Any researcher of Cuba’s twentieth century who has inspected the catalogue in Santiago de Cuba’s Provincial Archive will note its ample supply of cards listing clubs. The member names inscribed on parchment for each group promise to disclose the active civic life of Cuba’s cradle of independence and revolution: Oriente Province. Regrettably, despite the importance of Oriente’s sugar industry to the political and economic fates of Cuba’s twentieth century, many of those names remain hidden behind the curtain of time, an unrelenting Havana-centric—and arguably racialized—bias, and the reverberations of Cold War geopolitics. Squeezed between two cumbersome historiographies—the Cuban Wars of Independence (1868-1898) and the Fidel Castro-led 1959 Cuban Revolution—the workers and activists on Cuba’s sugar mills are mostly rendered voiceless.
Frances Peace Sullivan’s Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves: Imperialism and Internationalism in Eastern Sugar Towns introduces us to the workers, managers and mobilizers of Oriente’s northwestern coast during the interwar period (1918-1939). Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves follows a much more recent trend to deconstruct and reweave the “local and global spheres” by transnationalizing stories of imperialist oppression and redemptive activism in Cuba’s east.
Sullivan argues that migrants—Haitian, British West Indian, Spanish, and others—, followers of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Organization (UNIA), revolutionaries, communists, and antifascists all contributed to internationalist praxis because of their collective experiences fighting exploitation at the hands of U.S. capitalist manipulation and imperialism. Adhering to a tight chronological and territorial frame, Sullivan situates her “transnational history of a local place” in the northwestern corridor of Cuba’s easternmost province, Oriente, which she describes as the “most concentrated” zone of corporate imperialism in the Americas. Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves features five chapters that track the acquisition of Cuba’s northeastern coast by foreign interests, the rise of Garveyism among Cuban and migrant workers, the spread of Communism among sugar workers, peasant responses to Cuba’s 1933 Revolution, and antifascist mobilization for Spain’s Second Republic (1931-1939).
While Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves is by no means the first to examine the ways capitalists oppressed Oriente’s workers, the monograph challenges orthodox renderings of a victimized peasantry.
While Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves is by no means the first to examine the ways capitalists oppressed Oriente’s workers, the monograph challenges orthodox renderings of a victimized peasantry. Instead, it provides a compelling portrayal of workers at the vanguard, shaping the Cuban Communist Party’s (PCC) racial politics and strategies for combating empire.
On the eve of Cuban “independence” in 1902, Oriente had the largest share of small landholders on the island. Sullivan describes Oriente as “one of the most racially equitable agricultural regions in the Americas,” a reality that quickly changed. Depicted as a backwater by foreign visitors, capitalists, and domestic advocates of a U.S.-supervised modernity, the region lacked the material splendor that slavery had provided Cuba’s capital, Havana. Its isolation promised an ideal laboratory to protect foreign investments from what proponents implied were the degenerative influences of Spanish and Cuban political, social and economic projects. Several U.S. military interventions (1898-1902, 1906-09, 1912, 1917-1922) prepared Cuba’s eastern region for U.S. capital investment.
Sullivan’s analysis of U.S. imperial and capital expansion is sophisticated, balancing both its intended and unintended outcomes while focusing on the granular ways Cuba’s northern neighbor successfully homogenized the region’s economy. As Sullivan notes, northwestern Oriente province was “well established as a prototypical zone of imperialist monoculture,” yet it also lured workers from across the Caribbean and Europe who braided the region’s fate with those of other parts of the globe.
The first chapter reveals how the United States acquired most of Oriente’s arable land, creating self-sufficient, closed complexes that by 1924 processed about two-thirds of Cuba’s sugar output. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and culminating in the early twentieth century, sugar became so critical to the island’s economy that the native entrepreneur, José Manuel Casanova Diviño, famously affirmed that in Cuba, “without sugar, there is no country.” Sullivan successfully unravels the complex global networks that bound both administrators and laborers to an encroaching and dislocating capitalism. While migrants came to Cuba coaxed by company agents or through their own initiative to find work, once on sugar estates, companies segmented worker housing and spaces by nationality, race, and ethnicity to curb proletarian unity—an effort aided by the Cuban government’s routine deportation of mostly anarchists and socialists, branded “pernicious aliens.” Foreign sugar companies also used tactics like worker debt, private armed guards, and local authorities to keep migrant labor disciplined.
The largest chapter in the book is on Garveyism, a Pan-African movement that called for Black nationalism, economic empowerment and racial pride.
The largest chapter in the book is on Garveyism, a Pan-African movement that called for Black nationalism, economic empowerment and racial pride. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey launched the UNIA from Kingston in 1914, garnering interest among Black workers in Oriente. Migration from Haiti and the British West Indies to Oriente peaked from 1912-1921 amid a tumultuous decade for race relations in Cuba. In 1912, in what would come to be known as the “Race War,” thousands of former Black independence veterans were massacred for attempting to organize themselves politically based on race. Five years later, Cuban army soldiers executed at least fourteen Afro-Caribbean workers in another incidence of racial violence at the Jobabo sugar mill in eastern Camagüey province. While a hostile public rejection of the migrants further complicated their precariousness in Cuban society, workers affiliated with Garvey’s UNIA received protection from harsh conditions and gained a sense of community from the group to resist nativism. By the early 1920s, fifty-two local UNIA chapters existed on the island, more than any nation outside the United States. The author foregrounds the stories of lesser-known UNIA field organizers who had worked on Central American plantations before relocating to Cuba and engages the work of leading scholars in the field. Sullivan successfully demonstrates the centrality of company towns for global networks, particularly in the case of Black solidarity in the 1920s.
The decline of Garvey’s movement dovetailed with the rise of communist labor mobilizing in Oriente. UNIA often became the target of working-class critiques, claiming that Garveyism “only served to divide and distract the working classes.” Simultaneously, the collapse of sugar prices in 1920 to 1921 led to widespread unemployment. Fearing a riotous response from the destitute and much maligned Afro-Caribbean workforce, the Cuban government decreed the repatriation of approximately 18,000 Antilleans in the late 1920s, clearing the way for the primacy of labor organizing in Oriente’s coast.
The third chapter examines labor activism and communism in Cuba’s eastern sugar zone. Unionization among different specialties, races and nationalities was a well-established practice in Cuba, but doing so within the confines of the sugar mill defied company directives to segment workers. As Sullivan notes, when the Moscow-based Communist International and New York’s American Communist Party “turned their attention to the ‘yankee fiefdoms’… exporting fruit and sugar in Latin America,” the new stratagem helped garner much needed attention for the PCC. The chapter on communism explores how workers forced the PCC to pay attention to the revolutionary potential of Cuba’s sugar workers, and by necessity, the plight of foreign and native-born Black laborers. In so doing, they launched “a much more inclusive and specific organizing agenda.”
The chapter on communism explores how workers forced the PCC to pay attention to the revolutionary potential of Cuba’s sugar workers, and by necessity, the plight of foreign and native-born Black laborers.
The book’s greatest contribution is Chapter four on the sugar worker insurgency during Cuba’s 1933 Revolution, an event in which a broad cross section of Cuban society mobilized against the reviled dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. The story of Cuba’s short-lived revolution is well known, yet by centering the diverse group of workers who seized one third of the island’s sugar mills—instead of Havana’s students and military figures—a different sketch emerges in which workers took control of the foreign-owned properties, formed strike committees that organized cooperative kitchens, and staffed armed militias. Sullivan depicts the revolution in Cuba’s sugar estates as decidedly more radical, internationalist, and diverse than its leadership in Havana.
The chapter is rife with fascinating descriptions of one of the most significant—and ignored—episodes in Latin American history. PCC bosses feared another U.S. intervention, yet workers disregarded its instructions and seized mills. The Cuban government dispatched the army to repress strikers in the town of Banes. Instead, soldiers fraternized with the strikers and, as described vividly by Sullivan, “the red militia asked local soldiers … for military training so that they could fight the U.S. Marines.” This bastion of U.S. economic and military power had been transformed into a playground for internationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist soviets.
Chapter five connects mounting internationalism in western Oriente during the 1933 Revolution to the agency of workers politicized in company towns, volunteering to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War. This chapter is at its most compelling when exploring the biographies of Oriente’s workers-turned-internationalist volunteers in Spain. As the author argues, “The specific conditions of eastern Cuba’s development—economic dependency, highly concentrated land ownership in the hands of foreign monopolistic companies, rampant unemployment—ensured that Oriente’s working classes continued to see themselves as the forefront of a global battle that united Cuba and Spain.” Boldly assessing Garveyite Pan-Africanism and leftist radicalism together, Sullivan expertly recovers the work of anti-imperialist activists under a new name: antifascism.
Sullivan’s monograph is a valuable contribution with broad implications for the study of internationalism in Cuba, yet its light engagement with the anarchist movement detracts from the overall excellence of the book. Anarchism’s foundational importance for Cuba’s multiracial, multinational left-wing internationalism and solidarity positioned the movement as the standard-bearer from the Cuban Wars of Independence until Machado hampered, but did not destroy, the radical group in the early 1930s. An integral part of the “Old Left,” anarchists founded organizations, like Grupo Rompe Cadenas (Break the Chains Group), in key enclaves like Banes, representing the antiimperialist and anticapitalist ideas of workers on sugar mills as early as 1914. Even still, the author poignantly proves that eastern Cuba was anything but a backwater. It was, instead, an augur of the internationalism to come.
Daniel J. Fernández Guevara, PhD, is Visiting Researcher at the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. His research focuses on migration, identity and solidarity, themes covered in his forthcoming monograph, Cuba and the “Other Spain”: Transatlantic Solidarity and the Making of Modern Cuba. He is also Managing Editor of the academic journal Cuban Studies since 2022.