El trabajo forzoso en Cuba: Un recorrido amargo de la historia

In this book a prominent scholar of Cuban labor history, Efrén Córdova, examines four periods of Cuban history by looking at the marginalized elements in society (workers) to find the continuity of five hundred years of Cuban history. For Córdova, that continuity is the history of forced labor. Ultimately, the author suggests that workers in post-1959 Cuba are the inheritors of this history. In fact, concludes Córdova, today's workers are more coerced than at any time in Cuban history, including the nearly three hundred years of African slavery.

Córdova examines the history of the encomienda, African slavery, coerced labor of Chinese and other migrants during the nineteenth century, and the Cuban Revolution. These labor systems represent forms of institutional and structural violence levied upon workers. Using a judicious selection of both primary and secondary sources, and building from his own two-volume history of Cuban labor, Córdova provides useful overviews of all four periods. For instance, in Part I he addresses the origins of the encomienda system, how indigenous workers were employed, the debates and laws attempting to curtail the encomienda, and the problems with enforcing those laws. In Part II, the largest section with five chapters, Córdova succinctly examines why slavery arrived and grew in Cuba, the different uses of slavery, and the dilemmas arising from the gradual abolition of slavery in the late 1800s. But in this section Córdova begins to let his political views show. He challenges Marxist historians who examine slavery and its downfall from a purely materialist point of view and who toe the Communist party line that slavery really did not end until 1959 (168). Part III is the pleasant surprise of the book, as Córdova examines various forms of coerced migrant labor, including that of the Irish, Chinese, and Yucatecan Indians during the nineteenth century. This topic is virtually unknown to most readers and rarely addressed in Cuban histories. While he does not call these forms of labor "forced," he acknowledges that neither were they free. The Chinese case is poignant: they arrived on eight-year contracts, but when those contracts were up, most could not afford return passage and had to either scramble for menial jobs or sign new contracts.

Part IV focuses on Socialist Cuba. According to Córdova, the three previous forms of labor differed from (and were in fact less severe than) the post-1959 system because the current system obligates and coerces everyone to work. Córdova locates the present system's origins in Castro's manipulation of patriotic and revolutionary fervor to create a better society shortly after the Revolution came to power. Castro immediately called for voluntary labor and a great national effort. This opened the door for him to later impose measures that forced workers to sacrifice their time for the patriotic and revolutionary good of the country (213). Schools that had work components may have been portrayed by the Revolution as promoting self-sacrifice for the larger good and instilling a service-minded mentality, but for Córdova they were little better than venues for forced child labor. The author carries the same theme of coercion into his examination of overtime, the microbrigades, and other forms of so-called voluntary labor.

Writing from the perspective of a former functionary of the Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT) and from the stated positions on freedom to work as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Córdova challenges readers to examine the state of labor and labor-state relations on the island. Near the book's end he asks: "Where does all the money go that is generated by free, forced labor? No one asks" (228). While no one should deny that coerced labor exists in Cuba, Córdova turns a blind eye to workers benefits since 1959. More disturbing is his almost total neglect of female laborers throughout the entire book. This becomes particularly intriguing when one thinks about the stated goals of the 1975 Family Code that "forced" husbands to share household work and child raising with their wives, who were increasingly going to work outside of the home. Yet Córdova neither addresses women's labor issues nor this important law.

While El trabajo forzoso en Cuba is a useful overview of important periods in Cuban labor history, ultimately one must see it as more than a history. It is "history" serving a political agenda: to discredit the contemporary state of Cuban labor conditions and state-labor relations, which, according to Córdova, are worse than at any time in the island's history. In fact, the three sections of the book merely foreshadow Part IV. For instance, each section argues that elites sought to maximize labor for their own enrichment and power. Since 1959, "el régimen de Castro se ha caracterizado por su tendencia a extraer el máximo de esfuerzo posible de los trabajadores" (256). Secondly, each era had collaborators who propped up tyranny; since 1959, much to Córdova's surprise, many Cubans have joined with Fidel and their participation is "aparentemente consensual en parte" (213). In the same vein, elites of each era dominated workers by imposing previously unknown work regimens. There are other foreshadowings: urban slaves who feared being sent to the campo foreshadow post-1959 urban residents being sent to the countryside in work brigades, and a nineteenth-century Chinese government report on the labor conditions of Chinese workers foreshadows the reports of international labor organizations decrying Cuban labor conditions since the Revolution.

Finally, the book takes a traditional institutional labor-history focus that obscures the social dimensions of labor. In fact, workers as people are strangely anonymous. In over 250 pages of text, no workers are identified by name. In a book that purports to show how workers have been tyrannized, the author's inability to put a human face (or even a name) on workers serves to obliterate them from history. More to the point, the book borders on "victim history." Workers are pawns of elite powers, with little ability to resist and shape their own lives. But, of course, workers did resist and shape their own lives, even if they were highly restricted. Which raises a larger question: Why should we see Cuban labor history as a story of coercion and victimology? Why not one, too, of resistance and agency?