Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925-1934

In the period between independence (1902) and revolution (1959), immigrant workers were a vital force in Cuba’s sugar and tropical fruit industries. The largest single group came from Spain (especially the northern provinces of Galicia and Asturias) and from the Canary Islands. But land shortages and the fragility of the sugar industry, which made life difficult for postemancipation rural folk in several nearby island societies, also created circumstances that induced emigration to Cuba from the rest of the black Caribbean. The boom in Cuba’s sugar industry, driven by rising prices and increases in United States investment during World War I, as well as by stories of fabulous wages, attracted immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Puerto Rico, Aruba, and Curasao. By the early 1930s there were between 150,000 and 200,000 Caribbean immigrants (antillanos) in Cuba.¹

By the late 1920s, however, the welfare of these immigrants was under attack by a threatening anti-imperialist and racist discourse provoked by a worldwide economic crisis that culminated in the Great Depression. The movement for cultural and economic renewal that transformed literary and political life in the neocolonial republic contained a strident critique of the forces that were “diluting” Cuban national identity. Anti-imperialism and defense of cubanidad were, therefore, often accompanied by opposition to black immigrant labor because Cubans linked (correctly) the drive to recruit antillanos to United States sugar capital. The regime of Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925-33) responded to the new nationalism by initiating the repatriation of Haitian and British West Indian workers at the end of the 1920s. But the most dramatic moves to Cubanize labor and repatriate Caribbean workers were introduced by the brief revolutionary government of Ramón Grau San Martín, which came to power shortly after the collapse of the machadato. The actions of the Grau administration demonstrated how far the drive for social and economic justice could strengthen chauvinism and elicit support from Cuban-born workers of all races for measures directed against immigrants.²

Anti-immigrant sentiment and economic crisis came together in a powerful blend just as a wave of worker mobilizations, culminating in a massive general strike in Havana and other cities in early August 1933, overwhelmed the Machado dictatorship. Popular insurgency also determined the fate of the leftist Grau San Martín government, which briefly ruled Cuba between September 4, 1933, and January 10, 1934. The inauguration of Grau’s “Government of 100 Days” failed to halt the popular mobilizations, which in part were driven by the Cuban Communist party (PCC) and its allies. Without a mass base capable of defending its program—partly the result of the bitter hostility shown by Cuban Communists—the radical government was unable to consolidate its position. Finally, the combination of an aggressively hostile and interventionist United States government in alliance with the army strongman, Fulgencio Batista, secured the collapse of the Grau administration in the middle of January 1934.

Sugar workers were at the center of the mobilizations that helped to shape political outcomes during the second half of 1933. From August to October 1933, field and mill workers seized 36 sugar mills and estates, and in a number of cases the occupations adopted the form of worker and peasant councils, or soviets.³ The motivation behind mill seizures and occupations was very complex. The Great Depression and government attempts to stabilize prices by restricting the amount of land dedicated to the cultivation of sugarcane had drastically shortened the length of the sugar harvest (zafra), ruining sugar planters and creating havoc for field and mill workers. Sheer hunger motivated some of the rural insurgency, particularly the seizure of warehoused sugar and food stocks. In other cases, occupations and worker militancy were driven by rumors that mills would not grind in the 1933-34 season. Large-scale unemployment and the sudden appearance on town and city streets of tens of thousands of sugar workers, many of them native-born blacks and Caribbean braceros, increased the elite’s apprehension of the risk of social unrest and gave a distinct racial inflection to the threat of subversion by the subaltern classes.

The exclusionary aspirations of the new nationalist mood met with resistance from two quarters: the Cuban branches of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of Marcus Garvey, and the Cuban Communist party. While the UNIA’s challenge to a multiethnic cubanidad constituted a call for black “racial pride,” Cuban Communists promoted alliances that emphasized class rather than ethnicity or nationality. The anti-imperialist revolution that the PCC called for would be made by workers and peasants of all nationalities and ethnicities.⁴ Both the Garveyites and the Communists attempted to address certain needs of the antillano population. Garveyism, while ostensibly adopting conservative positions in labor-capital conflicts, became a resource that British West Indian workers employed to defend themselves when conditions worsened in the 1920s. But by the time labor insurgency exploded in 1933, the UNIA was a shadow ofits former self. The PCC, in contrast, viewed class struggle as the motor of history, and by late 1933 its cadres were already a significant force in the labor movement. More importantly for the antillanos, Cuban Communists were the staunchest opponents of the anti-immigrant policies initiated by the Grau government, which came to power after the 1933 revolution.

This article begins by discussing the racial dimensions of the nationalist and anti-imperialist discourse that developed in the 1920s and early 1930s. After examining the relationship between Caribbean immigrants and the PCC, it explores the ways in which black English-speaking immigrants and Haitians responded to the labor mobilizations of the summer and fall of 1933. While the nationalist thrust of the 1933 revolution undoubtedly promoted interethnic mistrust and even outright conflict, the heightening of class conflict in the sugar zones frequently drew immigrant and Cuban-born workers into a common struggle. No such panethnic solidarity occurred in a major strike that shook the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica the following year—and it is this contrast between the Cuban and Costa Rican cases that shapes the conclusion to this essay.

Anti-Immigrant Discourse

During the 1920s anti-immigrant discourse linked antillano workers to disease, unfair competition, and a general dilution of cubanidad. Elite attacks on black immigrants, however, were directed as much against Cuba’s “indigenous” black population, Afro-Cubans, as against antillanos. Paradoxically, these attacks may also have promoted the integration of Afro-Cubans into national society by discouraging black Cubans from engaging in political practices and selfdefinitions that were based on their identity as people of color.⁵ A particularly virulent opposition to black separatism had been a powerful trope in Cuban nationalist discourse among Cubans of European and African origin ever since the frenzied suppression of the 1912 rebellion, a revolt that had been launched by the Partido Independiente de Color.⁶ The idea of a Cuban nation that stood above class was, moreover, firmly anchored in the multiethnic character of the mobilizations that had driven the final struggles for independence in the 1890s.

Anti-immigrant views were not only articulated by politicians and members of the plantocracy and cane farmer (colono) class. Intellectuals, social activists, and certain sectors of an increasingly self-conscious working class also developed their own similar rhetoric.⁷ Fernando Ortiz, the pioneer ethnographer whose early writings on Cuba’s black population influenced a generation of researchers on afrocubanidad, shared many of the prejudices of the gente culta of his era. His early writings were influenced by a concept of racial hierarchy in which blacks were constructed as “morally primitive,” sensuous, closer to nature, and prey to irrational fears and taboos. Ortiz spoke warmly of the virtues of Italian and Spanish immigrants and warned that massive black immigration might bring unhealthy and criminal elements to the island. His warnings reflected the medicalization of social thought that shaped the attitudes of racists and reformers alike during the period from 1880 to 1920.⁸

Cuban anti-imperialist discourse was also deeply influenced by fears of Antillean immigrants, whose movements to and from Cuba were attributed to foreign domination of the sugar industry. In journals like the Revista de Avance (1927-30), nationalist fear of a diluted cubanidad was accompanied by unflattering and inaccurate references to the inferior nature of Caribbean workers.⁹ Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, the economic nationalist and defender of the colonos, considered the importation of Antillean labor to be the most noxious consequence of the rise of the sugar latifundium.¹⁰ Thus, as in other Caribbean and Central American societies such as Costa Rica, anti-imperialism took sometimes contradictory guises. It could eschew a radical critique of class inequalities and promote the concept of a Cuban nation “above” class, a position that could be adopted from either a conservative or liberal perspective. Or anti-imperialism could be linked to the mobilization of the subaltern classes of all colors and nationalities, a position most clearly advocated by the Cuban Communist party.¹¹

Nevertheless, pessimism regarding the impact of Antillean immigration on Cuban racial identity also penetrated the political left. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the progressive intellectual and historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, a member of the Grupo Minorista and the Liga Anti-Imperialista, campaigned against immigrant labor, arguing that the bracero trade was part of the heritage of slavery and the sugar elite’s search for profit through low wages.¹² Opposition to immigration had also been a strong theme within early Cuban worker organizations ever since the 1870s and 1880s, when tobacco workers, to take the most important example, felt threatened by employers’ preference for immigrants from Spain.¹³ The embarkation of over half a million Spaniards for Cuba between 1902 and 1925, added to the concurrent recruitment of several hundred thousand Caribbean braceros to work in the sugar industry, represented a major challenge to the nascent labor movement’s struggle to roll back employer control over the workplace. Since Cuban laborers were particularly worried that the government and employers might use antillanos as strikebreakers, their vociferous activism in favor of immigration control is not surprising.¹⁴

Black Immigrants, Politics, and the Labor Movement

The political and organizational dimensions of Caribbean immigration have been little studied, in part because writers on this period have assumed that Caribbean braceros were not active in the labor struggle given that they set themselves apart from, and were marginalized by, their politically active Cuban-born fellow workers. Immigrants were—the argument goes—reluctant to organize and thereby risk further ostracization and repression. In addition, the braceros have also been stereotyped as possessing a culturally derived disposition to differentiate themselves from the local workforce. Finally, it is alleged that the high labor turnover among immigrant workers meant that they had little time to forge the bonds of solidarity that would have linked them more closely with Cuban-born laborers.

The divisive impact of language differences as well as regional and local cultural variation must not be underestimated. But given the political agitation and union organizing that increasingly characterized the sugar industry from 1930 to 1935, it would be very surprising if Caribbean braceros had not been touched in some way by the heightened class conflict. While most British West Indian workers were temporary residents, by the early 1930s some Jamaicans had become Cuban citizens. At the port of Nuevitas, for example, the leaders of the longshoremen and stevedores were mostly Jamaican and Haitian, like much of the town’s labor force, and most of these immigrants were also Cuban citizens.¹⁵ There is also definite evidence of British West Indian involvement in union activities and radical politics. Back in Jamaica, former immigrant workers with experience in Cuba were among the pioneers of Marxism. Hugh Clifford Buchanan, “the first Jamaican Marxist,” had worked in Cuba in the 1920s, where he had been a member of the Garveyite UNIA and “almost certainly had at least indirect contacts with the Communist party.”¹⁶

Jamaicans performed low status field work, but their higher literacy and political nous earned them the respect of employers and, therefore, promotion to higher paying jobs. Due to their “superior personal hygiene and education,” British West Indians and Puerto Ricans were frequently given the most highly prized jobs both in the sugar yards, or bateyes (where they were employed in skilled and semiskilled jobs such as sugar dryers, stevedores, and guards), and on the railroads (where they worked as mechanics and electricians).¹⁷ Large numbers of British West Indians, especially women, also worked as servants for the foreign managerial elite, where their English was much appreciated by overseas managers. Of the 65,000 British West Indians working in Cuba in 1930, approximately 25,000 were domestic servants while 15,000 were skilled tradesmen working in a wide variety of sectors.¹⁸

Jamaicans and other English-speaking West Indians in Cuba had a reputation for being literate, aware of their rights, and knowledgeable about how the diplomatic support of British consuls could help them deal with employers and the Cuban authorities.¹⁹ “Nothing is too trivial for a Jamaican to bring to the notice of a Legation,” insisted a British diplomat rather testily in 1924. “My first few weeks here were far from pleasant,” the same official remarked, “I remember arriving each morning at the office to find it blocked with aggrieved niggers.”²⁰ The frustration and self-confidence of British West Indian workers were such that during the early 1920s it was estimated that 90 percent of the work handled by the British Consulate-General in Santiago de Cuba and 75 percent of the total business processed in 1924 by the British legation in Havana dealt with matters brought up by Jamaican residents. Eventually, London created a special post in its Santiago consulate, partly financed by the Jamaican colonial government, to handle concerns raised by Jamaican immigrant workers.²¹

The literacy of British West Indians distinguished them not only from the almost entirely illiterate Haitian braceros, but also from the largely unlettered Cuban laborers who were mostly employed as agricultural laborers in the sugar fields. A presidential envoy, Dr. Rogelio Pina y Estrada, who investigated conditions among black immigrant workers in 1934, concluded that “it is difficult to find [a Jamaican] who cannot read or write.”²² The resulting self-confidence of anglophone workers was frequently construed as arrogance by government authorities in Cuba and other countries such as the Dominican Republic.²³ British diplomats often expressed the same views. A lengthy memorandum on the situation of West Indians in Cuba prepared by the embassy in Havana stated:

Literacy apart, the self-confidence of British West Indians may also have been shaped by the fact that many of them had already been exposed to a world far beyond the Caribbean. Some migratory workers had fought with the British army in the First World War, a fact that was well known to employers and representatives of the Cuban state.²⁵ A Jamaican, Hubert Stulz, allegedly assaulted by police at the Manatí mill in 1924, had formerly been a soldier in the West Indian Regiment and had served with General Allenby in Palestine.²⁶ The first large contingent of Barbadians to leave for Cuba were all ex-soldiers who were given priority in emigration by the British colonial authorities.²⁷ Moreover, British West Indian braceros in Cuba frequently vaunted their military service in correspondence sent to British diplomats and colonial office officials. The braceros’ indignant letters often mentioned their loyal service to the British crown while relating the ill-treatment they had received at the hands of Cuban authorities. British West Indian workers were known to ostentatiously display war medals on their clothing and this practice, which infuriated Cuban officials, was the occasion for frequent assaults on immigrants by Guardias Rurales.²⁸

At first sight these expressions of loyalty to the British army, an institution that had systematically discriminated against black soldiers, relegating them to menial support tasks and denying them equality of treatment with frondine soldiers, seem surprising. They may even invite allegations of British West Indian workers’ “accommodation” to the colonial order that rest on assumptions about the “false consciousness” of Caribbean immigrants. But working in a country where differences in language and cultural heritage estranged braceros from mainstream society must have been a profoundly alienating experience for migratory workers from Jamaica and the other islands of the British Caribbean. In these circumstances a sense of community necessarily had to be constructed from outside the experience of participating in Cuban society, even when the main point of reference, Britain and the Empire, elicited mixed feelings. The references to crown, imperial loyalty, and Britishness, then, may have been manifestations of a “much-needed self-valorization in the face of comprehensive rejection.”²⁹

These occasional demonstrations of membership in the Empire reveal the extreme plasticity of Jamaican and British West Indian identity in an alien setting. Jamaican braceros, it seems, could clearly choose when and when not to be “British.”³⁰ In any case, appeals by British West Indians to the moral and legal authority of the crown flowed quite naturally from a long-standing element in the Jamaican radical tradition, according to which the intervention of the imperial center was often invoked, sometimes successfully, against unpopular actions of the colonial regime or local planter society.³¹ It would be wrong, therefore, to interpret these expressions of loyalty to the crown and imperial authority as signaling simple acceptance of the colonial order, as has been argued in regard to Jamaican labor emigrants in Costa Rica and Panama.³²

Haitians predominated in field work. They worked mostly as cane cutters, although initially employers argued that they were not as efficient as native-born Cuban macheteros.³³ Haitians frequently bore the brunt of discriminatory treatment and violence from Cuban authorities, but they were much less likely than their British West Indian counterparts to appeal to their government for diplomatic help. In one revealing incident in 1924, two Haitians working on the Santa Rosa colonia of the Río Cauto mill (near Bayamo) were killed during a fight with the administrator and mayoral precipitated by the Haitians’ decision to leave at a time of acute labor shortage.³⁴ Ill-treatment was so bad that in July 1928 the Haitian government issued a decree that temporarily prohibited emigration to Cuba.³⁵ Collective action by Haitian workers to protest poor wages and working conditions, although less common than among Jamaicans, was reported to have occurred on several occasions. A strike of cane cutters at the Mercedita mill in March 1928, for example, was almost entirely waged by Haitians who protested against the mill’s miserly payment of 60 cents for each 100 arrobas cut.³⁶

While Jamaican braceros were often accorded a degree of grudging respect, contemporary accounts are replete with cruel and mocking responses to Haitians. This was exemplified by the sarcastic, grandiloquent, and ridiculous names bestowed on them, such as “Pedro el Grande,” “Aleíbiades el Magnífico,” “Judas Crocante,” and “Cerveza Tropical.” Haitians were often given the names of former Cuban presidents like Menocal, José Martí, or José Miguel, or labeled with animal epithets (such as buey). Generally, Haitians were referred to only by first name, a custom of naming that underscored their status as “children.” Without legally registered surnames, many Haitian braceros became, in effect, legally disenfranchised. And when they were not mocked, Haitians were treated as objects of fear. Terrifying stories of Haitian ferocity and supernatural activities circulated widely in the campo.³⁷ References to the “primitive” religious customs, witchcraft, and voodoo practices of the Haitians were common. In his memoirs, the sugar worker Ursinio Rojas recalls how his mother was terrified by the Haitians and Jamaicans who lived in the barracoons at Francisco—all of whom spoke “foreign languages.” The young Ursinio would be locked up for safety when the foreigners passed the family house. ³⁸

Along the continuums of “civilized practices” and “racial quality,” Haitians were relegated to last place. More common, though, was the naked racism typical of the moral panic that gripped many Cubans, as exemplified by the following text, part of an article that appeared in El Heraldo de Cuba in 1922:

Even leftist observers employed racial stereotypes about Haitian workers, seeing their alleged failure to develop a rich associational culture (of the kind that British West Indians created) as undermining respectable modes of class struggle, which supposedly required self-discipline and a concern with self-improvement, education, and solidarity. Carleton Beals, the American radical journalist and writer, argued that “the Haitian immigrant is atrociously backward,” and referred to “a great flood of ignorant black labor from Haiti and Jamaica.”⁴⁰

These elaborate representations of “Haitianness” developed at a time when Cuban ignorance of Haitian conditions was overwhelming. Hardly anything was known about the Haitian background of the laborers who provoked such scorn and derision. Certainly there was no awareness of the historical circumstances from which the flood of Haitian peasants sprang. Employers and government officials seemed unaware of Haitian responses to the United States’ occupation of the immigrants’ homeland and of the militant peasant response to marine brutality, mounted by the cacos of rebel leader Charlemagne Perrault. Haitians were, by the Cuban plantocracy’s definition, supremely ignorant and superstitious, a discursive theme that was central to the racist and contemptuous treatment of Haiti that permeated debates and writings about the first black-ruled republic in the Americas. That some Haitian immigrant workers, descendants of the Caribbean peasantry with the longest tradition of autonomy, might have participated in political and guerrilla struggles in Haiti never occurred to opinion makers and planters.⁴¹

But Haitians were not simply victims of persecution and exploitation. It can also be argued that the layers of discrimination that enveloped Haitian immigrants provided them with a powerful way of asserting their difference and securing respect—a respect born out of the awe and even fear with which Cubans viewed them. Haitian workers were clearly not engaging in respectable forms of class struggle or exhibiting respectable forms of masculinity. Instead, they were responding to the derision and hostility of Cuban economic and cultural elites by defending their worth through ostentatious displays of the traits for which they were condemned by their critics. In the eyes of Cubans, Haitian immigrants engaged in a series of practices that surrounded them in a halo of mystery: their reputation for witchcraft (brujería) and magic; the barely understood world of Haitian vodú (a religious practice, long associated with slave and postemancipation forms of black solidarity, that Haitians brought to Cuba and that was eventually assimilated by broad layers of the peasant population of eastern Cuba); the codasos’ use of Kréyol (the oral language of most rural Haitians); and even the association between Haitians (represented as negros brutos by Cubans) and savagery.⁴² Haitians knew how to exploit their sinister reputation to heighten the cultural separation between themselves and the Cuban-born population. And when all else failed, they could use fear of the “exotic” and “savage” to secure respect and minimize harassment. Moreover, their prestige in matters of magic and herbal medicine could earn Haitians the respect of fellow workers and even colonos.⁴³ In other words, Haitians could turn marginality into an asset.

Communists, Unions, and British West Indian Workers

The scanty literature on the political and cultural affiliations of British West Indian workers in Central America and the Caribbean has tended to present these labor migrants as cultural and political isolates, working and acting on the margins of the societies in which they were inserted. This is not to suggest, as may writers have argued, that these workers were always passive. The evidence of British West Indian labor militancy on the United Fruit Company (UFC) estates in Costa Rica and Panama between 1910 and 1924 suggests quite the opposite. Nevertheless, at least in Central America, the militancy of British West Indians seems to have declined over time. Racial animosities between black and Hispanic workers, deliberately cultivated by the UFC, as Philippe Bourgois’s analysis of the UFC in Panama and Costa Rica convincingly demonstrates, made it very difficult to achieve interethnic solidarity among workers. As a result, attempts by the Costa Rican Communist party to attract black support failed and black participation in the important 1934 strike on the UFC’s Costa Rican estates was minimal.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, comparative evidence strongly confirms that after World War I the most consistent attempts to mobilize and recruit Afro-Latin Americans were made by communist parties.⁴⁵

Evidence of the participation of black immigrants in Cuban labor unions is difficult, but not impossible, to find. One revealing case is that of Enrique (Henry) Shackleton, probably a Jamaican or Barbadian, who was secretary of the Unión de Obreros Antillanos de Santiago de Cuba, which he represented at the Second National Labor Congress in Cienfuegos in February 1925. Shackleton also participated in the commission that drafted the statutes of Cuba’s first national labor federation, the Confederatión Nacional Obrera de Cuba (CNOC). A few months later, Caribbean delegates (including Shackleton) attended the Third Labor Congress in Camagüey, where the Unión de Obreros Antillanos delivered an extensive report on immigration and its consequences.⁴⁶ Another black union leader was Sandalio Junco, the PCC’s first Negro affairs specialist (and later the founder of Cuban Trotskyism) who, in claiming that the union was created by the Communists, evidences the strong ties that were felt to exist between Communist organizing and black participation in labor unions.⁴⁷

The Cuban Communist party’s vision of ethnic and immigration issues reflected the position of the Comintern’s Third Period.⁴⁸ Inaugurated by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the Third Period was seen as the final crisis of world capitalism. The bankruptcy of reformist political and workers organizations would create opportunities for revolutionary and communist-led attacks on capitalism. This would require communists to halt collaboration with social democrats, socialists, and radical nationalists and build an independent base within mass movements by establishing “dual” unions. The sectarian tone of the Third Period has been blamed (with good reason) for isolating communists from political and industrial organizing activity work in the mainstream. Less well acknowledged is the fact that the “class against class” line also obliged communists to identify new constituencies that would gain them prestige and support. This policy shift was clearly reflected in the new emphasis on building support among the labor force of the Caribbean fruit and sugar enclaves with their large communities of black immigrant workers. Naturally, the Third Period decision to privilege class over rival loyalties such as nation and race also made practical sense in multinational, multiethnic, and multilingual societies like Cuba.⁴⁹

As part of its turn to the left, the Comintern called for stronger action against racial discrimination and for energetic campaigns to recruit black workers. In July 1929, it created an organization of black workers, the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, with headquarters in Hamburg. Cuba was represented on the executive committee of this Profintern-affiliated organization and was featured prominently in its monthly journal, The Negro Worker.⁵⁰ Caribbean Communists, especially the Trinidadian George Padmore (head of the Profintern’s Negro Workers’ Bureau), played a key role in establishing the new organization. The committee tried to organize immigrant workers, especially the “new current of slaves,” the label Comintern officials attached to the migratory workers employed by the mainly United States-controlled sugar and fruit companies in Central America and the Caribbean.⁵¹ Visits by the United States-based, but Surinam-born, communist Otto Huiswood to Jamaica and Cuba (and his attempt to enter Haiti) in 1930 were probably linked to the new Profintern initiative and to the international work of the recently organized Negro Department of the United States Communist party’s (CPUSA) National Executive Committee, which Huiswood headed.⁵² West Indian seamen and dockers, especially those who were members of the Marine Workers Industrial Union, were entrusted with the work of carrying propaganda to Caribbean ports.⁵³

Among the new slogans of the communist movement was the call for black self-determination. Blacks, it was argued, constituted an oppressed nation in societies such as the United States and Cuba, where in certain regions they actually constituted a majority. Some communists opposed the actual separation of black peoples into new states as well as radical demands that in certain areas with a large black population (such as parts of the United States) 50 percent of jobs be reserved for black workers. However, in the middle of 1930 the Comintern’s Negro Commission adopted a more radical interpretation of the new line, insisting that the CPUSA’s slogan should be “The Right of Self-Determination of Negroes in the Black Belt,” a policy that would include “the right of negroes to exercise governmental authority in the entire territory of the Black Belt, as well as to decide upon the relations between their territory and other nations.”⁵⁴

The CPUSA’s line was replicated within the Cuban Communist party, as revealed by the latter’s use of the term “Franja Negra,” a direct translation of the CPUSA’s term “Black Belt.”⁵⁵ Beginning in 1930 the PCC campaigned for black self-determination in the southeast portion of Oriente province (Baracoa, Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, La Maya, Songo, Caney, Cobre, San Luis, and Palma Soriano), where blacks formed a majority of the population.⁵⁶ Self-determination was a loose concept, but the PCC made it clear that it could involve the creation of an independent state, if that was the express wish of the black masses in the Franja Negra.⁵⁷ The party also called for antiracist work in the cities as well as struggles against racial discrimination and the deportation of foreign black workers, especially Haitians.⁵⁸ The communist-influenced CNOC line on employment went so far as to demand the employment of equal numbers of black and white workers (“por cada dos obreros que entren en la productión, uno sea negro”).⁵⁹

The Communist party’s decision to plunge into organizing the sugar sector was also driven by Comintern advice. Since the sugar industry was considered the most proletarianized segment of Cuban capitalism, an international strategy of “class against class” made no sense in countries where Communists neglected the key proletarian sector. Given the social and ethnic structure of central and eastern Cuba, targeting sugar workers necessarily obliged unions and parties to engage with both native-born and immigrant blacks on a massive scale. Logically, a Communist party that was the leading edge of a largely black labor force would tend to show a dramatic increase in the number of blacks among its members.⁶⁰

However, it is not clear how close the PCC was in practice to Cuba’s black population. The long delays in targeting unionization of the sugar industry certainly affected the party’s work. In early 1931 the PCC admitted that there were “very few negro workers” and that there were “practically no negroes in the Party. . .although one-third of the population is negro.”⁶¹ This statement may have been an exaggeration, designed to sharpen the case for an aggressive campaign to recruit blacks, but the claim is partially supported by the evidence of confidential PCC reports available in the recently opened Comintern archives. In its early years the party clearly underestimated the political potential of Antillean migrant workers from the British West Indies and from Haiti who (in 1929) were described as having “a cultural level below that of Cuban workers and no tradition of struggle or organizational [activity]. . .they are docile material ready for exploitation.”⁶²

As late as September 1932, the Caribbean subbureau of the Confederación Sindical Latinoamericana (CSLA) acknowledged that its weakest work was among Caribbean immigrant workers; it urged the CPUSA to use its influence within the Marine Workers Industrial Union to circulate propaganda and provide secure travel for Comintern and Caribbean party cadres.⁶³ The Comintern archives provide us with a glimpse of some of the obstacles that stood in the way of organizing across national and color lines. There were frequent reports of white nervousness concerning the impact of massive recruitment of blacks. A 1932 report on youth work reported that the PCC had not organized dances in Havana for a year because blacks would have participated; the Santa Clara branch of the Communist Youth League, moreover, had called for a halt to recruitment since half their membership was already black.⁶⁴ But even with these fears, and despite the Communists’ mishandling of the Havana general strike in August, which helped precipitate Machado’s downfall, by the end of 1933 the party’s energetic involvement in the sugar strikes and mill occupations had speeded up the recruitment of black workers.⁶⁵ Leading cadres included a number of black figures, some of whom would soon become prominent Communist leaders. The earliest and best known was Bias Roca, a shoemaker from Manzanillo, who after 1934 was general secretary of the party and editor of its newspaper, Bandera Roja. Early black communists also included Martín Castellanos, primarily responsible for developing the thesis of black self-determination in Cuba; Sandalio Junco, a baker who was accused of Trotskyism and expelled from the party in 1932; and a young black sugar worker from the Nazábal mill, Antolin Dickinson Abreu, editor of El Obrero Azucarero, the magazine of the CNOC-affiliated Sindicato Nacional de Obreros de la Industria Azucarera (SNOIA).⁶⁶

By 1934 the PCC proudly claimed that it was predominantly made up of black workers.⁶⁷ This was clearly an overstatement. While 14 of the 67 delegates at its April 1934 second congress were black (as were 17 out of the 45 delegates who attended the first conference of the party’s Communist Youth League in May), party documents also noted that its organization in black villages and barrios was very poor.⁶⁸ Nevertheless, the ethnic composition of the party’s newly elected Central Committee indicated a marked improvement in the representation of people of color holding leadership positions; out of twenty-three members eight were negros and two were mulatos.⁶⁹ Moreover, the PCC’s determination to reach immigrant workers was being signaled on nearly every occasion. Bandera Roja’s practice of publishing materials in English and French clearly indicated the organization’s interest in reaching British West Indian and (less realistically in view of their high levels of illiteracy) Haitian workers.⁷⁰

Cuban Communists also targeted discrimination in social and cultural spheres, including within labor unions. For example, in January 1934 the Fourth Congress of the CNOC called on unions to include both black and white workers in dances and sporting events, demands that suggest that discriminatory behaviors were widespread. The Communists were most successful when they supported black efforts to defend their cultural autonomy and resist the dominant social order. A striking but rare example of the PCC’s understanding of the cultural dimension of Afro-Cuban politics occurred in the fall of 1933, when cadres in the party’s Oriente region campaigned to overturn the prohibition of “African” popular dancing decreed by municipal authorities in Santiago de Cuba, the site of the island’s renowned carnival.⁷¹

Explicit attention to the rights of black workers, especially the slogan calling for self-determination in the “Black Belt,” aroused controversy. Party sources suggest that the abstract notion of the Franja Negra never took root among workers of color and offended non-blacks. Indeed, non-Communist left-wingers thought that the emphasis on race was irresponsible and only served to divide workers. Cuban anarchists and, in particular, Trotskyists criticized the CNOC and SNOIA policy of advocating complete parity between blacks and whites among union officeholders, arguing that it was contributing to a “guerra de razas.”⁷² Other labor movement activists argued that despite the exclusionary and racist politics of the postindependence era, the Franja Negra notion ignored the fact that the 1895-98 independence war had forged a single Cuban nation and united all ethnic groups.⁷³

More importantly, the PCC’s defense of immigrant workers challenged important elements of Cuban nationalism. The rebirth of Cuban nationalism in the 1920s, along with its anti-imperialism and calls for self-discovery, contained a strong racial element. The radical nationalist critique of the dominant role played by United States and foreign capital in the sugar industry had understandably emphasized the links between foreign capital, the importation of Caribbean braceros, and the resulting downward pressure on wages and dilution of cubanidad. Therefore, when the Communists decided to attack ethnic and racial chauvinism, they offended the very same constituency that the Left was trying to win over and risked confrontation with a powerful current of opinion shared by Cubans who embraced progressive politics. Indeed, when the first stirrings of the Popular Front reached Cuba at the end of 1934, the PCC gratefully seized the opportunity to begin toning down its line on the Franja Negra, abandoning the concept completely during the following year.

The ultraleftism of the Third Period also obstructed the party’s plans to recruit more Afro-Cuban members. It was precisely the marginalized and impoverished black unemployed who were likely to be among the main beneficiaries of the new nationalist labor legislation, especially in areas where Afro-Cubans constituted a large part of the labor force and competed with Caribbean workers in a depressed labor market.⁷⁴ Afro-Cubans enthusiastically applauded the 50 percent legislation implemented in the fall of 1933, judging by the size and composition of the demonstrations that applauded the passage of the law; they also demanded an increase from 50 to 80 percent in the employment of native-born workers.⁷⁵ Anger over leftist opposition to the nationalist measures led mobs to storm El País, the only Spanish-language newspaper employing operatives affiliated to the CNOC, after the Havana paper had opposed the Ley provisional de nacionalización del trabajo.⁷⁶ Communists of color also became the targets of urban violence.

Finally, panethnic solidarity was undermined by several other new laws, such as those banning foreign workers from leadership positions in unions. Street fights erupted in Havana when nationalist organizations “volunteered” to implement the legislation, sometimes with the tacit approval of government ministries. Members of the nationalist organization that called itself the Comité Supremo del 50%, for example, visited the offices of labor unions suspected of opposition to the nationalist laws and physically ejected foreign-born leaders, replacing them with native Cubans.⁷⁷

Repatriation, Ethnic Chauvinism, and the 1933 Revolution

The ethnic nationalism of the Grau San Martín government flourished in an environment in which racial tension had been steadily increasing. Anti-immigrant measures had already been initiated by Machado. In an attempt to neutralize concern over unemployment and undermine the nationalist critique of official immigration policy, the Machado government favored native Cubans in employment. Public works contracts were altered to stipulate that 50 percent of workers employed in government projects be Cuban born.⁷⁸ More dramatically, in the late 1920s the government began deporting West Indian workers.⁷⁹ Lack of financial resources, however, limited the government’s ability to implement this preferred option. As a result, machadista officials tried to coerce foreign embassies into covering the costs of repatriation and, in the end, these costs were frequently borne by foreign governments.⁸⁰ Thus, in the summer and winter of 1931 and at the beginning of 1932, United States Navy vessels repatriated 700 Puerto Ricans and a large number of Virgin Islanders, while a Jamaican government scheme helped finance the return of some 40,000 of its citizens between 1930 and 1933.⁸¹ Jamaican workers were relatively fortunate. Workers from other islands, such as those from the Leeward Islands group and Barbadians (most of them employed at the Chaparra estate), did not receive equivalent aid from their colonial governments to help with the costs of repatriation.⁸²

Nevertheless, the major factor that led to the expulsion of Caribbean labor from the cañavarales was the collapse of sugar prices and the drastic shortening of the zafra. In the Nuevitas area (on the north coast of Camagüey province), employers were already trying to replace Jamaicans and Haitians in field work during the 1931 zafra.⁸³ Conditions at the Chaparra estate deteriorated to such an extent that over 500 British West Indians begged assistance from the British Embassy, complaining that

Ethnic and interethnic sensitivities, therefore, were already in a heightened state when the Grau San Martín government unveiled its social and economic legislation.⁸⁵ The two most dramatic manifestations of the new government’s economic and ethnic nationalism were an October 18 decree banning further immigration of Jamaican and Haitian workers, and a November 18 decree calling for the nationalization of the workforce—the so-called Ley del 50%.⁸⁶ A parallel decree obliging unions to appoint only Cuban-born individuals to leadership positions also created resentment—especially among those unionists who recalled how, in the early 1930s, machadista officials had blamed unemployment on the actions of foreign-led unions. As in Brazil, where Getúlio Vargas’s newly formed Ministry of Labor had passed (with strong Afro-Brazilian support) a law calling for the nationalization of labor in 1931, labor-market competition by foreign-born workers was also the scapegoat for a perceived “social problem” within Cuba. In both countries nativist and xenophobic rhetoric infected black and white laborers, even though there was no Afro-Cuban equivalent of the quasi-fascist Brazilian Black Front of the early and mid-1930s.⁸⁷

The ethnic and national policy of the 1933 revolution did not break with the previous regime’s stand; Grau continued Machado’s policy of repatriating foreign workers. In the cities the main victims were Spanish immigrant workers who dominated the utilities and commercial sectors as well as the railroads and urban tram systems.⁸⁸ Jewish artisans were also targeted. In rural areas, however, antillanos bore the brunt of the nationalist assault. The expulsions followed the passage of a law decreeing the repatriation of all foreigners who were out of work or without resources.⁸⁹ Although in theory the Grau government restricted repatriation to indigent workers, who were given a token two pesos upon their departure, numerous abuses against employed workers were committed.⁹⁰ As under Machado, raids and deportations were initiated by the Guardia Rural. And during the last 12 days of November, antillanos, particularly Haitians, were tracked down in Oriente province by bounty hunters eager to collect the rewards that had been promised to those who helped in their capture.

Candidates for repatriation were chosen arbitrarily. They included Haitians who were employed in the sugar or coffee sectors, as well as others who were small landowners. Many of the Haitian coffee cultivators in the Santiago de Cuba and Guántanamo areas had lived in Cuba for over 15 years.⁹¹ Cases abounded in which deportees lost belongings, animals, and wages or other monies owed them. They often had to sell their earthly possessions for a song—providing juicy pickings for employers, merchants, and local functionaries—which gave rise to the assertion that the repatriations constituted a second “zafra” for the lucky few.⁹² Haitian workers who had been particularly active in unions or labor agitation, especially those who had been active participants in the sugar insurgency of August through October, were singled out for attention by foremen, colonos, and mill owners.⁹³ Most of the deportees were not even allowed to alert their families or collect their belongings before being moved to deportation centers in Santiago. The first load of human cargo left Santiago on November 22, on board a Cuban steamer, the, Julián Alonso, carrying 995 Haitian deportees. Fidel Castro, then a seven-year-old Santiago schoolboy, recalled the sad spectacle of Haitian deportees leaving Santiago on a similar ship.⁹⁴

The PCC and CNOC attacked the labor nationalization laws as a fascist attempt to divide workers and make scapegoats of foreign-born braceros.⁹⁵ The Communists’ suspicions were certainly well founded, to judge by the many cases in which Cuban-born workers (including Afro-Cubans) helped round up Haitians. At the Alto Cedro mill, workers celebrated the capture of Haitians before assaulting Jamaican workers with chants of “Next time it will be your turn.”⁹⁶ In some areas Guardias Rurales bought the cooperation of Cuban-born workers with payments of 20 cents for each Haitian captured.⁹⁷ Communist party activists reluctantly admitted that Cuban-born black workers were frequently indifferent to the repatriation of antillanos, whom they considered to be of an “inferior race” and even “savages.” The nationalization of labor laws had caught the PCC by surprise and had created havoc in the party’s organizational work among native-born blacks.⁹⁸

In itself, the Ley del 50% did not specifically target the sugar industry; indeed field labor was explicitly excluded from its provisions. In response to protests by foreign-owned sugar companies, foreign technicians were also exempted, as were 200 Chinese workers of the United Fruit Company whose job it was to sew up gunnysacks of sugar after they had been filled.⁹⁹ A survey of eight sugar mills conducted by the British Embassy in the summer of 1934 revealed that while some British West Indians were being discharged, the number of repatriations as a result of the Ley del 50% was smaller than expected. This is not so surprising. Overall employment levels in the sugar industry had fallen substantially during the depression and the pool of potentially deportable workers was, therefore, much reduced. More importantly, from the mid-1920s British West Indians had drifted from the countryside to permanent residence and employment in cities and towns. A large percentage never returned to the cane fields, where the repatriation campaign was focused.¹⁰⁰

The Ley del 50% unquestionably divided working-class communities and weakened solidarities based on both class and ethnicity. Once again, native-born Afro-Cubans were amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of the labor nationalization actions.

Immigrants and Worker Activism in the Labor Insurgency of 1933

When the energies of the labor movement were unleashed in the summer of 1933, Afro-Cubans were prominent among the working men and women who flexed their collective industrial muscle and tested the new order. Foreign and domestic observers noted an increase in the self-confidence of Afro-Cubans following the overthrow of Machado.¹⁰² Black soldiers were prominent in public displays of anti-imperialist fervor, especially in Havana. During a demonstration on September 14, called by the Anti-Imperialist League to protest United States interventionism, a black soldier created a sensation when he pledged the support of his fellow soldiers in any move taken to prevent the landing of United States troops.¹⁰³ Observers were also struck by the prominent role Cuban-born blacks played in promoting and enforcing the Ley del 50%. Afro-Cubans were at the head of the crowds that worked their way through Havana streets in early January 1934, confronting shopkeepers and owners of small businesses who had not implemented the labor nationalization law.

North American diplomats and journalists, clearly unprepared for the explosion of political statements by black workers of all nationalities, expressed resentment when confronted by evidence of heightened black and Antillean assertiveness. Sumner Welles, the United States plenipotentiary and éminence grise of Cuban politics during the summer and fall of 1933, was outraged when an American citizen en route to the Miranda mill was obliged to obtain a pass “from a Jamaican who signed himself as corporal of the Red Guard.”¹⁰⁴ A more measured response to British West Indian sympathy with the revolutionary fervor sweeping the streets and fields came from the New York Times correspondents in Havana, somewhat taken aback by their Jamaican servants’ warm response to the efforts being made to unionize domestic labor. The wording of one diary entry (“John, being Jamaican, is quite keen on looking out for his personal rights”) says a good deal about contemporary expectations concerning Jamaican behavior.¹⁰⁵

Away from the cities, reports of the antillanos’ role in the sugar industry actions of 1933 are contradictory. Post-1959 Cuban historiography has presented a uniform and unproblematic treatment of this issue, according to which relations between black and white workers, native and foreign-born, were generally shaped by class solidarity.¹⁰⁶ The contemporary evidence, however, does not support such an undifferentiated reading of events. It is clear that Cuban-bom workers did not expect immigrants, especially Haitians, to be in the front line of unionization or political action. On the other hand, Haitian workers had certainly defended themselves when wages and working conditions began to collapse in the early 1930s. In mid-January 1932, Haitians and Jamaicans protested pay cuts by refusing to begin cutting cane at the United States-controlled Cunagua mill.¹⁰⁷ Moreover, one of the earliest actions in which the PCC and CNOC were successful was a movement of 300 Haitian coffee pickers in Bueycito (near Manzanillo) in December 1932.¹⁰⁸ Despite these incidents, Cuban Communists were clearly taken aback by the scale of antillano involvement in the sugar insurgency. As the most experienced of the Comintern envoys to Cuba in the early 1930s noted in a confidential December 1933 report:

Generalizations about the behavior of Haitian and Jamaican immigrants abound. Lionel Soto, the Cuban historian and diplomat, maintains that Haitians and Jamaicans proved difficult to mobilize in the first wave of union organization and strike activity, from January to March 1933.¹¹⁰ This view did not go unchallenged. A contemporary observer, the Communist party leader and theoretician Rubén Martínez Villena, celebrated the establishment of cross-ethnic unity, insisting that Jamaican workers had refused to act as strikebreakers at several mills during the first strike wave of 1933.¹¹¹ The Cuban Communist’s account, written in New York before he returned to Cuba, can be viewed as a comforting endorsement of the Comintern’s advocacy of agitation among black laborers, including immigrants. Another near contemporary account of black labor militancy, based on extensive field research and interviewing, was the Problems of the New Cuba (drafted in 1934 by a United States panel of New Deal academics), which noted that “negroes were among the leaders in seizing sugar properties and making exorbitant demands on mill managers.”¹¹² Finally, an examination of lists of sugar workers imprisoned in Havana in mid-October reveals many Anglo surnames, a sure sign of the presence of a British West Indian contingent.¹¹³

Foreign businessmen also thought that Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants were prone to “red” activities, even if they qualified their comments with the familiar reservations about workers acting “under duress” and being provoked by “outside agitators.” A correspondent for a leading sugar industry journal wrote in late October 1933 that

At the Estrella mill, the English office manager told the British embassy that 30 Jamaicans had joined the strike movement although, he added, all but half a dozen had done so “under compulsion.”¹¹⁵ At Manatí (in the northwestern corner of Oriente province), the British chief engineer reported that the “wildest” of the men who descended on the mill to press their demands were “Jamaicans and Spaniards.”¹¹⁶ The identification of antillano workers with labor militancy was sufficiendy widespread for a manager of the United Fruit Company to inform a United States Navy officer that his company would benefit from the Ley del 5o% because it “gives them an opportunity to weed out the known radicals and undesirables.”¹¹⁷ Since sugar companies were in general hostile towards Grau’s nationalist labor laws, this was a remarkable admission.

A more careful examination of the evidence concerning antillano responses to the labor insurgency reveals a much messier picture. Evidence of Haitian worker unrest always caught observers’ attention. At Tánamo (in northeastern Oriente province), a newspaper correspondent who attended a meeting of workers called by the sindicato noted with surprise how even the Haitian cutters spoke out.¹¹⁸ On the other hand, a SNOIA conference document implied that the complex ethnic composition of the sugar labor force was an obstacle to united action. The presence of Haitians at the Delicias and San German mills in Oriente province, it noted, “makes work more difficult.”¹¹⁹ In the same vein, the report acknowledged that once the era of black immigration had ended in 1930 and 1931, the resulting increase in the number of white workers employed in the sugar mills had “facilitate[d] struggle.”¹²⁰

But “Granda,” a delegate from the SNOIA’s National Bureau to the Santiago regional conference of the sugar workers union in September 1933, reported that UFC workers of all races and nationalities at Banes had joined with Jamaicans and Haitians, and that together they had formed a common block and participated in the milicias rojas,¹²¹ At the Río Cauto mill, Jamaicans had been enrolled in the strike movement.¹²² The same thing happened with the Comité de Huelga at the Mabay mill.¹²³ At Cayo Juan Claro, in Oriente province, Jamaicans and “Dutch” workers (presumably from the islands of Aruba and Curaçao) took part in strike action. At Miranda (also in Oriente province), Jamaicans and Haitians were reported to be among the leaders of protest activity in various colonias.¹²⁴ Jamaicans and Haitians at the América mill (Oriente province) were said to be members of the SNOIA. Among “Communists” arrested in early October in the Chaparra-Delicias zone in Oriente province were several British West Indians.¹²⁵ In October, British West Indian workers also appear to have been active at Jaronú, where a worker from St. Lucia, Walter Cyril, was killed by the Guardia Rural during a striker-led demonstration.¹²⁶

Eyewitnesses to the occupation of the Senado mill recalled no conflict between white and black workers. Rather, they noted the key role played by a Jamaican worker, Jaime Brown, who claimed to have fought in the First World War and may have been a member of the Cuban Communist party.¹²⁷ Finally, it is significant that ten of the victims of the massacre perpetrated by soldiers at Senado on November 18 were Haitians and one, Elijah Sigree, a Jamaican.¹²⁸

A detailed account of developments at the Báguanos and Tacajó mills during September 1933 (written from a management perspective) also suggests that Antillean workers did not shy away from labor activism; they certainly warranted particular attention from United States observers. Mr. Maurice Leonard, administrator of the Punta Alegre Corporation, referred to the harassment of his managers “by mobs of crazily excited Haitians and Jamaicans, as well as by Cubans and Spaniards.”¹²⁹ The occupation of the Punta Alegre mill was allegedly led by a Haitian nicknamed “Cerveza Tropical.” During the mill occupation, West Indian workers pulled up the railroad lines to prevent troops from arriving. They also tried to prevent the Cuban navy from disembarking sailors at the docks of Punta San Juan.¹³⁰ Jamaican workers had played an active role from the beginning of the occupation of the Báguanos mill: “Before noon a group of 20 Jamaican workmen with sticks appear[ed], and compel[led] the female servants of private homes to leave their work.” The women servants mentioned in this report may also have been Jamaicans, given the popularity of employing English-speaking British West Indians in domestic service. The management and nonunionized staff of Báguanos were constantly threatened by reports that the strike committee would be strengthened by the impending arrival of thousands of Haitians from Tacajó.¹³¹

Conclusion

As we sort through the complex responses of antillanos to the strikes and mill occupations of 1933, some tentative conclusions emerge. It is clear that Haitians and Jamaicans did not stand aside from the mobilizations; indeed there is considerable evidence of active participation by antillanos. There is, therefore, a sharp contrast between the behavior exhibited by Caribbean workers in Cuba during 1933 and the stance adopted by British West Indian workers in the tropical fruit enclaves of Central America. In Costa Rica, for example, antillano workers did not heed the call to drop their tools in the great 1934 strike against the United Fruit Company despite calls for interethnic unity by sections of the (by Cuban standards very weak) forces of the Left.¹³² In Costa Rica the Communists were unable to build a following among immigrants and the strikers were almost entirely Hispanic workers.

In both the Cuban and Costa Rican cases, braceros and locally-born workers were competitors in an appallingly depressed labor market. Similarly, there were strands of ethnic chauvinism in the anti-imperialist and nationalist projects that enveloped the labor movements of the two societies. The contrast between the behavior of antillano workers in Cuba and Costa Rica may be explicated by the relative strength of the forces advocating a radical, nonchauvinist version of anti-imperialism in the two countries. In Cuba, the participation of the Communist party was a critical factor both in the formation of the island’s first national sugar workers union (SNOIA) and in the coordination, if not the execution, of the most important strikes and occupations. This meant that the impact of the nationalist and racist discourse that constructed antillano workers as the enemy of cubanidad could, on many occasions, be blunted or overturned by appeals to class solidarity. In Costa Rica, at the time of the UFC strike the Communist party had only been in existence for three years; for this reason its presence on the Atlantic Coast was weak and its impact on labor militancy less consequential than in Cuba. Nevertheless, the contrast between the two cases should not be exaggerated. In Cuba, as in Costa Rica, racially charged jingoism served to divide the labor force along lines of nationality.

The difference in antillano behavior also appears to have been a function of the contrasting socioeconomic profiles of the two bracero groups. In the Costa Rican case it has been argued that antillano aloofness was a product of the fact that many British West Indian immigrants had become small land-owners by the early 1930s and preferred to support the UFC rather than the strikers and their allies among medium-sized national banana producers.¹³³ By contrast, antillano workers in Cuba did not grow significant amounts of sugar for processing in the mills (centrales) although many braceros, especially Haitians, did cultivate small plots as a way of surviving the increasingly lengthy tiempo muerto between harvest seasons.

But it was the differing contents and contexts of the Cuban and Costa Rican labor actions that encouraged and constrained the involvement of antillanos. In Cuba, worker effervescence during the summer and fall of 1933 was intimately linked to the temporary disintegration of the bourgeois political order. The collapse of the Machado regime on August 12 was followed, a little over three weeks later, by a sergeants revolt and the disintegration of army discipline over large areas of the island. These events rendered the normal repressive forces inoperative or weak during the early stages of the strikes and mill occupations. This temporary collapse of the old order gave sugar workers opportunities to reverse the rhythms of everyday life—with strikers expelling and humiliating mill owners and managers while at the same time creating parallel structures of organization, policing, and production. In the Cuban case, insurgency took the form of physical occupations of the mills and mill properties and this allowed for more radical breaks with the past than strikes could provide. In these circumstances, a large proportion of the sugar labor force and its families were sucked into the vacuum left by the temporary abdication of managerial and state authority. Antillano workers moved (and sometimes were swept) into the spaces opened up by the insurgency. Neutrality was rarely a viable option. In Costa Rica, however, the mobilizations did not exceed the limits of a strike, albeit a militant one, and the worker actions on the Atlantic Coast did not coincide with a crisis of the Costa Rican political system.

I am grateful for comments by Avi Chomsky, Ron Harpelle, Dario Euraque, and the anonymous reviewers of the HAHR.