Treated like Slaves: Black Caribbean Labourers in the Modern Cuban Sugar Industry, 1910-1930

The destruction of the sugar industry and a portion of its black labour force during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) proved to be a watershed event in the social and economic history of the island. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the cultivation of sugar cane with the labour power of the enslaved African had fostered the island's social and economic development. Employing racial and ethnic hierarchies, sugar producers crafted an extremely harsh and regimented labour system under the institution of slavery. As a result, by the 1870s they had become the world's largest supplier of raw sugar. In 1886, the plantation owners, and their dependent cane farmers replaced African slavery with an industrial wage-labour system. Their racialist beliefs encouraged them to continue to view the approximately two hundred and fifty thousand blacks and their descendants as natural born cane cutters. Black Cubans were poorly paid to cultivate, harvest, and process sugar cane into raw sugar.As the industry lay in ruins after 1898, a host of Cuban, American, and European sugar companies appeared to resuscitate and expand the industry. During the US military occupation of the island (1898-1902) they received financial support from some of the most important commercial banks of the United States of America, Great Britain, Canada, and Spain. Foreign credit and capital allowed Cuban and American companies not only to rebuild the plantations and centrales in the traditional sugar-producing western provinces of Havana and Matanzas, but also to purchase large tracts of land in the central and eastern provinces of Santa Clara, Camaguey and Oriente. In the latter, they constructed the most technologically advanced and largest sugar mills in the world, surrounded by thousands of acres of sugar cane.In spite of these developments, the growing and harvesting of sugar cane remained a manual endeavour. Before the American and Cuban sugar companies could resuscitate the industry, and subsequently increase both the size of their factories' hinterland and capacities to grind cane, they required a surplus of cheap labourers. When the sugar companies concluded that native and Spanish workers were unattractive and incompetent, they convinced the government that thousands of black agricultural workers from nearby Haiti, Jamaica, as well as from the British, French and Dutch islands would solve their labour problem. Promised better wages than they could earn at home the sugar companies imported some 190,000 Haitians and 120,959 Jamaicans alone between 1911 and 1930.1 Because of the preponderance of Haitian and Jamaican workers, or braceros as they were called by the government officials and sugar companies' administrators, their lives and conditions are the subject of this article.How did a labour shortage specifically obtain in the sugar industry? What role did the American multinationals' definitions of race and ethnicity play in creating this problem? What systemic characterisitics of sugar production exacerbated the labour problem? Why did sugar producers, particularly Americans, view black Caribbean workers as ideal macheteros and carreteros?2 Finally, how did the experiences of black Caribbean workers resemble generally those of bonded men and women in the nineteenth century?This study shows how American capital revitalized the fundamental elements of the plantation complex in Cuba, bringing together foreign capital and labour in order to produce sugar for the world economy. Once in Cuba, the race, ethnicity, and class of the black immigrant labourers determined their work and living conditions on the sugar enclaves. These agricultural landscapes were designed to reproduce a quasi-colonial ruling class culture that imposed a rigid class-colour hierarchy in accordance with American racial, ethnic, and class constructs, according to Barry Carr. More importantly, Carr believes, however, that the American definitions of race and ethnicity were tempered by a paternalistic management style that proved to be a powerful mechanism of control for the American sugar companies. …

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