Empire's Guest Workers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US Occupation by Matthew Casey (review)

Between 1910 and 1940, approximately 200,000 Haitian workers labored in Cuba on sugar and coffee plantations. They left rural Haiti for better wages that they would later take home. This excellent study reveals how companies tried to define every aspect of the daily lives of these "guest workers" and how Haitian immigrant laborers sought to maintain their identity and autonomy. Casey illuminates the methods and strategies individual Haitian workers employed to affect the processes of "state building, plantation agriculture, and race-making in the early twentieth century" (2).

Examining a variety of sources from court records to novels, Casey argues that Haitians resisted various sources of power and domination, including the labor regimes and policies of North American and Cuban sugar and coffee companies and the North American imperial influence in the Cuban and Haitian governments and economies, as well as the ideologies of race. Haitian men and women employed "collective actions that included informal economic activities, various acts of protest, religious rituals and subsistence strategies to strengthen their autonomy, increase their wages, serve their spirits or take advantage of their leisure time" to withstand those forces of exploitation and oppression (18). Their presence in Cuba influenced both nations' politics, economic development, and racial ideologies.

Casey believes that Cuba's presidential decree of 1913 to permit Haitian migrant workers to enter Cuba reflected an important fact: although the Republic had banned black immigration as early as 1902, Cuban officials ignored the ban, so as to accommodate the commercial interests of the foreign-owned sugar companies. Haitian immigration to Cuba was nothing out of the ordinary, beginning during the early decades of the nineteenth century when it was propelled by the Haitian Revolution. After the 1917 US military occupation of Haiti, Haitian immigration to Cuba dramatically increased, transforming rural Haitians into "shattered people" in order to "build the state, expand the export economy, and centralize administration" (66). Many left for Cuba displaced by excessive taxation, high inflation, the war of resistance, and the Caco Rebellion. During the 1910s, they migrated from the southwest of Haiti. When the rebellion ended, Haitians from the northeast migrated. By the 1920s, Haitian women had also begun to arrive in noticeable numbers.

Sugar cane companies employed transnational networks to recruit Haitian workers. Returning migrants spread the news about the jobs and received payment for every worker they brought to Cuba. Sugar mills hired labor agents to recruit the majority of workers. Once Haitians arrived in Cuba, the mills sought to define every aspect of their lives. Central to this endeavor was the racial ideology applied to assess their intellectual capacity, manual skills, and culture. Most mill administrators tended to view their Haitian workers as uncivilized, but born to cut and haul sugar cane. They were placed at the bottom of a racialized plantation labor hierarchy, with British West Indians at the top. Workers from Jamaica, Barbados and the other British islands were privileged because of their perceived superior cultural attributes, including speaking English. They filled skilled occupations. Smaller numbers of Haitians became boilers, masons, domestics, and cooks (113).

Haitian workers succeeded in retaining their autonomy in the socioeconomic and cultural spheres. Many established small plots of land to grow food. After work, they socialized with other black Caribbean workers to sing, dance, and share food and stories. Where mills provided workers with female companionship, prostitution became another "economic activity in which Haitian-born men and women engaged outside the formal wage labor" (130).

The middle chapters examine experiences on the coffee plantations during the 1930s. Casey reveals how workers moved from sugar mills to coffee regions because of higher wages. Coffee was harvested using methods similar to those used in Haiti, and Cuban coffee farmers employed men, women, and children. Therefore, Haitian families could established stable households, permitting seasonal incomes to increase (165). Nonetheless, Cuban farmers exploited them...