Haitians’ seasonal migration to Cuba must be understood in both transnational and intra-imperial terms. The back and forth movements of agricultural laborers were a central feature of transformations in rural areas and national politics in Haiti and Cuba, making it impossible to compartmentalize the changes into separate national narratives. Although legal contract migration to Cuba spanned from 1913 to 1931, Haitians had arrived in large numbers in the decades before. Later, during the 1930s, the Cuban government forcefully repatriated Haitians. While many thousands remained in Cuba after the last deportations, the seasonal migratory movement was effectively over in 1940. The bulk of migration, then, occurred amid the backdrop of US imperial expansion in the Caribbean and spilled into the early post-colonial years of the 1930s. US control was both flexible and uneven; it changed over the decades within each country and functioned distinctly between territories. There were, however, broad commonalities. This prologue will sketch the political and economic outlines of the early twentieth-century processes that transformed Haiti and Cuba – albeit with very different outcomes. The chapters that follow will explain exactly how migrants experienced and influenced these processes.

Haitians and other Caribbean migrants moved within a region whose political economy was shaped by the military, economic, and political presence of the United States. But the organization and effects of US imperial domination were hardly monolithic in the Caribbean – an unevenness that migrants uniquely experienced. The high point of US imperialism in the region began in 1898, when the United States intervened militarily in Cuba's longstanding wars for independence from Spain. In the aftermath of the war, the United States wrested formal jurisdiction over the remaining Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam; US troops remained in Cuba until 1902. They left on the condition that Cubans include the Platt Amendment in their constitution, which limited the government's power to conduct foreign policy and granted the United States “the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence [and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.”

The Platt Amendment gave the United States significant control over the Cuban state and created a relationship that scholars have ambiguously described as “neocolonial.” Although it was ostensibly designed to prevent political instability, the amendment actually institutionalized political violence in the early republic.