Rescuing Our Roots

These two books deal with a topic I've been researching for years.Such intimacy can lead to meticulous scrutiny and demands a balancing act between assessing the books properly and resisting the urge to advance personal views.With that dilemma in mind, I enter familiar territory for this review.Historian Philip Howard examines the migration of thousands of Haitians and British Antillean workers to Cuba during the early twentieth century.Anthropologist Andrea Queeley studies the descendants of British Caribbean people in contemporary Cuba, focusing on the "Special Period."Together they cover a long twentieth-century story through opposite chronological routes.Queeley's ethnography focuses on the eastern Cuban provinces of Santiago and Guantánamo, where the British West Indian Welfare Centre (bwiwc) was founded in the 1940s.Based on her fieldwork, and over 40 interviews, the book departs from the revitalization of the bwiwc after 1992, led by its Young People's Department.It reviews the lives of British Antilleans and their descendants during the Revolution and a "nesting" period during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their efforts in the 1990s to rescue their Caribbean roots.The introduction contextualizes the study theoretically, offering detailed insights on the methodology and its challenges.Chapter 1 provides a focused historical background that covers the history of British Caribbean migration to Cuba.Queeley is disciplined in building an efficient narrative and discussing only those aspects of a larger and more complex history that will be necessary for her study.Chapter 2 looks into the lives of African Anglo-Caribbean migrants during the Revolution, including complex politics of belonging.Foreign black Caribbean migrants experienced varying degrees of racism and xenophobia during the Republican Era .But still, by the 1940s, many remained in Cuba.With time, families flourished, ties to Cuba strengthened, and British Antilleans "became Cuban," as Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Lafitta put it in Subjects or Citizens (2013).Queeley's research takes the "becoming Cuban" discussion into the Revolution, exploring to what degree migrants and their descendants would belong in Cuba and its ongoing political process

Art · Caribbean island · Diaspora · Dilemma · Ethnography · Narrative · Political science · Scrutiny · Sociology · Anthropology · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law