Book contents
- Making the Revolution
- Making the Revolution
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Editor’s Note
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Revolutionary Actors, Encounters, and Transformations
- 1 Common Ground
- 2 Identity, Class, and Nation
- 3 Indigenous Movements in the Eye of the Hurricane
- 4 Friends and Comrades
- 5 Total Subversion
- 6 “Sisters in Exploitation”
- 7 Revolutionaries without Revolution
- 8 Nationalism and Marxism in Rural Cold War Mexico
- 9 The Ethnic Question in Guatemala’s Armed Conflict
- 10 For Our Total Emancipation
- Index
2 - Identity, Class, and Nation
Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925–1934
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2019
- Making the Revolution
- Making the Revolution
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Editor’s Note
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Revolutionary Actors, Encounters, and Transformations
- 1 Common Ground
- 2 Identity, Class, and Nation
- 3 Indigenous Movements in the Eye of the Hurricane
- 4 Friends and Comrades
- 5 Total Subversion
- 6 “Sisters in Exploitation”
- 7 Revolutionaries without Revolution
- 8 Nationalism and Marxism in Rural Cold War Mexico
- 9 The Ethnic Question in Guatemala’s Armed Conflict
- 10 For Our Total Emancipation
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines the migration of nearly 200,000 Caribbean immigrants – from Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba, and Curaçao – to Cuba in the 1920s and early 1930s. Jamaicans and Haitians, more than others, were perceived as threats to Cuban culture and national security, and between 1925 and 1933 the Gerardo Machado government encouraged the expulsion of Antillean workers and the nationalization of labor. Caribbean immigrants played a surprisingly important role in the organization of workers in the sugar industry and had a significant role in the sugar worker mobilizations of the early 1930s that culminated in the 1933 Revolution. The young Cuban Communist Party made great efforts to recruit and address Haitian and Jamaican workers, and West Indian immigrants were strikingly visible in labor agitation and resistance as well as in the strikes and mill occupations that accompanied the Revolution of 1933.
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- Information
- Making the RevolutionHistories of the Latin American Left, pp. 44 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019