"No Surrender": Migration, the Garvey Movement, and Community Building in the U.S.-Caribbean World

In the early twentieth century, powerful American companies established vast agricultural export communities throughout the Caribbean basin and imported Afro-Caribbean workers to labor in the region’s sugar fields and banana plantations. Once considered politically and socially isolated, West Indian immigrants to company-controlled enclaves actually involved themselves in the world’s largest black organization to date, Marcus Garvey’s Harlem-led Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Using UNIA Division #52 in the United Fruit Company town of Banes, Cuba as a case study, this paper argues that the very conditions arising from US economic expansion, including pervasive black exploitation, segregated enclave societies, and anti-immigrant nationalism, gave the association its tremendous appeal among mobile black workers. Garveyites in Cuba and elsewhere used the UNIA to build a familiar community readily available to men and women migrating throughout the region, combat racist anti-immigrationism with a rich culture of respectability, and participate in an increasingly interconnected African diaspora. By exploring the dynamic relationship between international economic expansion and local organizing practices, this paper will elucidate the formation and spread of transnational social movements during the interwar years, a period of heightened internationalism and “globalization from below.”