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

Howard examines black Caribbean workers recruited to work in Cuba during the early 1900s, a time when sugar production grew to meet increased international demand. With the demand came mechanization; in addition, large numbers of Caribbean African-descendant laborers were enticed to enter the island to increase production. Howard emphasizes “Caribbean braceros,” migrant African-descendant laborers of the West Indies and Haiti (5), and proposes to place them within Cuba’s larger political, social, and economic landscape. This is an enormous task, and he achieves some aspects of his goal.

Of course, it is always questionable for a sociologist to review historical works, even works squarely within her research agenda. This is the case here, but I draw on years of historical sociology studies on Cuba before the 1959 Revolution and approach this review from that posture.

The book’s six chapters raise a few questions that could cause a general readership pause, though most historians surely have answers. For example, what are the distinctions between black Caribbean and West Indies workers? Which Caribbean islands are the West Indies and which are not? Howard includes Haitians in his understanding of braceros, but I wonder if Puerto Rican African-descendants are also included. The book does not answer such questions, as Howard uses the labels interchangeably.

The introduction sets forth the historical context. It presents the definitions from which the author works, briefly describes his “conceptual” genealogy, and summarizes each chapter. However, I was not impressed with the sketchy review of the conceptual genealogy guiding the study (see James, 5; Knight, McLeod, Giovannetti, and others, 16–19). Chapter 4 puts forth the ideology underlying Howard’s idea of “evolution and expression.” Chapter 5 extends the “ideological” exploration to include Marcus Garvey and the “Garveyism” of his social movement. The problem is that the claims about “conceptual genealogy, ideology, or counter-ideology” give the reader no linkages to larger theoretical issues of these complex ideas or their relationship to the Cuban reality, Caribbean African-descendant workers, or Cuba’s industrial development.

Scholarly writers are not always required to give thorough consideration to ideas of theoretical thinkers they employ in their works. But Howard interweaves a few extended quotations from his thinkers, makes generalizations about select ideas, and leaves readers without an understanding of how these thinkers’ ideas pertained to Cuban circumstances. Unfortunately, this type of writing leaves me unsatisfied. I have always felt that historians’ major focus is and should be the reclamation of historical details significant to clarifying ideas, events, people, places, and circumstances. When and if these scholars wade into deep theoretical waters, they continue to have a responsibility for professional rigor.

Howard states the purpose of his study: “to engage in and to contribute to the literature that has focused on the Cuban sugar industry after its collapse during the War of 1895” (2). He seeks to accomplish what only a dozen articles and a few books and dissertations have even addressed: to reposition field workers in the center of an examination of the Cuban sugar industry. His purpose as he states it is to reveal how sugar companies treated black field workers, the workers’ socioeconomic relations with the mills, and how the workers themselves influenced those relations (11–12).

This book is an overdue addition to the limited literature on twentieth-century African-descendant migrants brought to Cuba to harvest sugar cane. Howard reveals how sugar companies, Cuban agencies, and governmental officials, treated black laborers. While the book does shed needed light on Caribbean braceros and sugar production on the island, slippages distract from the study. For example, Cassandra Seabourn’s map of sugar mills in Cuba is described as cartography by Seabourn, but neither the map nor the citation has a date. Howard refers to “traditional sugar-producing provinces of Havana and Matanzas” (2), but he...