Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres. Black British Migrants in Cuba

Between 1898 and 1948, the islands of the Caribbean underwent tremendous migratory flux. The collective impacts of nation building and imperialist expansion, economic restructuring and downturns, cyclical ebbs and flows of sugar production, and world wars pulled and pushed hundreds of thousands of Caribbean people, mostly of African descent, to leave home and family for wages abroad. Following Cuban independence in 1898, the sugar industry there expanded rapidly, opening up work to foreigners. More than 140,000 black British West Indians as well as Haitians, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans migrated to Cuba to work in the island’s growing industries, especially among fields of cane. Quite inevitably, as laborers their settlement occurred in the context of related Cuban historical processes, including nationalist labor policies (such as Cuba’s 1933 Nationalization of Labor Law [1933], or the Ley del 50%, which set aside for Cubans at least 50 percent of all industry jobs), xenophobia, the island’s economic dependence on sugar production, and migrants’ own palliative networks and communities. The ensnared processes in turn imprinted each other with new, indelible marks. In his latest book, Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948, Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres pores over an expansive evidentiary base to map these interconnected historical processes, traveling along the several two-dimensional axes of migrants’ richly complex lives. The study is cogently written, painstakingly researched (Giovannetti-Torres visited multiple archives in each of nine countries, conducted oral interviews, and mined a reservoir of foreign periodicals, among other sources), and is to date the definitive study of black British Caribbean workers in twentieth-century Cuba.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Development economics · Diaspora · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Restructuring · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy