Empire's Guestworkers
Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US Occupation

An innovative analysis of Haitian migrant experience, central to the exploration of race, politics, and development during US military occupation in Cuba.

Matthew Casey (Author)

9781107566958, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 May 2019

325 pages, 11 b/w illus. 2 maps 4 tables
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.34 kg

'Empire's Guestworkers is an impressive piece of scholarship, both analytically and methodologically.' Matthew Davidson, SX Salon (smallaxe.net)

Haitian seasonal migration to Cuba is central to narratives about race, national development, and US imperialism in the early twentieth-century Caribbean. Filling a major gap in the literature, this innovative study reconstructs Haitian guestworkers' lived experiences as they moved among the rural and urban areas of Haiti, and the sugar plantations, coffee farms, and cities of eastern Cuba. It offers an unprecedented glimpse into the daily workings of empire, labor, and political economy in Haiti and Cuba. Migrants' efforts to improve their living and working conditions and practice their religions shaped migration policies, economic realities, ideas of race, and Caribbean spirituality in Haiti and Cuba as each experienced US imperialism.

1. Making the Haitian-Cuban border and creating temporary migrants
2. Leaving US occupied Haiti
3. Living and working in Cuban sugar plantations
4. Picking coffee and building families in Eastern Cuba
5. Creating religious communities, serving spirits and decrying sorcery
6. Mobilizing politically and debating race and empire in Cuban cities
7. Returning to Haiti and the aftermath of US occupation.

Subject Areas: Migration, immigration & emigration [JFFN], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History of the Americas [HBJK]