Reviews Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and slaves; Keith Albert Sandiford's Cultural politics of sugar; Doris Y. Kadish's Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World; C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins
Throughout the 19th century, political migration within the Caribbean coincided with large-scale labor migration. This essay reconstructs the long-overlooked experience of political refugees who fled from Cuba to Jamaica during the Wars for Independence, focusing on their early reception and their eventual assimilation. Despite the official position of neutrality, white and brown elites, anxious to increase the number of Europeans, welcomed the Cubans who were mainly white.
Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
Reviews several books on Cuban history before 1959. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898-1934, by César Ayala; Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, by Ada Ferrer; Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, by Rosalie Schwartz.;
The importance of immigrant workers in Cuba's sugar and tropical fruit industries between independence and revolution is examined. The later anti-immigrant sentiment is also examined. SUBJECT(S); Chronicles the economic and political factors responsible for the migration of nearly 200,000 Caribbean immigrants - from Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba, and Curacao - to Cuba in the 1920's and 1930's
