Subjects or Citizens: British Caribbean Workers in Cuba, 1900–1960 by Robert Whitney, Graciela Chailloux Laffita (review)

The century after the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean colonies (from 1834 to 1934) witnessed more than a transformation in the systems of labor in the Americas. It was also a time of unprecedented mobility of workers across territories inside and around the Caribbean Sea. The bibliography of intra-Caribbean migrations includes studies on Leeward and Windward Islanders to South America and Puerto Rico, Haitian and eastern Caribbean sugar workers to the Dominican Republic, Barbadians and Jamaicans to Central America, and more.

Cuba was not an exception to this Caribbean process. The authors of this book challenge the tendency to “Cuban exceptionalism” in the historiography by asking “what makes Cuba Caribbean” (182). In doing so, they test the limits of Cuba’s nationalist historiography. Over the years, articles by Juan Pérez de la Riva, Mats Lundahl, Rose Mary Allen, and Marc McLeod, among others, have examined the different immigrant groups that went to the island, mostly to work in the booming sugar industry. Only one book-length study exists in Spanish, by Rolando Álvarez Estévez, which makes Subjects or Citizens: British Caribbean Workers in Cuba, 1900–1960 the first book in English to examine the experience of one of these groups: British Antilleans.

The book is composed of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The title of chapter 1, “Who Are the Cuban People?,” is teasing. It questions the prevailing understandings of Cuban ethnic and national formation—centered in Spanish and African heritage—as it portrays Cuba as a nation of immigrants, including the British Caribbean islanders investigated by the authors. Chapters 2 and 3 take a more regional perspective by examining the parallel experiences of British Caribbean migrants in two Hispanic Caribbean contexts: Cuba and the Dominican Republic, from 1920 to 1950. The chapters also have a transnational Atlantic coverage to the extent that they consider and discuss wider imperial policies of the British Empire, looking at events and policies in the different colonies and in London and their relation to British subjects in Cuba.

In chapter 4, the focus narrows to the 1930s, a period of economic depression and political unrest in which the terms of Cuban-US relations changed and nationalism thrived. Against this scenario, the Cuban government approved labor legislation that favored Cubans over foreigners while it stimulated hostility against immigrant workers, especially those coming from the Caribbean. Spanish workers were the most numerous immigrant group in Cuba during the period of this study, and while they were “resented” for various reasons, they were considered “more desirable potential citizens” than the nonwhite immigrants coming from Haiti and the British Antilles (120). “In Cuban popular imagination,” the authors argue, “all Caribbean people were black, and they all practiced some kind of exotic, primitive, and distinctly non-Cuban cultural behavior” (121). Here again, the authors advance the critique of Cuban exceptionalism; they emphasize Cuba’s shared history with the Caribbean and argue that despite the prevailing “political imaginations or historical discourses of nationalists,” many native-born Cubans had daily interactions with immigrants from other Caribbean territories (121–22). Yet these shared experiences did not stop the antiblack nationalism prevailing in the country, particularly among the elites.

In their recounting of Cuba’s nationalist labor laws in chapter 4, the authors reference other countries with similar legislation that also had the effect of targeting non-whites even when, as the authors write, this “rarely was spelled out explicitly.” They mention measures in Venezuela, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, with the latter country becoming again the focus of comparison for the authors (123, 136–38). Interestingly, for all the aims of locating Cuba in a Caribbean context, the authors missed an opportunity here. They use the infamous 1937 massacre of Haitians in the borderlands of Hispaniola to illustrate the antiforeign actions in the Dominican Republic in comparison to those in Cuba. Indeed...