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Gillian McGillivray, Matthew Casey. Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US Occupation., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1700–1701, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy290
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In Empire’s Guestworkers, Matthew Casey skillfully constructs history from below, telling immigrant stories from Haiti to Cuba and back again, but plotting them within the transnational migratory currents and Caribbean state-building projects that individual Haitian lives contributed to. The stories of this “significant but understudied group of Caribbean migrants”—approximately 200,000 from 1900 to 1940—simultaneously reveal how “the consolidation of centralized states, national identities, and export economies were shaped transnationally and from below” (3). The title points to another of the study’s important contributions: seeing Haitian immigrants as one of the first groups of “guestworkers” to replace slaves and indentured laborers. Contract labor agreements served the labor-hungry expanding plantations of early-twentieth-century Cuba (many U.S.-owned), but anti-immigration sentiments (in particular, against Afro-Caribbeans) and economic downturns led to massive deportations in the 1930s.
“Would free migration be defined by an individual’s ability to contract their labor privately and move without state restriction?” Casey asks, “or would it entail the intervention of the state to protect rights in the face of private abuses?” (64). Borrowing from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), Empire’s Guestworkers emphasizes that the Caribbean states’ capacity to “read” and “control” emigrants and immigrants left room for both immigrant autonomy and private abuse. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009) provides Casey with a second theoretical insight to analyze why migration predated the official contract regulations of 1913 and continued beyond the 1931 Cuban immigration ban. Many of the migrants came from Haitian “shatter zones,” places “inhabited by people whose lives are marked by efforts to assert autonomy from state attempts to coerce their labor, tax their productivity, or otherwise govern them” (66). Chapters 1, 2, and 7 show men and women at different stages of their lives making the decision to migrate to, or from, Cuba for various reasons. For some regions, Cuba was easier to get to, or trade with, by boat than other parts of Haiti. During World War I, many migrated because coffee prices declined in Haiti while sugar prices increased in Cuba. The U.S. occupation of Haiti may have pushed some Haitians off their land, but others opted to seek higher Cuban wages, then return to purchase and develop Haitian land. U.S. military occupation documents show Haitians leaving “shatter zones” for Cuba to escape the vagrancy laws that sought to appropriate their labor; or because customary rights to commons for subsistence and animal husbandry were undermined; or because U.S. Marines bought up the food in local markets, wreaking havoc on supply and demand.
