Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres (review)

During the nineteenth century, despite continuous domestic wars and Spanish imperial political instability, the Cuban sugar cane industry initiated a type of profound industrial revolution that propelled the island into the forefront of global sugar production. To understand the nature of that technological revolution, it is necessary to review how sugar was manufactured from sugar cane between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century. Over those four centuries, cane sugar manufacturers gradually arrived at what they considered to be the optimal productive unit: a relatively small mill and boiler-house surrounded by approximately 300 acres of sugar cane, operating with a coerced, usually imported labour force of some 100 manual workers. The major constraint to productive expansion was that once the sugar cane was harvested, it had to be crushed within twenty-four hours or crystallization of the liquid became more difficult. Three hundred acres provided the feasible scale that allowed harvested cane to be transported from the fields to the mills within the required time. Such a unit produced about 100 tons of sugar per harvest. Increasing gross production required multiplying the individual units. That was the pattern as the sugar industry gradually moved westward from the Islamic world in the fifteenth century to the Atlantic region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with new complexes in places like São Tome, Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica and Louisiana. And that was the practice of making sugar from the sugar cane until Cubans began to think differently during the nineteenth century.

By introducing steam-driven railroads, more efficient extraction mills, improved varieties of sugar cane, and centrifuges that facilitated crystallization, the Cubans eventually separated the agricultural process of growing sugar cane and the industrial process of manufacturing sugar, thereby boosting both productivity and production enormously. By the end of the nineteenth century the manufacturing complexes called Central Factories spread across Cuba –a process that continued to expand during the first half of the twentieth century with the massive United States economic investment in both the island and the industry. As sugar production increased, the number of producing units declined. Yet, as the author of this highly significant study persuasively demonstrates, the one area that stubbornly resisted modernization and improved efficiency was the actual cutting of the sugar cane in the fields. So until the late twentieth century when mechanical cane cutters were invented, production depended on an army of seasonally-recruited manual sugar-cane cutters to feed the increasingly voracious sugar mills. In the case of Cuba, manual labour in the twentieth century required the reluctant admission of tens of thousands of unwelcome, and largely mistreated black migrants from the neighbouring Caribbean islands, especially from Haiti and Jamaica.

In ten chapters and an extremely insightful epilogue, this study carefully analyses the complex implications of this essentially seasonal international migration on the politics of Cuba, Haiti, and the British Antilles, as well as on the United Kingdom and the United States. The narrative runs chronologically, with a focus on four discrete periods: the boom years before 1921; the 1920s and the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado; the revolutionary and chaotic 1930s; and the period between 1938 and 1948 when Fulgencio Batista gave Cuba a short-lived liberal constitution. Of course, common themes underlie all four periods but the separation permits for the meticulous examination of significant nuances that are sometimes overlooked in treating labour migrations generally, as well as within the Caribbean.

The first four chapters examine the period after the war of 1898 when Cuba moved into the political and economic orbit of the United States and continues into the early 1920s when the first post-war sugar boom collapsed, throwing Cuba into a major economic depression. A common thread that weaves throughout the period is the Cuban obsession brought over...