of the Caribbean.” They were blamed for Cuban unemployment and perceived as a “constant threat” to Cubans.4 All this coexisted with the gradual and discrete incorporation of foreign migrants in the labor movement that has been documented by historians, with the case of labor activist Henry Shackleton in the 1920s 1

2 3 4

Comisión secreta de trabajadores y empleados, to Guantanamo Sugar Company, NY, February 27, 1925, GSCP, Cuba Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Box 26, folder: “letts from Cuba.” “Colisión entre obreros en Regla,” El Mundo, May 23, 1921, 1; “Cuestiones obreras,” El Mundo, May 27, 1921, 16. “La manifestación de los obreros federados,” El Mundo, February 6, 1922, 14. “Los obreros cubanos abren campaña contra la inmigración indeseable,” La Prensa, December 11, 1923, 1.

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being the most cited by scholars. But Barry Carr and Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita have shown other instances of cross-ethnic alliances and solidarities in the labor arena, particularly in the 1930s. By the 1940s, I identified the case of discriminated British Antilleans being assisted by Cuban “friends,” and then instances such as Nathan’s inclusion in the Labor Day Parade of Camagüey. Beyond issues of labor, the five decades of the history of British Caribbean migrants studied here underline the uncomfortable place of blackness in Cuban national formation. In those fifty years Cuban society lived with the hangover of both the nineteenth-century fear of foreign blacks and elitist ideas of Cuban (and Latin American) whiteness.5 The invocations of Saco in the 1920s and the stubbornness of an exclusionary nationalism in the 1940s only confirm the endurance of racist thinking in Cuba, even after remarkable accomplishments toward racial equality.6 Racist discourses against the black migrant were consistent, if certainly changing and elusive, labelling Jamaicans “rebels” or “savage,” making British Antilleans the object of sanitary and hygienic concerns, or seeing black foreigners as polluting an ostensibly white Cuban nation. Moments of social and political instability, such as revolts in 1912 and 1917, the collapse of sugar markets in 1921, and the depression of the 1930s, certainly triggered overt xenophobic antagonism toward black Antilleans, with discrimination showing its most vicious face. Blackness also had an uncomfortable place in the British Empire, demonstrated through the prejudices that surfaced in British Antillean interactions with imperial representatives. The actions and words of consuls and other government officials were sometimes explicitly racist, and other times disregarded the migrants’ claims.7 Yet this strengthened the resolve of migrants who resourcefully denounced the inaction and racism of local British representatives to higher authorities in London. Whether this was part of British Antilleans’ confidence in the empire, or a strategic tool from below, the migrants’ agency put British officers in the awkward position of having to protect – or at least not ignore – their racial and colonial “others.” The emphasis on how British official support for the migrants was not a product of imperial altruism or the diligence of consular officials provides a different perspective on the history of British Caribbean migrants in Cuba. 5 6 7

“El pensamiento de Pozos Dulces y de Alberdi,” La Prensa, June 7, 2017, 2. De la Fuente, A Nation for All. On racism as disregard, see García, “The Heart of Racism.”

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It not only questions generalizations and assumptions in the historiography of migración antillana, it also triggers a closer examination of the British Caribbean experience in Cuba as a whole. Such a fresh look reveals a more complex history, with distinctions between Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean migrants that have rarely been analyzed, including advantages of one group over the other, and differences in patterns of migration, settlement, and the repatriation process. This, in turn, provides a more nuanced picture of the existing investigations comparing Haitian migrants with British Antilleans (as a generalized group) particularly during the 1930s. The differences between Jamaicans and eastern Caribbean migrants, the various migration trends for these two groups and the Haitians, the reduction of consular posts in the late 1920s, and the departure patterns of Haitians and Jamaicans during the late 1920s and the 1930s, along with the critical assessment of British government support, all call for rethinking established assumptions of Caribbean migration to Cuba. This, hopefully, will also generate new questions for future investigation. Questioning British consular support also allows for a look at other ways in which British Antilleans in Cuba survived, and even thrived as a community. British Caribbean migrants created welfare and mutual aid societies, some of which were used to advocate on their behalf with the British authorities. The UNIA was an important and lasting force for British Antilleans, maneuvering to remain active, even if it meant compromising its racial character for public consumption (as was the concealment of the word “Negro” in its name at one point).8 Garvey’s organization also operated in synergy with lodges and religious practice, fostering unity among Caribbean workers across various provinces, and numerous churches directed by British Antilleans became vital for communal and family unity in Cuba.9 The UNIA was also a space of crossethnic alliances well into the 1950s, with its share of Cuban members and sympathizers.10 In 1999, I had the fortune of meeting one such Cuban

8 9

10

Giovannetti, “The Elusive Organization of ‘Identity’,” 9, 14–18. See “Mariana [sic] Cuba Div.,” Negro World, July 16, 1932, 3; “Guanabacoa, Cuba Div. No. 484,” Negro World, May 28, 1932, 3. A letter from R. E. Jack, a minister in Chaparra, to Garveyite J. R. Ralph Casimir, highlights the important role of British Antillean churches in joining “couples in holy wedlock.” See R. E. Jack (St. Adrian’s Rectory, Central Chaparra, Oriente de Cuba) to J. R. Ralph Casimir, Roseau, Dominica, July 6, 1923. J. R. Ralph Casimir Papers, SCRBC, NYPL, Box 1, Folder 10. Nicolás Duarte Cajides to Provincial Governor, Havana, September 9, 1952, ANC, RA, leg. 388, no. 11640. McLeod, “Sin dejar de ser cubanos,” 75–104; Guridy, “Enemies of the White Race,” 116–130; “Correspondencia,” Negro World, July 24, 1926, 8.

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Garveyite. Her name was Juana Chapé Cardenas, a descendant of enslaved people who was born in 1913 and lived in Jobabo. When I explained to her my research and spoke of Marcus Garvey, mentioning the black leader’s name triggered an immediate reaction: “La puerta de África abierta para todos los negros” (“The door of Africa open for all the blacks”).11 In many ways, the 1940s were an important moment for British Antilleans’ organizational practices. Along with being a reaction to Frank Stockdale’s visit and report, the migrants’ efforts were a response to neglect from British imperial officials at that time. Many British Caribbean workers were enduring a “more or less hand-to-mouth existence” due to the prevalent anti-foreign labor legislation, and some allegedly were living in “filthy state.”12 Therefore, even when interethnic alliances did emerge between British Antilleans and their Cuban counterparts, they were countered by continuing nationalist antagonism and the prejudiced views of the host society. It must not be a surprise that the migrants kept their intra-ethnic ties and diasporic connections, as is exemplified in the cricket matches held in 1947 by the British West Indian Welfare Center (BWIWC) in Guantánamo and other migrant communities in the 1950s with counterparts from Jamaica and Belize.13 That BWIWC has had a long life, as Andrea Queeley’s recent ethnography illustrates, surviving even the 1959 Revolution, experiencing a renewal of important significance for the African-Anglo-Caribbean diaspora in present-day Cuba.14 The Cuban Revolution made important moves toward inclusiveness and full rights for those deemed “undesirable” in the past.15 Today’s recognition of figures such as Teofilo Stevenson, performing artist Hilda Oates, and professor Alden Knight are a testament to that. Inclusiveness for black British subjects on the other side of the Atlantic had its own long route, particularly after World War II and the empire’s proactive choice of rejecting their imperial allegiance and seeking their assimilation in Cuba. In the early 1940s, the momentary recovery of the 11 12

13 14 15

Juana Chapé Cardenas, interview, Jobabo, Cuba, May 21, 1999. G. B. James, to Acting Consul General, British Legation, March 11, 1948, NA, FO 1001/ 2; Picabea, “Hablando con un amigo mío,” in “The Manolo Manuscript,” Carl Withers Manuscript Collection, University Archives, New York University, 1240. Chailloux Laffita and Whitney, “British Subjects y Pichones en Cuba,” 77; Sánchez Guerra, Los anglo-caribeños en Guantánamo, 34. Queeley, Rescuing Our Roots. The usual reference is to resolutions of the Ministry of Labor in 1967; Nuñez Machín, Braceros antillanos, 21, 31.

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sugar industry caused by the war allowed some space for a more or less stable existence of those British Caribbean workers remaining in Cuba, and labor laws were allegedly not strictly applied against them.16 The British were certainly not anxious to have them back in the colonies, and by 1948 the argument was being made that Jamaicans would be better off staying in Cuba, where they were “at least among more or less friendly neighbours and in many cases they have relatives” on the island.17 British government officials dealing with colonial subjects in Cuba in 1948 were probably unaware that they were about to begin a longer ordeal with the trilogy of labor, migration, and race – this time at home. In 1948 the British authorities thought that they would settle the question of black British subjects “definitely” with their “best and most permanent solution” of assimilation and permanence in Cuba. In that same year, the acting governor in Jamaica wrote with “regret” that more than 350 men were heading to the United Kingdom in the Empire Windrush in the “hope to find employment” there.18 The British Parliament and the national press were expecting an increased group of 417 Jamaicans scheduled to arrive in late June, and A. Creech Jones from the Colonial Office wrote a memorandum “to explain the circumstance in which these men decided to come to Great Britain.” Jamaica was facing a serious unemployment crisis, he explained, and the “doors of Cuba and Panama are now closed and employment in the U.S.A. is very restricted. These men want work in England.”19 The Windrush migrants generated preoccupations about employment availability, but also about race. In a letter, by British prime minister Clement Attlee expressed that it was “traditional that British subjects” of “whatever race or colour,” “should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom.” He noted that it would be a “mistake to take any measure which would tend to weaken the goodwill and loyalty of the Colonies towards Great Britain,” and more so at a moment when the country was “importing foreign labor in large numbers.” But he added that if British policy “were to result in a great 16 17 18 19

Zanetti Lecuona, La república, 101–102; Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes to Anthony Eden, London, April 4, 1944, NA, FO 371/38074, no. A1569. J. T. Weir, British Consulate, Havana, “Minute: Repatriation of British West Indians,” March 30, 1948, NA, FO 1001/2. Acting governor, Jamaica, telegram to Secretary of State for the Colonies, London, May 11, 1948, NA, Home Office Papers (hereafter HO) 213/714. A. Creech Jones, “S.S. Empire Windrush – Jamaican Unemployed: Memorandum by Secretary of State for the Colonies,” June 15, 1948, NA, CO 537/2583, underlining in original.

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influx of undesirables,” a modification would have to be considered.20 Ironically, Attlee was invoking an imperial loyalty that had been considered “mainly sentimental” in the Cuban context, and was also anticipating the possible outcome of immigration with the same language that was used against British Antillean “undesirables” in Cuba. The Cuban British Antillean diasporic experience had reached British shores. By the next year, in 1949, incidents of racial discrimination had started to emerge,21 and another chapter for the black British diaspora would start to be written, one that (as in Cuba) would have its share of claims of belonging, individual acts of human agency, violence, and, very sadly, blood. Seventy years later, in 2018, that long, ongoing chapter began to be re-edited when Britain’s anti-immigration policies led to the so-called Windrush scandal. In a painful déjà vu taken from the stories of their ancestors told in this book, members of the Windrush generation faced time in detention centers, deportation, uncertainty, racism, and questions about their belonging. The twenty-first-century experience of the African-Anglo-Caribbean diaspora in Britain shows that many of the core issues of race, migration, and empire discussed here remain more relevant than one would have expected. If I were to follow Stuart Hall’s triangular image for the black British diaspora presented in the Introduction, then this book would be a fivedecade parenthesis in the larger Atlantic history of people of African descent. To be sure, no one wants his or her book to be a parenthesis. Yet, not unlike a parenthesis in a text which forces one to stop, or is used to provide a better understanding of what follows in the sentence, this five-decade interlude hopes to accomplish both of these purposes. The story of British Antilleans in Cuba – along with parallel and overlapping stories of Caribbean migrants in other mostly Hispanic American locations – provide new insights for our understanding of the following history of Caribbean migrants in Britain after World War II. It was precisely Stuart Hall who called attention to how, when black British subjects appeared visibly in Birmingham and Bradford in the 1950s, “geography and distance” had contributed to the “historical amnesia” of Britain about their imperial history.22 Britain’s encounter with the “other” in Cuba, and the racial distinctions and racism that came with it, were part of that history. At the same time, this fifty-year parenthesis 20 21 22

Clement Attlee to J. D. Murray, MP, July 5, 1948, NA, HO, 213/715. Listowel to Lord Faringdon, September 23, 1949, NA, CO 537/4273. Hall, “Racism and Reaction,” 24–25.

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from 1898 to 1948 is a stop; a stop to rethink and envision the history of republican Cuba in a regional Caribbean context, and as part of a larger Atlantic history of migration, diplomatic politics, and the political economy of sugar, of which the migrants were part as workers and Britain as consumer. The Cuban rural – and indeed urban – landscape would not be the same after the influx of thousands of black British Caribbean migrants, and their permanence in many localities such as Banes, Chaparra, Delicias, Guantánamo, and Santiago de Cuba. Cuba would be far from the “homogenizing monomania” that, in facing foreign blackness, was invoked by Saco and others in the early twentieth century, who aspired to “one cultural identity.” Rather, Cuba would be “multiethnic” and “pluricultural” in its sociocultural formation, even if this was not recognized.23 Whether Fernando Ortiz liked it or not, thousands of British Antilleans and their descendants would stay in Cuba, not “retarding” Cuba’s national formation, but contributing to a multicultural Cuba, and being part of the Cuban ajiaco.24

23 24

Martínez Furé, “A National Cultural Identity?,” 154–157. My emphasis. For recent contributions illustrating the multiple ethnic and cultural heritage of Cuba, see Raimundo Gómez Navia et al., De dónde son los cubanos.

Bibliography

     Researching this book involved many more archives and libraries than I had planned. Some of the collections I gained access to were not fully accessible to the public, others were partially processed or not processed at all, and yet others were in a state of limbo – for lack of a better word. I visited some archives more than once, and others only once. I tried to be as accurate as possible in identifying the materials used (files, folders, books, etc.) as they were organized or identified at the moment of my visit. But the status, organization, or identification of some of the materials may have changed in the years it took to produce the book, and researchers reading and consulting the sources I used should be aware of that. A brief comment is therefore in order. The Cuba Company Papers were under great care when I used them in the 1990s, but they had not been completely processed. I maneuvered (limited) access to the United Fruit Company Papers in Banes in the late 1990s, and while a transfer was expected and disputed, I am not sure of the current status and conditions of those precious materials. The Cuban American Sugar Company Papers in Las Tunas were partially processed when I used them, and my understanding from colleagues who saw them after I did is that there is more than what was made available to me. The National Archives in Dominica were located in a provisional site during my research visit in 2003. As far as I know from their website, their facilities are now massively different from the ones I visited. I am sure their great service remains the same no matter the conditions, and I hope their rich materials survived Hurricane Irma (2017). In the many years I spent researching, the Public Record Office in the United Kingdom became the National Archives, and their searching tools improved. Thus fully blind fishing expeditions moved to more precise ones. Every new visit meant that I could do more specific searches and request specific boxes. Unlike the challenges faced by my friend “Mateo” Casey finding a written record from Haitian migrants, I was lucky that some letters by British Antilleans survived 277

278

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and were not thrown in the Caribbean Sea. With improved search methods at the NA, possibly other scholars going today will find still more British Antillean letters to work with . . . or possibly not . . . Finally, I was privileged to have access to a number of private collections and papers, or simply file folders in particular offices, museums, or organizations such as lodges and churches. Some of these are not official archives, and are not listed below out of consideration for their keepers. I can only assume that these sources or materials remain in the care of their owners or guardians. My gratitude to all the archivists, librarians, and keepers of these materials is enormous. My work as a scholar and this book would not be possible without them.

 Cuba Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC) Fondo 54: Registro de Asociaciones (RA) Fondo 73: Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico)-Ramón Grau San Martín Fondo 189: Secretaria de Presidencia (SP) Fondo 302: Secretaria de Agricultura, Comercio y Trabajo [also named Agricultura, Industria y Comercio] (SACT) Fondo 304: Secretaria de Estado (SE) Fondo: Asuntos Políticos (AP) Fondo: Donativos y Remisiones (DR) Fondo: Miscelánea de Expedientes (ME) Fondo: Secretaria de Estado y Gobernación (SEG) Fondo: Secretaria de Gobernación (SG) Archivo Histórico Municipal de Santiago de Cuba (Actas Capitulares). Archivo Histórico Provincial de Camagüey (AHPC) Fondo: Jorge Júarez Cano (JJC) Fondo: Juzgado de Instrucción de Camagüey (JIC) Fondo: Registro de Asociaciones (RA-C) Archivo Histórico Provincial de las Tunas, Las Tunas (AHPT) Fondo 5: The Cuban-American Sugar Mills Company (CASMC) Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas (AHPM) Fondo: Gobierno Provincial de Matanzas (GPM) Archivo Histórico Provincial de Santiago de Cuba (AHPSC) Fondo: Gobierno Provincial de Oriente (GPO) Archivo Provincial Histórico, Holguín (APHH) Fondo: Registro de Información, Miscelánea Museo Municipal Histórico de Banes, Banes, Holguín Manager’s Letter Books, 1908–1912, United Fruit Company Papers (UFCP) Museo Municipal Rosendo Arteaga Guerra, Jobabo, Las Tunas Guión museológico

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Index

African Colored League, 129 African Communities League, 130 AFSC. See Atlantic Fruit and Sugar Company Agrupación Independiente de Color, 38 Algodones sugar mill, 143, 147 Aliens Registration Law, 221 Ambrose, Samuel W., 120, 260 Anderson, Emelina, 55 Aponte Conspiracy (Cuba, 1812), 9, 24, 84 Araquistáin, Luis, 154, 156–157, 182, 248 La agonía antillana, 156 Archer, Egbert, 142, 144 Archer, Samuel, 252 Arredondo, Alberto, 252 Asociación de Colonos de Cuba, 204 Asociación de Repatriación de los Antillanos Ingleses, 203, 214 Association of British Subjects of Morón, 235 Atkins, Edwin, 36 Atlantic Fruit and Sugar Company, 63–64, 155–157, 166 Badan, Bruno, 27 Banes, Holguín, 35–36, 49, 53, 61, 77, 122, 131, 224, 244, 276 Baptist War (Jamaica, 1831–1832), 9, 24 Baraguá sugar mill, 63, 68, 165 Baraguá, Ciego de Ávila, 55, 203, 224–225, 232 Barnett, Albert, 146–147, 265 Barrett, Joseph, 92–93

Batista, Melchor, 91, 95 Beaupré, Arthur, 41 black fear, 9–14, 26, 40, 42–44, 90, 240, 251 Black League of the Antilles, 28 Blanck y Menocal, Guillermo de, 211–213 Boston sugar mill, 35, 59, 61, 63, 155 Brice, Ernest P. V., 128–129, 132–135, 139–140 Bridgewater, J. R. H., 133 British Antilleans, 3–5, 8, 10–13, 15, 18–22, 53, 60, 70–71, 73–74, 85, 93–94, 96–97, 100, 137, 148–149, 153, 175, 181, 183, 194, 216, 218–219, 225, 227–228, 231, 233, 237–238, 240–241, 246–247, 252, 255–258, 261, 271, 273, 275–277 and British assimilation policy, 234 and claims of British subjects rights, 118–120, 185, 191–192, 235–236, 260–262 as competition for Cuban workers, 49, 76, 114, 164 and fraternal societies, 202–203, 214–215, 225–226, 235–236, 239 and labor conditions, 133–135, 194–195 and migration statistics, 45–48, 54–58 and patterns of migration, 29–33 and repatriation, 58, 64, 113–115, 119, 123–125, 128, 131–132, 154, 160, 164–165, 176, 182, 185–190, 200–201, 215–216, 220–221, 230–231 and settlement patterns, 199 and vales as payment, 117, 135, 143, 146

301

302

Index

British Guiana, 7, 22, 30, 194 British West Indian Democratic Association, 227 British West Indian Mutual Association, 202–203, 206, 235 British West Indian Progressive Association, 225 British West Indian Welfare Center, 273 British West Indies Regiment, 32–33, 182, 255, 260, 262 Britton, Albert, 92–93, 95 Brodber, Erna, 50, 53–54, 66, 123 Broderick, J. J., 173, 182–191, 229, 267 Brooks, L., 253, 266 Brooks, Theodore, 79 Brown, Egbert Ethelred, 82 Buchanan, Moses, 142, 144 Bullard, John, 93, 99 Caballero Morejón, Mariano, 89–90 Cadenas, Julio, 91–92, 95–96, 103–108 Camagüey, 1, 3, 35, 38, 58, 63, 75, 88, 153–154, 184–188, 200, 203–204, 220, 224–226, 230, 233, 236, 266–267, 269, 271 Camagüeyano, El (newspaper), 89–90, 111, 151 Campbell, Celia (Ms. Jones), 68 Campbell, S. McNeill, 189 Campbell, Samuel A., 92–94 Capel-Dunn, Denis, 194 Caribbean Dominion Assembly of the Inter Caribbean Labor Party, 1 Carr, Barry, 271 Carteles (magazine), 157–158, 248 Carvalho, Charles, 42 CASC. See Cuban American Sugar Company Casey, Matthew, 12, 73–74, 199 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de, 143–145, 195, 263 Chailloux Laffita, Graciela, 13, 271 Chambelona, La (Liberal Revolt, 1917), 10, 88, 245–246 Chamberlain, Mary, 20 Chandler, Edward B., 171, 185 Chaparra sugar mill, 35, 59–61, 65, 69, 116–119, 124, 133–134, 152, 154, 156, 165, 167–174, 182, 227 Charles, Joseph, 134 Chisholm, Donald, 256–257 Chomsky, Aviva, 17, 244

Churchill, Winston S., 119, 131–133, 236 Ciego de Ávila, 53, 55, 101, 112, 142, 146, 187, 224, 254 Cipriani, Arthur, 3 Clum, Harold D., 128, 138–139 Colonos (sugar growers), 96, 117, 145, 152–154, 156, 159, 204, 210 Compañía Naviera de Cuba, 125 Cuba Company, 15, 47, 77, 81, 90–91, 98–102, 108 Cuban American Sugar Company, 15, 19, 35–36, 57–65, 69, 116–118, 124, 133–134, 141–142, 153–155, 164, 172, 191, 227 and company towns, 165–169 Cuenco, María Pría de, 89 Cultural Association of the British Antilleans of Cuba, 235 Cupey sugar mill, 101 Cutilla, Miguel, 91–92, 107 D’ou, Lino, 245 Davis, Henrietta Vinton, 130, 163 de Bourgh, J. S., 130 Deerr, Noël, 94 Defly, Edmond, 84, 243 Delicias sugar mill, 35, 59, 116, 118, 133, 154, 156, 165 Desvernine, Pablo, 98, 102 Diario de la Marina (newspaper), 41, 78, 81, 90, 161, 245–246 Dolz, Ricardo, 107 Dominica Chronicle (newspaper), 167 Dominion Government, 1 Duharte Jiménez, Rafael, 42 Dulce, Domingo, 26–27 Dunlop, T. D., 265–267 Edwards, Musgrave E., 133–135, 142, 151–152, 270 Elia sugar mill, 91 Emanuel, William George, 77–78 Escalera, la (the Ladder) Conspiracy (1844), 9, 25, 42 Estenoz, Evaristo, 38–42, 86–87, 243 Estrada Palma, Tomás, 10, 34, 36–37, 79 Fernández, Fernando, 89–90 Ferrer, Ada, 23 Fifty Percent Law, 71–73, 196–201, 203–207, 221

Index Fleming, Robert, 98, 101–102, 108 Francis, Warrington, 134 Gainer, D. St. Clair, 147–148, 265 García, Alejandro, 62 García Menocal, Mario, 10, 35, 46, 83, 85, 87, 90–91, 98–99, 103, 105–107, 109, 248 Gardier, Lionel, 120 Garvey, Marcus, 4, 120, 122, 130, 163, 182, 273 Gedge, C. E., 186–187 Gimperling, Thomas, 197–199 Gómez, José Miguel, 10, 40, 46, 86–89 Gómez, Juan Gualberto, 37 Gomez, Michael, 5 Gonzales, William, 98–101, 103–105, 107 Grau San Martín, Ramón, 196 Greene, Julie, 17 Griffith, P. Merrill, 110 Grindle, G. E. A., 119 Guantánamo, 3, 110, 123, 227–229, 232–233, 249, 253–254, 273 Guantanamo Sugar Company, 79, 206, 270 Guerra, Ramiro, 154, 156–158, 174, 182, 248 Azúcar y población en las Antillas, 156 Guiteras, Juan, 112 Guridy, Frank, 8 Haggard, Godfrey, 115, 137–138, 143–147, 259, 265 Haitian Revolution, 9, 21, 23, 43 Hall, Arthur, 93, 95 Hall, H. Hall, 267 Hall, Joseph, 256–257, 264 Hall, Stuart, 5–6, 275 Harlem, N. Y., 32–33 Harris, Theophilus, 95 Harty, Harold, 49, 81 Hawley, Robert Bradley, 35 Haydock-Wilson, L., 229 Helg, Aline, 10, 37, 42–43 Holguín, 101, 134, 166, 224, 228 Hone, Neil, 171–173, 193, 229–232, 264 Hunt, John, 118 Inter-Caribbean Labour Party, 270 Ivonet, Pedro, 41–42, 86–87, 243

303

Jacobs, Melville A., 168–171, 191, 262, 270 Jamaica Times (newspaper), 41, 66, 115–116, 193 James, C. L. R., 6 Jenks, Leland H., 65, 204–207 Jobabo massacre, 18, 89–96, 98 Jobabo sugar mill, 90, 93, 98 Júcaro, Camagüey, 63 Kezar, M. F. E., 184, 186–187 Kirk, Neville, 17 Knight, Alden, 273 Labrade, Víctor, 114 Lacoste, Eugenio, 85 Lamming, George, 6 Lawrence, Josiah, 236 Leech, Stephen, 98, 100–108, 137, 253–258, 263–265 Le-Roy y Cassá, Jorge, 141, 196, 248–249 Levy, Andrea, 6 Lewis, Gordon K., 28 Ley del 50%. See Fifty Percent Law Ley Verdeja (1926), 153 Liberal Party, 10–11, 36–40, 87–88 Lochart, Margarite, 169–170 Louisiana Planter & Sugar Manufacturer, 154 McCormack, G. L., 140–141 McDormott, Aaron, 93, 95 Maceo, Antonio, 10, 28, 87 McGuire, George Alexander, 130 Machado, Gerardo, 152–153, 155, 162, 164, 182, 195–196, 251 McKenzie, John A., 242, 253–254, 264 McLeod, Marc, 43, 70, 111, 120, 122, 128–129, 163, 165, 191, 206 McNeill, Donald, 151, 181 Maingot, Anthony P., 23, 43 Mallet, Louis, 254 Manatí sugar company, 141, 154–155, 195, 257 Manzanillo, Oriente, 63, 78, 123, 207 Martí, José (nineteenth-century patriot), 40 Martí, José (Minister of War), 102, 107 Mason, William, 253, 258 migration, Chinese, 11, 26, 29, 77, 112, 207, 233, 245–246, 248, 251 migration, Eastern Caribbean, 57–58, 60–61, 64, 172, 179–180

304

Index

migration, Eastern Caribbean (cont.) and repatriation, 188–190, 193–194, 199–200 migration, Haitian, 12, 41, 48, 56, 60, 62, 64, 70–74, 77, 82–85, 88, 102, 110–115, 124, 131, 141, 145, 153, 155–156, 159, 164–166, 172–173, 178, 187, 198–199, 204–207, 220, 233, 243–249, 272, 277 and repatriation, 208–210 migration, Jamaican, 48–54 and repatriation, 200–201, 212 migration, Spanish, 113, 118, 164, 206–207, 246, 251 Moloney, Edward C., 254–255 Montoro, Rafael, 107 Morant Bay Rebellion (Jamaica, 1865), 9, 21, 27, 252 Morris, T. J., 180–181 Morúa Amendment, 39–40 Morúa Delgado, Martín, 37, 39 Moses, Edward, 228 Mouriño, Gabriel, 204 Moyne Commission (1938–1939), 212, 215, 219, 230, 232 Nathan, David S., 1–4, 6, 8, 14, 269–271 Nationalization of Labor Law. See Fifty Percent Law Negro World, The (newspaper), 118, 120–122, 130, 132, 135, 141, 163–165 Nettleford, Rex, 12 New Niquero Sugar Company, 63 Newton, Velma, 30 Nipe Bay Company, 46, 61, 243 Nipe Bay, Holguín, 35, 49, 264 O’Meara, Francis, 182–184 Oates, Hilda, 273 Ogilvie-Forbes, George, 217, 219–223, 227–229, 232, 234 Ortiz, Fernando, 48, 80, 84, 88, 241, 248, 252, 276 Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, 252 on black immigration, 241 Palacios, José de Gabriel, 244, 249 Palma Soriano, Santiago de Cuba, 164, 205–208, 250 Palma sugar mill, 205 Panama Canal, 5, 7, 14, 30–33

Partido Independiente de Color, 10–11, 18, 39, 83–85, 161, 242 and 1912 revolt, 40–42 and Morúa Amendment, 39–40 Patten, Lloyd, 138, 266 Pérez de la Riva, Juan, 59, 204 Pérez, Louis, Jr., 9, 89, 94 Pérez, Luis Marino, 85, 97, 244–245, 248 Petinaud, J., 227 Phillips, Caryl, 6 PIC. See Partido Independiente de Color Pina, Rogelio, 203–206, 207, 251 Plazaola, Fernando de, 111 Población Blanca junta, 26 política cómica, La (newspaper), 86–88, 111 Portuondo, Aurelio, 145, 147 Portuondo, Juan, 208 Preston sugar mill, 35, 49, 59, 61, 65, 119–120, 155 Previsión (newspaper), 38 Puerto Padre, Las Tunas, 59–61, 64, 87, 164, 166, 224–225, 250 Putnam, Lara, 6, 65 Quesada, Gonzalo de, 80 Quilez, Alfredo, 157 racial prejudice against immigrants, 121, 245, 247–249 and fear of crime, 114–115 and press campaigns, 118, 156–160 and sanitary arguments, 110–112, 154 Richards, Samuel Augustus, 119 Rionda, Manuel, 36, 79, 81, 145, 149, 154, 156 Rionda, Salvador, 131, 154–155, 195 Robinson, Amos, 228 Robinson, William, 17 Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio, 157, 174, 182, 248–249 Rolando, Gloria, 68 My Footsteps in Baraguá (film), 68 Roye, Locksley, 142, 144 Rumeau, Xavier, 123–126 Rural Guard, 19, 26, 83, 125, 142–143, 145–147, 151, 166, 169, 183, 187–188, 228, 243, 253, 257–258, 265, 270 Sabanaso incident, 172–173, 182 Saco, José Antonio, 24–25, 248, 251, 271, 276

Index Sadler, Charles, 137–138 Sagua de Tánamo, Holguín, 63–64, 155 St. Pierre, Joseph, 134 Samuels, Henry, 93–94 Santiago de Cuba, 52–53, 59, 64, 76, 79, 84, 87, 114, 117, 122–123, 128–130, 144, 163, 168, 178, 185, 198, 201, 215–216, 225, 242, 244, 265, 276 Scott, Rebecca, 28, 36–37 Sheridan, J. W., 115, 117, 124–125 Silveira, Vicente, 87–88 Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos de los Antillanos Británicos. See British West Indian Mutual Association Spanish American Iron Co., 77 Spring Rice, Cecil, 98, 102–105, 264 Stevenson, Teófilo, 273 Stockdale, Frank, Sir, 19, 219–221, 223–224, 227, 229, 231–232, 234–235, 273 on community life, 224–225 on repatriation and relief, 225–227 Stoute, William Preston, 55 Sullivan, Frances, 122 Sweaney, W. D., 238

305

Unión Africana, 78 United Fruit Company, 15, 19, 35–36, 49, 55, 58–59, 61–63, 65–66, 69, 77–79, 81, 119, 122, 124, 131, 154–155, 166, 205–207, 221, 233 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 4, 8, 11, 15, 120–122, 125, 128–133, 163, 182, 192, 202, 214, 272 Urrutia, Gustavo, 161–162, 249 vales as payment, 117, 135, 143, 146, 216 Van Horne, William, 34, 47, 77, 241 Vasconcelos, Ramón, 87, 245 Velasco, Carlos de, 84, 243 Vibert, M. E., 58, 237–239 Voice of Saint Lucia, 116, 135, 137, 167

Tacajó sugar mill, 142 Tánamo sugar mill, 63, 155, 205 Taylor, Oscar, 142, 144 Torriente, Cosme de la, 112–114, 117 Trelles, Carlos M., 141, 248 Trinidad and Tobago, 1, 7, 22, 30–31, 58, 178, 200, 235 Trusted, H. H., 177, 179, 181

Walter, Robert, 127–128, 176–177 Walters, William, 125 Weir, J. T., 219–222, 224, 228 West India Royal Commission of 1897, 31 Whigham, George H., 90–91, 99, 101–102, 104 Whitney, Robert, 13, 271 Williams, Juan, 78 Windrush, 274–275 Women migration, 65–69, 169 and employment, 68–69, 205 and prostitution, 67–68 Wood, Leonard, 35, 77–79 Wood, R. B., 64–65, 155, 168–171, 174

UFC. See United Fruit Company UNIA. See Universal Negro Improvement Association

Zanetti, Oscar, 62 Zayas, Alfredo, 113 Zevallos, Victor, 82