Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry by Philip A. Howard (review)

Black Labor, White Sugar is a meticulously researched, persuasively argued, and exceptionally well-presented examination of the extremely difficult experience of Caribbean migrant workers, mostly from Haiti and Jamaica, during the tumultuous years of the Cuban sugar boom between 1906 and 1933. It not only constitutes an outstanding contribution to Cuban and Caribbean historiography, but it also insightfully weaves the overseas Cuban migrant experience into the domestic political and economic changes then going on in Cuba as well as the broader neighboring Caribbean societies. In six highly analytical chapters bookended by an introduction and a short epilogue, the study magisterially investigates the changing fortunes of the new sugar industry created in Cuba after the disastrous war of independence ended with a military occupation by the United States. The economic transformation of Cuba after 1898 might be a familiar story. It certainly has a large and distinguished literature, including significant studies by eminent scholars such as Oscar Zanetti, Alejandro Garcia, John Dumoulin, César Ayala, Alan Dye, Gillian McGillivray, Barry Carr, Jorge Ibarra, Julio Le Riverend, Oscar Pino Santos, Jorge Giovannetti, Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Alexandra Bronfman, Aline Helg, and Louis Pérez Jr. Much has indeed been written about this period. Most studies, however, focus on the large-scale institutional and agricultural changes, and overlook or underestimate the basic human factors. In this superb study, the focus rests on the hundreds of thousands of imported Haitian or Jamaican workers who cut and loaded the mature sugarcane and participated in many highly mechanized sugar central factories across the island. It explores the daily lives and communal experiences of these workers vital to the process of making sugar. In almost every chapter, Howard vastly expands our general understanding of the period by qualifying the acceptable conclusions of previous scholars, by asking different questions, by presenting new information derived from several international archives, and by generally contextualizing social, political, and economic developments beyond the usual Cuba–U.S. dichotomy.

The study skillfully intertwines the rapid expansion of early-twentieth-century Cuban sugar production, especially in Camagüey and Oriente provinces, with the artificially created need for laborers by the large U.S. and Cuban companies that conspired to subordinate, exploit, repress, and demean their foreign workers. Although the companies constructed an elaborate ideology based on racial and ethnic differences, they could never fully establish the total subordination that they desired of their imported workers. Haitians and Jamaicans energetically employed a variety of mechanisms to resist their occupational subordination and social marginalization. They accentuated their religious beliefs. They formed mutual aid societies. They desperately held on to notions of the family, either by bringing family members from their homelands or making new families with local Cuban spouses. They also sought modest measures of economic independence by small farming on land that they either bought or by squatting on estate lands. Much as they tried, neither the U.S. or Cuban governments nor their company collaborators could entirely insulate their foreign workers from domestic political and ideological involvement. Haitians and Jamaicans enthusiastically espoused the ideas of anarcho-syndicalism that guided the organization of Cuban workers in the 1920s. By doing so, they harmoniously merged racial and class ideologies. In an impressively sophisticated discussion of the impact of Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism in Cuba (and elsewhere), Howard demonstrates:

Convergence of anarcho-syndicalism and Garveyism ultimately helped to establish among black and white Cubans and Spanish and black immigrants a transnational militant working class ideology. This ideology promoted ethnic, racial and class solidarity, bringing together all sugarcane workers to challenge the power of the sugar companies, as well as of the state that supported their hegemony”

(pp. 10–11).

When the sugar boom began to fizzle in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Cuban...