Hierarchies at Home

Scholars of work in Cuba have tended to focus on sugar and slavery at the expense of other areas. Anasa Hicks's Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution provides a welcome addition to the scholarship and opens a window into postslavery domestic labor, placing it within a broader discussion of both cubanidad, or what it meant to be Cuban, and labor.Hicks examines domestic labor, or labor within the home for pay, and dispels many preconceived notions about it. In 1899, even as the sugar mills still dominated economic life, over one-fifth of working Cubans were domestic laborers. Notably, two-thirds of domestic laborers were male, although that percentage decreased over time. While most domestic laborers were Cuban-born people of African descent, large numbers were immigrants, notably from Jamaica, China, or Spain. In the early years of the twentieth century, slavery cast a long shadow. Concerns about servants' honor and hygiene loomed large in white Cubans' consciousness due to the proximity of domestic laborers to their employers. This same proximity made it difficult for domestic laborers, particularly female laborers, to have a life beyond the site of labor and brought, all too often, a concomitant threat of sexual violence. During the early republic, workers used whatever they could, from the courts to public discourse, to assert their personhood and improve their condition, yet they did so within a racialized framework. In the 1920s, as Cubans grew increasingly critical of an increasingly authoritarian government, public demonstrations of unrest included domestic laborers, upending the old trope of domestic servants as members of the family immune to outside influences and pressures. By this time, women outnumbered men within the ranks of domestic service, and public discourse reflected extreme concern about the activities (e.g., strikes) of domestic workers.In 1938, Fulgencio Batista's government promulgated Decree 1754, which attempted to regulate domestic labor. The decree defined who was considered a domestic laborer, which households had to follow the law, and what laborers were entitled to, such as food and four rest days per month. Middle- and upper-class Cubans were vehemently opposed to Decree 1754. For employers, government regulation of domestic labor was a massive overreach. The government could not manage the family, and it was through the lens of the family that popular Cuban discourse framed domestic servants. The law was immediately rescinded, and the result was predictable: increased activism by domestic laborers. That activism would be absorbed by the 1959 revolution, which created schools to retrain domestic laborers, as domestic labor had no place in an egalitarian society. In many ways, domestics came to exemplify how the revolution uplifted Cubans. It is impossible to diminish the impact of that transformation on the lives of women working as domestic servants before the revolution. They had access to education, health care, and housing. While republican Cuba may have extolled modernity and liberty, it continued to reinforce the older social hierarchy in which everyone knew their place. The revolution toppled that notion. No more did domestic laborers work within the private space of the home. After the revolution, they took new jobs in the public space, but that movement left their former roles squarely within the prerevolutionary hierarchy in public memory by erasing their agency and their status as workers. It would be only through revolution and leaving their old jobs for new ones that domestic laborers could attain the status of worker—receiving it rather than taking it.As Hicks notes, it is difficult to interrogate domestic labor, not dissimilar to interrogating slavery, as most of these early twentieth-century laborers left little in the way of documentary evidence, and the little that domestic laborers left, as in the case of enslaved persons, has obscured their agency in improving their condition. In order to tell this story, Hicks relies on a variety of sources largely created by the class that employed domestic servants, including newspapers, court records, and more discursive sources such as novels. The silencing of domestic servants in the sources is exacerbated by the revolution's desire to create a raceless, classless Cuba, a desire that has erased a long history of domestic workers striking, lobbying, and organizing on their own behalf. In the post-1959 narrative, it was the revolution that uplifted domestic workers, not the workers themselves. For the later years of her study, Hicks grounds her conclusions in oral history and the numerous publications in which the revolutionary government extolled its own accomplishments.Hicks's work fills a significant void in the historiography of Cuba, which has long been dominated by narratives of slavery and revolution. She (rightly) centers domestic labor in the debates over what it meant to be Cuban, both before and after the revolution. Her work calls on historians to reevaluate how we examine traditional studies of labor and activism, much as has been done for studies of slavery and resistance, and is essential reading for scholars of Cuba

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