Undesirable aliens: race, ethnicity, and nationalism in the comparison of Haitian and British West Indian immigrant workers in Cuba, 1912-1939.

Author: McLeod, Marc C.
Publication: Journal of Social History
Date: Mar 22, 1998


In late March 1937, Cuban soldiers descended upon the sugar central Ermita in eastern Cuba and rounded up a "numerous contingent" of Haitian cane cutters who had been working in Cuba for years, including the "elderly" couple Elisa Dis and Enrique Francis. The soldiers "intimidated" the many haitianos who were "unwilling to go," transported all of them to a concentration camp in Santiago, and shipped them back to Haiti.(1) Elisa Dis and Enrique Francis thus found themselves in the midst of a massive deportation effort marked by "injustices" and "extortions" which had begun one month earlier.(2) The repatriation process proceeded at a rapid pace as the sugar harvest wound down. By mid September, Cuban authorities had banished nearly 25,000 Haitians; in contrast, only 253 British West Indian immigrants had also left the island.(3)



The events of the 1930s pose an intriguing question. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, as many as 600,000 Haitian and British West Indian workers migrated to the neighboring island of Cuba.(4) Most of these antillanos arrived as agricultural wage laborers, ready to cut cane in the sugar fields blanketing the easternmost provinces of Camaguey and Oriente; tens of thousands of them - Haitians and British West Indians together - still resided in Cuba during the mid 1930s. Clearly, however, Cuban authorities singled out the Haitian community for forced repatriation. In addition to the 1937 deportations, around 8,000 haitianos were expelled in 1933-34 and at least another 4,900 in 1938-39.(5) During this same period, a small number of British West Indians left Cuba, but all of them voluntarily.(6) Why, then, did Cuban government officials permit thousands of British West Indian immigrants to remain in Cuba, while at the same time they forcibly deported Elisa Dis, Enrique Francis, and nearly 38,000 other Haitians?

As black laborers in an economy dominated by North American capital and a society commanded by white Cubans, Haitian and British West Indian immigrants shared the most central features of their experiences in Cuba: racial discrimination and economic exploitation. While all Afro-Antilleans confronted and struggled against race- and class-based oppression - what anthropologist Philippe Bourgois has termed "conjugated oppression"(7) - Haitians and British West Indians also came from distinct national and sociocultural backgrounds, characterized by languages, literacy rates, and religious practices different from Cubans and from each other. The parallel migration of two distinct black Antillean groups to Cuba during the 1910s and 1920s thus offers a unique opportunity to unravel the connections among culture, nationality, and race. As the comparative histories of Haitian and British West Indian immigrants in Cuba suggest, rather than analyzing the histories of black populations solely through the lens of race, we must also consider the ethnic and national identities which distinguish different groups of the African diaspora from one another.(8)

Previous studies of twentieth-century black Caribbean migration to Cuba present a broad but incomplete outline of the subject.(9) Distinctions between Haitians and British West Indians, while not ignored entirely, have not been analyzed in a systematic manner. These studies also tend to overlook the mass deportations at the end of the decade and, to a lesser extent, those of late 1933 and early 1934.(10) Two main reasons for this gap in the historiography stand out. In the first place, issues of class and labor have predominated over those of race and culture within Cuban historiography. Rolando Alvarez Estevez, who acknowledges the differences between Haitians and British West Indians as much as anyone, still privileges class over race: "Racism . . . is a product of society divided in classes"; therefore "racism constitutes a manifestation of class struggle."(11) In the second place, many studies have used the "revolution" of 1933 as a (perhaps unduly) convenient cut-off point, thus de-emphasizing the continuities between the late 1930s and earlier periods. Yet only by analyzing the immigrant experience over time - and by distinguishing between the separate Haitian and British West Indian cultural practices and settlement patterns - can we gain some understanding of how race, nationalism, and ethnicity, as well as economic decline, contributed to the mass expulsion of Haitian workers from the island.

This study focuses upon the related yet diverging experiences of Haitian and British West Indian immigrants in Cuba during the 1920s and 1930s. After briefly exploring some of the pressures of racism and economic difficulties faced by all Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Cuba, it then looks at the nationalistic policies of the Cuban governments after 1933. The article examines the main differences between the two immigrant populations, including their structural characteristics, the social and religious institutions they formed, the diplomatic representation they received, and the perceptions of Cubans toward them, thus revealing how Cuban economic and cultural nationalism during the 1930s weighed more heavily upon Haitian immigrants.

A number of factors served to push black antillanos from their islands and pull them to Cuba.(12) Perhaps most importantly, the massive influx of U.S. capital in the early twentieth century resulted in the rapid expansion of the Cuban sugar economy, with production increasing nearly tenfold between 1900 and 1913.(13) State immigration policies which sought to promote "racial whitening" attracted nearly 900,000 Spaniards to Cuba between 1900 and 1929, but Spanish (and native Cuban) workers consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to labor in the cane fields.(14) Sugar company managers thus turned to Afro-Caribbean immigrants as a source of plantation labor, convincing Cuban government officials that the economic "necessity" of cheap labor outweighed the supposed evils of black immigration.

From the moment the first antillanos stepped ashore, they encountered the racism of white Cubans. In fact, white prejudice towards Afro-Antilleans appeared as an extension of long-standing beliefs about the Afro-Cuban population. Black Cubans supposedly were inferior beings that practiced witchcraft and engaged in criminal and immoral behavior. As Aline Helg has demonstrated, white Cubans remained devoted to three main "icons of fear," which corresponded to deep-rooted stereotypes of black Cubans at the levels of revolution, religion, and sexuality.(15) Such beliefs served to justify the ongoing marginalization of Afro-Cubans from the economic and political affairs of their country. They applied to black Haitian and British West Indian immigrants as well.

White Cuban intellectuals and journalists propagated variations of these icons of fear that applied specifically to Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Dread of a black uprising proved most easily transferrable to the haitiano population, since fear of an Afro-Cuban revolt dated back to the successful Haitian Revolution over a century earlier and was further fueled by the contemporary guerrilla war waged by caco forces against the U.S. occupation of Haiti.(16) Worried about what he saw as the decay of Cuban society, Carlos M. Trelles expressed concern that black immigration was leading his country straight towards "savagery" and would "convert Cuba into a second Haiti."(17) A corollary to this fear was the belief that antillanos engaged in unruly and criminal behavior. In a 1923 speech to the Academia de Ciencias Medicas, Fisicas, y Naturales in Havana, Dr. Jorge Le-Roy y Cassa warned that Antillean immigration introduced "vice and crime," especially violent crime, into the Cuban populace.(18)

Fear of African religious practices also found outlet in the black Antillean immigrants. At first, both Haitians and British West Indians were identified with what Le-Roy y Cassa labeled "heinous practices of witchcraft."(19) In one highly-publicized incident in Regla in 1919, white crowds lynched a Jamaican man charged with planning to kidnap a young white girl for brujeria (witchcraft) ceremonies.(20) Sensationalistic press accounts of the 1922 murder of another little child in Camaguey called for the death of the accused, who was identified at first as a Jamaican, but later as a Haitian.(21) Although it does not seem that Afro-Caribbean immigration engendered a discourse on black male sexuality in particular, Cuban intellectuals did associate Antillean immigration with promiscuity and immorality in general. They contended, for example, that antillano immigration was responsible for a sudden rise in the practice of prostitution. Hortensia Lamar, leader of a Havana women's organization, insisted in 1923 that "prostitution, especially among the Jamaican and Haitian women, [had] increased considerably and with inconceivable loathsomeness."(22)

White Cuban intellectuals constructed an additional icon of fear for black Caribbean immigrants in particular, as they accused antillanos of contaminating Cuba with illness and disease. Associating yet another evil with the Antillean newcomers, Le-Roy y Cassa contended that they had introduced smallpox, measles, and typhoid fever into eastern Cuba, maladies which then spread to the rest of the island.(23) "What good will preventative measures do," an editorial in La Prensa queried, "as long as the ports of the country are wide open to Chinese, Haitian, and Jamaican immigrants, who bring in malaria and smallpox?"(24) Government officials forced antillano blacks through strict quarantine procedures, ostensibly to control the spread of contagious diseases, but also as a means of social control over the arriving workers.(25) These beliefs - of Haitian witchcraft and proclivity for revolt, of Antillean criminality, disease, and immorality in general - remained strong in the minds of native Cubans and Spanish immigrants, even as sugar company managers prevailed upon Cuban officials to permit the immigration of Afro-Caribbean laborers into Cuba after 1912.

Whereas the Antilleans had been seen as essential to sugar production during the crop's halcyon days, their usefulness waned when the sugar sector went into decline. The crash of the sugar market in 1920 thus resulted in an early wave of deportations.(26) Faced with worsening economic conditions after 1927 (per capita income from sugar dropped from $107 in 1924 to $53 just five years later),(27) native Cubans began to blame antillano immigrants for their economic troubles. In 1928 the Cuban government responded to the negative public opinion towards Afro-Antilleans by embarking upon another effort to facilitate the return of destitute black immigrants. They repatriated 15,600 antillanos under agreement with their governments, encouraged the voluntary departure of 2,100 more, and forcibly expelled 41 others.(28) The vast majority repatriated were Haitians. The Haitian government, infamous for its lack of interest in the affairs of Haitian migrants, uncharacteristically provided them with some diplomatic representation. The Haitian Foreign Minister protested that local Cuban officials treated the deportees roughly, prevented them from gathering their belongings, and failed to inform them of their destination. In the dispute that ensued, the Haitian government temporarily suspended emigration to Cuba. But Cuba's sugar companies protested the lack of cheap labor and the U.S. government successfully took up their grievance with Haitian officials. Haiti-to-Cuba labor migration resumed in time for the coming zafra.(29)

Many unemployed and indigent immigrants gradually drifted back to their homelands at the end of the decade. Unlike Haitian braceros (laborers), most legal Jamaican immigrants had complied with their colony's Emigrants Protection Laws, and were thus eligible for repatriation at their government's expense.(30) In the early 1920s, few British West Indians had wanted to leave Cuba; only 400 took advantage of paid passage to their homelands.(31) Faced with worsening economic prospects, however, more and more antillanos returned of their own accord. The U.S. Consul in the port of Santiago reported in 1933 that many West Indians, "of whom the bulk has consisted of Jamaicans," had returned to their "native islands" during the past few years.(32) The Episcopal Archdeacon in Camaguey reported that many Jamaicans previously living in sugar-producing areas had returned home.(33) Apparently most of the returnees were unemployed rural wage workers; those workers who managed to secure jobs outside of the sugar industry were better situated to survive the exigencies of the world depression.

Antillean immigrant workers actively participated in the strikes and seizures which hit the Cuban sugar zone in late 1933. While our understanding of the mill takeovers remains incomplete, Barry Carr's recent research suggests a broader pattern of Antillean involvement.(44) British West Indian and Haitian braceros reportedly participated in the strike movements at a number of sugar centrales, including in Cayo Juan Claro, Mabay, Miranda, Punta Alegre, Rio Cauto, and Santa Lucia, as well as on the Boston and Preston plantations of the United Fruit Company.(45) Haitian laborers on Oriente's coffee estates apparently ceased work as well.(46) The inter-racial, cross-national solidarity achieved by the rural workers in 1933 seemed to promise a brighter future for Antillean blacks in Cuba. But the force of nationalism soon intervened.

Upon taking office in September 1933 and until deposed in January 1934, the administration of Ramon Grau San Martin sought to control social unrest by pursuing a program of economic and cultural nationalism. In addition to conceptions of Haitians as inferior beings, native Cubans also identified Afro-Antillean labor with U.S. sugar capital. As part of a broader political program appealing to national sovereignty, which included abrogation of the Platt Amendment, the Grau administration assailed the thousands of rural antillano wage laborers still living in Cuba. An official report stressed that wide scale sugar production dominated by "foreign companies had produced serious evils," including "the immigration of undesirable laborers."(47) A series of laws targeting immigrants followed. In October, Decree 2232 declared subject to deportation all destitute foreigners illegally in Cuba for not having complied with Cuban immigration laws - particularly those antillanos who had arrived years earlier under temporary labor contracts.(48) In November, the Grau administration passed a "fifty percent law," which stipulated that at least one-half of every labor force must consist of native Cubans.(49) These measures, by playing upon popular nationalist sentiment and the racial prejudice long held by white Cubans, enabled the Grau administration to defuse the volatile labor situation prevailing in Cuba.

In the general anarchy prevailing throughout the island during 1933, a handful of racially-inspired attacks presaged anti-immigrant backlash awaiting Afro-Caribbean settlers. In the city of Camaguey, an enraged crowd stormed the city jail in an attempt to lynch a Haitian man accused of killing a ten-year-old white Cuban boy. And in Santiago, the Daily Gleaner reported, white Cubans lynched two blacks (nationality unknown) and dragged their bodies through the streets.(50) Apparently the British West Indian population suffered no violence during the chaos of 1933. "No anxiety need be felt for the safety of the many Jamaicans still resident in Cuba," averred the British Vice Consul in Santiago.(51) Nevertheless, in the midst of class uprising thus lurked the ideology of national chauvinism and racism.

The fifty-percent law served to divide the Cuban labor movement along national lines. Not surprisingly, Afro-Antillean workers themselves objected to passage of the law. A U.S. diplomat in Camaguey noted "considerable opposition" to the anti-immigrant legislation: "Foreigners are protesting against the law on all sides and it is very probable that labor disturbances will result."(52) Disorder" reigned in Santiago in particular.(53) But the protests soon dwindled. Although the Communist Party did come out in opposition to the measure,(54) most native Cuban workers supported the anti-immigrant legislation for economic and cultural reasons. When Spanish workers in Havana attempted to close the establishments in which they labored, soldiers backed by native Cuban workers forced them to remain open. The fifty-percent law, a U.S. diplomat observed, lay behind the "lack of cohesion among the various organized labor groups" - especially between native and foreign workers.(55) Even the leaders of Defensa Obrera Internacional admitted that "we cannot deny that the Fifty Percent [Law] brought certain damage to the country by dividing the popular masses in two."(56) Without the firm backing of organized labor, Haitian immigrants stood alone against the repatriation effort which soon followed.

The municipal authorities and soldiers responsible for directing the repatriation process wasted little time. The forced departure of 995 Haitians from Oriente began in late November. "Brutal treatment" and "arbitrary selection" of the deportees marked the process of deportation. Cuban authorities suddenly picked up many settled Haitians without giving them a chance to sell their possessions or even to say farewell to their families. All 995 deportees were herded unto the coastal steamer Julian Alonso, which lacked food and medicine. The Haitian Consul in Oriente "strangely interposed no strong objection to this procedure," reported a U.S. diplomat in Santiago. Apparently the Haitian official had pilfered the $1,900 granted by the Cuban government to cover the costs incurred by the expelled Haitians.(57) After this first trip, more Haitians would follow. U.S. diplomats in Haiti witnessed the results of the Cuban policy "to deport all unemployed Haitians": 1,995 were repatriated in 1933; 4,943 were returned in just the first six months of 1934.(58) According to a Cuban official, his government deported 8,000 haitianos between November 1933 and July 1934.(59) Three years later, xenophobic nationalism returned.

The second round of forced repatriations was even more overwhelming than the first, with almost 25,000 Haitians expelled from Cuba between February and August 1937 and at least another 4,900 more in late 1938 and early 1939. In contradiction to class alignments, some employers of the braceros raised opposition to the deportation efforts, while most Cuban workers displayed little concern with the plight of their Afro-Antillean counterparts. Coffee growers on the eastern end of the island protested the repatriations because they feared the loss of their labor force. "The coffee harvests of Guantanamo and Yateras will be completely lost if the shipment of Haitians is not delayed for 45 days," the two most important associations of coffee producers entreated the Secretary of Labor.(60) Employers throughout the island, especially U.S. sugar company managers, denounced the nationalization of labor laws and the repatriation of Haitian braceros. "Foreign capital and foreign labour are thus united in their condemnation of the present Cuban policy," reported a British diplomat in 1937.(61) But widespread support among native Cubans for immediate expulsion prevailed. The influential work by the economic nationalist Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean, written in 1927, contended that Afro-Caribbean immigrants lowered the wages of the Cuban working class.(62) Most Cubans, whether workers or intellectuals, apparently shared his opinion. As in 1934, the repatriation movement proved to be "quite popular with Cuban labor elements," due to the general feeling that Haitians, with a low standard of living, kept wage scales down.(63)

The attitudes of the Afro-Cuban population to the forced deportation of the Haitians reveal the tension which existed among economic nationalism, cultural affiliation, and racial solidarity. The black journalist Gustavo E. Urrutia asserted that "the importation of Antillean laborers" had helped to place "the Afro-Cuban of today in worse economic conditions than the free black during slavery." He maintained that "the problem of undesirable immigration" was that racist intellectuals used it as a "pretext" to argue for a whitening of the Cuban population.(64) Urrutia thus disassociated Afro-Cubans from Afro-Antillean immigrants by echoing the economic and cultural arguments versus black immigration that had been put forth by white racist intellectuals for some time.

Black Cuban workers also perceived the antillanos as threats. "Cubans of all classes, including Negroes, are opposed" to the presence of Haitian workers in Cuba, reported a U.S. diplomat.(65) The leaders of Defensa Obrera Internacional lamented that "the black masses [had] formed a large portion of the ranks of the supporters of the Fifty Percent [Law]."(66) Antillean and Cuban blacks were also divided along sociocultural lines: "The black Cuban demonstrates antipathy towards the Haitian and Jamaican, whose lifestyle and cultural level are considered inferior to those reached by Cubans of color."(67) Although they shared a common phenotype, Afro-Cubans and Afro-Antillean immigrants in Cuba claimed distinct cultural heritages and competed for scarce jobs throughout the 1930s. In 1934 and again from 1937 to 1939, as "the movement for compulsory repatriation [was] gaining considerable momentum,"(68) Haitians hoping to escape deportation found themselves with few allies.

Not surprisingly, many Haitian residents struggled to remain on Cuban soil. Some haitianos appealed to the highest levels of the state to stay in Cuba. "My departure from this Republic," Antonio Pier entreated the Cuban president, "would force me to abandon my wife and eight children who are all Cubans, thus destroying a home that has been together for more than twenty years."(69) But most Haitian immigrants, especially those without relatives holding Cuban citizenship, eschewed official channels to plead their cases. They chose instead to flee. A rural guard lieutenant from Antilla could round up only seventeen Haitians, "as they were difficult to find and many of them were in hiding."(70) Many haitianos remained hidden. They retreated to isolated communities - including Barranca, Buena Vista, Caidije, La Caridad, Guanamaca, Loma Azul, Pilon de Cauto, and La Serafina - in the more remote areas of the provinces of Camaguey and Oriente. That so many Haitians have retained traditional forms of dance, housing, religion, and speech into the 1960s and beyond testifies to the viability, strength, and cohesion of these secluded Haitian communities.(71) But the many haitianos who remained visible to Cuban soldiers, including Elisa Dis and Enrique Francis, soon found themselves unwillingly crossing the Windward Passage back to Haiti. How did British West Indians avoid a similar fate?

Although seen by Cubans (at least initially) primarily in terms of their common racial identity and economic status, the Haitian and British West Indian immigrant populations were not identical upon arrival in Cuba. As revealed particularly by Cuban government immigration statistics, the two groups exhibited characteristics that differed in many respects, including language, literacy, gender ratio, and work skills, which affected their respective experiences in Cuba. Although they continued to face racial discrimination and economic hardship, British West Indians formed a variety of social institutions in the effort to control their lives and also turned to the British Legation in Cuba for diplomatic support.

Perhaps language and literacy were the most salient differences between Haitians and British West Indians. The British islanders spoke English - the native language of U.S. sugar mill managers and the second language of many middle- and upper-class Cubans; haitianos conversed in French Creole, a speech unfamiliar to most Cuban and North American ears. British West Indians as English speakers, meanwhile, reaped the benefits that accrued from linguistic affiliation with the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. A wide gap in literacy rates separated the Haitian from the British West Indian migrant population. According to Cuban immigration statistics, 84.4 percent of all Haitians arriving in Cuba between 1912 and 1929 were illiterate. At the other extreme, just 9.3 percent of all British West Indians entering Cuba did not know how to read or write.(72) Illiterate in their own language and usually with limited ability in Spanish, Haitian immigrants were forced to work as unskilled agricultural laborers, mostly as cane cutters in the sugar fields of eastern Cuba. They also proved particularly susceptible to exploitation at the hands of plantation managers and local merchants. The sugar bosses "exploited the Haitians doubly; they paid them less and impudently cheated them out of pay, since they were illiterate," recalled the sugar worker Ursinio Rojas in his memoirs.(73) As we shall see, British West Indian residents, fluent and literate in English, encountered work opportunities outside of the sugar industry, especially in service occupations.

Males accounted for the majority of both migrant groups, but especially that of the Haitians. Of the 165,567 haitianos to enter Cuba officially between 1912 and 1927, only 10,495 were women. The British West Indian migrant stream of 110,450, on the other hand, included 20,838 women.(74) Women thus comprised 18.9 percent of all British West Indian, but only 6.3 percent of Haitian migrants. The dearth of female migrants hindered the ability of Antillean settlers to reproduce culturally, let alone biologically. With a slightly less skewed gender ratio, the British West Indian population in Cuba presumably found it easier to form stable family units. Haitian communities, meanwhile, consisted predominantly of young, single males.

British West Indian migrants arrived in Cuba with more work skills and experience outside of agricultural labor than their Haitian counterparts. According to Cuban immigration statistics for the 1916 to 1927 period, 15.1 percent of all British West Indian entrants claimed prior training in artisanal trades such as carpentry or smithery. Only 3.5 percent of Haitian arrivals held similar nonagricultural experience. British West Indian women in particular carried with them the occupational skills which would allow them to compete favorably in the Cuban labor market: 16.7 percent of all British West Indian migrants - and probably much more than half of all female British West Indian arrivals - had worked as seamstresses or domestic servants before sailing to Cuba. Just 4.4 percent of Haitian migrants, on the other hand, possessed a background in these female-dominated trades. The vast majority of Haitians (around nine of every ten) arrived as agricultural wage laborers, usually under temporary contract with large sugar companies.(75) The British West Indian migration to Cuba thus differed markedly in a number of ways from that of the Haitians.

Upon arrival in Cuba, most Haitians did in fact find employment as rural wage laborers, particularly as sugar cane cutters. Haitian workers quickly earned a reputation as the most efficient and most exploitable segment of the sugar labor force. Lacking the diplomatic representation of the British West Indian immigrants and stigmatized by their French Creole language and culture, the nationality of Haitian braceros positioned them at the bottom of the Cuban labor hierarchy. Consequently, sugar company managers were anxious to secure their services. In conversations with U.S. diplomats, mill managers insisted that "Haitian labor is unquestionably superior to any other."(76) Indeed, the sugar mogul Manuel Rionda wrote: "I do not like Jamaicans. The best foreign laborers for cutting cane are the Haitians."(77) "Haitians are the best," his brother Salvador, on-site manager of the Manati plantation in northeastern Camaguey, concurred.(78) By the mid 1920s, sugar administrators had found their preferred source of plantation labor.

The many field laborers on the sugar estates who remained in Cuba after the harvest found it necessary to supplement their wage income. To survive the dead season following the sugar zafra which lasted from January until about April, they raised domesticated animals and cultivated subsistence crops in the fire lanes of the plantations. Some Haitian workers proved adept at growing food crops on rocky, barren land using pockets of water trapped between impermeable rocks, a technique learned in the mountainous region of southern Haiti.(79) Other forms of rural wage labor offered an alternative. Many Haitian wage workers rotated between the sugar zafra and the coffee harvest. In the early years of migration they returned to Haiti annually to work the coffee crop; with the rapid expansion of coffee production in Oriente Province during the late 1920s, many migrated internally instead.(80) The Haitian experience in Cuba thus revolved around rural, agricultural labor.

While some British West Indian immigrants in Cuba continued to cut sugar cane, many others used their unique language skills, prior job experiences, and formal education to shift away from the sugar industry. Some worked as carpenters, as mechanics, or for the railroad. The ability to speak English led many British West Indians into the service sector - as chauffeurs, cooks, gardeners, hotel servants, and school teachers - especially for North American families and upper- and middle-class Cubans who prized English language skills. Domestic service in particular attracted many British West Indian women. The Jamaican Secretary for Immigration in Cuba estimated that by 1930 up to 25,000 of the 60,000 Jamaican immigrants worked as household servants.(81) The jamaicana Consey Dwyer recalled working as a servant in many locales throughout Cuba, including for six years with a U.S. family in Havana.(82) British West Indian men also worked as domestics, as exemplified by a servant named John who worked for New York Times correspondents in Havana.(83) Even the doorman at the National Palace, David Hitchman, was Jamaican.(84) Although domestic service may have exposed many British West Indians to the domination and paternalism of their employers, it nonetheless offered them the chance to earn a living away from the cane fields and, especially, during the tiempo muerto.

The housing practices of Haitian and British West Indian immigrants illuminate their varied experiences in Cuba. The two groups settled toward geographic poles: Haitians remained in the remote, sugar-producing regions of the countryside; British West Indians tended "to gravitate towards the larger cities."(85) Many Haitian laborers dwelled in "small temporary shacks of palm, bark, and thatch on a crude frame of small branches," or they hung hammocks in "open one-room barracones."(86) Their communities tended to be situated away from the habitations of native Cubans. British West Indian citizens demonstrated the contrasting ability to integrate physically into urban Cuban society. Noting the proliferation of British West Indian-owned housing in the eastern city of Santiago in 1925, the Episcopal Bishop in Cuba concluded that the Jamaicans had become "permanent residents."(87) A substantial number of British West Indians settled in Guantanamo, Caimanera, Boqueron, and even Havana as well.(88)

The Haitian and British West Indian communities in Cuba diverged along educational lines as well. I found almost no references to Haitian efforts to acquire formal schooling in Cuba. Three factors help to explain this phenomena: the Haitian community in Cuba included few school-age children; the socioeconomic position of Haitian cane cutters precluded them from sending those few children to Cuban schools; and Haitian parents may have preferred to educate their children informally in the community, thus giving them greater control over the education process itself. An example illustrates the latter two factors. In 1935 the residents of the isolated community of Caidije in Camaguey hired Congenio Martinez, a literate Haitian cane cutter, to teach their children to read and write in Creole. The experiment lasted but a year, as only seven or eight families with children could afford to pay the required fee of 50 pesos per month to support the teacher.(89) This incident points to the economic restraints which impinged upon the educational plans of the Haitian community in Cuba. That the members of Caidije hired a Haitian instructor rather than a Cuban (or instead of sending their children to Cuban schools) also testifies to their desire to retain close control over the transmission of educational and cultural values to their offspring. As they had done in Haiti, most haitianos in Cuba educated their children informally within the community, and in turn strengthened ties within the community itself.(90)

Educational patterns within the British West Indian population differed from the family-based schooling pursued by the Haitian residents in Cuba. On average, the British West Indian settler had received a formal education at home, arrived in Cuba with the ability to read and write English, and, while residing in Cuba, sought formal schooling for his or her children. All eight children of the Jamaican settler Cyprian Christian Wells, for example, attended private, English-speaking schools in Oriente.(91) As we shall see with their religious needs, the Episcopal Church also serviced the educational aspirations of many British West Indians. In 1938, eight teachers staffed All Saints School in Guantanamo; seventeen others worked in a total of nine parochial schools scattered throughout the easternmost provinces of Camaguey and Oriente.(92) British West Indian settlers used this contingent of educators to impart a formal education to their sons and daughters. In so doing, they may have widened the gap between the Haitian and British West Indian populations forged by the differing literacy levels which existed on arrival in Cuba.

Religious practices especially distinguished British West Indian from Haitian residents in Cuba. Haitians generally maintained their traditional practices of vodou, a syncretic or "symbiotic" religion whose gods derive from the union of African deities and Catholic saints.(93) As a "decentralized" religion which "pushes out from below," vodou proved especially adaptive to the Cuban milieu.(94) Vodou rituals do not require specific, permanent sites of worship. A small, palm-thatched structure, common to the Cuban sugar region, sufficed as a vodou temple, or hunfo. Haitian immigrants also adjusted their ceremonies to life in Cuba, even adding new loas (spirits) to their belief systems when needed.(95) Despite the dislocation which accompanied migration to Cuba and rural wage labor in Cuba, Haitian immigrants in Cuba could retain their traditional religious practices because of the decentralized, flexible nature of vodou. Vodou also enabled haitianos to impose some degree of control over their lives in Cuba. The main focus of vodou since the colonial era has been healing. In other words, rural Haitians have used their religion as a system for dealing with suffering.(96) Haitian immigrants in Cuba certainly found the need to deal with pain, grief, hunger, and want. Vodou also cemented ties among Haitians. Through shared worship and ritual obligations vodou served to maintain social control within the Haitian immigrant communities. In short, haitianos came together around vodou. As in rural Haiti, their religion served as the most important focus around which Haitian immigrants in Cuba could organize and preserve themselves.

British West Indian immigrants, on the other hand, flocked to the Episcopal Church in Cuba. Indicative of the considerable British West Indian presence in the church, Episcopal officials were forced to ask themselves what they considered to be a "perplexing" question: "Is the Cuban mission a mission to Jamaicans or to Cubans?"(97) Sizable West Indian congregations existed in the eastern cities of Camaguey, Santiago, and Guantanamo. As early as 1921, Bishop Hulse lauded Jamaican believers as a "well-trained Church people, always ready to do their share not only in conducting the service but in paying the expenses."(98) Unlike their Haitian co-workers, many of those British West Indian braceros laboring in the cane fields also affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Missionaries acknowledged the difficulty in establishing "permanent work among the West Indians who shift around so rapidly."(99) Local British West Indian lay persons and catechists thus proved essential to the formation and maintenance of stable congregations in the sugar zone. By the mid 1920s, they conducted regular services in a number of mill towns: Cespedes, Ciego de Avila, Florida, La Gloria, and Santa Cruz del Sur among others.(100) The Episcopal bishop singled out the "flourishing" congregations at Manati and Baragua for specific recognition; at the latter site, never less than 100 and often more than 400 persons attended services.(101) Of the 42 Episcopal congregations in Cuba in 1924, more than half, or 24, were exclusively "Jamaican."(102)

Despite their numbers, the British West Indians still faced racial discrimination within the Episcopal Church. In those locales where the church claimed both West Indian and U.S. adherents, two sets of English services were celebrated - one for the North Americans and another for the Antilleans.(103) Racism divided the Episcopal community. The North Americans and Cubans "are opposed to . . . the West Indians," lamented one missionary. "They will not come to the service as long as we permit the poor negroes to gather in the Church."(104) And in rural Cuba, sugar companies often cooperated with Episcopal efforts to preach to British West Indian cane cutters. Some companies provided buildings for church services; in at least two cases they even paid part of the salary and provided housing for Episcopal ministers.(105) Apparently the sugar managers hoped that church teachings would make for a more docile, acquiescent work force. British West Indian participants in the Episcopal Church thus encountered racial prejudice and maybe even increased economic subjugation. Ultimately, however, they distinguished themselves in the eyes of native Cubans from Haitian practitioners of vodou.

White Cubans thus came to differentiate between the two Antillean immigrant groups with regard to one important icon of fear - religion. Since the nineteenth century if not earlier, white Cubans had denigrated Afro-Cuban religious practices such as santeria as witchcraft. Haitian vodou and Cuban santeria shared a common heritage in Catholicism and West African religions; consequently, practitioners of vodou confronted a legacy of racial intolerance. Haitians were associated with brujeria, which in turn conjured up images of cannibalism. Haitians "are semi-idolators, since they have a mixture of Voodism, Romanism, Cannibalism, etc.," declared an Episcopal minister in Camaguey in 1929. "They kill children to take out the hearts, to eat, to cure certain diseases."(106) The many British West Indians who participated in the Episcopal Church, on the other hand, affiliated with the cultural practices of white North Americans, a dominant socioeconomic group in Cuba. In other words, through membership in the Episcopal Church, British West Indian immigrants distinguished themselves from the more "superstitious" (i.e., more African) Haitians.(107)

British West Indians also formed a variety of social organizations in the effort to improve their lives in Cuba. Many immigrants joined branches of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the black nationalist organization founded by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, giving Cuba the second largest number of delegations outside of the United States.(108) British West Indians established no less than twelve lodges and mutual aid societies throughout Camaguey and Oriente, beginning with the Santa Catalina lodge, founded in Guantanamo in 1901.(109) In the mid 1920s, West Indian workers also organized themselves into the Union de Obreros Antillanos. The Santiago trade union sent Enrique Shackleton as representative to national labor meetings in Cienfuegos and Camaguey in 1925.(110) Through their own organizational efforts, then, British West Indian immigrants attempted to ameliorate their living conditions in Cuba and gained a degree of acceptance within the wider Cuban society in general. There is no evidence to suggest that Haitian immigrants participated in any of these groups in meaningful numbers or that they formed similar institutions of their own.

Unlike their fellow Haitian immigrants, British West Indians benefitted consistently from the strong diplomatic support available to them as subjects of the British Crown. In 1924, for instance, the British government canceled the visits of two naval vessels and threatened "to restrict, if not indeed entirely to prohibit, further emigration of coloured labourers to Cuba." The envoy from London protested the "maltreatment" of workers on sugar plantations, the poor conditions at the quarantine station in Santiago, and the tendency of Cuban authorities to use firearms, "too often with fatal results." Unsatisfied with the Cuban response, British officials published a "white paper" containing selections of the diplomatic correspondence exchanged between the two governments (and the Cuban government responded with their own "grey book" in the hopes of garnering international public opinion for their side.(111) The dispute culminated in the Cuban government paying increased attention to the plight of British West Indian immigrants. In the following year, the Jamaican colonial government provided funds for a Secretary for Immigration to work in Santiago under the auspices of the British diplomatic corps, which further helped the immigrants in dealing with employers and Cuban authorities.(112)

When it came to the question of repatriation in the 1930s, British West Indians were served by their status as British subjects in two direct ways. In the first place, the British Legation in Cuba and colonial governments in the Caribbean, especially that of Jamaica, helped to repatriate destitute West Indians who desired to return to their native islands. Between 1930 and early 1937, therefore, more than 12,000 Jamaicans sought and received repatriation through the Emigrants Protection program.(113) In the second place, pressure on the Cuban government helped to ensure that those British West Indians who wanted to remain in Cuba would be spared the travails of forced deportation. When Cuban authorities began repatriating Haitian immigrants in early 1937, on the other hand, they at first did not even inform the Haitian Consul in Santiago of their plans, and later "paid no attention to his protests."(114)

By the end of the 1920s, the broad patterns of Antillean settlement in Cuba had been established. In general, Haitian immigrants were relegated to the margins of Cuban society as agricultural wage laborers. They willingly remained isolated from the Cuban mainstream. Indeed, a few years later a U.S. study would conclude: "The Haitians are usually unmarried. They live by themselves, without much participation in the few social activities of the countryside."(115) By concentrating in tight-knit, rural communities centered around practices of vodou, Haitian immigrants in Cuba could collectively resist the various forms of oppression they encountered. British West Indian immigrants in Cuba also faced the combined pressures of economic exploitation and racial discrimination, but to a lesser degree than Haitians. British West Indians engaged in more diverse economic activities, gravitated toward urban centers, sought formal schooling for their children, and affiliated with formal organizations, especially the Episcopal Church. While still maintaining a sense of national identity and frequently turning to British diplomats for assistance, many British West Indian settlers were able to integrate partially into Cuban life and advance in the Cuban labor market. Haitian immigrants, meanwhile, remained isolated on the margins of Cuban society. When economic decline coalesced with established ideas of racial and cultural inferiority in the late 1920s and 1930s, conjugated oppression hit Haitian immigrants harder than British West Indian settlers in Cuba.

The radical Cuban nationalism of the 1930s affected all foreigners in Cuba, especially Afro-Caribbean immigrants. But Haitians alone suffered the horrors of forced removal. Cuban authorities and intellectuals publicly explained that the repatriation of Haitian laborers in the 1930s satisfied national economic needs. After all, Antillean braceros worked for a mere pittance, they claimed, and so lowered the incomes of the entire working class. The British Vice Consul at Santiago reported that "it is a well-known fact that of the West Indian immigrants the only one who is reconciled to cutting cane is the Haitian."(116) Haitian immigrants thus remained closely linked to the main target of Cuban nationalism - U.S. domination of the Cuban economy, especially the sugar sector.

Such economic explanations, however, obscure the powerful ideological motivations which lay behind the forced deportations of tens of thousands of Haitians from Cuba in the 1930s. Ultimately, the racial and cultural assumptions which underlay the state's position toward haitiano immigrants reveal themselves: "Their low morality and the sickness and vices from which they suffer constitute an unquestionable threat to our country," averred a Cuban government official. In trying to justify the repatriations he thus invoked the traditional Cuban fears of black criminality, disease, and immorality. What he termed "the noble undertaking of ethnically improving our country," however, would not target British West Indian settlers in Cuba.(117) As Cuban Secretary of Labor J. M. Portuondo revealed to a British diplomat in 1937, the deportation drive would attack "Haitians only, on whose repatriation the [Cuban] Government were determined on account of their low economic and cultural standards."(118) While black Cubans may have enjoyed increased recognition as contributors to the Cuban national identity during the 1920s and 1930s,(119) ideological domination based on culture found new victims in the Haitian immigrants hoping to remain in Cuba.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the history of Antillean blacks in Cuba is that so many managed to settle permanently. According to the 1953 census, 27,543 Haitian-born individuals resided in Cuba. Of the 14,421 residents listed as British nationals, the vast majority must have been black antillanos, especially the 11,779 persons living in Camaguey and Oriente.(120) A number of factors help to account for the durable presence of British West Indians in Cuba: although they experienced class exploitation and racial discrimination, their cultural background situated them above Haitians in the Cuban socioeconomic hierarchy. Thousands of British West Indians returned to their home islands during the 1920s and early 1930s, usually with the assistance of British government officials. Moreover, many British antillanos - especially those who remained in Cuba after 1933 - had been able to shift away from rural wage labor into more diverse and more secure occupations. And to some extent native Cuban views of their cultural and social traditions may have mitigated the conjugated oppression they encountered.

The lasting Haitian presence in Cuba requires further explanation. The class, race, and ethnicity of Haitian immigrants in Cuba all worked against them. Yet despite the economic hardships of the depression and the massive effort to repatriate them, many Haitian immigrants managed to remain on Cuban soil. To do so, they pursued extreme measures. Many haitianos were forced to rely upon closed, rural communities which kept them on the margins of Cuban society but out of the hands of Cuban authorities. Whether in Caidije, Guanamaca, or numerous other Haitian villages, in many ways they lived as modern-day maroons. More undesirable than British West Indian immigrants for sociocultural reasons and lacking strong diplomatic support, haitianos in Cuba faced their most severe challenge in the 1930s when economic decline and nationalism combined, leading to the repatriation movement. That so many Haitians survived the threat is testimony, in no small way, to the strength of that very culture which brought the extremes of conjugated oppression upon them.

History Department Austin, TX 78712-1163



The endnotes I'm not posting, but if anyone wants them just ask.